My Attitude is Getting Worse

Welcome. You have been given great advice. It took me a long time to accept that I needed anxiety medication. Counseling is also a good idea. It might be helpful to try and change your prospective and see her as someone who is not well that you care for vs a partner and wife. I’m not sure how you do that. Do you have a plan B? Have you considered Al? Her own Al apartment, activities, new friends and a reason to get dressed in the morning might not be such a bad thing for either of you. When you said you would stand by her, in my opinion that means you would do what is best for her and see that she has the care she needs. Al doesn’t mean you drop her off and you’re done.There is still a lot of work that goes into caring for someone in Al. I’m glad you found this group.

@DonCaregiver you definitely are not alone in finding it difficult to control how you respond to your wife. My husband has anosogosia and is unable to recognize his mental and physical decline.

I have a tough time remembering to walk away rather than respond with frustration or anger. I’ve decided I need a visual reminder and am considering buying this to remind myself to “turn around and walk away” rather than engage with him. I also recently had my doctor prescribe a med to help me.

This is a caring, supportive and judgement free community. Don’t hesitate to vent here. Your post helped me realize I’m not alone.

This is something of a rambling aside to the commenting above that is right on. Try to find a counselor/psychologist/social worker who is experienced with dementia and the inevitable, gradual, awful, horrible decline. If one doesn't help, look for another, especially if they list things like grief, dementia, Alziheimer's, etc in their list of interests or specialty areas. Do what you can to find a support group, online or otherwise. In person is better. And keep looking and commenting here, which was my main source of support and especially knowledge for 8 years. Especially for knowledge about the specifics of situations like yours. Get advice, both personal and financial on AL and Memory Care so you know what you might eventually need to get into. Maybe look into palliative medical care in a system that also has hospice. Those people kicked my butt to make changes when I was in over my head and didn't know it, and they pulled strings to find an appropriate placement when the time inevitably came. My DW died slightly over a year ago, at a time when I was at the end of my rope and I really thought that my caregiving role, which sounds very similar to yours, would go on forever. Now that I am looking back, I know two things. First, have to take it a day at a time. That is the big one. Get through the day. Do what you have to. Just survive. Staying alive and healthy is your objective. Work on the issues as they come up, like the yelling issue. Get help to work to fix it, but know that other similarly stressful issues will come up. Love your wife as she goes through the increasingly worse phases of not being who she was. It becomes a very different kind of love—- more parent to child than spouse to spouse. As you've pointed out, that can be horrific. It is. Hard as f&ck.

Don't be hard on yourself. Get in home relief as you can, though this will not be the panacea you want it to be. You've obviously got to deal with the yelling and you know it and are working to do something about it and that is the best you can do. Maybe go yell in private. You know it's not her fault, not serving any useful purpose, and you'll learn to change your ways if you keep trying via things like your post, finding a counselor, etc. etc. You are doing the hardest job in the world and I feel for you, as others felt for me. Very likely, after putting in your time, it will all end when you least expect. I thought my wife would live several more years beyond what she did. Then you'll probably be in shock and grieving hard for some period of time but that will somehow soften. I have no idea how things have very, very gradually become mostly "normal" for me again, but they have. I still have a ways to go but a good world will still be out there for you and me. Dealing with your own emotions at this point, as you are really trying to do, especially if you can understand what they are and finding ways to try to deal with them could help you a lot in the long run. Because even when you aren't entirely successful, you will know that you did the best you could, and that turns out to be enough to help eliminate the regret you might otherwise feel. If you end up looking back and thinking that it was a long hard road, that you had a lot to learn, that you made many mistakes, big and little, but you did your best to learn more and to do better the next time, one day at a time, you'll be able to look back with few or no regrets. And that was the second really big thing for me. I really screwed up many times, was an a-hole, but just kept trying to learn and to do my best. And knowing that makes me feel good now. Good luck. I'm very sorry that you are in this big club.

I find mom has a way of sucking me into an argument. She demands answers and explanations. Why won’t you let me do this or that? If I try to explain (using facts and logic), well we all know how that goes. She tells me I’m being ridiculous. The doctors don’t know what they are talking about. Im not telling the truth. If I try to distract her she calls me out for changing the subject and gets mad. If I walk away she claims I’m the unreasonable one, because I refuse to talk about her concerns. She claims I won’t even talk with her about … to anyone who will listen. I end up looking like a horrible person to anyone who doesn’t have all the details of the situation. If I can manage to come up with some kind of fib on the fly, she often sees through it. It is a no win situation. Thankfully medication has helped.