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JenBrehob

Sandwiched between my kids and my parents

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JenBrehob
, March 26th, 2017 at 07:50 PM (436 Views)
At our SCY championships I had a great time to speak with Rick Battistini, our coach du jour, and he had a lot of wisdom about taking care of one's parents.

I had been looking for any commiseratory blog entries but didn't see any.

My father had cancer and was taking a lot of extra care last year and he unexpectedly died of a massive heart attack on December 30th 2016.

My mother was not in great health at the time and took it understandably very poorly and had a sharp degradation in her own health.

I ended up 9-1-1ing her to the hospital for a 1 1/2 week stay and now she is rehabbing at home.

I have had to stop everything but coaching Masters 3x per week and am battling back to swimming time for myself for my own gratification and stress release and health.

I don't know how much longer my mom has and I have limited help form limited family nearby.

Since I've been coaching and teaching swimming, I have needed the support of my parents and this is really tough.

Last weekend at SCYs I was so tired I was not having fun until I could nap for 1 1/4 hours between events then had to scratch the last 2 because I had to get back to Mom and relieve my son from mom sitting!

I am figuring it out bit by bit!

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  1. flystorms's Avatar
    Is there anyone who can help relieve you of some of the things on your plate? Is there another coach who might help out for a month or so? Or someone on your team who is interested in coaching and could give it a try temporarily?

    Definitely take some time for yourself for stress relieve - whether it's sleeping or swimming or whatever. Like they say on planes, put oxygen on yourself before helping others, otherwise you may not survive.
  2. JenBrehob's Avatar
    Thanks! For me, the coaching and swimming (nothing in excess) is stress relief. I am getting even better than I was at naps, too.

    Today I went to our branch with the LCM pool, since the more local branch was having the HVAC redone, and the first person I spoke to in the pool was a teammate on our Masters team who has also been a part time coach and she understood a lot of it and we had a great chat. I also had a better time than expected swimming 1100 first time in a long time Long Course!

    So that was great. Otherwise it's been my mom getting better (gained 2 lbs since last checkup, as of yesterday) and getting some help, I have some elder services helping by providing an aide for 7 hours per week so I'm getting 2 little breaks and my girl twin just got home from college so that should help over the summer a bit!

    My grandmother was very good at pacing herself so I am learning the same!