My brother came down to help move my parents into my house last Friday, and we have them and most of their stuff in now. They had been staying in a tiny guest house on my sister’s land out in the country, but it wasn’t working out - the house was infested with mice, it was so packed with junk that they didn’t even have room to set up their bed (slept in the couch), and they were missing doctor’s appointments because they were 75 miles from their doctor and my sister didn’t have time to take them. My brother-in-law, who has a lottery addiction, got mad when my Mom won $100 on 2 scratch-off tickets (she hardly ever buys them) and started asking them to pay rent several months before the time they had previously agreed to do so. Luckily I have a supportive wife, a decent-sized house, a couple of extra rooms, and a 2-car garage, so I was able to get them out of that situation.
We’ve moved 7 truck-loads of stuff over so far. It’s amazing how much crap people can accumulate over 50 years. It was sad going through it all looking for stuff worth keeping, since the mice had ruined lots of neat old stuff. Now my garage is full of old furniture and boxes of stuff that hasn’t been unpacked in my parent’s last few moves. We’re going to have to go through it and give away or sell most of it. My Mom wants to hang on to a lot of the stuff (most of it picked up at garage sales) and it’s hard to convince her she’ll have to let a lot of it go - she knows antiques and she has all kinds of stuff that wasn’t worth very much, that she bought because she found a bargain on it. We’ll manage, though.
My responsibilities in life just keep multiplying. I went from being single with less than 10% of my net income being needed to pay bills to sharing responsibilities with a working mother, to taking care of both my wife and stepdaughter when she quit work to go back to school, to taking care of my wife, stepdaughter, mother, and a father with Alzheimers - in just a year and a half. I think it’s making me stronger, though. I’m usually extremely lazy and loathe moving over almost everything, yet I’ve had no trouble staying motivated, even though it involves digging through stinking mouse-pellet riddled junk in a packed 10x20 room, moving 500 lb. oak armoires, and driving over 300 miles a day shuttling it over to my house. My wife is normally the organizer of the household, but I find myself being the one pushing to get my parent’s drug schedule documented in case my Mom gets sick or dies, arranging appointments with gerontologists, and trying to find activities to keep my parents occupied.
One good thing about this is I am really bonding with my brother, who I don’t see very often as he lives in Oklahoma still and I’m in Texas. He’s been really concerned for my parents in the months they have been living in that shack and says he had been trying unsuccessfully to figure out a way to get them out of that unhealthy situation when he heard that I had decided to take them in. He used to be really hard on me for wasting my life but now I think I’m actually earning some respect from him, which feels really weird.
Anyway, that’s what’s going on in my life. Though I’m going to be a lot busier, I should keep posting here just as much as I do it all from work. Finding that challenging myself leads to me surprising myself with what I can do, I’m also signing up to take some college classes, and will be trying to test into college algebra later in the month so I can take it with my wife next semester and help her with it.