This is the first time I have written to the forum and just feel the need to share what things are like. My wife's mother has been slowly deteriorating from about 4 years ago - all the usual stuff, so I won't go on about that. I had seen it all before as my mother died 10 years ago from Alzheimer's and so I knew what was coming, more or less. Having learned (or so I thought) from my many mistakes with my mother, I thought it might be easier second time round. Fortunately, we live in a reasonably big house and so we converted our double garage into a small but very comfortable and quite lovely little granny flat. She moved in in August this year and we have home help and generally I don't think we're coping badly at all. But my wife takes a different attitude. She is very resentful of the way her mother has basically taken over our lives and is becoming increasingly stressed and agitated. She snaps all the time at me and her daughter and it is this I am really struggling with, not the actual caring for my mother-in-law. She is very martyr-like about the whole thing and we have to be very firm with her regarding helping out. In my opinion she works too hard at her poorly-paid part-time job, doing extra hours when she shouldn't, which doesn't help. I wish she could give it up but we need the money to pay for the conversion as of course we are not able to use any of my mother-in-law's money - or so our solicitor advises us. At this rate, I feel my mother-in-law is going to have to go into a home sooner rather than later as it is tearing our family apart. I feel stressed as I am the major breadwinner and have to make sure we have a roof over our heads; not so easy in these difficult times. All in all, as I say in the title, it's getting bad.
I'm sure there are others in the same situation struggling to cope as well and just writing about it like this gets it off my chest. I would really appreciate any tips or help from others who have struggled like this might have.
Thanks for listening
I'm sure there are others in the same situation struggling to cope as well and just writing about it like this gets it off my chest. I would really appreciate any tips or help from others who have struggled like this might have.
Thanks for listening
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