I'm wondering if any one has any advice to offer re. caring/getting the right care for someone whose first language is different to their own.
My MIL left Poland during WW2 when she was just 8 (a few weeks after witnessing the death of her mother). She survived time in Siberia and India (we're talking the Catholic 'holocaust' here not the Jewish) and came to the UK aged 16 and unable to speak any English but with smatterings of a couple of other languages. She married another Polish refugee (FIL, died 19 years ago) and Polish was spoken in their home exclusively until my husband and his brother were in their teens when they rebelled and starting speaking English, which by then was definitely their first language (they both only spoke Polish until they went to school).
During the 80s my parents in law became shopkeepers and their English improved to the extent that my mother in law says that that was when she started to think in English. But her English vocabulary has always been too limited to allow for fine distinctions in meaning.
I am really struggling sometimes to tell if some of the nonsense she spouts is the AZ or her diminshing grasp of English. I suspect that if I could speak with her in Polish things might make more sense, although I'm sure she would still have word retrieval problems in any language. But when it comes to things like her recent agreement to a DNR I honestly have no idea if she has properly grasped what it is.
My approach is usually to use very simple English and test her understanding with gentle questioning, but I'm concerned that as her early years continue to become more immediate to her this language mismatch will become more problematic. I've tried to learn some simple Polish, but I always was hopeless at languages so that wasn't very sucessful. And although my husband and his brother's remnants of Polish are probably up to the task neither is generally available to attend appointments with her, or even to visit her that often (through no fault of their own).
On a completely different note there is so much love for those you are caring for in evidence on this forum that I almost feel ashamed. I can't pretend that I have any reason to love my MIL, in fact quite the opposite, maybe her experiences as a refugee made her what she became but she was really not a nice person and AZ hasn't changed that. I am doing my best for her, as patiently as I can, but I wonder sometimes if someone she actually liked would be able to coax more from her than I can.
Any advice as to how to navigate all this would be most gratefully received.
My MIL left Poland during WW2 when she was just 8 (a few weeks after witnessing the death of her mother). She survived time in Siberia and India (we're talking the Catholic 'holocaust' here not the Jewish) and came to the UK aged 16 and unable to speak any English but with smatterings of a couple of other languages. She married another Polish refugee (FIL, died 19 years ago) and Polish was spoken in their home exclusively until my husband and his brother were in their teens when they rebelled and starting speaking English, which by then was definitely their first language (they both only spoke Polish until they went to school).
During the 80s my parents in law became shopkeepers and their English improved to the extent that my mother in law says that that was when she started to think in English. But her English vocabulary has always been too limited to allow for fine distinctions in meaning.
I am really struggling sometimes to tell if some of the nonsense she spouts is the AZ or her diminshing grasp of English. I suspect that if I could speak with her in Polish things might make more sense, although I'm sure she would still have word retrieval problems in any language. But when it comes to things like her recent agreement to a DNR I honestly have no idea if she has properly grasped what it is.
My approach is usually to use very simple English and test her understanding with gentle questioning, but I'm concerned that as her early years continue to become more immediate to her this language mismatch will become more problematic. I've tried to learn some simple Polish, but I always was hopeless at languages so that wasn't very sucessful. And although my husband and his brother's remnants of Polish are probably up to the task neither is generally available to attend appointments with her, or even to visit her that often (through no fault of their own).
On a completely different note there is so much love for those you are caring for in evidence on this forum that I almost feel ashamed. I can't pretend that I have any reason to love my MIL, in fact quite the opposite, maybe her experiences as a refugee made her what she became but she was really not a nice person and AZ hasn't changed that. I am doing my best for her, as patiently as I can, but I wonder sometimes if someone she actually liked would be able to coax more from her than I can.
Any advice as to how to navigate all this would be most gratefully received.
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