Just Keep Rollin', Just Keep Rollin'

This feels like one of those weeks where I'm just going to have to keep moving forward. It's not a bad week; there's just a lot to do. I've had some pretty good, but very busy days. The past couple days have entailed teaching and accompanying, cleaning and cooking. And taking care of Justin. This morning, Justin's attendant didn't show up until 40 minutes after he was supposed to be here. I was so not happy. Justin had a doctor's appointment this morning, so we were on a tight schedule. Therefore, I had to get him out of bed, dressed, fed, the whole shebang. I was fixing his breakfast when the attendant finally showed up. We just had to send the attendant away because we were going to have to leave pretty soon anyway. That just makes me so frustrated because we depend on the attendant. The reason we have an attendant is so that Justin can be taken care of in a way that makes him independent and not dependent on me. But when the attendant doesn't show up and we don't know where he is...it makes the morning fairly stressful. Learning and understanding the line between caregiver and wife, and how much that is crossed can be difficult. I wish it were clear cut, but when your husband is in a wheelchair, it's a very blurry line. And yet, no matter how crooked or indistinguishable that line is, there's has to be a boundary of some sort. When we were engaged, I told Justin that I would love for us not to have an attendant for the first week so that we could just be ourselves, get up when we wanted and be very private. But Justin, in his wisdom, said that of course we wouldn't have an attendant during the 2 or 3 days of our honeymoon, but that we should start using an attendant as soon as we were back on our regular work schedule. I'm glad he did that now, but the adjustment to having an attendant was hard. To have a person coming in every morning and sometimes at night can feel very invasive. They see you when your hair is messed up and you're wearing a robe or when you've just finished crying your eyes out because you're upset or when you're not happy with your husband and get snippy about everything. But, somehow, you learn to deal with it because they are a necessary part of keeping a boundary between caregiver and wife. And when they don't show up now, I get upset. I get upset because they represent one of the few areas that keeps that line intact. Their very presence gives me a bit of room to be a wife and not a nurse. And when life gets stressful and Justin needs more care than normal because of various and sundry things, that bit of room is all I have to separate the wife from the caregiver.