I'm a Caregiver, and I Matter

A birthday present to myself. Brenda Avadian leads caregivers in a simple Mirror Exercise to remind them, "I'm a Caregiver and I Matter." Caregivers experience a wide range of reactions depending on where they are along the caregiving journey.

There's No Turning Back...

My Logitch K120 keyboard, which I've owned for about three years. Note the dents, the missing letters, and possible pieces of peanut butter sandwich lodged between the keys. This is a writer's keyboard.

If I had been on the ball today, I would have written a post for Caregiving.com about caregiving my father from a distance. That topic is so muddled these days that I can't make sense of it, though, and I can't put it on paper yet. Death, when it touches someone close to us, changes us. All of us. There's no turning back.

That change goes very deep, too. I realize, in my conversations with other caregivers, that we're a breed apart in many ways. We have one portion of our lives (usually our own) that's disorganized and unimportant. The other part of our lives is insanely organized, much like Temple Grandin's Livestock Handling Systems. What goes in follows a defined path until it exits.

My life as caregiver to mom was organized. It became more organized the sicker she became. The one-time-per-day seven-day pill holder went to a two-week pill holder that held morning, noon, and night pills. The journals became real journals instead of sticky notes. The physical observation went from downright obvious to sly, so it wouldn't upset mom to know that I was becoming more concerned about her yellow skin, her swollen ankles, her swelling stomach.

My life, on the other hand, kept fading into the distance. It helped that I wasn't at home for this illusion to work. Home became a lone fragment of fog floating up and over a mountain away from my daily routines.

But I'm home now. It's real. I'm becoming more organized. You may have read about part of that organization in my previous entry about changing the spare bedroom into a basket-making studio for my husband. My office? Still the same -- I have a path that leads from the door to my chair. I have a keyboard with no letters from overuse. I have chaos.

But, I'm focused on my mission to finish this memoir. My tool is the clock. I've used it before in keeping time with mom's daily routines, and I can use it again in writing this book. I know how that time-keeping works, as do so many other caregivers. Time. That linear framework consisting of hours, minutes, and seconds is all we have to align ourselves among the realities of health, sickness, and death.

There's no turning back (except for this damnable daylight savings time bullcrap).

Making Progress with the Organization Challenge

Two days ago I posted photos that I took of the spare bedroom that my husband and I are working on so he can use that space to make his hand-made baskets. Those photos, which I took on November 1st, represent the mess created by me from traveling back and forth between my parents' home and my home over the past two years -- plus dragging a lot of mom's things back with me to my home. Today, just seven days into the month, we've made tremendous progress on this room.

I'm very grateful to Caregiving.com's 30-Day Organization Challenge, because I don't believe we would have made this progress without a challenge. Take a look:

The first image of the corner near the closet -- everything is gone! I won't tell you what my office and our bedroom look like, though...

I couldn't back up far enough to take a photo of this corner of the room -- now that corner holds my husband's desk, computer, and basket supplies that were, initially, in our bedroom. We did a little switching around here.

As you can see from the photos above, we moved a lot of things out of the spare bedroom. But, a lot of my husband's things were in our bedroom, so we simply switched the portable closet for the desk, and his bookshelf with basket supplies for my bookshelf that still has a lot of junk on it.

This shot shows a LOT of things moved. I still have the rest of the month to go through all the boxes.

I'm very proud of the images above -- even though I haven't gone through all the boxes yet, I was able to organize the bags and loose items into separate piles to make my task easier.

Uh-oh...I have "stuff" on the top of the bookshelf. I'll move those items this evening.

All my husband needs to do to get started making baskets again is a table. We've got one -- he just needs to bring it up from the basement. And -- ta-da! This part of the task is done, all in just one week.

30-Day Organization Challenge, or How I'm Dealing with "Stuff"

One corner of the room -- and this was after I had already moved some boxes.

Caregiving.com started a 30-Day Organization Challenge for members on November 1. Denise is providing daily prompts for folks who want to follow along and spend 15 minutes per day organizing a purse, a mud room, bills and receipts (which would take me three months alone!), or under the kitchen sink. Members also have a choice to pick another project to organize. Since I knew I'd spend more than 15 minutes per day on most of the prompts, I decided instead to tackle one large project.

I couldn't move far enough into the room to capture the entire mess in one corner.

Since we're trying to work together on projects, I approached my husband about this organization challenge. He makes beautiful hand-made baskets and he could bring in income with these baskets if he had a larger space to work with. For the past two years he was stuffed into a corner of our bedroom, with no room to work at all.

The chifferobe? It's for sale (local only)!

I suggested that we clean out the 'spare' bedroom that isn't a bedroom at all. As you can see from the photos, this room is a catch-all for my clothes as well as for my mother's things that I'm salvaging from my parents' home. The room was, on day one, so dysfunctional that I couldn't find clothes to wear. For the past five days now -- every day this month -- my husband and I have spent approximately 15 minutes per day moving things back and forth between our bedroom and that spare bedroom. You wouldn't believe the difference already!

The books are mine -- but most of them will go up for sale on Amazon. That's just one bookshelf out of ten in this house. A little bit of a nutty obsession -- each book I own has a story behind it.  The clothes? They belonged to mom. What the heck am I doing with them? I'll figure it out...

This project could have been a daunting task, but with my husband's help it's coming together quickly. At this point we're just moving things back and forth, though. The task of going through all the boxes and organizing things is going to take the rest of the month, I'm sure.

I'll post "after" photos when we're done. Then we can tackle the living room, which is almost 1/4 filled with more boxes from the folks' house. Oy.