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.