When was the last time you laughed? Really, really laughed? If your aging mother has been struggling with her health, physical mobility, or other challenges, it can be very difficult to find humor in anything. Even though you may have stepped up to be the primary caregiver in this relationship, elder care is a wonderful option to consider.
Not enough people consider elder care.
There could be any number of reasons for this, but the most common is people just don’t know very much about it. Whatever little they do know, it is often mixed in with misconceptions and the completely wrong idea about what elder care can do.
Professional, experienced elder care providers have a great deal of compassion for the clients they take on. These clients are usually elderly men and women who have some difficulty with daily life.
An elder care provider may offer transportation services to their clients. Not all of them do, mind you, but for those that include this, that means the senior may be able to go grocery shopping without calling on you. Your elderly mother may be able to visit with her friends, whom she hasn’t been able to do for a while because you work during the day when her friends get together.
An elder care provider can also assist an aging client with a wide range of daily tasks, including preparing a meal, doing the laundry, vacuuming the floors, and other light housekeeping duties, as well as more intimate matters.
You may have become your mother’s primary caregiver because of proximity, your relationship, or simply the fact you didn’t know other options like elder care were available.
Yet, there may be certain matters, tasks your mother struggles with, she is reluctant to ask you for help with.
What might be some of these issues?
Toileting, for one. If an aging person has diminished strength in their legs, just sitting down on the toilet or getting back up from it can be incredibly challenging. If your mother was recently hospitalized and is recovering following surgery, injuries, or just spending too much time in a hospital bed and not getting exercise for her legs, this simple task could suddenly be extremely difficult.
And, when you are witnessing the struggles, she is dealing with, you might feel helpless. You may also worry endlessly.
Many family caregivers lose sleep doing this job.
They don’t think of it as a job, but an act of love. It certainly is, but you really need to think of it as a job, too. When you are constantly seeing the struggles your aging mother is facing, are always seeming to help her or be called for assistance on any number of things, the one thing you will do more than any other is worry.
When you worry late at night, you won’t sleep. Then, when you don’t get enough sleep, you will seem to worry even more about every little detail.
And then it becomes much more difficult to laugh. When you hire elder care to help you in this endeavor, to support your mother, you will find the time and energy to reconnect with life, loved ones, and the things that also matter and that will make it easier for you to laugh once again.
