Bad ideas, and a good one

 Once again thank you for the supportive comments and emails, it does help to know that there are others who are in the same situation.....unfortunately, it's a club none of us want to belong to really.

Husband has good days and bad days, sometimes a good day with just one or two less good bits, other times mostly bad for several days running - those days I feel like walking out and never coming back.  I don't have that option though - I've got nowhere to go for a start, certainly nowhere that I could have Betty with me, and I know that husband simply wouldn't be able to cope on his own for any length of time.  I couldn't and wouldn't do that to him.  

The last couple of days have been pretty awful.  I knew he was up to something, he kept disappearing into the garden with his tape measure, then coming back in and looking up things on his computer.  So I asked what he was doing.....it turned out he's decided he wants a greenhouse....well, a polytunnel actually.  Our garden isn't very big, in fact there's nowhere really for a greenhouse to fit - he said yes there is, one of the small (6 feet square) gravel beds where he's currently growing tomatoes in pots.  This bed is in the middle of the garden, right next to the patio where our garden table and chairs are, and the rotary washing line is on the other side - it would be in the way of the polytunnel and would have to be moved, I don't know where to!  Where he wants it is also in front of my bedroom window - so to have it there would entirely block off our view of the garden when sitting at our garden table, and I'd be faced with it outside my bedroom window, blocking my view there as well.  I asked why he wants it - to grow tomatoes and cucumbers he said.  We've grown/are growing tomatoes and cucumbers outside in the garden beds perfectly well both last year and this.....so no need for a greenhouse.  Also, it would just become a dumping ground for all the junk husband collects - he's the untidiest bloke in the world and it would simply be another place to fill with clutter.  We had quite a big polytunnel in our previous garden and it was more than half filled with his junk.  I'm just not having that again, and we don't need one anyway.  He's still going on about it though.  I wouldn't be surprised, although would be annoyed, if he ordered one off the internet anyway without telling me, he has a habit of doing things without my knowledge.

He also announced yesterday he wants wifi on his phone......the phone that's a very basic smart phone which he still doesn't know how to use properly and still has to ask me for help with reading and deleting texts (he never sends any), the same phone that he lost his (PAYG) credit on because he hadn't used the phone for 6 months!  He's said about getting internet on his phone before, each time I've explained why it's not a good idea - what would he use it for, for a start?  And why pay monthly for something he's not going to/will be unable to use?  It will just be yet another headache for me to have to deal with, and show him how to use each and every time he wants to do something on it, because he will never remember.  

And he's been so damn argumentative the last couple of days.  I don't argue back anymore, I just walk away.

To top it all off, I discovered that for the last few nights he's not had his bed guard up, he folds it down when he gets into bed.  He's not getting the thrashing about nightmares anymore since the GP advised him to stop taking the neuropathy pain med that was causing them, which means he hasn't fallen out of bed recently.  Prior to him starting to take that med though, he had previously fallen out of bed a couple of times - he's a very restless sleeper, constantly fidgeting about and turning over, one of the reasons why we have separate rooms.  He didn't voluntarily tell me he wasn't using the bed guard anymore - I found it folded down when I went to put some clean washing in his room.  I asked him if he'd still been using it.....he ummed and ahhed and looked shifty before admitting he hadn't.  He couldn't really explain why - well, no good reason anyway, he just said it'll be alright.  So I just shrugged and said if he wants to run the risk of falling out again and perhaps smashing his cheekbone on the chest of drawers next time, well that's up to him.  I can't force him to be sensible, or even to listen to me.

I've read a few more carers stories recently, one of them said about something she does which she finds helpful in getting rid of the stresses of daily life.  At the end of the day, once she's settled her husband in bed, she sits down for half an hour with a cuppa and writes a list of all the stressful or annoying things that have happened during the day.  She reads through it - and then screws it up and throws it in the bin - so she's throwing out all the frustrations of the day before she goes to bed.  What a good idea.