I am working on getting rid of stuff that belonged to the queen mum today. It always makes me emotional and today angry. I believe what happened at the nursing home has traumatized me, and I still wear my grief like a second skin. Today I am looking through the stuff that was in her desk. Everything we could never find so we bought another was in that drawer. Now I have 4 staplers, 3 measuring tapes, 6 pairs of scissors and more pens that I want to count, and push pins and rubber bands and on and on it goes. I have had a couple of people give me suggestions on getting a job. Like I don’t know to look in the newspaper, I hate it when someones suggests the obvious to me. In my heart I know these suggestions come from a place of love and yet it makes me mad because neither one of them has worked a low paying job in forty years. They have no idea what it is like being an itinerant worker these days. I was so surprised how cruel women can be in the workplace. I still have no idea why they didn’t like me and decided to make my working life miserable, no sisterhood working there. And don’t get me started about ageism in the workplace. I see another box to go through, it looks like kitchen stuff, oh good just want I need another potato peeler.
Tag: anger
Where did it go?
I’m having a hard time liking the world right now. When I say world I mean people, not anyone specific just people in general. I have this bad habit of reading the dailymail on the internet. The queen mum would have called it “a penny dreadful.” It gives me the worst news possible along side of pictures of Bruce Jenner’s new fingernail polish. It shows me ISIS brutality in detail and then I get to see Kim Kadashian’s butt. We are all mourning Spock on Facebook while a blogger Dr. Avijit Roy was hacked to death in Bangladesh is not even mentioned. The full color picture of his bloodied wife standing over his body while onlookers stand by is shocking but they are not reality stars. What the hell has happened? When did sensationalism and cruelty knock out compassion and peace? I feel like the world has gone crazy. I hardly know anyone who seems happy, do you?
Meltdown #1
For 57 days my life was an emotional rollercoaster. I was running a marathon in my head and couldn’t stop. The only way I slept was if I self-medicated which lasted for six hours. I need eight hours to function. My emotional stress was constant. It was exhausting. I knew I needed to slow down and take care of myself and I also knew I needed to play this pain out. I had to be as close as I could get to my authentic self or this grief would come back to haunt me. I don’t want to live with pain like that anymore; there is too little time. Nothing like death to remind you to live.
I slowly started doing things to relax. I went and soaked in a hot tub for an hour and let my pain seep into the warm salt water. It really helped as I use water to find my self when it has run away. I love water, it heals me.
During this hurricane of hurt I had a few emotional breakdowns. Once after waiting 20 minutes on the phone to cancel a subscription of my mums’ I let loose on the operator about the fact that mum had two subscription for the same thing as the constant barrage of renewal notices had caused her to pay twice. “Surely you could see that it was the same person at the same address getting the same information.” One of mums’ fears was dementia, so she would get too embarrassed when she would make any kind of accounting mistake. In the six years I was around I watched her keep charge of her banking and medical issues plus a plethora of medicines. I couldn’t have done it. There I was screaming at this man on the phone, crying hysterically about how mean it was to take advantage of the elderly and then in the middle of it I hung up without “officially” cancelling her subscription. I wonder how often this has happened to operators?
My Town?
I have lived in mum’s gentrified, adorable, PNW town for six years. Besides being her caregiver, I have had jobs working at a hotel, cleaning houses, and pet sitting. I haven’t met a lot of people but I took some creative writing classes and swam at the local pool (lap swimmers are very unfriendly). I was hurt when mum died and the only people who called to offer sympathy were two of her old local friends. I am grateful that my old friends called from around the country. No one that I had met in this quaint, almost all white bread, politically correct, GMO sensitive town felt the need to call. They are so aware here, they are too correct.
Here is one example of my limited exchange with “my” community.
For almost four years I have known a couple in town that I once worked for as their housekeeper, I have babysat their animal, I have the keys to their house even though I no longer houseclean for them, I have the keys because they have been known to call me up to check on house, animal whatever. I have had Thanksgiving dinner with them, the wife and I have girl dinners together. I am a Facebook friends with both of them so they could read about what I am up too. The husband calls me up to ask me for some help (they always pay generous) and during our conversation after I assure him I would be happy to take care of his concerns he says to me “I hear your mom died, were you close?” My heart skipped a beat and I’m sure my face turned bright red (good thing we were talking on the phone) as I replied “Yes we were, I’ve been her caregiver for the last six years, that is why I moved here.” With no hesitation he goes back to talking about his problems. My town. Am I concerned he might see this? Not really, I doubt he would even think I was talking about him.
The Buzzy Donahue Show 