Thursday, July 27, 2006

Aboriginal artefacts



Adelaide for 3 days, I had Monday to myself so I went walking all around the town and ended up at the Museum looking at the Aboriginal stuff. It is quite fascinating, but hard to draw as it was dark, and no seats!
Tuesday was an awful day, the day we put my mother in a nursing home and she was so angry and afraid and upset and it was awful, but she has become a danger to herself. The place is very nice but i dont think I would want to be there either. She had calmed down a bit by the time we went back in the afternoon with some of her furniture, but on Wednesday when we went back with some paintings she was very angry and aggressive again.
I hated it and still feel very upset about it all.
We had to clean all her valuables out of her unit incase it was broken into, I now have 4 boxes in my house waiting to see if she wants any of them. I am housing the china collection.
Today I am home, I ache all over and am not sleeping.
Tomorrow I go away until Monday, not sure how much work I will get done, it is a Grumpy womens week end and I feel grumpy.
My two sisters will look in on our mother as they live in Adelaide.

8 comments:

Robyn said...

Ahhhh! Grumpy Women's Weekend! That sounds like the right thing for me. Where do I sign up?

Jan Allsopp said...

Impossible to think of any comforting words in this situation. (I would be saying them if I could!) It must be very hard, and very horrible. I guess the only thing to do is constantly remind yourself of the logical and rational reasons it is definitely the best thing to have done. Thinking of you.

Penny said...

Thank you for the thoughts, it all helps. My son who arrived from Melbourne tonight asked me if I had taken note so that if it happened to me I wuld know what or what not to do. I thought I might be just as difficult!

Linda T said...

So sorry to hear of the stress of caring for your mom. Sometimes these things are just hard, hard, hard.

picklesandroses.blogspot.com said...

It is a sad time, indeed, when one's parent becomes the child that you have to care for and make difficult decisions in their behalf. And now, beginning my 70th year, I dread the time when my own offspring have to make those decisions. I just hope my daughter and daughter-in-law will have a group of Grumpy Women to go into retreat with.

Jana Bouc said...

It's great that you were able to do some drawing in difficult conditions with all the stress going on in your life right now. The drawings are interesting and I hope they gave you some comfort and enjoyment while you were dealing with such a hard life passage. I hope your mom will settle in and find her new home to be OK. My mom's 82 and I know the future will not be easy with her.

Peceli and Wendy's Blog said...

I found your blog by chance. I live in Geelong. Your thoughts about putting your Mum into care resonates with me. I howled when I took my mother to a partial-care institution. It was clean of course but the staff seemed patronising. Mum had refused to come and live with us. Said I was too untidy! Then the second move two years later - to total care within a hospital in the Mallee town of Swan Hill. I howled again. The view from her window was of electric light poles, and she was an alert woman - only her legs let her down. Selling the family home meant of course that 'my home' was now in the hands of strangers as I had lived there for seventeen years through childhood. The home town was never the same since.
Sorry to carry on a bit like this.

Julie Oakley said...

I am sorry to read about your awful week. My mother point blank refused and just made impossible demands on everyone around her. However to be honest I'm not sure that any residential home would have allowed their existing residents to suffer her vitriol, so she may never have been accepted.