How To Treasure Your Mother-In-Law

I have some sound advice; if you are having difficulty treasuring your mother-in-law, spend a weekend with your own mother. My mother-in-law is accustomed to being cared for as she has been in a wheelchair and catered to by her son, my husband, for almost 15 years. She not only accepts it, she relishes the idea of someone being at her beck and call. Fast-forward 80 miles to my parent’s house. Momma is legally blind and daddy has an eye infection in both eyes, which he got from caring for momma’s eye infection. Momma’s eye looked great when I went to see them the week earlier, daddy was in full-blown trouble. Momma’s comment to the situation was, “mine was worse”. Difficult for a blind person to make that assessment I would say. I told daddy that he needed to see a doctor immediately for some antibiotics. He informed me that he was using momma’s eye drops, which is just another indication that he is not making good decisions. Finally daddy did call my son, his oldest grandchild, to take him to the doctor four days later. The first doctor said that this was the worst case of pink eye he had ever seen. Daddy was given drops to put in his eyes every hour. Daddy has lost his sense of time. He put the drops in every time he thought about it, which was constantly because his eyes really hurt. He ran out of medicine.

Monday morning the grandfather and grandson were sitting in the doctor’s office for a re-exam. The eyes were worse. They were referred to an eye clinic. Medicine was changed and an appointment was made for Wednesday. Wednesday morning the grandfather and grandson were back at the eye clinic. Eyes worse. A new doctor’s appointment at a Piedmont Hospital cornea specialist came with a new diagnosis, eye infection in both eyes with the added insult of shingles in his right eye. A new, urgent, course of treatment to prevent imminent blindness was prescribed. Every hour four procedures had to be performed on each eye. One might think that their four grown children were ignoring their parents, one would be wrong. The stubborn, independent parents refused outside intervention. This was it. I called momma, who mercifully had been left at home, and told her that she could not see to take care of daddy and he had to have some help or he would also be blind and to quote an old family saying, "they would be in a hell of a mess". When momma is scared she will agree to anything. When daddy came home she had changed her mind. That was really it. Their next-door neighbor who thankfully is their youngest child came to the rescue. Tommy became the administrator of prescribed treatments. This was a new role for him as his wife has always filled that position in their family. Remember, Tommy is related to momma who does not deal well with medical emergencies. I’ll have to say, he really stepped up to the plate and did a wonderful job.

My brothers and I have made momma so mad in the past by showing up unannounced to do major house cleaning. Apparently blindness can fool you in to thinking your house is actually clean. I know blindness can lead you to leave things in the refrigerator that resemble a science experiment. Our efforts were met with such resistance that we were relieved to hear that momma had relented and hired a house cleaner. Once a month, are you kidding? Oh well, it was a start. We were thinking more on the lines of someone four to six hours every day. We sought their support in that effort by saying things like, “We want you to stay in your own home for as long as you can.” I vowed to never come to clean her house again. This was different, we could not let momma make a poor medical decision for daddy. His eyesight was at stake. I told my brothers that I would take over the eye-care for the weekend if they would interview and hire someone to stay with them for eight hours a day. We had grand visions of this becoming a permanent thing.

You have heard the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child” Well I am here to tell you it takes more than that to raise elderly parents. Momma and daddy have a guardian angel at my brother Tim’s office. April attempts to keep track of daddy’s bills and checking account, which is like trying “to nail Jell-O to the wall”. She peruses his credit card bill looking for donations to scam artist TV preachers, one time vitamin orders that have been scheduled on a monthly basis, and other things that senile people subject themselves to. Paying daddy’s other bills is quite a trick. The first part of that trick is getting him to bring them in to the office before they get lost in a stack of old magazines. The most intriguing part is dealing with the unaccounted for checks. My parents would be living without lights, heat, or telephone if it were not for her efforts. We have come to depend on April for our parent issues. She schedules and keeps up with their doctor’s appointments because they can’t remember and go on the wrong day. She gets daddy’s prescriptions filled because he could not make it out of the pharmacy without misplacing his prescription. She is the one that put herself on the line to hire someone to stay with momma and daddy. If there were ever a star in anyone’s crown in heaven, it would be in April’s.

Let me get back to the mother-in-law treasuring aspect of the story. Momma was terrible the entire weekend. She didn’t catch on to the infectious nature of their situation. She did not want me to wash their towels, pillowcases, and clothing. She could do that. I got her on board when I told her that SHE could get re-infected. Things don’t go well when you forget one of the founding principles of living in the Steele family, “It’s all about momma.” Momma wanted to forgo the 11:00a.m. eye care routine because it interfered with their set lunchtime at Cracker Barrel. We can do it when we get home was not an acceptable statement so we started the trip out to eat on a bad note. I bravely headed for my car with daddy in the front passenger seat and momma and my daughter-in-law in the back seat. Momma was complaining about my poor driving skills in a stage whisper the entire trip. She recounted over and over how she could drive as well as I. In an effort to convince me that she could actually see how to drive she pointed out every approaching vehicle, intersection, and stop sign. Let me tell you this, there is nothing that can get on your nerves more than a blind person in the backseat telling you how to drive. In my defense I might add that if I had followed her instructions I would be writing this from either a hospital or the morgue. Let’s just say the day went downhill from there. Just think, this was only my first day there.

Sunday was the prearranged day to interview the caregiver, Julie. We were all so nervous that they would change their mind, which was not an option as none of us could be there to perform the eye care the next week. Sweet Julie came with her husband Sunday afternoon. We all sat and talked on the porch. She had cared for her grandparents and seemed like, and was, a wonderful choice. We agreed on the price of $10 an hour, 40 hours a week. This was going to work, we thought. There were three big problems. Momma and daddy didn’t think they needed any help, they didn’t want any help, and they didn’t comprehend the price difference of being able to stay at home verses being in an assisted living facility. Julie came as arranged on Monday. Momma wouldn’t let her do anything except the eye care. When Julie asked about doing the laundry, Momma said that she had already done it. Later that night momma told me that it was stupid to have someone sitting around the house all day with nothing to do. I told momma that what was stupid was having someone in the house to help them and not letting them do it. I have to commend Julie she saw to it that daddy wore clean clothes, she didn’t let him drive, and she lasted three days. Myself, I could only do two. Daddy sat her down and told her that he couldn’t afford her prices, a term that he has never uttered to momma. She wouldn’t have batted an eye to spend $400 on a dress. To add insult to injury to Julie, my sister-in-law had an emergency appointment for her child Wednesday afternoon when she had planned to take momma to her retina specialist. Poor Julie, she got fired and then had to take momma to the doctor. I can just imagine that she will not include elder caregiver on her resume again.

This is all a very long explanation of why I came rushing home, grabbed my husband and told him that I loved him and where was his precious, sweet, darling mother. Then I purchased a Miata the following day. I just love cars with no backseat.