Okay. I’m warning you, this one isn’t pleasant. I’m writing about it anyway because I need to grouse about it somewhere, and if I put it on Facebook I’m gonna have a hard time. I am already having a hard time, so why add to it.
I haven’t been doing great anyway. I am probably diabetic, and I can’t keep up with a supply of test strips because quite frankly, I’m broke. (That final payment for the phone went through. I’mm down to… two bucks and some change? I think?) I’m still eating crap and I never feel good as a result. I am sleeping with my feet elevated every single night for the first time in my life because I have had intermittent problems with swollen feet and ankles since age 18 and that has progressed to regular problems, and my previous method of coping — propping feet up on a coffee table during the day — is not available to me here. I’ve noticed that my also intermittent problem of heart palpitations gets worse if I am leaning back in one of Dad’s recliners, which is fucking weird, but that and other little issues have now got me wondering if I have atrial fibrillation (Afib). And of course there are the uterine fibroids and the ongoing hormonal fuckery of perimenopause.
So on top of all that, I had a large late lunch or early supper of gumbo and potato salad… and not long after that I had to shit, and turns out I’m constipated. I am attempting to manage it, involving a decent dose of magnesium oxide and then a laxative I happened to still have in my personal stash, but it is slow going and involves multiple toilet trips, apparently.
During my second one I heard Dad shuffle back to the hallway just outside the bathroom and move around and pause and move around and at one point I heard him open what I thought at the time was the dryer door (more on that in a minute… you won’t like it) and shuffle around some more and I thought, Here we go, he needs the toilet too, I better hurry and turned out I was right and he asked if I could get done soon and I did and he went in. Problem solved.
I thought then.
I went back into the bathroom maybe half an hour to an hour later because I needed a run on the porcelain throne again. At least every time I go in there I’m productive, but it’s never everything that needs to get out. I’m in constant low-level pain at the moment and very not happy about it. But I got done — well, for some value of “done,” as I’m still not emptied out properly — and then approached the washer and dryer because, well.
Well. Since I moved back in here I have been circulating my clothes out of my clothes hamper, where I had packed them the night I was evicted, then wearing them and then washing them and putting them into the dresser properly, with the intent that when I got the hamper emptied — it is not a large hamper — I would use it to corral the car-related stuff I still keep in the trunk of my car. Today I realized that what was left in the clean hamper and what was in the dirty clothes hamper in my room (that one came with the room) pretty much made up a laundry load. So I washed it all.
Dad has recently done laundry and had left it in the dryer. I had thought when I heard him open what I thought was the dryer today that he was taking that stuff out finally, because surely he had noticed I was running the washer. When I opened the dryer I saw that was not the case. So I took his sheets out and put them away in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Then I turned my attention to the washer to change my load over.
First thing I see is this towel that looked oddly out of place. It also looked strangely dirty. I went to take it out and it unfolded halfway. It had two wadded washcloths in it. Stained in some brown substance. There was more of the brown substance in solid bits all balled up in there.
Motherfu–
I attempted to get as much of the shit as possible down the toilet and then took the rest of the bundle out of the washer and it’s sitting on the bathroom floor. I am washing my clothes again. I am not even attempting that towel and two washcloths. He’s got plenty of both. He can buy more if he wants.
I mean. I get it. He’s seventy-two. That’s a difficult age for things like personal sphincters. Nobody likes being in a situation like that. But we usually leave the washer open between loads and it didn’t even occur to him that it might be closed for good reason. He didn’t even look. He just chucked his crap, literally, into the midst of my clean clothes. I’m lucky it didn’t fucking leak.
Probably it didn’t fucking leak.
I can’t know for sure. Also there’s the psychological effect of this on me. Hence the rewash.
This pretty much answers one question about me, though. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I would want to do personal care for an elderly person as my paid employment? No. Nope. Really not. Am not fucking doing that. It’s enough that I will have changed two children’s diapers, and cleaned up two children’s puke that as often as not also wound up on me, and cleaned up after this one old man. He gets an in. No one else does. Especially not for free. I’m done.
No one’s going to be my personal care anything when I get that old. This culture does not give a single fuck about old women. It’s going to be some shitty publicly-underfunded old-people home where they leave me in my dirty Depends all damn day. Certainly no man would ever go that extra mile for me. (You’ve seen what old men do with wives who need personal care. They rope the eldest daughter in — no wonder my daughter wants to be a man — or they hire a care attendant or they chuck wifey into a nursing home.) Why the fuck should I for anyone else? On so little pay? Or none? Dad only gets the in because I have free housing here. That’s it. That’s all. He squeaked by. And even then, only up to a point. I’ll throw out his shitty towels. If he wants any more involved than that, he needs to get a permanent home carer or move into the veterans home.
So there you go. I just hope I get his literal crap into the trash before he notices I’ve noticed. I’ve had an unpleasant enough day.
Oh, and he’s drinking. I told Doug about the first bottle but have not yet mentioned the second. Dad bought this one two days ago and he’s already more than halfway through. I fully expect to be abused by one or more people if he kills himself on that shit. That’s all anyone seems to know how to do, shit on me and never ask questions then or later. I should care more about the effect on my dad than about people’s opinions, but no one has declared Dad legally incompetent. My hands are tied. Worst case scenario he kicks me out of this house and then what do I do? Mom has a spare room, apparently, but I don’t want to live with Mom’s husband. Man gives me the creeps. He’s ten years younger than her and ten years older than me and that really is not what you’d call a situation devoid of potential for fuckery. The bad kind. And I have no other options. MAYBE Doug’s house. He’s in Oregon. I’m surprised my car got here. It wouldn’t get there. There’d be no fucking jobs even if I did. That wouldn’t last long.
…
Oh, hey. My guts hurt less now. So that’s a win, I guess.
Okay. I need to get some pieces written for Substack. My thought is to write enough material to post two or three times a week (I can schedule them) for another month or so. I also want to set my homepage back up with a WordPress install. Text doesn’t parse correctly on self-coded pages and I don’t have the patience or savvy to play with htaccess. I also need to think about how to set up more bracelet listings and also my Sandor Clegane drawing on Etsy. At least two of those might bring some decent income. Might. If I’m very, very fortunate.
Shaddup. I know.
Sigh.