18-05-2025, 08:49 AM
(This post was last modified: 18-05-2025, 09:28 AM by Oh_hunnihunni.)
My daughter was on instagram messaging with me last night, on about her garden which is coming along really nicely. I am very pleased that part of my parenting has 'infected' her with such good results. Then in the middle of one post she dropped the news that my sister, who turned 70 this year, has just been diagnosed with alzheimers, and my heart just broke in two again. After all those awful years with watching first my grandmother, then my mum go through the long goodbye with vascular dementia, different cause, similar outcome, to think she and her family now have that ahead of them is just so painful. I tried to tell my daughter that but she has focused so much on her own MS struggle that she has kind of wrapped it up in 'my genetics' and is able to put this news into that bundle of inevitability. The gene that predisposes people to brain diseases like MS and alzheimers, among others, is the same one, so I guess she sees it as a shared issue somehow, having had time to process that inevitability and the shreds of hope that come with current therapies and potential future cures. But my experience just lets me see the horror that is to come for both families, and brings me back to my own conviction that I am so not going down that road. Give me the genes of the other side of the family please, I'll take cancer over that any day. That or the quick way out in my own time and space.
So, last night was a sleepless one in this little flat, making tea at 2am and resorting to my current CJ Box novel. Life with Joe Pickett in Wyoming is such a comforting distance away from the real thing. And now that daylight is here I can start to get used to the idea, and at the same time wonder about having a child who could just drop such a bombshell into an instagram conversation with so little thought of the consequences for the effect. But then, that is genetics too. It was just that talent for emotional distance that meant I could not stay with her father, for all his other excellent attributes, lol.
Ah well, another day in an interesting life, not raining out there yet, just in here on my parade...
So, last night was a sleepless one in this little flat, making tea at 2am and resorting to my current CJ Box novel. Life with Joe Pickett in Wyoming is such a comforting distance away from the real thing. And now that daylight is here I can start to get used to the idea, and at the same time wonder about having a child who could just drop such a bombshell into an instagram conversation with so little thought of the consequences for the effect. But then, that is genetics too. It was just that talent for emotional distance that meant I could not stay with her father, for all his other excellent attributes, lol.
Ah well, another day in an interesting life, not raining out there yet, just in here on my parade...