Mission Creep

Mission creep, in military terms, is when the objective suffers shifting goal posts: You start out by enforcing a cease-fire neutrally, then you take sides and capture the worst warlords because it’s the only way to keep the peace. You’re giving military backup to an ally’s troops and when that doesn’t win the war, you start going into the field. And before you know it you’re in a full shooting war that you never wanted to begin.
I’ve suffered something of the same helping out Mum. I originally made my June visit because she was in hospital and Partner wanted help deciding what to do. By the time I came up, Mum was out of the hospital and my mission mutated to babysitting her to save them a couple of days of 24/7 care. On top of that, my sister came up with a bunch of useful things I could do while I was there, such as get the power of attorney signed (I did) and collect all her tax information (as noted, it’s now disappeared).
The original purpose for this last trip, when Mum and Partner were both heading off to Portland at the start of August, was that since she resisted round-the-clock care (at the time the home wasn’t insisting on it, but we thought it advisable), my sister and I would take over the job. I hadn’t planned to come up and help out again, but since my sister was offering to fly in from Europe for two weeks, I felt I couldn’t say no (shared sacrifice is hard to argue with).
As noted, in the previous posts, the Portland move is off and Mum has 24/7 care, so I wasn’t needed. But my sister pointed out someone should talk to Mum face to face about splitting her and Partner up … so I wound up heading up here yesterday.
Almost immediately, tasks multiplied:
•Find a cousin’s death certificate because we’ll need this to close an account she shared with Mum.
•Give the home a copy of my power of attorney.
•Find the tax material and mail it off (no luck).
•Do some paperwork for the home nursing care service.
•Take Mum to a hair appointment and an optometrist appointment.
•Take her shopping at Target for new shoes, which she needs for her sore feet (as it turns out, she found shoes so we didn’t need the trip, but went and bought odds and ends anyway—another example of mission creep).
•Arrange online access to her Comcast account.
•And then it turned out Mum’s neurologist appointment was moved up to Monday so my stay got extended an extra four days, as I mentioned in the last post.
That’s the thing about elder care: There are always going to be more jobs to do. More paperwork to straighten. More errands to run. It’s very easy, I can see, to get sucked in and just not stop. Having gone up and stayed up, the idea of just popping up if they need me again seems almost logical.
So I have to set limits. And remind myself that being willing to help doesn’t mean I must help at any cost or without any limitations r at any time they wanted to. That just isn’t an option.
We’ll see how things progress from here.