Losing my patience

I called Mom to check in this morning. I never know if the conversation will be benign...what she had for breakfast is a popular topic...or difficult. This morning was difficult. She received a bill for an office visit to her opthamologist yesterday that kept her up all night worrying.

Truth be told, she is up and down all night anyway going to the bathroom....but that is another blog post.

So..I had a anxious, sleep deprived 90 year old on the phone freaking out over a bill that is due in four days. She wanted me to rush over there and take her to Safeway so she could purchase a money order. She only uses her personal checks for her rent and the phone and light bills. Everything else, such as items purchased from catalogs, her water bill, which goes to an out of state company, and her medical bills are paid with money orders. It makes no sense to me...and it creates more work for me...so naturally, I am not very understanding of her irrational system around who gets a check and who gets a money order. Most likely, she saw something or read something about identify theft and has created this system to protect herself. Or this is just the way she has always been.

We went around and around about this particular crisis. I told her I could not come over today ...that it was not a crisis and I would come over tomorrow. Perhaps she will have forgotten about it by the time we talk this evening.

Mom has always had the habit of making the simplest tasks difficult. After I hung up the phone this morning, I just stood in the laundry room sobbing. I prayed for patience, but just felt engulfed by the weight of responsibility of dealing with Mom's daily needs.

She is old, she is confused, she has never been too good about dealing with the world in a rational manner. Dad was the rational one, the one that took care of the bills...the one with the income that supported them. Now she is muddling through in her own anxious and befuddled manner. It takes so much energy to help her take care of her life. I am exhausted with it...and it is only 10:30am.