I’ve Become My Parents

In response to The Daily Post’s Writing Prompt:  I’ve Become My Parents

Do you ever find yourself doing something your parents used to do when you were a kid,  despite the fact you hated it back then?

I have become my parent,  and quite frankly,  I despise it.   But not in the way you are thinking right now,  I hate it because I have become the parent to my parent.

I found that I had to stop my world and put a pause in my life in order to care for my mother.   I find myself telling her what to do and what not to do.   Strangely enough,  I literally have to tell her to things as if she were a child,  “Why are your clothes on the bed?”,  “Fix your bed”,  “The floor is not the garbage”,   “You are leaving a trail of your tissue all over the place”,  “Stop spitting on the floor”,   “Eat your vegetables”,  “No you can not eat sweets”,  need I go on.   In the beginning I had a hard way to go in letting her know all the wrong she was doing.  I didn’t understand it,  it truly bothered me.  Why should I have to explain things to her,  she should know,  right.   Until the doctors and nurses explained that it was okay.   It happens.   I was truly hurt,  but I had to,  as the saying goes,  man up and take charge.    I still don’t like it.   I don’t enjoy it at all.   I have been doing it for quite some time now and I still don’t like,  but nevertheless.   I am still doing it.   Taking care of the woman that raised me and took care of me basically in the same manner that she raised me,  of course with some differences.

I don’t hate my mother, I love her dearly, but what I do hate is that she is doing all the opposite of what she didn’t like.  She is not senile,  she doesn’t have alzheimer’s disease,  so I don’t get it.   I do remember my always trying to help her keeping the house clean.   So that can’t be it,  I am so baffled by what she is doing that it makes me crazy sometimes.   I don’t believe in putting her in a home.   She was in there for a while for rehabilitation and she was getting depress.   I even felt as if I were visiting her in prison.   The place was sad, dreary, and dark.  Where she was placed,  there seemed to be no life,  no joy,  it looked oh so sad of a place to spend the rest of your life.   It was taking a horrible toll on me.   I told a nurse there that I need to get her out of there because I don’t believe she deserves to be put away in prison.   She was a good mom.   I just don’t understand the turn around of her being now, is all.