KatieDrake
Disciple of Prayer
My family has hit the roughest series of storms we've faced in our lives, and every day it seems another storm comes up. Conflict arises, bitterness stews, tensions rise, and hearts are being put through the wringer. Tent months ago, we were faced with the task of caring for our grandmother, who's frail, prone to bouts of selfishness, and ailing with a case of dementia which is pushing everyone as well as her closer to the edge every single day. Her son, my ###, visits daily ever since we took her in. He practically lives with us. He eats our food, takes our time, and intrudes upon our privacy and hospitality. But he's ungrateful for any of it. Behind our backs he disapproves of everything we do to care for our grandmother, his mother. We're with her constantly, watching her, caring for her, loving her, feeding her, putting up with her temper tantrums and emotional outbursts caused by the dementia. We humor her, cater to her, give up everything we have, want, and do just for her. We just try each day to make it through without a mental or emotional breakdown, which actually happens a lot anymore. Yet none of that is enough to satisfy my ###. We need to coddle his mother, he believes. We need to care for her, entertain her, and undividedly focus on her in a way that meets his standards and views, or he thinks we're just not caring for her well at all. At top of all that, we lost my grandfather this last March. He was dealing with numerous physical ailments of his own, the very things that eventually took him from us. He had the most unselfish, generous, thoughtful, kind, and good heart of any I've ever known and will ever know. Apart from Jesus, that is. My grandpa truly had a heart of gold, a humor that never failed to lift our hearts and make us all smile. He was the peacemaker in the family, the base God built our family on. Everything fell apart when he died. All joy left, stress mounted, conflicts keep us all teetering on the brink, and we're all looking to his memory, longing for a simpler time and just struggling to make it through everything we've been facing. Life got even harder than ever since he died, and continues to get harder still. Every day it's a new problem that's the same old thing. We're struggling financially from supporting a family of penny pinchers on a budget barely enough to get us through each month, emotionally from the stress and anxiety of this new normal we've found ourselves thrust into, and physically from the strain and wear of caring for an invalid woman with a messed up mind. We need strength and peace in this time and for the times ahead. I'm sorry for the long message. God bless you for taking it though. Thank you for praying.
