Fear
Losing my eyesight has been my greatest fear since I was a kid. I’ve had a few scares since.
Now it’s official. I have the early stages of dry macular degeneration, the same thing that made my grandmother so blind. There is no treatment, no cure. There are some things that can be done to slow it down, as long as it stays dry, and I will do those things, mostly consisting of quitting smoking and taking massive amounts of certain vitamins and antioxidants. And hope that it doesn’t turn into the wet macular degeneration, which is far faster and far more destructive.
I go back for a checkup with the opthamologist in October, to see how quickly it’s progressing.
And for now, I’m trying very, very hard not to freak out that my biggest phobia has been realized.
The countdown has begun
Flying to Michigan to see Mr. Wow for a week on the 30th. *bounces excitedly*
I like to think I can be eloquent
And I’ve wanted to write about some things. But I just can’t find the words. When I try, it gets lost in this incredible upswelling of happiness, and I’m reduced to staring blankly at the screen and thinking, “Wow. Just… WOW!”
And I’ll be going off to see Mr. Wow in early July. I can’t wait! I can’t even be sad about missing BayCon this weekend, because there is a WOW in my near future.
Next year, I hope to be able to bring my WOW to BayCon. He’s geeky too, just like me, and he’d probably enjoy it. Besides, the only friend of mine who’s met Yar is drewkitty, and I know that there are others who want to.
About the only coherent thing I can say is that I keep expecting to come down off the honeymoon stage high. I’ve known Yar more than a year. I’m usually finding – and ignoring. or even actively shoving aside – warning signs that this is Not A Good Thing long before this. I’ve been very good at that form of self-delusion in all the bad relationships. It was even easier to do in the cases where the guy was actually a good person, but that there were obvious, large, glaring incompatibilities. I knew that they were there on some level, I just kept paddling deeper into that river I have so loved to spend a lot of time in, De Nile.
But not this time. There have been no little nudges from somewhere inside my head that I’ve then had to lock in a mental closet. No little voices giving warnings that I’ve had to ignore. None of that. Nor have I put him up on a pedestal like I generally have in the past with whomever I’ve been involved in. I haven’t felt the need to do so to drown out the doubts.
My subconscious has decided that this is all too good to be true, and has started presenting me with bad dreams. Not ones where Yar suddenly starts acting like the abusers of my past. Even my subconscious seems to find that entirely too unbelievable. Instead, the bad dreams have simply been that Yar changes his mind about how he feels for me and everything between us comes to an abrupt end.
Even I have to admit that I was more than due for something good. I’d never have imagined that it could be someone THIS good, though.
Just… WOW!
Uh oh, it’s magic
I had nothing in particular planned today, other than spending time talking with Yar. Since I’m sick, Juan has taken over the shopping and cooking, and Shaddy is taking care of some of the other errands, like getting the cars serviced and such.
And boy, did being sick give me a case of the gloom-and-dooms. Yeah, the problems I was rambling about before are bad, and it’s not an easy life. But as I’m recovering from the bronchitis, things aren’t looking anymore like OMG TRAPPED FOREVER HELP HELP.
My aunt Cheryl offered to come stay here for a while. A few days, a couple weeks, whatever we want. She’ll look after my grandmother and keep the household running, and my mom and I can get out of here for a while. I need that. Mom needs it even more. I at least got away for a while in January. She’s been trapped here in the house… and mostly in her room… other than doctor appointments, physical therapy sessions, and podiatrist appointments since early August.
It’s sounding like we’ll take Cheryl up on her offer, and we’ll head north, up to the area of Eureka and Arcata. We’ve been talking about moving to that area when my grandmother dies and we leave Delano. Everything we’ve seen and read makes us both think that it’d be a good area, and that we could afford to get someplace to live up there. But reading and pictures don’t beat actually looking around in person, so that’s what we’re going to do. I’m not sure when we’re going to go yet. Probably not for a week or week and a half at least, to make sure I’m over the bronchitis.
But in keeping with her theory that we both need time away from this house, my mom gave me a surprise this afternoon. Shaddy had been planning on taking his daughter to the Cinco de Mayo carnival today, but a heavy storm came in and he didn’t want to drag Jasmine around the carnival in the heavy downpour. So instead, my mom bought tickets for the two of them and me to go see David Copperfield on his one night performing in Bakersfield.
The 6pm show was sold out, so the tickets were for the 9pm show. It meant that I’d be gone for the entire time that I usually spend talking with Yar. Our biggest form of contact is the chat window on the game we both play, and that we met on, for two or three hours at night. I could only email him and let him know I wouldn’t be around. It comes on top of a couple shortened nights in a row thanks to school and/or family obligation on his side or mine. I hated to bail out completely on short notice, and I missed our nightly talk. But it’s not like I was going to turn down my mom’s gift of a $50 ticket, either. What I really wished was that I could have taken Yar with me to see the show.
I love magic shows. Love them lots. I’d seen Copperfield once before, 23 years ago when he did a show at DeAnza college. He hasn’t lost any of his skill. He still puts on a great show. I think the real evidence of magic, however, is that I’m definitely 23 years older, and he still looks pretty much the same. He probably sold his soul for the same semi-eternal youth package that Dick Clark bought. I have to admit that I missed out on a lot of the patter. Whenever he started talking, I’d start missing Yar and wishing that he was there next to me instead of Shaddy and Jasmine. But then he’d perform an illusion, and I’d be hooked all over again.
I will say he’s gotten a lot more casual with his shows than he used to be. Oh, there’s still lots of lights flashing and smoke drifting and wind machines blowing. But the silly, sparkly outfits are gone. So’s the bad hair (ahhhh, mullets back in the day people actually thought they looked good) and even he admitted that it was bad hair. He must be… what, early 50s? 52, according to Wikipedia. So it’s not surprising that he doesn’t do the death-defying escapes anymore. But he did do some close-up magic with cards, dancing tissues, etc. And he hasn’t lost a bit of his dexterity or showmanship.
Jasmine, who’s 7, was so wowed that after the show she kept asking where he lives. Turns out that she wants to figure it out so she can go live with him and have him teach her magic. And on the way home, though the rain had stopped, there was still heavy cloud cover. She was unhappy because she couldn’t find a star to wish on. She wanted to wish for magic, just like Copperfield’s.
I could cry
It’s time for my annual bout of bronchitis. It hit yesterday, so I have about two weeks of this to get through. I’m either so drugged up on cough medications that make me extremely drowsy and often knock me out, or I’m coughing so much that I’m gonna start straining muscles. That means that keeping up with stuff around the house has gotten much more difficult. It didn’t used to matter as much. If I was knocked out most of the time from cough medications or hacking up a lung, my mom could always take care of what I couldn’t get to. But not this time.
She has hit a plateau in recovering from the stroke, able to get around the house but not able to get out and do errands. She can walk around a bit, but standing in one place is difficult and often painful for her, so no taking over the cooking. I managed to talk one of the guys who lives here into doing the grocery shopping today and cooking dinner tonight and the next couple.
Mom doesn’t do any exercises to strengthen the muscles that were weakened by the stroke, so it’s unlikely she will improve further. She is also back to the amount she was drinking before the stroke. She doesn’t seem to realize how much it affects her and how much of the balance and muscle control she’d regained she loses from the drinking. I can watch her becoming more and more wobbly and less and less capable as the day goes on. She has fallen a few times recently, and I’m sure it’s because she’s back to the heavy drinking. Her skin has gotten thin with age, and she’s on blood thinner medication, so she gets these gashes on her arms and legs that bleed profusely and it’s difficult to get the bleeding to stop. But saying something to her about it won’t make a difference. It hasn’t before, it’s not going to now. She fell again tonight, about 3 hours ago, and last I checked on her, her left arm had still not entirely stopped bleeding. She’s starting to look like I’ve been beating her with all of this. Every time I saw her so drunk she could barely walk before the stroke, it made me cry myself to sleep that night. It’s a thousand times worse now with the stroke. And I feel like a fucking weak coward, because if I was really doing what I should, I’d refuse to buy her the booze. I’m the one who has to do all the grocery shopping, after all. But with everything else, all the other stresses, I just can’t face the day after day of fighting over it if I refuse. I should be stronger than this, but I just can’t fucking get myself to do it.
Meanwhile, my grandmother’s mind is slipping further. She can’t hear nearly anything unless I’m yelling it, and then she gets pissed off at me for yelling. She’s pissed off at me because I have refused to throw out my artwork, which is apparently useless and taking up space (and it’s not like it’s space she needs, or even would use if it was empty.) She’s recently been making it pretty clear that even though I live here, I should do my damndest to make sure that I leave no sign anywhere that I do. The fact that I live out of a box and a suitcase is an issue, even though they’re out of the way, because they’re visible signs that I live here. Never mind that the reason I have to live out of a box and a suitcase again is because two months after I had my own room once more, she and my mother informed me I had to give it up so someone else could have it.
My grandmother has also decided that for some unknown reason, I have completely rewired the dryer so it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. It doesn’t turn on the way she’s convinced she’s always turned it on. The thing has always had a start button in order to get it running, but she’s sure that the way she used to turn it on until recently was by turning the timing dial to the time she wanted and then pulling it out. That’s how the washer has always worked, not the dryer. But every time she does laundry, she comes to get me to show her how to turn on the dryer, and then yells and screams at me for a while about changing how it works on her just to drive her crazy. She also is convinced that I’m “doing something” to the TV to make it hard for her to watch it. Never mind the fact that I only watch one hour of TV per week. Every time she can’t get the TV working because she poked the wrong button when she turned it off the night before, it’s my fault and I get yelled at for it while I’m fixing it for her.
She’s pissed off at me because I “choose” not to sleep at night. She’s pissed off because I “sleep all the time.” If I don’t get any sleep or get very little (as usually happens) then she tells me that I should be perfectly fine because all I ever do is sleep. She won’t eat anything but sweets all day – heavily sugared cereal, cookies, and ice cream – and then tries to refuse to eat dinner because she’s “too fat” (her clothing is extremely baggy and hangs off of her) and so that’s a fight every single night to get her to eat anything healthy at all.
She’s losing control of bodily functions. There’s a stain on the chair she always sits in, and it’s obviously a urine stain. But she claims that it’s the cats making the chair filthy, and knocks them off the chair if they ever dare to get in it. The day before yesterday, a new wrinkle in this is that she shit herself rather explosively in the morning, after she’d been up some hours, just before she was going to take her shower. She’s currently still able to clean herself up after something like that, but who knows for how much longer with the way things are going. And one of my own issues is that I can’t deal with fecal matter without heaving up everything in my stomach. This is the case even if I can’t smell it. Just seeing it will cause me to start gagging.
And with the cats, she frets if they’re are out at night, but even if we tell her that all of them are in, she goes and stands there at night holding the door open in case any cats want in – letting all the cats out in the process. So I wind up spending hours trying to wrangle the cats and get them into the house for the night, after already having gone through it once to get them in.
She doesn’t care that having my psychotic cousin over here drives my mom’s blood pressure up and puts her in danger of another stroke. Nor does my grandmother care that when he’s here, I can’t sleep (sometimes for days on end if he’s here for multiple days in a row) because I have to be on guard so he won’t attack her or my mother. She tries to force us to let him stay here on the couch anyway.
Anything… and I do mean anything… that she doesn’t like at the moment is pretty much automatically my fault. I am so sick of getting yelled at, insulted, and threatened for things that I didn’t even do. And if I say I didn’t do them, she gets even more pissed off at me for lying to her. Even the cats messing up the chair thing isn’t always the cats. Sometimes she accuses me of peeing on her chair.
I have nowhere to work on artwork except at the dining room table since I had to give up my room. And if I’m there, she likes to wait until I’m concentrating and then come up behind me and stab me in the back with her fingernails. She thinks it’s hilarious to make me wreck some piece I spent days, weeks, and one case months on. Then she gets pissed off at me when I’m not amused by her little “joke” and starts screaming at *me* to leave *her* alone. I’ve managed to hide the destruction in a couple pieces, but often the piece will be ruined beyond my ability to fix.
I am low man on the totem, and even though my mom makes a point periodically of telling me she appreciates all I do, everything else is not making me feel much appreciated. I feel trapped. I feel like I’m drowning. I spend a large portion of the day refusing to let myself cry because I want to desperately but I just don’t have time for the tears. I’m going through a lot of self-pity right now, though I don’t let it prevent me from doing what needs to get done. The one thing I have to look forward to every day, the one good thing in my life right now, is the three or four hours I spend talking with Yar online, and the trip out to see him in July, hopefully. I’m skipping BayCon this year, because of the expenses of the trip in January when Yar came out to California for a few days, and the projected expenses of the trip in July. There are a lot of people I will miss seeing, because BayCon is the only time I get to see most of my friends.
I can’t even go hang out with a friend down here just to get away for an hour or two. Because I have no friends down here. Nearly six years I’ve lived here, and there have been people I’ve gotten on well enough with at the college. I’ve suggested we hang out, and they take my number, don’t give me theirs, and I never hear from them again. Since I had to drop out of college when my mom had her stroke last August, and discovered it was too soon when I tried to go back this semester, I haven’t even had that hour or three a couple times a week to get away from all this.
This is not how I pictured my late thirties and early forties. I sometimes find myself resenting being in this position, and hating myself for that. I know I have some advantages living here, like not paying rent or having to worry about bills. That was an acceptable trade-off when I was helping to take care of my grandmother and was also getting some money toward college so that when I get out of here, I can maybe manage to have something resembling a life. But since I had to drop out of college, my workload has more than doubled for less “pay”. I know that this isn’t how either of them pictured their lives at the ages they are now either. I know it’s not easy on them either, and that what they’re going through is worse than what I’m dealing with in so very many ways. My mom hates her helplessness and wants to get her independence back, I know that too. But since she wouldn’t do any of the physical therapy exercises to continue her improvement after the sessions ended, doesn’t do any other exercises to improve things either, and drinks the way she does, it’s unlikely she will and she will need me to be with her for the rest of her life. And all I want is to get my degree, get the job I’ve been wanting with it, and build a life with Yar. It’s looking like, at best, that will be eventually get my degree and the job that I want, and live a life with both Yar and my mom, if Yar is willing to have her as a rather permanent attachment.
I really don’t even want to think about what it’d be like if he doesn’t want to deal with having to live with someone else’s alcoholic invalid of a mother. Yar’s the best thing in my life, the best thing ever in my life. But with that comes the fear of losing him. And all of this is so much to ask him or anyone to accept.
I know that some of this is also that when I get really sick, I get gloomy and things look bigger and harder than they are. But even without the gloominess from being sick, it’s a fucking huge and heavy load.
Not good enough
Doing the best I can with this situation is not good enough. Hell, it’s not even barely acceptable, it seems. Since I’m apparently a problem for everyone here, maybe I should just move the fuck out.
I’m a fucking agent!
I was quietly doing a little research. My mom was quietly playing a game. I have no idea what my grandmother was up to, but it was quiet too. Which made the sudden yelling just outside much more obvious.
Whoever it was, it was female and seemed to have one preferred word, which popped up about every three: fuck, and its variations. So I went to find out what exactly was going on.
I’d been waiting for a chance to shower. Even though it was nearly noon, I was still wandering around in pink pajamas. My grandmother decided to start doing laundry just when I was heading toward the shower, so I was waiting for there to be hot water again. I didn’t expect to have to go confront insanity while clad in pink pajamas.
But there insanity was, in the form of a slightly chubby Hispanic woman in black leather jacket and black jeans, her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, and black wraparound shades hiding at least some of the crazed look she had on her face.
She was screaming at Shaddy, who was standing in the open door to his room (formerly my room, for all of two months). I had no idea what she was on about. The clearest things out of her mouth were the constant variations on “fuck”.
Shaddy started yelling back, about the time that I got out there, telling her to go away. Very mildly, all things considered. She ignored him and just kept right on going.
I stared at this for a moment, and wondered if this was his ex-wife. I’d heard him say she was crazy, and I’d never seen the woman. But then I decided that it’d gone on long enough, and I put on my best intimidating manner and stepped in. I figured that she would only listen to someone who sounded like her, so I told her to get her “fucking ass off my fucking property, and do it right the fuck now, you stupid fucking cunt.”
Oh yeah. I used the c-word that I hate. I figured it’d get her attention. I was right. She turned to me and opened her mouth, but I cut her off before she could get a word out. I repeated, with variations, what I’d already told her. And then told her that if she didn’t, I’d be happy to call the cops and have her arrested for trespassing and disturbing the peace.
So, where she’d ignored Shaddy, she turned and started walking away. She kept right on yelling and swearing the whole time, and now I realized that she was demanding that we go and get her a 20 of dope. What? What the hell was wrong with this crazy bitch?
She got partway down the driveway toward the front of the house, and then stopped and started screaming at Shaddy again, who’d followed a little way behind to make sure she kept going. Thing was that his being there did no good. She wasn’t worried about anything he had to say or do. So I stepped down off the back porch and followed. I told her again to get the fuck off of my fucking property. She turned and started to walk further toward the front of the house, continuing to rant, swear, threaten, and demand that we get her dope. When she got near the sidewalk, but still on our property, she stopped and turned again and started screaming directly at us. Again. Same litany.
I told her to get her fat fucking ass off of our property in the next two seconds, or I’d be on the phone with the cops. She turned to me and told me to go ahead and call the cops, because it wouldn’t matter. “I’m an agent! I’m a fucking agent! The cops ain’t gonna do shit to me! I’m a fucking agent!”
Which is when Shaddy and I started laughing our asses off at her. She did not like that. I’m sure she thought that informing us she was an agent would somehow convince us or scare us. When all it caused was the two of us practically rolling on the floor at the stupidity of that statement, she started screaming again about how we owed her a 20 of dope, and we’d better go get it.
When I could talk again, I told her to get off the property and not to come back, or I’d make sure she was in jail. She started saying that she’d be back. She could come back anytime she wanted because she was a fucking agent! But now she was going to go to Mark’s house. With that she finally left. But she kept on yelling and swearing the whole way.
Mark is our neighbor and lives on the next street over. His backyard adjoins ours. We could trace every step she took to get over to the next street, because she just kept right on yelling. I’m not sure she ever even paused to breathe.
When she got to Mark’s place (who actually is, unlike us, a former drug dealer and may have drifted back into that, from what we’ve been seeing), instead of demanding dope, she began accusing him of stealing her car.
You’d think a dealer would know better than to steal the car of a fucking agent. Heh.
Shaddy told me what had happened. This woman (he wasn’t sure what her name was, but thought it might be Cha Cha) had just showed up here and started off yelling at Juan (another homeless one that my mom took in, who stays out in the bedroom I used to have that got flooded with raw sewage). So Juan went over to Shaddy’s room and ducked inside, but the woman wouldn’t stop. She pounded on the door until Shaddy opened it, and then started up on him. She claimed that he’d sold her Drain-O, and she’d spent three days in the hospital because of it, and he owed her a 20 of dope. That’s what all the stuff that was too incoherent for me had been.
The dumbest thing is that Shaddy is the least vice-ridden one of us all. He smokes an occasional cigarette, but that’s it. He’s otherwise a complete straight arrow. He won’t even drink or eat something that has alcohol in it, as he’s Muslim. No drugs, using or selling. Nada. But supposedly he (and/or Juan, she seemed to get the two of them confused, even when they were both standing right in front of her) sold her Drain-O when she tried to buy dope from him, and now he owed her a 20 of dope.
All we could do once she was finally gone, and we could hear her screaming at Mark, was shake our heads and laugh.
But I guess we’d better be careful.
After all, she’s a fucking agent.
Strangely blue
It started off just a quiet, normal day. Nothing extraordinary. Despite its mundane start, this day will always be one I remember. Today was the day that I discovered my ass has mysterious powers. Well, power, anyway.
What is this power, you ask?
Oh, you don’t?
Well, I’m going to tell you anyway.
On this perfectly ordinary day, my mother was taking a perfectly ordinary shower. I heard the water shut off and a pause, and then she called my name. I got up and ran there, afraid she’d fallen since she’s still unsteady on her feet after the stroke.
It turned out she was perfectly okay. She just wanted to show me something. The thing that made me understand that my ass had acquired some strange new power. Not a useful power, mind you. Just strange.
Somehow, my ass has acquired the ability to dye things blue.
Ever since my mom’s stroke and her slow recovery, she has used the front bathroom because the toilet is higher off the ground and it’s easier for her to get back up. That’s also the bathroom everyone in the house uses exclusively, aside from showering. I am the only person who uses the bathroom in the back of the house, and that has been the case since August. So no one else could have left a blue ass-shaped dye-job on the toilet seat. It could only be me.
The thing was white yesterday, and all the years I’ve lived here it’s been white. But today, it has a little white, and then this sort of heart-shaped area of dark blue. Now, it’s not just common transfer. My ass is not blue. I used a pair of mirrors and checked. My ass is still ass-colored.
We tried to use cleaner, and the dye faded very slightly, but refused to let go. Bleach didn’t dent it either. It looks like the size and shape of my ass is permanently imprinted on the toilet seat. In blue.
Leave it to me to acquire mysterious powers of the ass. And only to stain white porcelain dark blue.
My mother is not convinced that I have acquired a strange new super ass power. Her theory is that the alien in a cat suit is performing some sort of experiment that makes my ass and the toilet seat cause some sort of chemical reaction. And I suppose that’s possible. Strange things happen around the alien in a cat suit.
But I say it’s my new superpower. The ass that saved the world from boring white toilet seats since, well, this afternoon.
I’ve noticed
I have little to no problem ranting and rambling at great length when irritated, angry, sad, or amused. Somehow, it’s hard to write about happy. I mostly just want to hug those moments to myself. Even more so if it’s happily in love.
So, since that’s the case, sparse updates are likely to be even more so. But at least in this case, no news is definitely good news.
Besides, I doubt that anyone other than me is really interested in reading long ramblings about how Yar is amazing, special, funny, talented, and on and on. Because I could very easily go on and on. And on.
Hard to believe that April is approaching already. That’s when Yar and I first started talking, April of last year. At first just in email, and then nightly in chat beginning in early May. The time between then and now has mostly flown by. There were certainly some hard times in there, the worst being my mom’s stroke in August. Having Yar to talk to made even the worst parts more bearable. I don’t know if I – and consequently, the family – would have gotten through it as well if he hadn’t been there.
Thank you, dearest Yar, for being there for me, and for being such a source of happiness. :)
Change
I’ve a long history of choosing the worst possible romantic partners. There have been exceptions to this once in a while. But generally, I have had a talent for attracting the controlling and abusive.
This time is one of those exceptions. I’ve changed, and I’m not willing to settle for the controlling or abusive. I have managed not to be attracted to it, either. No more. Yar is, among other things, my proof of change.
He’s gentle, kind, generous, thoughtful, caring, giving. He’s smart and he’s funny and he’s creative. Considering my past, he’s almost too good to be true. And yet, he’s right there. He IS true.
We only had a few days together before he had to be back for the start of the semester. I managed to get sick the day after he arrived. I don’t mean a little light fever, either. I mean re-enacting scenes from The Exorcist sick. I could only keep down water, tea, and broth.
There were times in the past when I’d gotten sick while involved with someone. While I was expected to take care of the men in those past relationships if they were sick (no matter how major or minor their ailment was), this was not reciprocated. If I was sick, no matter how major or minor, I was supposed to bull ahead and keep going like nothing was wrong. I can remember being so sick I could barely get out of bed to get to the bathroom once upon a time. I certainly never made it into the kitchen to get something to eat. I didn’t have the energy. This lasted several days. The first night, after I’d called out of work and spent the day sleeping and unable to even get myself a snack or something to drink, the guy I was seeing grudgingly got me something to eat when he got home from work. The next day, I again didn’t eat or drink all day, because I couldn’t make it to the kitchen again. But when he got home from work, said guy was furious with me for not having dinner for him. It didn’t matter that I was so sick that I hadn’t even been able to get myself a glass of water to drink. He’d gotten dinner the night before, and it was my turn. He finally went out and got himself food, but nothing for me. He refused to even give me something to drink. I eventually managed to make it to the bathroom and fill up on water from the tap there, using my hands to drink because he’d removed even the cup normally left in there for brushing teeth. When I climbed back into bed, he tried to demand sex and was even more furious when I refused. It was like that for the next three days, until I’d recovered enough and was desperate enough that I could make it into the kitchen. I discovered that he’d eaten pretty much everything in there. My bank account was light and if I’d ordered a pizza delivered or some such, my rent check would have bounced. So I ate a few stale saltines and drank water.
That’s what I was used to when I was sick. Though if my partners were sick, I usually did everything I could to make them comfortable. The ones who did help me out if they were around when I was sick generally did it with much put-upon eyerolling.
This time was so different. I wish that I hadn’t gotten sick, so we could have done more than spend much of the time in the hotel room. But Yar fetched me tea and broth and water, comforted and cared for me. To him, that’s just how you treat someone for whom you care when they’re sick. But to me, with such a great contrast between my past experiences and this, it was something special and made me feel special. Simple as it was, since I’m a fairly undemanding patient, his patience and caring made me feel like something of a princess. I’m not accustomed to feeling like I’m being treated as a princess. Such a simple thing, but to me, amazing.
I’ve needed much Yar in my life for years. I just didn’t know that until the end of April/beginning of May. I certainly plan to have as much Yar in my life as possible in the future.
Another Christmas fucked all to hell
Christmas used to be very special to both my mom and me. It wasn’t about all the things people gripe about in connection to the holiday. Neither of us is Christian, so it wasn’t about the Christian connection to the holiday either. It was about simpler things. Family traditions that brought us joy, the beauty of Christmas lights, a feast of a dinner, finding or making just the perfect thing for someone as a gift, all of that kind of stuff.
Since I moved here, we’ve hardly celebrated Christmas. Most of my relatives are, quite frankly, pretty atrocious. And the holiday seems to bring that out more strongly. My psychotic cousin has usually been the worst offender. My life and my mom’s life have both been threatened by him on Christmas. He once actually did try to kill my mother for Christmas. On and on. Instead of polishing off things we cherished, the season is turning into something of a nightmare, with old horrors renewed in our memories every year and new ones being perpetrated. We gave up even bothering to deal with it. Christmas here has been just another day.
This year, what with things like my mom’s stroke making life so difficult for all of us, I tried to bring back some of the old joy of the season. The outside of the house is decorated with lights, and a Christmas tree occupies the living room. These are both things we haven’t bothered with for years now. I planned a good dinner, sang carols, and did my damndest to remain cheerful in spite of everything else that was going on. It was almost working. It wasn’t like Christmas used to be, but it was a little better than it had been. Enough of even kinda mediocre Christmases might have even given us back some of the joy of the season we used to feel.
Two days before we got the Christmas tree, I injured my shoulder. I was in a lot of pain. I’m usually pretty stubborn about pain, and I just keep going in spite of it. So I went and found one of the prettiest trees we’ve ever had. I went all over town to find a stand for it, because ours had disappeared (probably stolen by my psychotic cousin, along with almost everything else that I ever owned) and I wanted the tree to stay as fresh as possible for as long as possible. There was not a single stand to be found anywhere in this useless dead-end of a town, unless it was one meant for an artificial tree. Stores gave me the runaround on stands. “Oh, we’ll have them tomorrow. The shipment should arrive by 4pm tomorrow.” The next day, someone else telling me, “Oh, we had no shipment that was supposed to arrive today. You must be mistaken.” I spent three days wandering from store to store and runaround to runaround before I finally gave up and got the tree, with a pair of wooden boards nailed on the bottom to hold it upright. I strung the lights on it, but that was as far as I got that night because my shoulder was getting more and more painful the more I used it.
The next day, my grandmother started screaming at me about how I needed to get the tree done NOW. She implied heavily that I’m so lazy that the tree probably wouldn’t be decorated and done until sometime after Christmas. When I pointed out the problem I was having with my shoulder, she made it quite clear that she doesn’t give a damn how much pain I’m in. The tree being decorated immediately was much more important than any amount of pain I might be in. So that night I cooked dinner, I spent some time talking with Yar, and then I went in determined to finish the tree. After hanging more than 100 ornaments, I still wasn’t done and had been in tears from the intense pain in my shoulder for half an hour. I finally couldn’t lift my arm anymore and had to give up for the night.
The following morning, within minutes of waking up, my grandmother was in my face again, attacking me and insulting me, even worse than the day before, because the tree still wasn’t done. I could still barely lift my arm, and I had to go to the grocery store that day, followed by another three or four hour cooking extravaganza to make food good enough that my grandmother would deign to eat it. If I don’t make something extraordinary, and have it done right at the time she decrees, she usually refuses to eat it and it’s the only healthy thing she eats all day. Add in making sure my mom got lunch, that she got any help she needed during the day, that the other household errands got done, etc, and my day was full. I talked with Yar for a while after dinner again, and the pain died down a little in my shoulder, so after Yar logged out for the night, I finished decorating the tree. In all, I hung more than 200 ornaments. I was again sobbing from the horrible pain in my shoulder and couldn’t lift my arm anymore when I was finished. I decided then that, even though we normally also put up garlands and tinsel on the tree, that this was all I was going to do. I’ve always loved decorating the tree, and spend hours at it, getting it just right. This year, between my shoulder and my grandbitch, it was an entirely miserable experience. Even my mother, who usually defends my irrational grandmother when she gets like this, referred to her as a heartless bitch.
Yar’s birthday was on the 15th, and I’d been working on a piece of art to send him. Things had gotten crazy enough at home that I’d had little opportunity to work on it for a while, even though I started more than a month before. It wasn’t done in time to mail it to him. I told him that if I could get the time to work on it over the weekend, I’d send it out on his birthday. Not perfect, but better than nothing. But the shoulder injury prevented me from working on it. It’s still not done, because it’s only been within the last couple days that I’ve been allowed to let my shoulder rest and start to heal. So it didn’t even get there in time to be a combined birthday/Christmas present. Yar might not mind, since he’s more concerned that my shoulder heal than that I push to get the picture done, and I’ve been listening to him on that instead of pushing it. But it still bothers me that it is now so late.
Then tonight my uncle and aunt came by. For years, my mom and my uncle have had periodic debates. They used to enjoy them. But tonight, my uncle accused Mom of jumping all over him for no reason, and wouldn’t stop. He kept going and going until mom was in tears and left the room. He claimed she’s been doing it for something like two years now. What I was thinking, but didn’t say because I didn’t want to make everyone even more miserable on Christmas, that it was also the approximate time that my uncle started making some comments that were pretty cold and empty of any compassion or empathy. And that this change came before my mom started (if she even did, rather than merely expressing a different opinion, which is all I’ve seen her doing) jumping all over his shit (as he so nicely put it). My grandmother kept telling them not to fight. My mom kept trying to say that she wasn’t upset or trying to attack anyone, she was just expressing a different opinion. My uncle kept on going on the attack. And finally, my mom started crying and left the room. She was still crying almost an hour later.
And he apologized to ME for attacking my mom, but completely ignored her after that. No apology, no nothing. And the way he apologized. “I know you usually back her play no matter how wrong it is…” was how it started. I really wanted to light into him and show him what it’s like to really have someone jumping all over his shit, but I didn’t. There’d been enough hurt already done. The holiday was already in pieces. It wouldn’t have done any good, except give me a chance to rant and get out some of my fury with him. I’d have (maybe) felt a little better, but at the expense of making more people, like my aunt Cheryl, miserable. So I let it go. I just said that I didn’t want to get in the middle, I didn’t want to take sides, I just wanted to finish cooking dinner and get people fed. And then I went back to the kitchen to stew along with the duck I was cooking.
Cheryl is good. She tried to comfort my mom. She tried to get some of the spirit back. She was sweet and caring. Unfortunately, my uncle had upset what small, shaky joy we’d been able to eke out in the face of past Christmas insanity too far to recover it. It might not have worked, but I appreciate that she tried so hard.
So now my mom is hurt, I’m furious, and my uncle is probably feeling quite justified in ruining everything I tried to build this year, and everything that Cheryl was unable to salvage.
Yeah. Merry fucking Christmas, from a family who really knows how to put the “fun” in dysfunctional.
Oh. Em. Gee.
Two weeks! Two weeks two weeks two weeks!
The time’s been going by slower than cold molasses. But it’s getting close anyway.
Of course, time will not cooperate once the date gets here. I know that those few days are going to go by in a nanosecond. Time’s a bitch like that.
Even if Yar and I wind up hating each other (unlikely to the highest degree, but still possible I suppose) it’d be worth it just to get out of here for a while. I’m reaching the point where I need time away from the grandbitch. She has been driving me crazy for some time now. It’s reached the point where it doesn’t matter what she says or how she says it, I’m immediately angry and just want her to shut up. I have controlled the reaction and haven’t let any hint of that get into my voice or my dealing with her, unless she’s specifically attacking me. But I’ve had enough and need time away to get some equilibrium back where she’s concerned. I don’t like the amount of anger and something that’s almost verging on hate that has been building up in me because of and about her. It does nothing to help the situation that I’m stuck with.
I’ve had Yar to look forward to talking with nightly, and this upcoming trip in January to look forward to. When things get bad around here, I just concentrate on those happy things. I use the excitement over my few days of vacation and meeting Yar to combat the grandbitch’s venom.
And I’m pretty optimistic about this meeting with Yar. At the least, if we discover that the spark just isn’t there in person, we’re close enough that we’d still be good friends. And that’s a good outcome. Not as good as I’d like currently, but good.
bouncebouncebouncebounce
It’s official. The flight is booked. He’ll arrive January 6th and leave on the 10th. *happy dance*
It’s also official that I’m so excited by this that I’m gonna burst. :D
That patience thing
Yeah, I still haven’t learned that. I want it to be January NOW. Before I asplode.
Plans are still tentative, but it’s likely that I’ll be spending a few days with Yar sometime in the first two weeks of January. He’ll fly out here from the snowy mitten he lives in and we’ll stay in the Bay Area if this works out. I’ve got people who’ll hold down the fort here so I can get away for a few days (and I need the vacation desperately, apart from the chance to meet Yar in person).
There’s a lot we need to discuss, and if we make this trip to the Bay Area together, we’ll have the chance to do that. Around here, the grandbitch would never give me a moment’s peace to have the kind of serious talk that Yar and I should have. That and I have a need to get my snuggle on, which would definitely not happen here.
I feel like a kid in the week before Christmas, feeling like it’s never going to get here and the anticipation and excitement almost feel like they’re too much. Like something is going to burst if it doesn’t get here right now.
I’ve also spent quite a lot of time feeling giddy. I’ve had my share of crushes, of falling for someone, of relationships. But this is the first time since my first big crush when I was 12 (four years older than me, nice guy, very handsome, football star, son of a Texas oil millionaire – if you’re gonna have a first crush, that’s the way to go) that I have felt so giddy and so full of huge, dopey grins. Seriously, my face hurts most of the time because I can’t stop smiling. Even my grandmother hasn’t been able to remove the grin for more than 10 minutes. Considering what she’s like, that is some pretty powerful grinning. :D
Yeah, the distance is an issue. It’s a big issue. It might be too large an issue, but we’ll have to see. That’s an obstacle to tackle sometime in the future. If things continue as they have, if we find that the attraction doesn’t dissipate over time or with getting to know each other in person, then we’ll worry about that. For now we’re good friends with potential for more, and that’s enough.
Dopey grin alert
Huge, huge, ridiculously huge dopey grin spotted hanging around Christophine’s face all day. Some observers report small but visible growth throughout the day and evening, and speculate that the grin may soon block out sunlight for an entire California county. Christophine’s only comment on the phenomenon is to report that her face has been hurting for hours, but it’s worth it. The grin seems to have taken up semi-permanent residence and has refused to be chased away for long, regardless of provocation.
In other words, in spite of everything that has happened in the last several months, I’m ridiculously, disgustingly happy right now. :D
Wow!
Yesterday was my birthday.
Today I got a package, sent registered mail, from Singapore. I knew that could only mean Miss Alnedra, the sweetest and most thoughtful person ever in the history of the world. I’d adopt her if I could. Seriously.
I opened the package. My mom was there when I did.
We cried. In a good way.
Neddy, I love ya. You are amazing. *hug*
The Mom Update
I’ve been so busy, I haven’t even thought much about writing here, unless the alternative was to say or do something (usually regarding my grandmother) in real life that I would later regret.
So, the news as of now: Mom’s had several sessions of physical therapy now, and is showing some definite improvement. A brace was custom-made for her left leg, and with it she is a lot steadier on the walker. I follow along behind in case she starts to wobble anyway, but she is able to get around, at least within the confines of the bedroom, much better now than she was before.
The one exception to this was when she decided to use her walker, without me being there to steady her, after she’d had two gin gimlets. I’d seen a couple days before this that two gimlets would make her lose all the command of her muscles that she’d regained. She couldn’t even sit up anymore without slumping over toward the left, the side that the stroke weakened. I was right here, in the room with her, but my back was to her as the only place to set up my computer faces away from the rest of the room, and is not movable since it’s a built-in desk. She didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t hear her get up. I turned when I heard the sound of the walker, but by then it was already too late. She fell. At first, she landed on the bed, and that would have been okay. But she hit hard enough that she bounced off and landed face first on the floor. I was already moving to try and prevent the fall, but I wasn’t fast enough. And while I can lift her from her chair or the bed, because I can get my legs into it, I needed upper-body strength to get her off the floor. While I’m stronger now than I was before this started, I couldn’t get her off of the floor by myself, especially since she wasn’t able to help thanks to the booze. I ran outside to the men who’ve been working on the roof (we found out that it was sagging badly, had horrible termite damage, and could have collapsed on us at any time) and got them to come in and help me get her back up on the bed. She has been forbidden to have that much booze again.
At the same time that my mother fell and I had to try and get her off the floor, and then get help when I couldn’t, my grandmother nearly managed to set the kitchen on fire. If I hadn’t been trying to deal with the Mom situation, I could have caught it much earlier than I did. My grandmother meant to heat up some stew. She got out the pot of stew, and also a pot of old rice that I was letting chill a little so I could turn it into fried rice. She put both on burners, even though she just wanted to heat the stew. And then she turned on the burner under the rice instead of under the stew. She had the burner going at maximum. By the time I got in there, the rice was on fire. I got the fire out, and started clearing the smoke in the kitchen. The smoke detector didn’t go off. The batteries are fresh, and when last tested it worked. It goes off for too much steam in the house – like when boiling noodles for spaghetti – but when there was actually smoke, it stayed silent. So now it’s going to be replaced.
When I got everything taken care of, I told my grandmother that it would be about an hour before I could cook fresh rice to go in the stew, since obviously she’d wanted some stew. First she got pissy with me that it would be so long, and then she announced that even though she was heating up the stew, she wasn’t actually hungry anyway. She then went on to use her worst tone of voice on me and to make lots of accusations about how I’m ruining her life.
At that point, if it hadn’t meant abandoning my mother, I’d have walked out. I was too stressed, too tired, and too sick of my grandmother’s attitude to keep going, if not for my mom. I actually started to go. I walked out of the house, barefoot, without my purse, and just kept going. I eventually got stopped by the guys who are doing the roof, because they thought I was looking for something and were going to offer to help me find it. That gave me a chance to think about what I was doing. But right that moment, if they hadn’t stopped me, I’m not sure when I would have.
In spite of the fall, Mom’s improving physically. And mom’s fall could have been much worse. Fortunately all she got were a couple bruises, but that was it. And when she hasn’t had the booze, she has come a long way thanks to the thrice-weekly physical therapy appointments. She has begun to get more use of her left hand back. She was able to do some typing today. Not well, but all typing before today had to be done one-handed.
We’ve learned that, unfortunately, the back bathroom is too narrow for her to use the walker. This means that, until she’s off the walker and on a cane, we can’t get her in and out of the shower very easily. We’ve done bed baths, but those aren’t as effective as a good shower, and she’s reached the point that she’s talking about having to use steel wool if she wants to get clean.
To make everything that much more difficult, I injured myself a couple days ago. I slightly dislocated my right kneecap, which is the bad side to begin with. I haven’t allowed that to prevent me from doing the things that are absolutely necessary, but it’s not pleasant. I’m pretty tired of the constant ache. Today is better, though. I’ve stayed off of it as much as I can, when the necessities let me do so, and it’s healing. I can’t baby it any longer though. I absolutely have to go to the grocery store today, as well as pick up prescription refills, and various other errands that are going to mean walking around on it.
I’m constantly exhausted. Constantly. Even if I do manage to get to sleep earlier than usual, in spite of my sleep disorders, those are the nights that the cats decide to yowl all night. Or mom wakes up as much earlier than usual as I managed to get to sleep, so the status quo of getting somewhere between 2 and 4 hours of sleep per night has been maintained. This has gone on for more than a month now. I don’t know how much longer I can keep going at this pace. It’s contributed to my injury, and the other, more minor injuries I’ve given myself. Exhaustion has made me a complete klutz.
I really just want to sleep now, but duty calls. It’s later than I usually do a grocery store run, but it has to be done, as well as all the other errands that have been put off for the last few days.
Aaargh
My grandmother is driving me absofuckinglutely nuts. She’s so convinced that I’m incompetent that I have to go over the books for the rental units almost daily. Even if none of the renters have been in to pay rent and there have been no deposits made to the rental account, I still have to go over it with her six or seven time nearly every frigging day because she’s sure I’ve done something wrong somewhere. Or else she thinks that I’m stealing from her and is trying to catch me at it, even though it’s her grandson that has been the one robbing her blind in the past. And these multiple times to go over the books are always at the very moment I try to have a little time to myself while Mom’s napping, since I’m doing a lot of physical labor lifting an adult who’s nearly dead weight multiple times a day, running to fetch anything Mom might need, doing her laundry, and even attending to her bodily functions and hygiene. I have no time to myself to de-stress during the day, or to rest my aching muscles from lifting a full-grown adult around. I don’t mind doing what I’m doing for Mom, but the combination of my grandmother’s attitude toward me and her feeling that if I sit down for even a minute means that I’m lazy… well, it’s gonna send me right around the bend sooner or later.
On top of all of that, the psychotic cousin’s ex-wife kicked him out of the house, so he’s been around here all the time, unless he was working. This afternoon he announced that he quit his job. That means that he will be here all the time, and will doubtless talk my grandmother out of what money she does have. He makes it impossible for me to go out and run errands when I need to, because no matter how many times we tell him to park on the street, he pulls in behind my car and blocks me in.
What he doesn’t know is that I still have a key to the van. And I’m about to the point of asking Shaddy to follow me in his car, drive the van out into the middle of nowhere, and just leave it there. He can’t try to turn me in for grand theft auto. The van was never put in his name. It’s still in my grandmother’s name, and in spite of her opinion of me, she’d never turn me in to the cops. As crazy as she is, she still at least recognizes that I’m the only thing between her and a nursing home.
It’s probably a good thing that she doesn’t know if I had the power by the terms of the living will, she’d already have been declared incompetent and be in a home.
She’s back
We found out that the rehab center that the physical therapists were talking about was the same nursing center, still run by the same people, that my grandfather wound up in for a while before he died. The care there is truly horrid. They let what would have been a minor and easily fixable condition, that they knew about because my grandfather talked about it several times to them, go on and worsen until it verged on life-threatening. So it was decided that Mom would be coming home and doing her physical therapy on an outpatient basis after all, and it’ll be up to me to take care of both her and my grandmother.
The last several days have been exhausting. I haven’t been able to get much sleep with the sleep disorders and the cats crying all night. And then, if the cats do eventually quiet down from panicking over the way they can’t find Mom, they wake me up between one and three hours after I get to sleep, depending on when they quieted down, so they can have their usual 6am breakfast. I usually can’t get so sleep again after that.
Night before last, I was tired and tried to get to bed early, leaving my grandmother to lock up. She usually does, so I didn’t worry about it. The Demon cat started yelling, and would not stop. Things finally quieted down a little around 3am. I thought I’d be able to get some sleep. But my psychotic cousin and his son showed up and walked right in the door. My grandmother hadn’t locked it.
He’s a threat, both as a thief and physically. I could not sleep while he was here, but it’s my grandmother’s house and she gave him permission to stay. Stay he did, with his van parked in the driveway all day so I was unable to get to the grocery store. He wouldn’t move it. And I didn’t sleep. The psycho stayed here until 8:30 last night.
The cats, especially the Demon, started crying at 9pm. I eventually got them quieted down, and they stayed quieted down all night, but I was so stressed by then that, in spite of my exhaustion, I wasn’t able to get to sleep until somewhere around 5am. The cats woke me an hour later for their feeding, and I eventually managed to fall back to sleep around 7:30am.
My grandmother woke me at 8:30am. It was ostensibly to tell me that my mom had called and would be calling back (I found out later that Mom had specifically told her not to wake me, because she knew how little sleep I’ve gotten in the past week). The real reason my grandmother woke me up, however, was apparently to pick a fight with me the moment I was awake. She started the ball rolling with the next thing she said, telling me that I was completely unable to do anything to be able to take care of my mother because I can’t do anything right, ever. I said, “Yeah, that’s right. You think I’m too stupid to be able to do anything, ever.” She informed me that I’m also unable to stay awake long enough to do anything, ever. What the fuck? I’ve been getting between two and three hours of sleep a night for a week. In spite of that, I’ve been doing the shopping, running the errands, cooking the meals, dealing with the rental units and the renters, keeping an eye on the psychotic cousin when he was here to make sure he neither stole anything nor attacked my grandmother again (he has two prior elder abuse convictions for attacking her), arranging to have a ramp and wooden deck built so that we’d be able to get Mom into the house, and on and on. But I apparently am lazy and do nothing but sleep all the time, according to her.
This was to some degree a continuation of the anger she’s had at me for the last couple of days. She’s been trying over and over to get me to forge signatures on checks, and I have been telling her over and over that I will not do something illegal. She thinks that if she tells me to do it, then it’s not illegal. So as far as she’s concerned, my refusal to do so just proves that I’m too stupid to do anything right, and that I’m only refusing to make her life miserable.
After all of this, I’d had it. I told her to go fuck herself and slammed the bedroom door shut.
Mom called shortly after, to let me know that they were discharging her from the hospital today, so I got ready and started to head out. My grandmother saw me leaving, and demanded to know where I was going. I was too angry to be coherent, so I just walked past her. She told me, “Fine. Goodbye, and don’t bother coming back.”
If it wouldn’t strand my mother, I’d have taken her up on that right then and there.
I got to the hospital around 9:45am, and we waited. And waited and waited and waited. Finally, all the stuff that we were going to need for Mom’s home care was gathered together and shoved into the car, Mom was installed in the front passenger seat, and we headed home. It was 1pm.
At home, we got Shaddy to give us a hand getting Mom out of the car and into the house while I carried in walkers and bedside commodes and the bag of stuff from the hospital. Mom’s fiddling around on her computer now, and I will shortly be heading out to pick up the list o’ medications on her various prescriptions.
My grandmother is avoiding speaking to me at all. This is a good thing, and if it continues for the rest of her life, I will be much happier. I’m perfectly okay with never having to speak to her again.
