How have you handled how caring for a loved one has changed your opinion of them?

My family moved in with my father (81), who has advanced Parkinson's. I do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, medications and my husband takes care of the upkeep on the house. We do have a contract for a care plan which will allow us to retain the house if and when he has to move into a long-term care facility (and not lose the assets to Medicaid). My father is physically frail and has some cognitive decline, although it mostly seems to affect his executive function. I have basically replaced my mother's role for him. (She is currently in a memory care facility as a result of Alzheimer's, so we have the added stress of caregiving for her, as well.) She waited on him hand and foot. He has very few manners, so we don't get many pleases and thank-yous. He has lost much of his ability to read and interpret social cues, so he's completely oblivious to the busyness and chaos of our lives and will interrupt at almost anytime to ask for my help with something. He's super cheap and questions us almost every month when we pay him our portion of the bills (which is half of everything). I think he just has trouble keeping track, but his lack of social graces make his manner of dealing with us very frustrating. He's not super demanding, but his manners and interactions with us are really grating on both me and my husband.

On top of this, he has some unpleasant addictions that are really troublesome. He smokes (which we knew when we moved in, so I just grit my teeth and deal with that, although he never smoked growing up, so it's not something I'm used to), but it's still very annoying when he knows how much I dislike it, but he'll smoke right before we all eat dinner as a family so that he reeks, or he waits until after he smokes to take his Parkinson's pills, when he knows that the smoking makes him shake uncontrollably, which makes it difficult to get his pills out. I've also discovered that he has an online porn addiction, which is just...YUCK, but hasn't caused any real issues for my family, as he has his own space in the house. But, I discovered last summer that he regularly goes to an erotic massage parlor, spending $200-$300 a pop. He's spent up to $800 in a month. Couple that with how cheap he is about other things, it creates an infuriating situation. I realize that his medication can cause addictive behavior, especially sex addiction, but I have no idea if this was an issue before or not.

Then, there's his unsafe driving. He's gone through a medical review with the MVA at least three times, each time with us praying that he would fail. Each time he passed, though I have no idea how! He rarely drives faster than 30 MPH, crosses the center line, has trouble seeing at night, etc. We shared our concerns about his driving, but he's very passive aggressive and just ignores us. But on Memorial Day, he was in a head-on collision after a egregious error on his part. Thankfully, no one was hurt too badly, but his car was totaled. He does still has an old pick-up truck that we keep for trips to the dump. My brother and I told him that the accident was it. He needed to stop. Since then, my husband and I have been rearranging our schedules to make sure that he has rides to anyplace he needs to. But, everytime we leave the house, he takes the truck out, usually to feed his "habit".

I could go on and on but my real question is have you ever gotten into a caregiving situation with a relative with whom you've always had a wonderful relationship, only to have your new perspective on that person (or perhaps their new behaviors) really cause your feelings to sour? I love my father and we've always had a great relationship, but I'm really starting to find it hard to like him at all. I don't know what is him and what is his cognitive decline (though I suspect it's a pretty balanced mix of both) but I feel terrible that I have such negative thoughts and opinions of him after 44 years of a being a daddy's girl?