Caregivers Must Realize That Imperfection Is Good Enough

Dear Carol,

You are so right in everything you said here. I find it amazing looking back, at how much a person can do when they have to.

I also wanted to comment about decisions, your first gut reaction is usually the right one, and anyone making decisions should remember not to go back and rehash what they did. We all make mistakes, but we move forward.

Happy New Year.

Love and kisses Helene

Carol you wore me out just reading it. I like you have always been a prefectionist and I also have OCD. I did all the holiday deocrating like my mother which growing up wasn't a lot.We had to move a lot when I was a child and my mother did the best she could with very limited resources.

One Christmas I remember as a child we were in a cheap hotel room. My father had called again and told her to pack the car and move however many miles to the next home. He was a wanderer. Here we were Momma me and my three older syblings. I think I was 7 any way she put me to bed and I started crying as always my mother took me in her arms to comfort me. I told her Santa couldn't find me I had already mailed my letter from where we had been living. My loving mother assured me Santa was special and he would never forget me. My mother had almost no money. She got out a sock and laid it on my pilow and tucked me in. I woke the next morning to an orange, apple and a piece of ribbon candy. I was thrilled. My brother and sisters were not. I was grateful for what Santa had left because there was a note in there that said next year would be special. That was the last time my mother allowed her wandering husband to move her and her children at Christmas.

My husband having alzheimers and the strenth I gained from watching my mother endure over the years made me realize this year it isn't quantity, the meal the gifts but Jesus birthday and who you are with. My beloved husband and I were alone. No turkey no gifts and sadly he has worsened. He was with me this year and I decorated the house for him Okay me too. I fear this will be our last. He moves to Hospice this next week. Home but hospice he is showing signs of organ failure.

Thank you all for your support and I hope you enjoy the real Christmas story of my childhood I shared with you. I have learned perfection is not always so important. It's quality and not quantity.

Fearing what this new year brings. Peace I pray for and an end to my husbands suffering and him going into Gods arms.

Happy New Year dear friends.

Connie

My mother, at the advice of her doctor, will be moving to a permanent facility for Alzheimer's and in knowing this before the holidays, decided to let go the usual festive decorating and hustle and bustle of the season and just enjoy......each other.

Our family "tradition" of the holidays was, in the past, before our father passed away last year, to do it all up right. Big tree with all the trimmings, decorating every room of the house and outside as well, with baking and candle lighting events around the town.

Well, not this year after our news of submission, I made the decision to focus this holiday on Mom and what brings her the most joy. Her most joy is having her love ones around her, with her, beside her. No, she doesn't carry on a conversation and she doesn't interact with us, per se. But we can see it in her facial expressions like a light coming back into her eyes that she is still with us. She doesn't want to eat the traditional Christmas feast we serve, she eats her Fruit Loops cereal, but she sits at the table with us and listens to our laughter and conversations. And we take pictures, candid and posed and then I will make a photo album for her to have with her, in her new home, in hopes of jarring a moment in time for her to remember.

In this new transition for not only her, but for ourselves, we found acceptance and more love and more respect and most of all, we found how to feed her soul and her soul smiled back at us with a light in her eyes.

I have alway's heard that nursing homes are nowhere to go. The care and smell are not real good. How true is this?