Fake Hair Don’t Care

 I ordered some inexpensive fake hair pieces on the TikTok shop. It’s been a little hard to match the coloring of my natural hair, but this is the closest I have come so far. I love the way this looks. I only had my husband take a picture so I could see the color difference between my real hair and the ponytail. I would think that this slight difference is ok, but any other opinions welcome. And after this picture was taken, I did redo my real hair so that little piece wouldn’t stick out the side. 

I also actually love how my back and shoulders look. Before I lost 20 pounds, they looked way different. I feel like my upper arms have shrunk, and I look more toned although not the most toned person in the world. I stepped on the scale this morning and it read 196, so up a pound or two, but another downside to being a caregiver for elderly people is that the constipation seems to be contagious.i always seem to catch it from the ones who freak out about it the most. I was 212 when I started the weight loss pill, and 215 about a week or two before.  

Tidbits

 I got this text out of the blue from my company. Well that’s helpful. My mom said “Why couldn’t they round it up to $120?”  

Yup, idk. Then I found out that it’s based on how much you drove in April and May. Everyone’s bonus will be different. I’m happy with $119.94. 

My daughter turned 19 on June 11.  I’ve been worried about her, as she’s a little overwhelmed by her summer job. When I worked at the children’s museum, kids from the YMCA day camps had a reputation of being the most “behaviorally challenged.”  I was very worried when she said they added a kid to her group who has a problem with eloping. I was relieved when I found out that kid had his own aide with him at all times. Thank God my daughter doesn’t have to keep this escape artist in one place while having to supervise other kids. She’s often too tired to talk much in the evenings. We are celebrating her birthday this weekend. 

I was thinking back to 2007, I used to be on a website for women called Ivillage. They had message boards for everything, including “expecting clubs” for every month. I actively posted and commented in the June, 2007 expecting club, even though my OBGYN really wished I wouldn’t- it seemed like those women had every complication known to womankind, and they made me paranoid. But, there was one woman in that group who was a “sovereign citizen.”  This means she didn’t believe in government at all. My husband often watches arrest videos on YouTube, and I think of her whenever sovereign citizens come up. She gave birth unassisted to a boy 6 days before I had my daughter on June 5, 2007. She didn’t give him a birth certificate or a social security number. In fact, she didn’t even give him a name, claiming he would choose his own once he could speak. 

I’ve been thinking about that kid a lot lately- how is he doing trying to enter adulthood with no documentation? They lived in Florida, somewhere near Sarasota at the time. I wonder if he is able to work, go to school, get his own place to live, and so on. Perhaps at some point he may have been taken by social services if his parents were arrested and grew up with another family who encourages him in the right direction. 

Thrifting Thoughts

I have been thinking lately about the person that wrote the recipes in cursive in the first 16 pages of the blank book I got on 25 cent day. I started wondering, if I try one of those recipes and do something odd, there might be a situation like this: 

In other words, I wonder if her spirit would be judging me. There are those memes going around with an elderly woman looking judgmentally down from heaven, and the caption reads, “Your grandma watching you cook chicken in an air fryer.” 

I’m also wondering that about the clothing I’m cutting up. What if this was someone’s favorite pair of jeans, and they’re watching me from heaven as I desecrate it?  Meh. I shouldn’t think too hard on it. 

The act of taking all these clothes and cutting them up into 6 inch squares is very anxiety reducing. It’s great. Sewing them into quilts is also anxiety reducing. I felt the same way about doing inventory in stores back when I worked with my husband. Scan, quantity, enter, over and over again, I mean it balled up this static energy and forced it out. I like that feeling. 

I am ending two days off in a row now. Tomorrow, which is Friday, I’m working with the woman who has ten hour shifts. But, she’s going to the cardiologist. She can’t get into a regular car, so GCboss arranged a transport service in a wheelchair accessible van. GCboss said the driver will help me get her in and out of the wheelchair. You know what, I really hope so, because she isn’t able to bear weight at all during transfers. And she’s larger. I cannot lift her into the wheelchair by myself. A smaller person I could, and a larger person who can bear weight during transfers I could. But neither apply to her, and even though GCboss says the driver will help, I’m still worried that they won’t. It’s causing me a TON of stress this evening, but I’m trying not to think about it. GCboss DID say they’d help. I’m just worried it will be someone with the “I don’t get paid enough” attitude.  

I also have to wear scrubs that match, because of going to the doctor. I admit, my scrub bottoms and tops often don’t match. Or I will just wear a nice t shirt with scrub bottoms sometimes. I just have to remember that in the morning. It was so much easier when I had a uniform. 

 

Thrifting 25 Cent Day

Every Wednesday morning from 7-11 am is 25 cent day at the Family Thrift Outlet on Hwy 6 in west Houston. There is another Family Thrift location on Hwy 6 about 4-6 miles north of the outlet location-

And the one 4-6 miles north is NOT an outlet. The items will be more expensive. The outlet is next to a Chinese restaurant called Cafe East. 

My daughter wants plaid flannels for her own projects. She’s doing something with them on hats and jackets. Above is a picture of all the plaid flannels I could find, but it was towards the end of the morning once I started having an eye out for them. 

It’s seldom that they’ll have books left on 25 cent day, but I was able to find this blanket book. On the first page, someone wrote recipes tried after 12/1/1986. Then, there are a few pages of handwritten recipes. If your cursive reading is up to par, you might be able to try some yourself. I can read cursive, but I have to strain and make it out slowly. This was the best find for a while, and I plan on writing my own recipes in subsequent pages. 

 

The Ups and Downs

 I’ve said it a million times. Being a caregiver in people’s homes is a great job if the client is great, and it’s a crappy job if the client is bad. I’ve had an “up and down” go of it lately. I had a 99 year old who was suffering panic attacks. She passed away on June 1, luckily not while I was with her. GCboss texted me notifying me of her passing. I then sent condolences to her daughters, and they thanked me profusely. They were a great family, but I felt like I was peering into the future, because her panic attacks were so much like mine. I think I would actually like to live to be 99, I just don’t want panic attacks at that point. 

I’m with another person during the week with 10 hour shifts that is extremely easy. She needs someone to tend to her every couple hours or so and is very pleasant, and there is a lot of down time between tasks. I worked very well on my writing in my notebook one of those days, but another day with her, I was too focused on horrible experiences with therapists. So I just sat there with her and watched Alfred Hitchcock back to back. This lady likes very disturbing old shows. When I googled Alfred Hitchcock and told her some facts about him, she got on a very long roll of asking me about all these different old actors- what year did they die and how old were they when they died, she wanted to know for all of them. Wikipedia came in handy. One of them was married five times and had kids and stepkids from most of these marriages. She wanted to know how many kids he had total, so I had to add them up. She ended that conversation with, “He was busy.” 

The other client whom I’ve been working with since I started, had a pain level of ten yesterday and would yell if I barely touched her. I felt extremely bad and had to apologize twice. I told GCboss. Not much happened. She’s better today. I don’t know what went on with her, but I was stressed out the whole afternoon. 

I’m very down about this being my life. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not cut out for therapy. I think it’s unfair that I was talking about a past experience only to be told “Just don’t focus on the past!” In a shitty tone. For literally any other woman in this society, that would have been considered “processing your trauma” and other women would have been all buttered up and coddled. Not me!  I have to shut the fuck up apparently. 

I’m glad I’m off tomorrow. Tuesday,‘I’m working with the 10 hour Alfred Hitchcock fan. I’m going to psych myself up to work on my writing instead of watchin that with her during my down times. This lady’s also very appreciative of me. Sometimes they aren’t!  I am going to work on focusing on the positive. Yeah it sucks that I have to watch people die, but at least there’s downtime where I can jot things down, because writing is my true calling. 

Therapist Call Out

 I reached out to the therapist I saw Wednesday June 3 and the two preceding Wednesdays to ask why she berated me so harshly about trying to process abuse perpetrated by my aunt. When I did so, her tone changed from pleasant to nasty, and she lectured me to “stop living in the past!”

It was a one hour long session. The last 20 minutes of this session, I had kind of shut down so she started what she called a “clinical assessment” where she asked me basic questions. When I reached out to her yesterday asking her to clarify why she had gotten so ugly with me, she responded that no such conversation ever happened and that the entire session consisted only of the clinical assessment. Then she told me not to contact her again, because she knew that the assessment was only the last 20 minutes and that her shit parade over me was before that.

She is lying, and only I know that. Because of this, I will never again agree to process my past with a therapist unless the session is being screen recorded. I want to encourage others to always screen record your therapy sessions that are done over zoom, even if you trust your therapist. If any sort of verbal or emotional abuse happens, and you do not have proof, you cannot report it. You “can”, but it’s your word against theirs. They have the power to manipulate your diagnosis, because psychiatric diagnoses aren’t based on any physical, provable markers. If I was to report this interaction, all she needs to do is take a pen, scratch out my PTSD diagnosis and write another one which has delusional thinking as a symptom. Then tell the board, “See, she’s making it up.”  

And I’m not making it up. I will not be ready for therapy again for a long time, and if/when I am, the therapist HAS to be ok with being screen recorded. I have a hunch that 0% of them are ok with it, and that’s fine. That means I never have to go through another one of them and they lose my business. There is a lot of pressure out there to go to therapy, and any time in the past that I’ve said I didn’t want to go, I was pressured even more. 

Being told, “Just don’t focus on the past” is extremely dismissive and a thing people say when trying to get you to go to therapy, ironically. You’ll hear things like, “Don’t listen to people who just say forget about the past, process it in therapy!”  So this is a huge smack in the face. Never again. 

I have a screen recording app called “record it”. There are about 6 or 7 more of them in the app store, mostly free. I highly recommend screen recording these people. I should have this past Wednesday, and I will not ever go again unless I have permission to. 

Marjane Satrapi and Truth in Storytelling

 For a few weeks or a few months now, I’ve been planning to blog about this old interview of Marjane Satrapi talking (especially in the first 60 seconds of that video) about writing something based on your own experiences and it not being 100% true. 

I suppose now would be the time to mention it, because Marjane died yesterday at age 56. It doesn’t state the cause of death other than to say she “died of a broken heart” one year after the death of her husband. 

Americans would never put it that way, but she died in Paris, and dying of a broken heart is real. I can imagine being devastated over the loss of your spouse. Sometimes I’m lying with Kevin and I can’t imagine it. I could see myself being in the danger zone of dying from sadness, but refusing to. 

I liked Persepolis when I read it, and I liked what she had to say in the first 60 seconds of that video even more. When writing something based on your own experiences, like she did with Persepolis and like I’m doing with The Child Advocate, the story will not be written down EXACTLY how it happened as if the camera had been running. This is important for me to remember, since these therapists tried to sabotage me by asking me if I was sure that happened instead of xyz other thing. Liberties have to be taken, or else it doesn’t become a story. Details also have to be changed to protect anonymity of people we worked with. Memories get convoluted over time, not because we are shitty crazy people, but because we are human. 

Rest in Peace, MJ. Thanks for the masterpiece.