Settling In

A series of small stories about placing my mother-in-law in a care home

Part 1 — The Phone Saga

When we settled my mother-in-law (MIL) into the care home we’d chosen for her, we had hopes. I hoped she would be safe. My husband, her oldest son, hoped that she would almost miraculously improve, see the sense of her move, and happily, with understanding and consideration, choose to stay in the home. It was a five-minute drive from where we lived and ten minutes from his work. To my lovely man, that seemed ideal. He desperately wanted her to see it that way as well.

MIL was reluctantly agreeable to coming into the home. She acquiesced to my husband’s plan back at the end of June because he, well, we both, billed it as a ‘holiday’. “It’s somewhere you’ll be cool when the very hot weather hits,” we assured her.

We’ve since had one of the rainiest and coolest summers on record. It beats all British stereotypes of recalcitrant summer. It’s now the end of August, and the confused trees are putting on their autumn clothes, which they will suddenly drop any minute now, in favour of bare-shouldered winter fashion. Any minute now. I’m terribly bad at hiding my disgust.

From the beginning MIL had many things to complain about. They had to mark all her clothes on the labels so that they’d know whose was whose. “What if the ink bleeds into the fabric?”

She didn’t know anyone there, and they didn’t understand her accent. She’s from the Midlands. We live in the South of England…