Rising damp!

After something of an even more prolonged absence than usual I have finally made it back here in an effort to update and to detail some of what has kept me from blogging much lately. My random missives on Facebook have caused some questions and concerns from some of you kind people and so I thought it was time I pulled my finger out and posted something at least!

This is gonna be a long one, be warned!

My current situation goes back a fair way, in fact all the way back to my fathers death in November 2009. I still, for the sake of my families privacy, can't go into great detail but suffice to say that since then my mother has struggled to come to term with her loss and also with significant memory issues which only became apparent once my father had died.

To say it has been a nightmare for both her and myself would be something of an understatement, I think I can safely say it has been pretty much the hardest thing I have had to cope with in my life and despite support from my siblings, as the one living here all the time for me it has been a constant internal battle of emotions, and patience and at times a complete feeling of frustration and exasperation and of feeling I was becoming completely overwhelmed by it all. My stress levels have been through the roof and if anyone had told me that once we lost my dad I would have to deal with this situation immediately afterwards I think I would have run screaming into the hills there and then.

And it continues, thought after almost a year of doctors and appointments a few months back we at last got some answers and a little help with a way forward. Day to day little has changed but being armed with more information instead of trying to deal with it all 'blind' makes it a little easier. There have been times though when I really felt so 'up against it' that I couldn't see a way to cope any longer. On many of those occasions I wished I could blog the details just to vent but I couldn't and still can't but I can now at least share a little of it and of how it affects me. That is not to underestimate the impact on my mother herself or on my other family members but this is my blog and hence it's my thoughts and feelings that are here.

So, where does that bring me too now?

Well, the current state of play is this: it has been decided that my mother will cope better in a different and smaller house for various reasons and so our family home, of over 45 years, has been put on the market to enable her to move to a lovely new retirement apartment nearby. She will move just as soon as the building is completed which is projected to be May/June and whether this house sells by then is not relevant, if it doesn't we have made other arrangements.

And that leaves me with something of a dilemma. Yes, when the going has got tough over the last 18 months sometimes all I have wished for was to be able to move out and escape the problems here, I have been desperate for some privacy and peace and quiet at times but the reality of achieving that is a whole other thing now I have to!

My problem is this. I earn little above minimum wage, we live near London and prices to rent even a small studio apartment are hideous (upwards of £600pcm...including absolutely nothing). I have viewed a few but those one would like to live in I just can't consider financially and even those that could never be classed as a remotely 'bijou residence' seem to be out of my league.

Plan B, much though it's not a route I wish to go, is to rent a room. It's hardly where I anticipated my life would be at my age, I hate the idea of living like a student in one room and sharing amenities with strangers..... I feel like it will be my own personal version of 'Rising damp' (that reference may be lost on non-UK readers) but even that is proving difficult to achieve! It seems very few people want someone of my age to house/flat share which is kind of understandable, when I was student age I doubt I would have wanted to share with someone of my current age. it would have felt like sharing with a parent!

So, I am a little stuck. This seems to be the story of my life, it feels like I just launch from one crisis to the next sometimes and I keep wading through them in the hope there will be a period eventually of some degree of simplicity in my life...but there never seems to be.

So there you have it, a not so brief update on what is and what has been going on in gemmak's-ville. Don't ask me where I will be in three months time because right now I haven't go the vaguest bloody idea.

Just call me Miss Jones!