THANK YOU for all your suggestions/empathy on the coughing post. Today I am coughing more, enough more that I worked up the nerve to ask my boss are we supposed to call in sick when we’re coughing this much? And she said no, we just wear masks. So. That’s. Great. But I do feel better having checked: I was a little worried I’d be assuming they didn’t want us to call in sick, when actually they really did want us to, and they’d be like “Um, how did you not know we didn’t want you coughing on elderly people??” I have three kinds of cough drops in my work bag, and I plan to be medicated up to the gills. And perhaps I will bring something to sip.

Okay, I have a work story. I will change details to protect privacy, but none of this is medical anyway. Well, almost none of it. ONWARD.

I regularly go to… Do you know, this is hard to figure out how to say, even though it’s simple and in no need of tact. I go to a couple? I go to a man and a woman and they are married and live in the same house? I care for a woman and her husband, there we go. Their children are quite active in their care, which is good and not good, as you can probably guess, even if you’ve never worked this job. It is good when people’s families are involved, and it is good to see it, and it is sad when the families aren’t or can’t be involved. But grown children can be bossy and upset and stressed, and there can be family dynamics that are tricky to know what to do with, and also it’s usually the families who treat us badly, if anyone’s going to.

Anyway. The house is all marked up with things we should not use. There is one cabinet of dishes we can use, the Corelle and the plastic and the promotional mugs, and the rest of the cabinets are marked off with masking tape and “Don’t use!” signs. There is a shelf of towels we can use, and there is a whole linen closet that is verboten. There is a drawer of silverware we can use, and a drawer we can’t.

I have had two unpleasant encounters with one of the grown children, both of which involved the grown child very, very, very upset that, for example, an unauthorized towel had been taken out of a closet, or an unauthorized plate had been broken. (In neither case was I the one who had used the item, but I was on duty when the violation was discovered.) “There are plenty of everyday towels! I don’t even understand why this happened! Don’t people see the signs? What are they even doing rooting through those cupboards?? This china from the NINETEEN-FORTIES! There are too many people in this house!”

Well. In both cases, the awkward thing was that I was pretty sure it was the man of the house who went into those cupboards. The caregivers have no reason to go into them, and we can see the posted signs. But of course the man of the house may take out his own possessions, and frankly he’s not as clear as he used to be on which are which. The trouble is, I don’t know how to say to the upset grown child, “You know, have you asked your dad…..?” without sounding like I’m trying to blame him and get us out of trouble. And of course I don’t KNOW: there ARE a lot of us in and out of the house, and maybe one of us DID take out the towel from The Forbidden Closet. But since the closet is in her dad’s bathroom, I think the most likely explanation is that one of us forgot to put out a fresh everyday towel for him (we have to bring one up daily from the shelf of authorized towels downstairs), and he just opened the closet conveniently located right in his bathroom and took one of the ones from there. Why does this not occur to the grown child? Well, there are a lot of emotions involved. And sometimes it’s easier to blame us, since they can’t exactly blame their parents for using their own possessions.

But this is where I’m going with this. I had assumed that these special possessions were roped off because the parents at this stage of life have shaking hands and failing eyesight, and because sometimes they might for example use a very special towel to clean up cat barf in the garage. And that may be the case. But there’s more to it than that, because the man of the house was telling me how they paid thousands and thousands of dollars to bring these items from his wife’s country back when they were first married. Eight sets of china from a special china factory in her hometown. Thirty sets of special sheets. Beautiful embroidered towels. Boxes and boxes of decorative items. All of these things have been unused for 60 years because they’re too special. Most of them are in boxes in the basement, the same boxes they were brought here in. Some of them are in the cupboards, but only to look at, not to use. “I don’t know why we even brought them!,” he said.

“Well,” I said, searching for something to say. “Your kids will be glad to have them.” “Oh, they’ve been trying to get their hands on them for YEARS!,” he said. Oh. But?

Okay. So, possibly if you are roughly my age, you are picturing “the parents” in, say, their 60s, and the kids in their 30s or so. But the people I am taking care of are mostly in their 80s and 90s, so the grown kids are usually about my parents’ age—like, mid-60s. Is this reminding anyone else of poor Prince Charles, now past retirement age as he waits LITERALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE to MAYBE get to be king? These beautiful dishes and linens, sitting in boxes completely unused as the decades go past; the grown kids, past retirement age, still not allowed to use the good towels. …Perhaps it’s not a perfect correlation with the Prince Charles thing.

I mean, at least in Prince Charles’s case, his mom WANTS the crown and is USING it. In this case, the parents don’t even WANT the dishes and sheets and towels, but they STILL WON’T LET THE KIDS USE THEM. And now the kids won’t let the parents use them. By all means, leave those things boxed up in the basement where they can do GOOD. The kids can move those boxes to their own basements AFTER the funerals.

Well. This line of thought does feel a bit…familiar. How many articles have you read in your lifetime, urging you to USE the good dishes, WEAR the good perfume, USE the things you’re saving a special occasion? Five articles? Ten? Two dozen? And how many of them used the imagery of how sad it would be to die without ever having used the good stuff? But it seemed more vivid to me when I was looking at people who were literally planning to die without ever opening the boxes in the basement, and their children reaching old age without opening them either.

ANY of us could die at any moment, of course, but at a certain point you’re out of the stage of “I mean really it could happen to anyone at any time” and into the stage where your caregiver can’t be certain of her schedule for the next week because you might no longer be on it. I would really love to be serving them their meals on the good dishes, and drying their hair with the good towels. It WOULD be sad if an irreplaceable 1940s plate got broken, it WOULD. But I’m looking at the two possibilities: (1) using the dishes many, many times and enjoying them each time, and ending up with a set that has a few missing/chipped pieces, or (2) never using the dishes, and ending up with a perfect set. That we never see. Because it is in a box. It re-motivates me to go ahead and use that little jar of expensive night cream.

We watched Gandhi for our New Year’s Eve movie, and despite what you’d expect, it was not exactly a chill mellow meditation movie. Or maybe that is exactly what you would expect, and we should have asked you first. Anyway, it was the kind of movie I think of afterward as An Important Movie To See. I am very glad we saw it, and there were some truly excruciating scenes in it, but how lucky am I that the worst I had to experience was SEEING those etc. etc. etc. Anyway. Good movie. Good to have frequent breaks for pizza rolls, mozzarella sticks, chocolate-covered pretzels, putting a cool washcloth to my swollen eyelids, etc.

I am coughing again. Here is what is happening: I get a cold, just a perfectly ordinary cold, no big deal, not even a bad cold. Then I cough for two or three or four weeks, the kind of coughing that builds on itself until I’m gagging. No fever. No other bothersome symptoms. Just relentless coughing, until my stomach and back and shoulders are sore from it.

This was unpleasant but tolerable when I was an at-home parent. Now that I am working, and furthermore working for elderly people who should not be coughed on, this cannot stand. Listen, is there anything, ANYTHING, that can stop the coughing temporarily, for say two to four hours?

(This job, like all of my other jobs so far, gives lip service to not going to work when you’re sick, but actually does want you to come to work when you’re sick. This would not be a productive area for debate, because I KNOW RIGHT, but there it is. The elderly should not be exposed to germs, nor should people in hospitals, and yet this is where we are as a society until something elemental is changed about how we handle staffing. Really. I am too frustrated even to get relief from discussing how dumb it is. But anyway, even in A Better World it’s hard to imagine taking a month off of work for a cough. And then doing it again two weeks later. So. Back to the topic at hand.)

My mother says codeine cough syrup, and that is what the doctor gives me whenever I go to her and plead my case. But it just makes me feel pleasantly lightheaded and slightly queasy while I cough.

I think I have tried most of the over-the-counter cough syrups by now. Robitussin. Mucinex. DayQuil. Delsym. Feel free to recommend them anyway (it’s been awhile since I tried Delsym, for example), especially if there’s something FANCY about it: i.e., “I take Mucinex WITH half a Benadryl AND I gargle vinegar.” I WILL TRY SERIOUSLY JUST ABOUT ANYTHING. Oh, I have also tried Miss Grace‘s suggestion of a small glass of Drambuie before bed, which I’m not sure if it helps the cough PER SE but it certainly is delightful and delicious and I have bought many a bottle since she recommended it.

Also feel free to say things you feel as if maybe you shouldn’t say, such as “You know, this is probably cough cancer” or “My asthma was just like this before I knew it was asthma” or whatever. I’ve mentioned the situation to two different general practitioners already, and both of them were all “Yep, colds sure suck, and coughs are a normal part of colds, SHRUG.” And maybe they DO and ARE, but I feel as if I cough a LOT MORE than the average Josephine.

Ever since Trudee mentioned it in the comments section, I have been listening to this song:

Odds Are, by Barenaked Ladies.

Very heartening.

One of the nice things about having a driving teenager in the house is that if I am halfway through making dinner and realize I don’t have an ingredient, I can send the teenager to the store for it. But. Last week I was planning to make chili but suddenly got in the mood to make soup instead. All I needed was the frozen vegetables, and that’s easy enough, so I sent Rob. Here is what I wrote down for him:

I explained it verbally, saying that I THOUGHT it was called “Classic” but it might be something similar, so I was writing down the exact vegetables in the blend so he’d be able to figure it out; and that I believed the bags were 16 ounces, but I needed 20 ounces so he might need to get two bags. I think that’s pretty clear. This is what I was expecting him to bring home:

But two of them, since as I remembered, the bags are 16 ounces. Here is what he instead brought home:

I mean. How did this even happen? His answers were unsatisfactory. At first he tried to defend his choice: “You said Birdseye frozen vegetables, these are Birdseye frozen vegetables!” “You said 20 ounces so I got three boxes!” “They didn’t have anything marked Classic!” It was hard to know what to say. I had him look again at what I’d written down. I reminded him of what I’d said. I didn’t want to make him feel stupid, but his wrongness was so inexplicable: microwave-ready boxes, of a specific not-at-all-what-I-said vegetable blend, that comes with a sauce. They WERE Birdseye, though! Good job, honey!

And then I still needed vegetables for the soup. I made Rob come with me to the store. He was pretty cranky about it, but I wasn’t sure how else to complete this training exercise, except to guide him to the frozen vegetable section and show him the piles of the very thing I’d asked him to buy.

Tonight at work I had a terrible shift, where things happened that I am not trained or paid enough to deal with and yet I had to deal with them anyway. For a mental picture that gives you the gist without the details, imagine that you have agreed to work as an assistant teacher in a classroom and, while you are there, all the students throw up all over the floor, and you have to clean it up even though it is not at all what you were hired to do, because in this imaginary scenario I am creating just to give you the idea, you are the only person there and no one else can help all those poor sick kids.

Anyway. It was awful. It reminded me of when one of my babies would have a diaper so terrible that I didn’t even know how to start, and considered CUTTING the onesie off rather than dragging that horrifying object up over the baby’s head. (By the way, if you have not yet encountered this and need to file away this information: most onesies can be pulled DOWN.) Or when a child would throw up so extensively that I would be sobbing while cleaning it up, because I knew I would never, ever be done cleaning it up. And yet the only thing to do was to keep working at it.

And I did keep working at it, and I did fix it. At the end of the shift, the client said something so loving and grateful to me, I went from thinking, “Never again. Nope. Never, ever again. This is WELL BEYOND my pay grade,” to thinking, “I can never leave, not until death do us part.” I went home and poured a giiiiiiiiant brandy, for shock and trauma. I put all my clothes into the laundry and put on comfy jammies. I washed my hands up to the elbow in the hottest water I could stand, several times. I lay down on the bed and the littler boys snuggled in, one on each side, and I soaked it up.

This is reminding me of working a cash register. It’s a job that I hate, and that I am very good at. I am polite, and smiley, and I try to fix things and make the customers happy. While doing this, and afterwards for literally years, I suffer. Every snippy or unfair thing a customer says, every error I make, every time something goes wrong that I can’t fix—all of those things are slow-burning coal for the lying-awake furnace.

It’s hard to explain to my bosses what the problem is. Why am I saying I don’t want to work the cash register, when I am so obviously a natural at it? Why am I running out the door, lighting everything on fire as I go, when dealing tactfully with horrifying messes is clearly my calling? It is difficult and complicated and hard to explain, to be good at something you hate.

Isn’t it weird to think there may right now be people who won the lottery but don’t KNOW they’ve won the lottery? Like, they could still be asleep.

And when I was thinking about that, feeling kind of happy about how they were going to be SO SURPRISED AND HAPPY, I started thinking about all the BAD surprises we might not know about yet.

I continue to fly verrrrryyyyy lowwwwwww. This is the song my radio alarm woke me up with the other day, and it has felt very apt:

Pinch Me, by Barenaked Ladies.

Here, I know: let’s force this. I will say three good or happy things, not counting the big ones like that all of us are alive and safe and warm and fed, and not counting any of the ones where I have to list all the horrible things we’re lucky NOT to be going through.

1. After our last set of experiences, we tried a new lab for Edward’s bloodwork and it was ONE MILLION TIMES BETTER. Fast. Easy. Nearer to our house. No screw-ups. And I deleted the rest of this paragraph where I discussed how one experience was too soon to call it, and how we didn’t yet know if our insurance covered it.

2. The creepy, spidery-looking thing dangling under my chair turned out to be a little bit of fluff and not a spider.

3. Tacos for dinner tonight.

4. Oh, I thought of another one: I ordered some clearance Christmas chocolates and they’ll be here tomorrow.

I’m here to stop myself from going back to my town’s Facebook page, where right now there is a very tiresome yet provoking argument. I’m sure that Michelle doesn’t mean to imply that the only way for people to get information is the way SHE prefers to get information (thanks for yet again replying to a question using only a link to Google, Michelle! Very neighborly of you!), and I’m sure Carol doesn’t mean to imply that the town’s page should only be used for things she personally is interested in (thanks for yet again saying you don’t understand why anyone cares about this, Carol!), but in that case why is this argument happening and why are phrases such as “you people” and “better things to do” being bandied about? And why does it happen that there are people who think it is a waste of time to chat on Facebook, but do NOT think it is a waste of time to criticize others, on Facebook, for chatting on Facebook?

I have already said my piece (despite believing that the absolute best way to handle this would have been to hit “hide conversation”), and it was well-received (more likes than Michelle and Carol are getting, and no one fighting with me about it), so now I need to stop participating while I’m ahead. It helps to remember that theoretically whatever I write can be seen by my clients and their families.

Speaking of which, I am feeling panicky and meh about my job again. I don’t know why it happened. Oh, actually, I think it’s that my schedule changed. One of my main clients decreased her hours and that eliminated a big chunk of mine. So now I’m meeting new clients again, and my schedule is irregular again, and I don’t like either of those things. Anyway, I’m back to feeling bad on work days, and feeling like it’s the wrong job for me, and needing to repeatedly list to myself the reasons why I should stick with it anyway (it’s a good answer for the “What do you do?” question; it’s a good job for immediately increasing hours/paycheck if Something Happened; I believe in the value of the work itself; I wasn’t happy when I WASN’T working, either; probably nothing else part-time and entry-level is going to be any better, and at least I’m over the new-job hurdle with this one; I DO feel good on my way HOME from a shift).

Well. It’s possible some of this is post-holiday blues. It doesn’t FEEL as if it’s connected, but one can only go so many years feeling depressed in January before one is forced to concede that it COULD be part of it. I’m very glad to have something fun planned for this weekend. I’m also glad, despite what I just said about my job, that I’m working today: how I’m feeling right now is how I used to feel a LOT of the time, and it’s one of the reasons I GOT the job, so I don’t think I can say it’s BECAUSE OF the job. And despite the dread I feel right now, I know from experience that when I’m THERE working, and when I’m on my way home, my mood will be significantly better than it is right now.

Tis the season for suddenly wanting to get rid of stuff, and that is what I have been doing. Last night I went through our closet, not with the “Only keep what BRINGS YOU JOY” policy (please), but more with the “If there is dust visibly accumulated on the top edge of this garment, perhaps we no longer wear it.” Paul still had ’90s-era rugby shirts. I had shirts I was keeping in order to bitterly resent what disappointments they’d been. I went through my bras and got rid of the ones I never, ever wear. I got rid of a pair of pants I had been keeping just in case I ever had a need for a pair of pants I hated.

I went through my stationery. That was hard to do, but I had SO MUCH of it, I would literally not be able to use it in my lifetime. It was at the point where I no longer enjoyed choosing a note card to send, because of how difficult it was to go through the crammed boxes of them. I filled TWO plastic grocery bags with stationery to get rid of, and I STILL have lots left. I didn’t want to WASTE it by getting rid of it—but I WAS wasting it, by keeping it and not using it. Now someone on Freecycle has it, and SHE will use it.

I got rid of a shelf’s worth of books. I wanted to own each of them at the time I acquired them, and got satisfaction out of those acquisitions and the subsequent possessions—but either I haven’t re-read them or I’m done re-reading them. Time to stop keeping them just in case there is an apocalyptic situation where I would be glad of every page.

I tossed a handful of lipsticks that I never wear. They were fun to try, and educational; and they will, I hope, keep me from buying anything orangey or light pink in the future—and so they have served their purpose full-well.

In fact, that was a helpful line of thought for me: that even if I hadn’t gotten my money’s worth in the sense of using up the whole lipstick or using up all the cards, I’d gotten my money’s worth ANYWAY: the fun of considering the purchase, the fun of making the purchase and bringing it home, the fun of using several of the cards / trying the lipstick / wearing the shirt to a party. I got rid of a shirt I’d worn literally once, to a lunch date with an ex-boyfriend. I’ve had that shirt for 10-12 years, and it was exactly the right shirt for the lunch date and has not been right for anything else, and it cost $13 on clearance and it is time for Goodwill to have it. I got my FULL $13 out of that shirt the only time I wore it: it wasn’t “$13 per wearing,” it was “$13 to have the Right Shirt for that occasion and feel perfectly dressed for it and relieve some of the what-on-earth-should-I-WEAR stress leading up to such an event.” And what additional value am I getting out of an item by STORING and NOT-USING it? More value will be extracted by giving it to someone who WILL use it—or, at minimum, in the case of things that must be thrown away, by freeing up space to put something else.

It also helped to remember something I read in a book about hoarding, which is that the peak stress is felt in the moment before getting rid of an item; afterward, there is usually relief, and no regret, and in fact usually the item and accompanying stress are forgotten entirely. This is for items that actually OUGHT to be gotten rid of, of course: don’t try this with, say, all the shirts you usually wear, or the saucepans you use multiple times per week. But I have found it to be true for things such as a blush that’s too orange for me, or a book of essays about pregnancy I haven’t read in eight years and am no longer interested in reading, or the mugs that always get pushed to the back of the shelf.

The hardest calendars to choose this year were the ones for Rob/Edward’s room and William/Henry’s room. Rob (16) and William (14) like a lot of the same calendars; Edward (10) and Henry (8) like a lot of the same calendars. It ends up being “Which of Rob and William’s choices do Edward and Henry not mind?” But in a few years Rob and William will go off to college and then Edward and Henry will get the full power of choice. We ended up with mostly calendars that weren’t even on my original list.

This is the calendar for Rob and Edward’s room:

(image from Amazon.com)

Astronomy. This wasn’t one of the original list I showed them to choose from, but Rob said, “Are there any SPACE calendars?” and Edward said “Oh, I like space too!,” and so it was decided.

This is the calendar for William and Henry’s room:

(image from Amazon.com)

This Day in History. I was surprised they both wanted this one, but they did.

This is the calendar for Elizabeth’s room:

(image from Zazzle.com)

Walrus. Purchased on a 50% off sale with free shipping, because Zazzle is expensive.

For the kitchen:

(image from Amazon.com)

Kitchen Happiness. I was pretty sure this one would win, and it did.

For next to my computer:

(image from Amazon.com)

Guinea pigs. I didn’t realize how much I wanted a guinea pig calendar until I saw one. This one was such a hit with the kids, I considered getting it for our kitchen calendar—but that would throw everything off, because I didn’t want the Kitchen Happiness calendar for next to my computer.

For next to Paul’s computer:

(image from Amazon.com)

Vintage Patent Blueprints. I was thinking the older boys would like this, but they were both meh about it—and then Paul glanced over and said HE would want that one.