As of today, two of my children are adults. My middle son turned 18 today.
It’s really strange for me. I know I’ve said it before, but I’m in a unique position. I can watch him shave his face, reach up to hug him because he’s so much taller than I am, and yet I bought him Lego to unwrap today – the contradiction being because he is severely autistic.
I feel sad that he isn’t like his older brother – thinking about moving in with his girlfriend. I don’t know that he’ll ever have one. But at the same time I am, very very slightly, content that for a while longer I will be able to watch over him.
Do you ever have one of those days when you want to write – you really do – but everything that comes out of you is sheer crap? I’m having one of those today.
On a happier note, I handed in what I consider another eight pages of utter drivel for my short story course today. Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. I hope it’s not. But I wasn’t allowed to polish it since it had to be a rough draft, so I certainly wasn’t happy with it.
It’ll at least be interesting to see if my professor sees the same things wrong with it as I do.
So unless I get a reprieve from this creative brain fart I’m having today, my NaNo wordcount is going to pot. I am so due for a weekend off – it’s been five weeks.
Maybe after 48 hours of solid sleep this weekend I’ll be back into the swing of things. Back in the saddle.
Back to being creative enough not to keep falling back on proverbs.
Or maybe I’ll feel better after a good night’s rest tonight. After all, tomorrow is another day.
I’m in a unique, somewhat unenviable position of having a child who enjoys trick-or-treating but doesn’t eat – all of his meals are administered through a tube. So while he’s at school, I must either hide the candy or eat it.
Though I do my best to resist temptation while indulging in my second love (after my kids) of writing, as they say, resistance is futile. After all, what better way to pass the time whilst NaNoing than eat sweets?
Thank goodness for running around the mall doing Christmas shopping in December, eh?
Good Saturday morning! I hope everyone is having a nice weekend, particularly those who don’t have to work. If you have a regular 9-5, you shouldn’t be working today, right? Then again…
I was reading the paper (it’s become a habit now, since I did my challenge) and was struck by an article in the entertainment section about Jared Leto and his loss of 30+ pounds for the sake of his role in the upcoming movie, “Dallas Buyers Club.” You can see his picture here. It’s really quite shocking.
Reading this lead me to think about what we do for our jobs. Sure there are some of us who flatly refuse to wander outside our job description, but at some point I think we’ve all been in a position where we’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty for what we do for a living. Some of us do it all the time.
My own job, as a stay-at-home mom is 24/7. You might say being on call all the time IS part of my job description, and it is. But at the same time, I didn’t go into it with the expectation that I was going to be in it alone.
His Majesty, for whom I slave night and day
And speaking of my ex, over the last ten years he has been working at a few different retail chains as manager. Budgets in these places always seem to be a concern, according to him, and he is constantly having to work overtime so as not to tax the budget by having to pay employees – he is on salary.
I’d be interested to hear what you do that is ‘above and beyond.’ Come on, toot your own horn. After all, it’s rare that we get any appreciation from all we do, isn’t it?
I had no idea that it was a ‘thing,’ but apparently, with senile dementia comes paranoia. As my mother ages I’m thinking more and more that I need to research the stages, before she goes through them.
Last night she told be that she had been talking to her sister, six years her senior, on the phone and that her sister is losing her mind. My mother loves to complain about anything, but when it comes to her siblings, nothing has ever been more delightful to her than being superior to them. Being an only child I can only assume that this is a result of early childhood bullying, or simply being told what to do, since my mother is the youngest of five.
Anyway, she was gleefully informing me about how her sister had related the same thing story times in the space of five minutes, and then the subject of my mother’s apartment came up. To backtrack a bit, before my mom moved to town, I lived in her apartment since I hadn’t found a place of my own. Her apartment came available on the market, so I bought it. Then when her old house sold, she bought my house and I moved out of her apartment the day she moved in. Confused yet? Just keep going.
She forgets that she came to visit me when I lived in her apartment. She swears up and down that she never saw the place before the day she moved in. When I tried to remind her last night, she not only denied it, she told me that I was the one who was losing my mind, not her – she’s obviously worried about it even if she won’t admit it.
What really got under my skin, and is worrying me, is that she accused me of saying she saw her apartment before she moved in just to make her think she is going crazy – like I’m doing it maliciously.
I’m getting close to the point where I’m going to have to move her into a place where she can have assisted living. Not a nursing home, necessarily, but a retirement home at least. She wants to move in with me, but I just can’t handle it. My children have to come first, as well as my own health. She is just too much work.
I’m just afraid if I wait too much longer, she’ll think I hate her. This paranoia thing is really scary.
It’s my last day to report on what inspired me from the previous day’s newspaper, and I must say, it has been a challenge. I may start again after NaNoWriMo is finished – then again I may take a break. I’d rather not try to make plans that far in advance.
On my final day here then, I’d like to talk about the orange box. Being that it’s Hallowe’en, you might assume that it’s related in some way to the holiday, but it isn’t.
The orange box is being introduced in my city to go alongside the blue box, for recycling paper, plastic and tin, and the green bin for compost. What is the orange box for, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t ask and I’m the only one just finding out about it…) It’s for electronic recycling.
How, you may ask, (and this time you really may be asking) has recycling inspired me to write a blog post? I got to thinking about what we consume. Throwing away something electronic was something we used to do maybe every five years, if not ten. Years ago, things lasted longer not only because they were built better, but because they didn’t go out of style as fast. In my house right now, however, I have five old-style computer monitors, four computers – the oldest has a 5 1/4″ floppy drive – one ancient laptop, and one old tv set, not to mention numerous broken cellphones, VCR’s and DVD players. All of the monitors still work, but what else am I to do with them but throw them away?
Having written all that down (and I’m shocked), I realize that the time has come when we need such a thing as an orange box. Still, it makes you think, doesn’t it? All this junk we’re getting rid of into landfills and that which goes up in smoke to pollute our air – where are we going to live when it all takes over?
Here’s to the original, organic orange box. May one light up your Hallowe’en!
Bitcoins. Have you heard of them? I just did today, when I read yesterday’s newspaper.
According to the news, the first-ever-in-the-world Bitcoin ATM is opening today in Vancouver, British Columbia. The way it works is, you scan your palm on the machine (quite literally “wave” – see what I did there?) and you can then put as much as $3,000 into your Bitcoin account, or “wallet.”
Sounds easy enough, but then I wanted to know how one spends all this money. The answer: on the internet! Apparently, WordPress accepts Bitcoins. (I haven’t looked it up, I’m just going by what the news says.) But how does WordPress know that the Bitcoins I’m spending are actually my Bitcoins? After all, a palm scanner isn’t a regular household appliance….yet. So I decided to google “How does a Bitcoin work.” I got this: Bitcoin: How it works, which didn’t help me much at all. On first glance it looks a little bit like PayPal. I lost it at the map. Check it out for yourself.
If this system of Bitcoins doesn’t fall flat on a wave of confusion, it just might end up what separates the middle-aged from the youth of today. My mother can’t use a debit card – can’t understand the concept. Maybe this is where the youngest tip of the baby-boomers like me get to wave bye-bye to Generation X.
The article in yesterday’s newspaper that caught my eye was about a community group which takes disabled adults (over age 16) on outings. The sentence in the article that sparked my interest in particular said, “Without our programs, some of these individuals would be staying at home so it helps reduce the risk of isolation for the parents and caregivers as well as the participants.” That got me thinking.
The first thing that comes to my mind when someone mentions ‘caregiver’s isolation’ is simply the fact that when they’re stuck at home caring for someone who is disabled, they just don’t go out. But it goes so far beyond that.
As a parent of disabled children I find it hard to have discussions with parents of “normal” children, because we have so little in common. Even people who aren’t parents of kids the same age as mine (for instance, if they’re grown up and moved out) have a hard time relating to me. Whether they assume because my kids aren’t like theirs, they can’t possibly have any of the same tendencies, or whether they’re afraid of being told that their problems can’t possibly be as bad as mine, I”m not sure. Maybe it’s both. Therefore, I try not to talk about myself much. When they are kind enough to ask me about myself, no matter how nonchalant I am about the way I live, telling anyone about my kids is a slow death towards being a conversation stopper. Occasionally they’ll mention a niece, or a neighbour who has a similar circumstance, or they’ll ask me questions about the health of my children, but when I’ve said all there is to say, if I don’t quickly find something other than the weather to talk about, (and it’s always up to me to find something, because no one knows quite where to go after being told about my kids) then it’s game over. In fact, come to think of it, it shuts people up about as fast as telling a stranger I’m writing a novel. Think about that for a while.
Having said all that, I’ve been invited out tonight with my next door neighbour and six of her closest friends for dinner, none of whom I have met before. As long as I can keep the conversation away from my kids, I should be fine. But of course someone is bound to ask me what I do for a living…
My point is, the isolation parents and caregivers of the disabled experience isn’t necessarily as clear-cut as it sounds. So next time you come across a single, stay-at-home mom of disabled children, or a novelist for that matter, don’t be afraid to look beyond what’s apparent.
Ah, the innocent narcissism of a child. Not to be confused with the pathological sickness found in some adults, we are born with a strong sense of self-preservation, and it’s not until we grow that we realize our own needs aren’t all there are. I wonder where we cross over. Is it the first time we see our own mother cry? Somewhere, somehow, compassion becomes a part of our psyche, and that’s where the narcissism of childhood ends.
However, on days like today nothing matters to my son, Alex, except Alex. My baby turns thirteen years old today and he’s extremely proud of himself. It’s delightful to me to see him bask in his own glow. It was beyond my wildest dreams when he was born that he’d ever reach this milestone, and so I’m happy to make his every wish come true.
Alex ‘n’ Me
Four foot two, and sixty pounds, he’s a dynamo of enthusiasm and love for everyone around him. In his mind he is as small as his frail physique; as much as his physical age is telling him he needs independence, he still comes to mom for cuddles when something hurts. He retains that childish innocence – that me me me mindset, and yet he’ll pat me lovingly on the cheek if I say I have a headache.
I have no idea how long his childishness will last… I have no idea what to expect of tomorrow, but I do know one thing: Today, nothing matters but my baby.
According to an article in yesterday’s newspaper, the government of Ontario’s health ministry will be taking the warning labels on food products a step further. They are proposing legislation that will require major fast food chains to advertise, right on their menus, the calorie count and other pertinent information (fat content?) of the food they are serving. It will be right up there with the price, so we can see exactly what we’re doing to our bodies – at least those of us who understand the ramifications of ingesting 1,000+ calories in one sitting. For those who don’t, I suppose it’s not going to make a difference.
Is this information for the benefit of those who haven’t seen the movie “Supersize Me“? Or for those who didn’t realize when they watched it how, much like “Titanic,” predictable the ending would be?
I’m not saying I’m above anyone who ignores the obvious health risk of eating at fast food restaurants – I enjoy a Big Mac as much as the next guy. What gets me is that the government feels the need to plaster the fact in our faces each time we visit one of these chains. How much faith must they have in us to think we’re too stupid to realize what we’re doing to ourselves? The reason they’re planning this is to be proactive, and reduce the need for health care because as a society, we tend to be overweight… in essence they’re trying to save us from ourselves and in the same breath, admit that they are failing to educate us in the first place.
Part of me leans toward what it says in the picture, and the other part of me wishes the government would be even more proactive in the first place. By finding a better way to teach our kids to care about themselves and their future families while they’re still in school, maybe our society can learn what moderation means.
What do you think?
The posts in the category “Yesterday’s News” reflect inspiration found in the previous day’s edition of my local newspaper. They are not a retelling of the news. This is a challenge to post a blog entry once a day, every day until Hallowe’en, and possibly beyond.
lindaghill.com 
