Thanksgiving Night was a freaking night.

I've posted my story here before so I won't bore you with overly-repeated details. Mom has dementia (diagnosed in 2023) and was moved into AL in 2024. She's been sad about it ever since. It's horrid. I hate this disease and the god who decided we needed this disease because we weren't praising him enough/in the right way.

Anyway.

My mom is constantly losing things - mostly her phone and her keys. So I have tags on everything, specifically Tile tags (I don't have an iPhone so I take what I can get - Tile's not really the best but it's better than nothing). I have a tag on her keys, on her phone (it's a sticker), and in her wallet.

Every couple of days I do a review of her finances (to make sure there are no suspicious charges) and the location of her tagged belongings (to make sure everything is where it should be). This is especially important when we get into holiday weeks (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother's Day, her birthday) when her friends are more prone to visit and take her on fun outings, but are still not fully understanding that by doing so they are responsible for keeping an eye on those things too.

So when I went to pick her up from her friend's house Thanksgiving night, I notice she doesn't have her purse, doesn't have her phone, doesn't have her keys. I ask the friend - did she have any of these things when you picked her up? Mom pats herself down, doesn't find them. Friends search the house - can't find anything. So I assume she just left her AL without them, even though I encourage her friends to encourage her to keep her phone on her (if they can find it).

Drive her home. This is around 10:30 pm at night. We get back to her AL, and I say "let's look for your keys - maybe they're in your purse." I say this because I know, mentally, she derives a sense of security in knowing where her purse is, which is important to redirect her anxiety. At this same time, I set down around $200 worth of flea medication for her dog she'd bought from the vet. I also see that her TV isn't on - I ask her about it and she says "oh it stopped working." I ask for how long. "Oh a couple of days." Did you ask anyone for help? "Oh..."

FUCK.

She loves having her tv on - she normally just watches the news but she sleeps with it on, and I guess it helps her sleep. So fine. I start fiddling with the TV; figure it's a loose cord or something, easy to fix, then I can start looking for her purse. Mom has this tendency to bag random things (typically clean clothes with dirty clothes and random napkins and other random things). Packing/bagging seems to be her go-to action when she's anxious, I guess it's her way of thinking/feeling as though she's organized. I figure she probably bagged it and, once I'm done with the TV, I can use my phone to ping the location of the keys and the wallet.

I fix the TV and realize the flea medication I set down is gone. I ask her if she grabbed it. "I don't think so..."

FUCK #2.

As I'm now looking for this flea medication, I'm also checking my phone's app for her tagged items and... It's not showing her purse anywhere. That means her purse isn't in her room. That means her wallet and her keys are not in her room.

FUCK #3.

So I start looking everywhere - under the bed, in her dresser, in her closet... Nothing. I do this for the next hour because this is now kind of an emergency. She's stressing and continuing to pull out bags, rummage through them, and put new stuff in those same bags and shuffle through them again.

I'm quietly losing my shit in the lightning storm that used to be my brain, thinking:

• Why isn't her purse/wallet/keys here
• Where did the flea meds go I literally just saw them how the fuck do you lose something in your own room
• Why the fuck isn't this stupid app updating
• WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN "TILE DOESN'T UPDATE IN REAL TIME," THAT IS LITERALLY THE MOST ESSENTIAL ASPECT A TRACKING DEVICE SHOULD HAVE

There is a clawing, screaming sensation of stress and frustration in my skull at this point, the kind that makes your heart beat faster and overrides your ability to think about anything other than the external stressor(s).

Every few moments, she says "I'll keep looking - I'll reimburse you for the medication" or "I can look through that stuff (when I know FOR A FACT that she's going to forget, or wind up misplacing something else)."

I finally snap.

"That's not the point - it's medication you bought, that I set down on your bed, and it's now just gone. Just like your purse. Now they're both just nowhere."

I'm so frustrated at this point, my normal filters just completely failed.

"HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL?!" she screams.

Like some weird sense of post-nut clarity, I realize what I said and how I said it and suddenly feel like I kicked the world's most innocent golden retriever. I apologized profusely but she shut down and wouldn't talk to me anymore, so I left. I sat in the car for the next 20 minutes realizing what an awful person I was to lose control over myself and the situation like that.

Final insult was getting home well-after midnight to learn that my husband hadn't fed our cat, despite the fact that he'd called me around 11 to see where I was. I dunno, that just pissed me off in a different way but I was just so numb at that point I just fed the cat and went to bed.

Mom's short-term memory is shit but her emotional memory sure isn't. I'm awful and guess I'm posting this because I want people here to know that.

We found the purse, by the way - she'd left it at another friend's house but didn't even recognize she had for the better part of a week.