Quarter
Jul 16 2012 in Denise's Blog, Weekly Comforts by Denise
The tight quarters of caregiving can leave you feeling cramped.
You share space with strangers, in your home, in the hospital, in the doctor’s office. And, those you don’t know now know the details of your life, include all those dirty ones. These strangers can feel like the enemy.
Wouldn’t it be nice to just say, “I’m not sharing my space and my life with you any longer.” And, then they walk out the door.
If only.
The strangers in your space can also mean the solutions in your life. Welcome strangers by looking for the familiar–they’ll have something in their stories that will resonate with you.
Let go of the frustration over the space and details they share with you. Let in the possibility of a perspective that more help will make your days easier. With a perspective of how much help you have, you may find that your quarters feel like money in the bank.
Reminders
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- Understanding Your Caregiving Wait (caregiving.com)
- Talking Money (caregiving.com)
- Webinar Follow-Up: What Part of Your Caregiving Story Do You Love? (caregiving.com)
ejourneys said on July 20, 2012
Over here, our “dirty details” are my partner’s hoarding, and I decided early on that I needed to take photos of that and show them to everyone to whom I went for help. I had to overcome my own shame concerning all the inanimate material I had to share space with (and which, quite frankly, attracted some rather undesirable animate material). The payoff was being able to counter my partner’s insistence that she was fine and to get her help that she initially did not want.
As a result of that, I appreciated sharing space with home health nurses and then a social worker following my partner’s surgery in 2009, because it provided other witnesses and other voices to back mine up. (Secrets take up a LOT of space, and sharing that kind of space is no fun at all.)