This is the Hardest Time in My Life

As the title suggests, and it's true, this is definitely the hardest time in my life. I'm just hoping it never gets more difficult.

The main reason this time in my life is so difficult is that my mother is 83 years old and has dementia. I am embittered, admittedly, because I'd always been mistreated by her and my sister and other family members; alienated and treated like garbage since I was a child, this makes it all that much more difficult for me to take care of her. I am enraged most of the time. All I'm going to say is you will never know what it's like unless you go through it. Being aware and sensitive, it's even worse for me. I realize some people are walking around comatose, so nothing bothers them and they're simply not aware that anything is ever wrong. I'm too aware. I'm shaken often. Don't know if it's a blessing or a curse.

It's painful. Everyday my mother needs me and I take care of her, but I am also enraged at her. She needs someone other than me to do this, no doubt about that. She needs someone whom she hasn't mistreated, someone who doesn't resent her deeply. She needs someone whom she won't continue to trigger and abuse with her conscious or unconscious manipulations.

Problem is the whole bottom has dropped out on me. The only job I have is the one of taking care of my Mom. I get paid to do it, through the County, but what I get paid doesn't even cover half the work I do. When it's all over, I'm stuck. Don't know what will happen at that point. When I started taking care of her, I was fed up with being a slave to a job, yet I did have a job. But I had to quit the job because it was too much to take care of her and maintain employment. She was calling the cops in the middle of the night because she was having hallucinations; I wasn't getting sleep and being drained throughout the day, taking care of her and dealing with her hallucinations and demands and also going to a stressful job full of abusive co-workers and the usual stupid management.

It's all come down to this. I struggled in a relationship with a self-centered girlfriend that laid almost everything on me, fought with me and most of the time I was the only one working. So I had to deal with her combativeness and a job both. We got separate places, but her room-mate kicked her out and she was on the verge of homelessness so I made a place here at home for her with me and Mom. Right now she's asleep. That tells you what I'm dealing with. I'm breaking down while she sleeps at 7:30 in the evening; been asleep for hours. You know what they say about Nero when Rome burned?

And she would let me know she thought her ex-room-mate was better than me on numerous occasions; the person that didn't mind her being homeless is better than me evidently. Gives you an idea of what I'm dealing with.

Absolutely the worst time in my life.