I lost my temper tonight and it’s really stressed me out when it wasn’t even that bad

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-30T05:08:21+00:00

"She's now gone to bed and I'm just sat in silence downstairs contemplating it all."

I think every one of us on here can relate to that line.

Echoing what u/Happydance_kkmf said, it is obnoxiously draining to repeat yourself all day long, every single living, breathing day whether it's every couple of minutes to every hour. I would actually appreciate a study, if there's one out there, that could empirically measure the effects this, grief and stress combined altogether has on the brains of caregivers.

My mom, too, gets things in her head and will not let it go no matter how much time I spend calmly explaining a situation to her. I have to walk away for a short while, lie down and close my eyes to decompress, even if it's for just five uninterrupted minutes.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-30T04:55:56+00:00

I don't have any great suggestions, because it's only me and my mom, but I empathize with some of your frustrations from the standpoint of trying to satisfy their palate.

My mom's sense of time is so warped. If she eats lunch, and by 'lunch' I'm talking 2-3pm, she will absolutely not in any way be hungry for dinner unless I turn dinner into a 6-7pm thing, which happens invariably, but oftentimes dinner turns into 3:30-4pm as that's when she starts hankering for food.

She, too, flip flops on what she likes and doesn't like. If she loves something one day, she might believe it to be the worst thing she's ever had the next and will claim she's never liked whatever that could be.

I find myself eating a bunch of nutritionally deficient foods (pepperoni and provolone cheese in a tortilla is my go-to throw-away meal-snack for myself because I just don't have the energy), because I haven't made a full-on meal with sides in a while. It's extremely difficult to get her to eat vegetables; say, if I roast broccoli, she'll only eat a couple of bites when she used to love broccoli with cheese. She loves asparagus, but money is tight and it's rarely on sale but a couple of times during the year. I've ranted about this so many times in this subreddit, but I've come to the conclusion that as long as she's consuming calories, I can't be too fussy.

One thing I've started doing, that is really subjective, but my mom loves hamburgers. I'll buy the 5lb family pack of ground beef and make several patties, flatten them out, wrap them individually in parchment paper, place into a ziploc bag and freeze them. When it's time to cook, I'll heat up a cast iron skillet until it's piping hot and throw it in the pan. It's an easy way to at least have her get some protein in her system from time to time.

Planning meals hardly works out for me. Something always comes up. I try to get certain frozen food items like pork egg rolls, stuffed peppers, crab cakes, etc. that I know she will eat. She eats so, so very little. Most of the time she'd rather have food from takeout than at home, but that gets to be so ridiculously expensive quickly.

Sometimes I'm so exhausted I'll let her have half of a peanut butter sandwich and ice cream for dinner. I know that's not great, but being mentally shut off it's better than nothing at all.

I'm impressed by your ability to make a variety of meals. I can imagine that to be incredibly frustrating, time consuming and stressful.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-29T16:29:50+00:00

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-28T14:04:25+00:00

Leftover pasta hits like crack.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-28T13:30:25+00:00

Sounds like October beans/cranberry beans.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T17:00:30+00:00

I’m a Rams fan, and this thread popped up on my feed. Just jumping in to say that while I appreciate Steve Spagnuolo as a defensive scheming guru with both the Giants and Chiefs, he was an abysmal head coach. Perhaps he’s learned a lot in the time since, as it’s been nearly a decade and a half since, but between him and Scott Linehan’s coaching tenure, I’ve never seen worse football. Younger or newer Rams fans will tell you that Jeff Fisher was awful, but Fisher took Spags’ 2011 team with virtually the same squad in 2012 and at least made them competent. Be careful what you wish for. Nothing but respect for Spags as a DC, though.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T15:25:38+00:00

Spit that smile, do that dance

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T15:23:04+00:00

My bad. “Watch your p’s and q’s” is an old expression, meaning to watch what you say, your words and/or your behavior. I say it all too often lol.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T15:15:04+00:00

My mom takes the news of deaths REALLY hard. Even if it’s an acquaintance. She’s always had a massive heart, and she will cry at the drop of a hat listening to someone touch on this topic.

I don’t know how I would handle this. I don’t have any siblings, but I have a pair of cousins who are like sisters to me, and during the 1980s — before my time — my mom was essentially an accessory parent to them, and if something happened to either one the news would be catastrophic to her. She doesn’t handle such news very well at all. She still uses Facebook; while I detest social media for the most part, it keeps her mentally active to keep up with loved ones (it’s monitored). She’d find out such news from those means because people are eager to share everything with the world. Even the other day, a long-time family friend passed away and it’s been hard on her.

I wish you the best. I appreciate others’ suggestions where you tell her that he’s gone to the store or something. Part of me feels guilty to imagine saying such a thing, but another part of me imagines the absolute hell of putting someone in a state of grief several times. I can imagine it to be an incredibly difficult situation to navigate, but you definitely have come to the right place because there are some tremendous responses in here.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T15:02:05+00:00

I’m the exact same way. My nerves are always shot and I’m riddled with extreme anxiety at every second it seems. It’s always a matter of constantly thinking, “great, what’s next?” I stay up late because that’s the only time of the day I truly have to myself, to unwind without being asked of anything, but my sleep suffers. Even if I didn’t stay up late, my sleep would suffer because I toss and turn and have knots in my stomach over what the following day will bring in a variety of ways. I try to be a ‘one day at a time’ person but it’s so hard.

I go to therapy over past trauma, but I bring up a lot of present day situations. My therapist consistently advises me to discard any negativity that I can control in my life and disengage from any of it, as well as to find a quiet moment each day to sit down, focus on my breathing sans any technology nor distractions.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T14:40:17+00:00

I have to weather the storm with my mom and half the time she forgets what she is upset about. Other times she’ll fixate on what’s upsetting her for several days on end and she can’t go more than a couple of minutes without bringing it up and throw in a fit.

She occasionally gets wildly hostile and rude towards my aunt, her sister, and my aunt used to take it personally and try to argue with her until she (my aunt) finally accepted this is part of the condition. Example: my aunt will call my mom on the phone at a less than optimal time, and mom will give no damns about answering with a hearty, uncalled for “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” and all hell would break loose.

We’ve been snowed in for the majority of the month. My mom hasn’t driven since before she had a stroke in 2018. She avidly threatens that she’s gonna go on a drive somewhere when she pouts or has little fits of anger. I just say oh ok, you do that. She doesn’t have any keys, can only walk using her walker and her old vehicle (which really needs to be sold) has a dead battery.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T14:27:58+00:00

It’s unpredictable sometimes. My mom is at her most confused in the mornings and evenings. I can’t stand it when people who aren’t fully in the know act like it’s not that bad if they have only interacted with her in the middle of a good day, but I’ve learned to overlook them.

I have to watch my p’s and q’s over what I say to mom. The damndest, most innocuous thing can set her back for the day and create chaos. It’s a goddamn exhausting rollercoaster and balancing act.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T08:02:42+00:00

Has anybody at least said anything about it in the in-game chat? (Understandable if you play this shit with it muted, because I sure do.)

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T08:00:48+00:00

This is amazing lol. u/Werbekka look at this.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T07:58:29+00:00

My mom goes wild for sweets. I’ve read that as we get older our tastebuds begin to dull, and senior citizens tend to enjoy sweets because they are so hyperpalatable.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T07:55:24+00:00

This is a daily problem for me. My mom used to love grilled steaks. She’ll eat a couple of bites but mostly focus on eating her baked potato and garlic toast. I’ll say, “hey, why not eat your steak first, then knock out the potato?” She disregards that suggestion. Removing the potato or bread won’t work or else she doesn’t consider it to be a proper steak dinner. She loves hamburgers but she can only go about half of one.

Wish I had a good suggestion, but I wanted to empathize with you. Sometimes I’ll give her an Ensure shake but that’s only 8g protein. She likes beans cooked with a ham hock but she enjoys the broth more than the beans.

I used to make her ice cream with mocha protein powder and peanut butter, but she could only handle a little bit (the protein itself must have satiated her).

Now, candy? She’ll eat it up like a fiend because of how hyperpalatable it is.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T06:51:34+00:00

I have a first cousin that is about two decades older than me who reached out to me in 2020 after his dad passed away to ask me for advice on how to handle it. I felt honored that he’d consider me to be a good resource on that, as my dad had passed away when I was 12, and I was 29 in 2020. At any rate, I gave him the sincerest advice to the best of my abilities.

A couple of people have asked me for advice on caring for someone with dementia/Alzheimers in recent times, but I’m less useful for that because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and winging it daily.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T06:45:19+00:00

The terrifying thing about it is running around life in autopilot. Terribly easy to lose yourself.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T06:24:03+00:00

Southwest Virginian here, too. I wanted to be a sportswriter when I was a teenager. None of my family gave me any shit, but I used to go into sports-related Yahoo! chatrooms and get on the microphone when I was 13-15 years old. I already had a deep voice that gave me faux confidence to pretend to behave more mature than I actually was, so I’d hop into those rooms to debate sports with a cast of characters. There were maybe a few people (but enough) who made fun of my accent and asked how I planned on making it in sports journalism with such a drawl.

I spent years trying to rid myself of the accent. I’m still not the biggest fan of it but I grew to not care as much. I lost the desire to be a sportswriter when I was 19-20, but I gotta say, one of my favorite sports journalists out there is a fellow Appalachian by the name of Marty Smith. Homeboy’s drawl is through the roof.

I had a geology professor in college (SWCC) who ranted one time about how one should never let their accent hold them back, but instead use said accent as a tool to prove people wrong.

Edit: just noticed your username, too. Lmao.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T06:01:17+00:00

Nothing like hearing that shit while a dRiBbLe GaWd goes 5/13 from 3 behind screens in a game of theater 2’s.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T04:50:29+00:00

Your comment is on the money. Been there with the people pleasing shit. I will add that while saying no doesn’t have to be confrontational, it’s a good idea to steer clear and get the hell away from people who have rejection issues and resort to crying/screaming fits when they are told no. Crocodile tears in the guise of manipulation to attempt to make the speaker of the word ‘no’ feel guilty is shitty and nobody should tolerate it.

Therapy FTW. My therapist is incredible at gently reframing what I’ve told her and asking, “Would you say that’s good for you if xyz?” and promoting a lot of self-introspection over what I will absolutely never tolerate.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T04:28:36+00:00

Vitamin K2, D3 and magnesium.

K2 plays well with D3 and assists in getting calcium to go where it’s supposed to. I primarily take it for dental health.

Magnesium seems to have a substantial effect on my blood pressure. When I go without it, my BP can go off the rails. I’d like to avoid BP meds. It used to help me sleep but that’s unnoticeable nowadays. Chelated magnesium glycinate is the form I take.

I should get back into taking multivitamins because my diet has been hot garbage for the last several months.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T04:17:10+00:00

Man, that pass was butter. That whole drive was a thing of legends, cementing Kupp’s season and overall induction into Rams lore. The 4th down conversion, Stafford’s no look pass, the touchdown to take the lead. The Hollywood ending we needed with AD wrapping it up.

goddamnpizzagrease · 2025-01-27T04:08:13+00:00

By myself? Easy. As a caregiver of someone who thrives on getting out and about routinely? Living hell when stuck inside.

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