Spread too Thin

If you asked me, what's the hardest thing about caring for your mum, what would I tell you?

That it jars every time I discover another lost memory? That's hard.

That is maddens me when she ties herself in knots over the Wretched iPad? That's frustrating.

That I must hang onto my patience when she asks me the same question at lunchtime that she did over breakfast? Yup.

But the hardest, the very most difficult? That'd be the perpetual juggle between managing Mum and managing my marriage. I tread a tightrope between the two and it's exhausting and draining.  And I live in dread that I may fall off and row with one or the other or create even more tension for it is there; this rope I tread is pulled taut.

Two different people  - my partner, my parent - with two very different sets of needs, agendas, timetables. Demands.

I remember this feeling as a mother - when my children were little, when everybody needed a piece of me and the piece they needed had to fit a different shape at a different time. I was as butter spread so thin you could see through me sometimes.  I was as a jigsaw made of a thousand pieces which sometimes I lost or tried to force into the wrong space.

Of all the things I considered when Mum came to live with us, this was not one of them: that the feeling of being pulled in a million different directions would sustain, feel harder, leave nothing of Me.

Sometimes, sometimes when the day has been fragmented by the demands of the two people I live with so that I write late at night, jagged,  I want to run away, I want to run away and hide and gather myself up so that I can be whole and strong.

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The prompt for this post? Next week, BBC4's Woman's Hour are running a series of programmes on the emotional challenges of caring ...