Vacation in the Zip Code

Mr. Guy South came to visit! The misters guy took a ferry to the city, went to a gallery, saw the rock music, and came home. I took the next day off work so that I could have breakfast with the misters guy and catch up. It was blissful. First, nobody in my family knew I was off work and they left me alone. When I don't get texts I know they're cooking something up, but I ignored the signs.

We drank coffee and ate beaucoup de toast and I am the only one who will beg to see someone's vacation photos, so I did. Mrguy South had been to Japan and we have similar sensibilities so we feasted our eyes on dreamy shots of architecture and fall foliage. So good.

Our bellies were empty, so we went down the street to the new Guatemalan restaurant. So good!

Before I even ordered anything I perused the cold case and found Guatemalan grape soda. Omg. Completely frosty and delicious.

This beauty was a chow mein tostada. It consisted of a corn tortilla on the bottom, some veggies including chayote, and chow mein noodles tossed in an unidentifiable mild red sauce. I had to have it, what with them not having ostrich. Mrguy South and I shared it.

I had these little tasty bits which were huge considering they were an appetizer. The green puree that came with it was so 'ono! Muy 'ono, even.

Guess we liked it. The people were so nice and they were playing perky kine marimba music that Siri was unable to identify. After our meal, more coffee and our friend hit the road.

A super relaxing day, nay, an island of lowered blood pressure, in the ocean of doggie doo that is my life.

Driveway Surprises

The roses are gaining on us, much to my delight. They live halfway down our hillside, and I've never been able to enjoy them without danger of falling down the slope. A side benefit of this winter's non-stop rain, the roses are now branching out in other directions, advancing up the hill and over our driveway juniper. They smell fabulous and are surprisingly rugged for roses that only have five or so petals.

Another visitor to the driveway this week was Mr. Snake. Mrguy saw him from the kitchenden and said he was worried that the snake in the driveway was not moving. Maybe he was injured. I went down to see the snake, and he was NOT happy to see me. He did the big sidewind as if to say "I don't need legs. Legs are for dummies. I am going to wiggle quickly and lose you in this bush". 

Good job, snake! Hide behind the poison oak. 

You are not dumb.

The One Where Cozy Death Gets The Hook

It's hard enough dealing with my mom, her parade of new caregivers and life in general without also adding Cozy Death. They never really explained who was going to coordinate my mom's care, they didn't communicate with the community my mom lives in, with us or with the doctor. And they kept insisting on services and treatments that we explicitly declined. Oh! And the parade of new people they sent were frightening to my mom (who now hates strangers) and that fear led to outbursts. It's super obvious that she disdains and is even frightened by people of color.

**Trigger warning for those who don't want to read examples of my mom's racism**

I feel a real sense of conflict protecting and trying to love someone who is an outright racist. She turned on the last caregiver because she was black, from Eritrea. I saw the familiar signs: she'll whisper that someone is "bad". And when you don't agree with her opinion, it escalates. Mom thinks she has lots of money (which she does) but she thinks it's in her purse (which it is not) and says that people are stealing from her (also not true). Because they're stealing they are, therefore, bad and dangerous and the police should be called. First the nattering, then the slow burn and then combustion. 

It reminds me of the Bastille Day incident at the gulf coast restaurant where I used to work.

It was July 14th, and we were doing a special French menu. We were playing super Frenchy music on the stereo. I was working the bar, and had a few customers who I was serving. An unsteady woman came in and ordered a vodka and milk. I served her, and went back to my other duties. As Edith Piaf sang La Vie En Rose, the woman began to unravel. I was heading into the kitchen and had just banged through the swinging kitchen doors as she muttered to herself and then said in rising volume "This song is too loud and the music is too loud and AAAAAIIIIIGHHH!!!!!" Her scream was her ticket to a gentle escort onto the street.

Can't say that I like Edith Piaf either, lady.

So yesterday morning I terminated our contract with Cozy Death. I had hopes that they would help with figuring out some meds that would calm mom down. Instead it added to her anger.

And today we have a new caregiver. Hope I don't have to intervene. Hope I don't have to hear unkind thoughts and my mom's fantasies about punching or killing people.

It's getting a little old. 

Happy Monday!

They look so peaceful when they sleep.

Monday has become one of my favorite days. The dream team takes care of mom that day and I can do other things, like work. I have one standing meeting, and one standing conversation at the end of the day with my good friend the minister.

Today's a little different. I took Juneteenth as a vacation day, and will work on the Freedman's Bureau transcription project. My current set of items to transcribe is lists of outrages inflicted on Freedmen in Texas in 1866. My favorite part of these is getting identifying names of people right so that descendants of enslaved people can learn more about them and so that people who inflicted pain on others can be easily found, as well. People are so willing to find their good traits in their ancestors. Let's show them the full picture.

Mom ate another caregiver yesterday. I had to go down there, ask the caregiver to leave and finish her shift. THIS is why I'm glad that my mom lives 15 minutes away now. The caregiver was not skilled, was timid, and when my mom turned on her, as she does, she let my mom do whatever. When mom was found ON THE FLOOR NEXT TO HER WHEELCHAIR at the nurse's station, the caregiver was yards away, around a corner, texting to someone. 

After all this, after mom calmed down from "madder than a wet hen" but with fists instead of feathers, we watched Shark Tank and she finally felt sleepy. She nattered on nonstop for about an hour in word snippets. Except when she was talking about preparing for vacation, a subject so native to her that she can construct whole sentences about it easily. She wants to talk about how many cars to take, how many people can fit in them, whether the boys are already there...whoever she means by that.

In other news, our new line of forklifts is officially tanking. I wonder what happens next.

But I don't have to think about that today. I'm taking a vacation day. My family does not know. It is mine and I intend to enjoy it.

Celebrity Dreams: Courtney Love Edition

I dreamed that Courtney Love was giving college-level courses on horses in order to make extra cash.

Sundayyyyy!

So I'm going to just gloss over the fact that our newest caregiver (onboarded by me on Saturday) seems unskilled and more of a white-collar lady. I liked her a lot, but...

Wait. I am not going to gloss over this at all. It was quite a day.

New caregiver was helped by my sister in the early hours. Then I came along to take the caregiver and my mom to a hair appointment. It was the first in many months. Years? But my sister had tried to arrange in-home hair and it wasn't happening, so I bit the bullet and just scheduled something. The salon is 5 minutes away.

I arrived a half an hour before, and we were still late because of the many things:

• Mom didn't want to go
• Lack of desire to put on a sweater
• Complete lack of understanding of how to get in a car

This last bit was treacherous. Until now she's been able to understand what to do, what risks are involved, etc. Now she's all "Whatever, Man". For real -- the caregiver and I were struggling to get mom in the car and mom was completely unengaged. We were holding her suspended, basically, and she was unable to help. Unable to be encouraged to help. Kinda more interested in picking up detritus from the ground, as her future health hung in the balance.

But she looks great. Excellent haircut.

I had to talk with her later in the day. I had to talk with her yesterday afternoon, also, as she and the caregiver argued about whether or not my mom could be allowed to walk unassisted. For those new to mrsguy, she is a fall risk. Hasn't walked well for half a year. Has walked with a walker for 6 plus years. Oy.

But a beautiful thing happened. On Saturday night I bought a really weird painting at auction, and I picked it up on Sunday. The auction spot is near where the forklift factory was in the 1980s. There was a thrift store attached to the pickup spot and it was glorious. I bought some pottery and many leopard print old lady garments, and 5 martial arts movies on dvd. On the way home I passed the humane society and they were doing doggie obstacle courses, and I saw a huge bunch of pelicans.

And then I had to talk to my mom, but it doesn't mean that the other stuff didn't also happen.

This painting looks amazing in the circus bathroom. And to celebrate I finished papering the wall in the lady bathroom with more circus posters. So I guess I have two circus bathrooms?

Never too many, in my opinion.

Mom Doesn't Like to be Helped (unless by her children)

Sometimes that's all a person wants. Peace. Today is one of those days.

The weekend nighttime caregiver turned out to be super nice. And I didn't notice if she was "morbidly obese" but I also don't care.

The medication seems to be having some side effects that are distressing to others. Mostly being up in the night talking to my father, long dead. During the daytime she asks the caregivers to call us, so all of us sisters talk to mom pretty often.

Middlesis was really upset about the side effects, and there was some unexplained body stiffness that was weird, and she really wanted to change the medication. Once my sister fixates on this, there is no talking her out of it, so I went along with it. But she doesn't want to be the one who talks to the doctor. But if she doesn't, she rags on the person who does her bidding if the result isn't what she wants. I am not playing that game any longer.

In order to get her to do her own dirty work, you have to coach her. Suddenly Thor has lost his hammer, or Samson his hair and she doesn't know how to make a phone call to a doctor or what to say. So many texts occur. 

The next day, the day of the phone call that she is so worked up about, that she has wound *us* up about, she gets a text from the caregivers that mom is just fine. She decides not to call the doctor. I am fucking livid. Whether it's mom's life insurance or mom running out of money or whether she thinks my brother should not get the extra cushion of cash he gets monthly that we do not, she drags us into her spiral of the moment and then gets over it, leaving us still spiraling. I fall for it every time.

In the middle of all of this I got a call from a hospice / palliative care company that I'm going to call "CozyDeath". CD was prescribed by our doctor, and I promise you that my mom is nowhere near the end. I love hospice, but she doesn't need it. I feel like CozyDeath offers fantastic services (we should all be treated so nicely) that are geared toward clients living and dying at home. I'm willing to check them out, but even that is layered with bureaucracy and spontaneous visits that need to be worked around.

Hospice is challenging. I am so impressed by what they all do, but they're bossy and call me with 15 minutes notice to tell me that they're dropping in on my mom who doesn't like to be dropped in on.

Now she's had some ativan, because she thinks the counselor and the nurse who dropped in are there to rob her. She called me, wanting to call the police.

Oy.

 

When Nothing Turned Out Right, But It Did

This weekend things worked out ok. The caregiver that my sister was worried about turned out to be really great. I took my mom and our daytime caregiver (who was 40 minutes late) on a jaunt to McDonalds and then a ride along the bay. On the way home I stopped at an estate sale and it was full of cool Japanese stuff. I came away with an aluminum bento box stamped with a mark for the University of Osaka. And I bought some cassette tapes that were deliciously transporting -- the kind of thing you'd hear in a restaurant in 1990.

This morning I returned to pay the nighttime caregiver in cash for her first two shifts. This means that I got to meet her and I thought she was thoughtful and charming. She had no problems with my mom.

Today is our 28th anniversary, and after shopping and Japanese music and a little Ted Lasso with my man, I felt pretty relaxed.

It's amazing what a few hours to oneself without my mom shrieking at me will do. We tidied up the pots on the front porch this morning, and I got the wild idea to put a loveseat out there in the future. It's cool and shaded in the summer and could be a perfect spot. The deer visited the street plantings today, and a fat brown bird took a ten minute bath in the saucer of one of the giant pots that came from my grandfather's Nash dealership. The bird plopped into the saucer, flapped his wings about, jumped up onto the fence, tapped the water out of his beak, and then flopped back in the water, repeating several times. He did his ablutions for about ten minutes stirring the water so that it made reflections in the glaze of the pot like something in a Hockney painting. Anyhoo, today is an ok day. I'm cooking a chicken for mrguy, and he's poised with a squirt bottle, trying to train boy kitten not to eat his one-eyed sister.

Enough for now. Someone posted a prompt today that spoke to me. "Think of a time when nothing turned out right."...

We four arrived at JFK from SFO and picked up our bargain rental car. The passenger seat was so cramped that I had to sit sideways. The glove compartment couldn’t be opened unless we pulled over and I got out. On the way to Hoboken, Mary, in the back seat, got super excited by a neon sign and rolled down the window quickly so she could take a photo. She may be 5’1”, but Mary’s strong from all of those years waiting tables. She used such force that we never did get the window up. For this reason we enjoyed the heady perfume of rush hour exhaust during our slow ride through the Holland Tunnel.

We got to the club, and after sound check the guys borrowed some tools to try to get the window up because at some point this evening we were expecting a snow storm. Somewhere during Sarah Silverman’s set, in the middle of the hot, cramped club, I started having a panic attack. I went outside and sat in the cold, trying to calm down and not alarm anyone.

I don’t recall seeing my husband’s band, or Yo La Tengo, but I do recall that the blizzard didn’t happen until morning and that it was really freaking cold on the ride from Hoboken to JFK with a broken window at 2am. We also got lost and drove in circles around Ground Zero for a while. Finally we made it to the airport and exchanged rental cars, turned on the heat, drove back to Brooklyn, dropped off the bandmates, parked and slept like the dead at our friend’s place. 

In the morning, things turned around. I slept in and ate breakfast with our hosts. The band went to play on the radio and as the expected blizzard finally arrived and the clouds dumped their load of puffy snow, I sat on the edge of the bed with a cup of coffee staring at the radio, listening to them play on WFMU. 

Bouncing Back

We have spent this week dealing with my mother's outbursts and trying to find caregivers. It barely leaves time for work.

I took *two* days off at the head of the week. One was Memorial Day, which I absolutely had to take off after spending the weekend with or recovering from my mom. Then I took Tuesday off in order to talk with her physician's assistant about getting her tamped down. They prescribed her more of her medication, but so far it isn't turning her into the person I want to know.

I tried to describe it to my friend / trainer: 

Me: "I want her to turn into Milton the Monster."

Friend: "What?"

Me: "Gay. They gave him a little too much tenderness until he spoke like Jim Neighbors."

Please make my mom into Milton the Monster!

Oh well.

In the Vortex of Power (sister discussions)  this week there was much ado about caregivers. One gained a lot of weight and my sister is afraid that my mom will be mean to her. The agency I'm working with is hard to communicate with, and I juuuust headed off their sending me a person last night when we didn't need one. The weekend day caregiver I liked is trying to work 7 days a week and will likely not work out for us because that's a lot of work. 

The volume of texts and emails makes me feel like Tippy Hedren in the gas station in The Birds (only a lot less helpless). Pecked to death by tiny birds. And then the caregivers need shopping for mom (unexpected early need for Depends), so I stopped work early to deliver the Depends through a crack in my mom's door so she didn't see me.

Back at home, I found the monthly Depends order on the doorstep. Oy!

I thought I'd cleaned up all of the day's messes and settled everybody down when my mom called. 17 minutes of stream of consciousness nagging. Didn't I think that she wanted to be at the party I'm at with all of the girls? Don't I know that because my she gives me all of her money she should be able to know where I am and who I'm with? I just want her money. And attention and...you get the point.

She finally wound up by saying that now I knew all of the great things that she knows about me. There were more but she couldn't think of them ;)

Night, mom. I love you! See you tomorrow at 10:30. I'll take you for a ride, and to McDonalds.

Then I wrote an email to a potential counselor, describing my situation and need for someone to talk to, and she quickly wrote back to say that it sounded like I wanted a career counselor. Boo. The rejection threw me for a loop and I spent some time crying and feeling sad. Like life was not worth living, etc.

Today is another day. Yeah, the day caregiver was 40 minutes late but the one who had gained weight (according to my sister, and I don't care) seemed really nice and my mom wasn't mean to her. Mom and the caregiver and I went out for a weird ride to a place along the water with old decrepit buildings. The poppies are still out in force. The water was beautiful and you could see the underside of the bridge. 

I dropped them off at my mom's community and mom resumed her "angry seagull" face that I used to find so cute when I didn't see it as often. I darted off in the car that she thinks is hers, and on the way up the hill saw a young mother deer and her spotted baby running in the middle of the street, the baby's back legs coming up off the ground together and shiny black hooves clicking together in the sun. It was a lovely sight.