Wednesday, March 01, 2006

One of the hardest things

Scott's mom is 63 years old. She has lupus, Sjögren's syndrome, fibromyalgia, and has broken her hip once, and had two heart attacks. As you can imagine, with all that going on, she has many doctor's appointments.

About 18 months ago, she had a small fender bender in Scott's car. It only cost us $572, but it was rather scary because she stated that she had "nodded off". At that point, we suggested that she didn't drive, and finally ended up with the car at our house (we had pretty much given it to her but it was still in Scott's name).

She's been fussing about getting the car back because Scott's been taking her to doctor's appointments, but his job has gotten so busy lately, that he's had to have her cancel several appointments. So tonight, we took the car over there and had her do a test drive with Scott in the car. When they got back, Scott told her he didn't want her driving...she had scared him, and he doesn't scare easily.

Needless to say, she was pretty upset. Our vehicles are our independence - and we were taking her's away. Nevermind that she hadn't driven in 18 months - it's the principle of the thing.

It's deeply disturbing to us to have to do this to her, but the risks are enormous. She lives in Arlington - a community well known for it's disproportionately high number of accidents. In fact, I was watching the news while they did the test drive - and out of the six accidents they showed, five of them were in Arlington...where she lives. It would be bad enough to have her injured in an accident, or God forbid, killed in one, but we would have to live with the guilt forever, if she hurt or killed someone else.

It is not at all easy to reach this point, where the child has to parent their parents. She's not going to be able to live by herself too terribly much longer, and because we're so far out in the country, having her live with us is probably not an option. Assisted living is probably the best way to go, but she's very resistent.

This is definitely one of the hardest things to go through!

Because we just got home a short while ago, my goals for tonight were shot - and now I'm bummed on top of it.

1 comment:

Amy S. Petrik said...

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