How is this supposed to work? 2023 12 29

 


I may never understand how this was supposed to work. I certainly did not anticipate what it was going to feel like entering my third year of family caregiving, another year of 500+ hours a month looking after my Mom. I did not understand that my family, all my siblings, would be perfectly fine with leaving all this work to me. That they may express some guilt, they may take on 1% of that caregiving work and consider their job done. It is really hard right now to look ahead at 2024 and know that it is all on me. That if I fail, if I falter, if I give up, Mom is going into an institution and there is good reason to believe that her life will be over not long after that.

It is hard to live with the knowledge that there is no backup, there is no replacement for me. That the longevity of Mom's life, the number of days she has left, depend on my capacity to continue showing up day after day.

There is no budget to pay for my replacement. There is no budget to pay for professional help. 

What are we going to do when Mom's savings are expended? When we need to rent this suite just to keep the house?

I am implementing a couple of initiatives to see if I can generate cashflow on my own behalf even as I continue to provide caregiving for Mom. Selling original art cards. Setting up a rain barrel installation business. I do love these ideas. But that is what they are. Ideas. Who is to say whether I can actually turn them into positive cashflow for this household?

In a very significant way, whatever success I have had to date has been a result of believing that I can succeed at what I have undertaken. And so, to draw the line forward, my success in 2024 is also going to rest, in large part, in my belief that I can succeed, that I can make a success of all three ventures: family caregiving, card making, rain barrel installations.

I'm feeling low today as I go through the bottom of the sine wave of my confidence. However, there are four crows in my drawing board waiting for some blue lines, there are infinite pictures I am collecting to make more drawings from. I know how to write a business plan and I can probably get one written before the end of January. I am entering the stage of hypothesis validation: for year three, who will buy a card, who will pay to have rainwater collection system installed.

Somehow I have survived this far. I suppose it is reasonable to predict that I will survive the next year.

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