Grief is a Step Function

My mom died in April. My only sibling, my brother, died in July. My mom's death was expected. My brother's, at only 50, was most certainly not. 

Not having lost anyone truly dear to me before now, I would have thought that grieving would have some pattern to it. To borrow math graphs, it might have been a linear function with a negative slope, or exponential decay. It isn't. It's a random step function. August was terrible. September was better. October was bad. Thus far, November has been truly gutting. I will have my first holiday season without my mom or my brother, and I am ambushed by tiny little things at every turn that leave me leaking tears.

We got our Christmas tree, and as we finished putting up the plain baubles, I found the wooden Charlie Brown ornaments that my mother painted when I was three. The hands that painted them are gone forever.

I was reading an article about key changes in pop songs, thinking I would discuss it with my musical kids, and the last thought in the article was this:

    "You want to know why Motown was such an incredible font of composition? Three words: Detroit Public Schools."

Mom loved Motown and she went to Detroit public schools. She would have loved that. And I can't text it to her. 

And I can't call my brother to share that grief because he is gone too. The one person who should have been the lasting link to my childhood is also gone forever.

And I find myself here in the middle of The Two Towers, the slowest, most boring of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where nothing is happening and there is only the overwhelming sense of the End of Things approaching, and I can't share a sardonic giggle with either of them about that analogy. 

I imagine that there will come a time when this doesn't hurt so much, when I no longer find myself crying over throwaway lines in NPR articles, when I no longer reflexively reach for my phone to share a silly thought or a story about my kids, only to remember that there is no one on the other end to answer. But there is no telling when that might be because grief has its own winding timeline.

Pearls Before Swine

The upside of my mother dying—insert cynical snort—is that (maybe) I can let go of trying to be a person she would be proud of. 

For my mother, the ugliest insult you could hurl at someone was to say he was selfish. It carried an outsized weight, a bitter contempt and hatred far beyond the conventional meaning. So to make my mother proud was to be selfless. To offer of myself, to give my time, my effort, my love without expectation of any return. And I have spent my life trying to live up to that. 

What a fucking waste.

During the pandemic, with schools working remotely, if at all, my coworker Luke was struggling to take care of his special needs child. Like most parents, only more so, school was primarily childcare for him. And when COVID took school away—right after he and his wife split, no less—he was kind of fucked. He was working maybe 25 hours a week. So I offered to take care of his son for a few hours a week so that he could actually...you know...be at the job that was paying his mortgage. I was watching this minimally verbal kid with severe behavior problems more than his family members could be bothered—because nobody but me would do it for free. Hundreds of hours of my life that I could have done literally anything else with, and that I will never get back. When money became available—from the state, and thanks to Democrats who care about people—Luke asked me if I would take the job, and I said I wasn't interested. Given his reverence for money, I was not going to become his employee, with the entitlement to my time that it implied. So I was no longer of use, and fuck me very much. 

His family members, however, now that pay was in the offering, could suddenly be stirred to watch their own flesh and blood. 🙄

So Luke and I continued to work together, and I continued to do nice, little things for him and everyone else, because it's who I'm supposed to be. I didn't need the job, and working for Melissa was irritating and demeaning af, but I continued, in part, because I was afraid that if *I* quit, Sharon would quit, and then Melissa would close the company, and what would Poor Luke do? Poor Luke, who needed the flexibility of a job that would let him drop everything so he could take care of his autistic kid.

Well, the fucker up and quit Monday without having given any notice that he was looking. Jose had asked ALL of his employees, given the precarious footing of the tiny company, to please let him know if they were thinking of leaving. He wouldn't blame them, wouldn't penalize them, would even offer recommendations because he understood that people have to do what's best for themselves, but he needed to be able to plan to try to keep the shitty little ship afloat. One of the engineers let him know—after she'd been rejected—that she had interviewed, and Jose had told Luke that he'd been hurt that she had done it despite his request.

And despite all of that, hereafter forever known as, Fucking Luke went and found another job and accepted it without telling Jose. Or me.

Because no matter what you do for people, they are shitty and not worth your effort.

When the Online Systems Go Offline

I have had a Wells Fargo account for nearly 30 years. I have been faithfully paying my current Wells Fargo mortgage online from my Wells Fargo checking account for over decade. So when I went to pay my mortgage last Friday, I was surprised to find that the transaction could not be processed despite the fact that there is clearly enough money in the account. It said to try again later or call the customer service number.

I tried again Saturday. I tried again Sunday. I tried again Monday. Today I finally gave up and called the number. 

Automated Voice: Please say or enter your account or card number.

Shit, where's my account number on the website? It's all asterisks. Duh, think! I know it by heart since I've been a Wells Fargo customer for 30 years.

Me:**********

Automated Voice: Please say your account number one digit at a time, or enter it using the keypad.

(sigh)

Me: * * * * * * * * * *

Automated Voice: You can add voice print identification for the future. Please follow the prompts to set it up, or say cancel.

Oh, FUCK NO.

Me: Cancel.

Automated Voice: You can add voice print identification in the future. Would you like to continue to receive prompts?

Me: No.

Automated Voice: If you would like to add voice print identification in the future, please speak to a customer service representative.

How many times do I have to say no to this?

Automated Voice: Please wait for the next customer service representative.

Their hold music sucks, but I guess I can at least be thankful it's not Opus No. 1.

April: Thank you for calling. This call may be recorded. ...yada yada yada... For security purposes, can I have your name?

Me: Jessica Cordova

April: Do you go by another name?

Duh. My bad. I haven't changed my name with Wells Fargo because the nearest branch in 1000 miles away.

Me: Jessica Madarasz. M-A-D-A-R-A-S-Z

April: Do you have access to the name on your statement?

Me: Yes?

Child, I just gave it to you.

April: ...

Me: It's not Jessica Madarasz? That's weird. 

Panicking slightly inside. Guess I should have set up Voice Print ID... But imagine how fucked it would have been if it had been someone else calling. I'd have been locked out of my own account forever.

April: If you can't provide the name on the statement, you'll need to go to a branch for further ID verification.

Me: The nearest branch is 1000 miles away.

April: ...

Fuck. Wait! I'm logged on! I can download a statement and check.

For fuck's sake. Really? Are you shitting me?

Me: Jessica Meagan M-E-A-G-A-N Madarasz

Now the bitch is satisfied. Great.

April: How can I help you?

Me: I've been trying to pay my mortgage online since Friday, and the website keeps telling me to try back later.

April: Can you log on?

God grant me the strength.

Me: Yes, and when I try to pay my mortgage, I get an error saying that the transaction cannot be processed at this time despite the fact that there is enough money in the account.

I read her the exact wording.

April: Have you contacted the mortgage department?

Me (clearly exasperated): No. Why would I do that when the website says to call this number?

April (salty): I'm just trying to find out if you've talked to the mortgage department. I'll need to transfer you to them.

FFS.

I wait. 

More loud, shitty hold music.

Automated Voice: Since this is a call about a debt collection, the call may be monitored and legal proceedings may follow.

Motherfucker, I've been TRYING TO PAY YOU FOR FOUR DAYS.

I explain to Curly (srsly?) that I've been trying to pay them for four days.

Curly: I'd be happy to help you with that. Can I offer you other Wells Fargo products that apply to you?

Me (curt): No.

Curly: Okaaaay. Can I have the routing number?

Are you fucking kidding me? If Y'ALL don't know it...

Me: **************

Curly: That's shows as a Wells Fargo account.

No shit, Sherlock.

So Curly finally sets up the payment, explains that if I want to cancel it, I have to call, but I may not be able to cancel it on the day it's set to be processed, and will I please fill out the email survey saying that she was an excellent representative of Wells Fargo?

I know it's not their fault. They didn't design the website in the first place. They didn't break it in the second. They didn't write the automated menus. They didn't write the scripts they have to go through. 

But for fuck's sake. 

And none of this addresses the original problem, which may still crop up at the end of this month when I go to make the November payment....

Etsy: Vile Den of Thieves

I started knitting in 2006, and I've been on Ravelry since you needed an invitation to participate in the beta. My mom taught me how to crochet when I was a child, but I've done a lot more knitting since learning because I prefer the look of knit fabric for clothing. However, recently, especially since the pandemic shutdowns, the youths have taken up crochet, and I had FOMO. 

(I suspect a large part of why young people crochet rather than knit is due to the prevalence of "video tutorials" on YouTube that these people raised in media saturation prefer, rather than having to decipher a written pattern. And those kids can get off my lawn!!! I love Millennials and Gen Z. Really. They just choose not to read, which breaks my heart, though I digress.)

In any case, the resurgence of crochet had me looking at crochet patterns, and a pattern listed on Ravelry directed me to Etsy, which has a gobsmacking number of crochet patterns. 

I was a little annoyed that people have listed patterns for sale that are clearly just scans of old knitting and crochet magazines. The Etsy store owners can have no claim of ownership of the intellectual property of a pattern in a physical copy of Vogue Knitting magazine from the mid-80s that they found in their grandmother's craft room, and here they are charging $2 for it. It didn't bother me too much with REALLY old—excuse me, "vintage"—patterns because there is no other way to acquire the out-of-print pattern legally and to compensate the 1980s designers or publishers, so $2 for the work of scanning and uploading? OK, I guess. Still hinky, but whatever. 

However, in flicking through the Etsy patterns, I recognized a crochet top that I had actually made from a pattern I'd found on Ravelry. The top had the same name as the one I'd made, but the store name didn't ring a bell. So I checked Ravelry, and indeed, the pattern is available for free from the actual designer on her website. There is at least one other pattern by that designer in the Etsy shop in question. The Etsy thief even used her pictures for one of the tops! And they are asking for $6.36 for a literally freely-available pattern. I hunted around for a comment section to be able to link to the designer's website and the free pattern, but you need to be a verified buyer in order to comment. I looked for a way to report the listing, but the only option was to report a listing as your own intellectual property, not someone else's. So I went to the designer's Ravelry page and sent her a message letting her know that SHE could report the fraudulent listing. I certainly didn't buy the pattern from Etsy to see how much work the seller might have done to turn the blog post into a downloadable PDF, or if they clicked Print-to-PDF on the blog post and uploaded. 

(As of a week later, the designer has not responded to my message, so either she's not checking Ravelry, or she just doesn't think it's worth the trouble to address the fraud.)

So now, in addition to questioning whether I should use Etsy because the corporation has increased its cut of actual creators' pay, if I do choose to buy something from Etsy, I need to investigate the sellers to see whether they seem to be the owners of the intellectual property because Etsy evidently turns a blind eye.

And all of this, along with the many ways to manipulate Kindle self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited to either downright steal other people's writing or game the system to trick it into paying more than you've earned, offends my sense of fair play. That there are so many people looking for a way to cheat rather than create is just so infuriating and disheartening at the same time. 

The Theme is Fascism!

 Maggie's Senior Prom is tomorrow night, and she is going. Ugh.

I have my whopping share of generalized Gen X disaffection that caused me to leave high school at 16, and I have a particular animosity toward The Prom because of the pervasive fiction that "you'll regret it forever if you don't go." I do not regret not having gone to the prom. I have been to formal events since then—the Millennium Celebration at the San Francisco Opera was quite memorable—so I know that if that's what you're into, there is no shortage of events for which you can buy an expensive single-use dress and uncomfortable shoes. 

But all of Maggie's friends wanted to go to the prom—because you'll regret it if you don't!—so we bought her a dress and a ridiculously expensive ticket. The event is being catered by a local microbrewery, which is sad because they are 17-19 and can't drink. It's just some pretty expensive hipster mac 'n' cheese. But she'll regret it if she doesn't go!

The school sent out "Important Information" today, and it is the most joyless bullshit I've seen for something that is supposed to be "fun." It begins by saying you cannot show up late—no admission after 6:45. No refunds. It goes on to warn that you MUST have a ticket, and it MUST be in your name, and you MUST show ID that matches the ticket. Better not have broken up with your boyfriend—which, of course, teenagers would never do 🙄—after you bought his ticket or you're screwed. No refunds.

Then there are detailed instructions about parking and drop offs. If you get dropped off, you have to climb to the third floor of a parking garage—in your formalwear—to enter through the door where you're subject to identity verification and search of your person and your purse. Not exactly a red carpet entry, especially if you've rented a limo.

Then they remind you that you better behave, or you'll be denied entry or be asked to leave. No refunds.

And finally, you will not be ALLOWED to leave early. So after an adult has felt you up, you've had your belongings searched, you've been asked to sit quietly like you're in school, been fed overpriced buffet food, and had to pay for someone to take a bad picture that will one day be laughed at on the Internet, if you're somehow not having a good time, you're still stuck. No escape. 

And did we mention, no refunds?

...but you'll regret it if you don't go.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Maggie is already regretting agreeing to go.

My Mom Died Tonight (Or Is It Yesterday?)

My mom had a stroke a decade ago and another one last year. She had been suffering from heart failure for several years. She had been hospitalized twice in the past year. My sister-in-law Lucy called yesterday to let me know that my mom wasn't feeling well. Or, worse than usual, anyway. I had already known because I had talked to my mom the day before, and she had literally asked, when complaining about her ongoing health problems, why the doctors wouldn't just let her curl up and die. 

And at 2:00 in the morning East Coast time, my dad called to tell me that mom had passed. He was beside himself, which is not surprising. He is a drama queen to begin with, and if it were me at home with her, I would have been forced to google what you do when someone dies relatively peacefully at home. 911 doesn't seem like the right answer. There is no longer any risk to life and no emergency service that can help the situation.

It's a very practical problem that is the sort of thing my mother would have taken a deep breath and handled. 

But she's gone.

And as self-serving as it often seems in other people, the thoughts of "what she would have wanted" keep rising in my mind: 

She would have approved of my dad's joke that, ever the designated driver, she died on 4/20. She would have approved of my joke that it was the stupid iron supplements that she had started taking that were what killed her. She would have found it funny that my last text to her was that I hope she feels better soon. She approved of making light of, well, everything.

Should we cancel the trip with Antonio to Berklee College of Music this Saturday for New Student Welcome Day? Fuck no! She would not have wanted us to stop living and doing joyous things. 

Should they hold a memorial for her? (As Jose keeps pointing out, they donated her remains to a medical school—shut up, it's what she WANTED—so there can't be a proper "funeral.") I feared that the people most materially affected by her death—my dad and my brother's family for whom she was essentially a domestic worker—would decide to have one. She would not have wanted a funeral, and even if they held one, it really would have only been her family getting together to mourn together because she had all but withdrawn from contact with anyone else. 

What she would have wanted was for us to not make a fuss over her death and to go on, as productively and happily as possible. 

I hope that my brother and dad are eternally grateful to Lucy for dealing with body. Ever practical, my mother had tried to arrange it before her death, but there was an issue with the organization that she had contracted, and Lucy stepped in and arranged for UCSF Medical School to take the body instead. If it had been left up to my dad, he probably would have let the mortuary talk him into buying a $10,000 casket in which to cremate mom's body, which would have absolutely infuriated her ghost, if such a thing existed. I feel like it should be someone's campaign to let poor people know that they can do a double good of donating remains for organ donation/tissue harvesting or medical school training and save the ridiculous expense of a funeral and burial. Some organizations will even return the cremated remains—if you're interested in that sort of thing—after the useful bits have been taken to pass forward life and health. (I also started googling after Lucy told me about the hiccup with the first organization, but I didn't think both of us working the problem made sense, especially since it's more in her skillset. If not for her, I'm sure I, from the opposite side of a continent, would have been the one trying to arrange the donation so I am also thankful for Lucy.)

I have lots more thoughts that I will need to write about because, despite the irrational pull to do so, I can't call her to talk about how to go about grieving her immeasurable loss...

#AutismAwarenessMonth

April is Autism Awareness Month, and I came across an adorable, joyful finger-painted meme that said "Autism is not a disability. It is different abilities." 

WTF?

I have two middle schoolers in my life who are on the autistic spectrum, which is kind of amazing since I have so few people in my life. 

My nephew often just comes across as an asshole. He speaks with a somewhat flat affect, like a bored Valley Girl, he paces restlessly around rooms, and he says totally insensitive and inappropriate shit that will one day get him punched, possibly even by a family member who knows and loves him and is aware of his condition. For example, he was having a complete meltdown one Saturday morning while I was visiting because...his braces were bothering him because one anchor wasn't perfectly centered between the top and bottom of his tooth. Note that he, even in his hysteria, admitted that he was not in pain. He stormed around the living room yelling and crying that he couldn't possible bear this for two years—he'd already had them for a month without a complaint—while three adults tried to help him distract himself from thinking about it. I finally lost all patience and sent him to his room when he screamed at his father, my brother, "I don't give a shit what you think." I was willing to humor his (entirely unnecessary) emotional turmoil up until he started abusing the other people in the room. He went to his room, calmed down a little, came back to perform his upset for us some more, then, not shockingly, he forgot about it for the rest of my visit because it wasn't painful, it was just something he was temporarily obsessing over. (Yes, for a child with ASD, it can be harder to ignore physical sensations or obsessive ideas, but it is possible, just like the rest of us do day in and day out, and like he had done for a month before ruining a Saturday morning for himself and his family before forgetting about it entirely.) He is an honor student, which is not surprising considering his intelligent, educated, involved parents, though he does have an Individual Education Plan with all sorts of accommodations since he is not very good at "executive function," things like paying attention even when he thinks class is boring; remembering that he needs to take his backpack, Chromebook, gym clothes, and pencils to school; and clicking "Submit" on Google classroom after he finishes an assignment. 

The other child I know is profoundly affected. He is also middle school-aged, but there is no mistaking him for anything approaching normal. He is mostly potty trained, but he still needs someone to check to make sure he has cleaned himself and not left the bathroom covered in pee or poop. He is on powerful anti-psychotics during the day to keep him calm and sleeping pills at night to keep in bed, and they don't always work. He too has meltdowns, pacing back and forth, moaning incoherently, and throwing himself on the ground, kicking the floor, which is quite alarming as he is now taller than I am and outweighs me. However, he does not have the communication skills of even a pre-schooler to articulate his state of mind: he has a receptive and expressive vocabulary of several hundred words, but he cannot put them together coherently, and he cannot carry on any sort of two-way conversation beyond confirming or denying simple requests. 

    "Do you want some dinner?" 
    "chickenfrenchfries."  

He can read a little and write and type on his tablet a little, usually but not always enough to find the children's videos on YouTube that he wants to watch at a hectic, chaotic clip. He attends a school for children with special needs, as he would be entirely disruptive to a normal classroom and would not benefit from being included in one. He needs very specialized one-on-one attention to stay on task with even the simplest assignments. He cannot be left alone for an afternoon, will never be able to hold down a job, never be able to live independently. He is the very definition of permanently, totally disabled. 

The idea that these two boys have the same condition, even as an umbrella term, is so absurd. One needs some behavioral therapy, accommodation, and understanding, and the other needs permanent long-term care. That's quite a "spectrum." Neither of them has any sort of special savant talent that can be nurtured and become the basis of a fulfilling, successful life. There is no Sheldon Cooper trade-off of social skills for genius or artistic talent. 

They say that if you know one autistic child, all it means in that you know one autistic child because nothing can be extrapolated from one to the others, but I know two, one at each end of that very broad spectrum. Neither of their conditions has any sort of up-side, and both of their sets of parents would be utterly delighted if their difficult, suffering kids suddenly woke up one morning as totally, boringly neurotypical. 

So whoever these people are who enjoy their autism spectrum disorder and its "different abilities" and want it celebrated, I cannot even imagine. 

Thoughts on "Young Adult" Fiction

To this day, my favorite job ever was working as a data entry clerk. I spent 20 hours a week while I was in college and grad school typing in the metadata for books in the general interest section of the ASUC bookstore, which meant I spent 20 hours a week leafing through catalogs of books for both academics and a lay audience, including an extensive section of children's books. 

Some time between then and now—I'm sure the internet could tell me but I don't feel like looking it up—the publishing industry invented the category "young adult" or YA, for short. They are books meant for ages from tweens to actual young adults. The books are often genre bending stories that might otherwise be difficult to shelve in a brick-and-mortar store.  In the US at least, the fact that they are marketed to minors means you can talk about murder, torture, and all manner of horrifying dystopia—so long as nobody fucks. 

One of my enduring interests is the way that the culture views sex. People hit puberty an average of five years before they become legal adults in the US, and there is a peculiar, self-contradicting obsession with the sexuality of people who are biologically capable of sex and reproduction, but not yet legally or emotionally mature. In the interest of protecting them—quite necessarily!—from an evidently inexhaustible supply of Republica—uh, predators, the reaction is often to pretend like they are always and forever victims who do not have agency or libido. I often wonder whether the adults who cry about 17-year-old children* being exploited remember what it was to be 14 and horny. And if they don't, if they are in the position of never ever talking and listening to their own pubescent offspring. 

A response to the criticism that YA fiction contains no sex has been to say that children's books are not FOR adults, and so should not contain sex. The children and their books should be left to their chaste innocence.

Allow me to retort: Maggie told me she knew of a cadre of girls who had made a pact to lose their virginity—at the eighth grade semi-formal. Forget prom and the despicable movie 🐓Blockers. These girls were claiming to be set on—with absolutely NO practical probability of—having intercourse at 13. 

Please, tell me again about how "young adults" aren't interested in sex. 

FWIW, my child, who knows that her body belongs to her and her alone, and that sexual feelings are part of being human after a certain age that no one else can chose for you, wondered aloud if they were planning to do it in the backs of their parents' SUVs as they were being driven home, all being too young to drive themselves anywhere. 🙄

Naturally, none of this is to say that children do not need to be protected, but as with so much of life, everything is contextual. Fending off fundamental biological urges for five years is a lot to ask. Forty-five-year-olds scheming to get with perfectly legally-consenting 20-year-olds is kinda gross. A non damaging space somewhere in between would be ideal.

And all of this thinking on my part comes about because I am writing a book that would comfortably fit into the YA category—alternate history with a magical element—except that I will not back away from sexuality.

Eh. There are no more brick-and-mortar stores, so who cares where it would be shelved...

A Permanent Solution to Temporary Problems

This morning over coffee Antonio told me that Sarah's friend and schoolmate at Berklee tried to kill himself yesterday. Members of their group chat hadn't heard from him, so they walked over to his apartment only to find the police there. Danny Salazar had swallowed a bottle of pills and tried to hang himself. Over the course of the day, we found out that he would be ultimately successful. He was brain dead, and the doctors waited for his mother to arrive from Texas to take him off life support. 

It is indescribably devastating to imagine his mother's flight to Boston and her arrival at the hospital and at the bedside of a warm body that no longer contained her son, and to sit with it while the machines were turned off and ceased to keep its heart beating and its lungs filling, knowing that what was left was just flesh and that the child she had carried and loved beyond all rationality was irretrievably gone. My mind withdraws from imagining myself in her place, like a finger pulling back after accidentally brushing against a hot stove.

I never met Danny and I knew very little about him. He was a drummer. He had a crush on Sarah last semester, and when he met Antonio, he was full of bluster and casual, "playful" insults for Antonio, who could not even view him as a serious rival for Sarah's affection. Then he had an unreciprocated crush on another girl. Then another. He moved out of the dorms and into an apartment with friends. His band Archon Theory recorded a song—with irony worthy of Gen-X, it is called "Optimist"—and made it available to stream. They had scheduled a mini-tour of dates for performing live. 

I don't know what else was going on. Was he failing out of school? Was he unable to continue paying the tuition? Was he on medication that wasn't working? Or that he wasn't taking? Should he have been? 

I do know that every one of these amazing musical children—now young adults—is the product of years of effort and support from their families and teachers and coaches. The thousands upon thousands of dollars and hours that went into even the least talented of them, to end up at one of the most renowned music schools in the world, is staggering, and often worth every penny if it brings art and sometimes just joyful noise into the world with it.

And yet, Monday evening, it seemed to Danny that it was not enough to light whatever darkness he felt. He chose a permanent solution to what were only temporary problems. 

If he felt he wasn't a good enough musician, he could have practiced more—he was in school for music after all! If he was failing out of school, he could have worked harder. If working harder wasn't enough to pass his classes, he could have taken a leave of absence to improve enough to be ready for the curriculum. If he couldn't pay the exorbitant tuition, university education is not at all necessary, or even common, to being a rock musician. If a woman didn't like him back, there are 4 billion others. At 18—just barely beyond being a child!— and in reasonable health, the list of things that you are just impossibly too late to start and succeed at is quite short, limited mostly to "child prodigy" and many, but not all, elite sports. 

I have often said, with respect to suicide, that it is not my place to decide how much pain other people should be forced endure. But in this case, there were ways out that he did not take. Many different paths in life, medication, therapy. 

It is such an unnecessary tragedy.

Act III

As Antonio finishes out his program at community college and looks forward to transferring to Berklee College of Music this fall, and as we wait for answers from the last three universities that Maggie applied to—naturally the ones that she actually WANTS to attend—I am on the precipice of Act III of my life, and that is the hard one, evidently.

That’s number one. Number two is spend as much time working on the third act as you do on the first and second act combined. Most good screenplays and good movies fall apart in the third act. It needs to be better and more intricate.

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) May 19, 2021

Eight months from now, my life may look entirely different. Both of my children will most likely be moved away, though in that halfway way that being "away at college" is not quite entirely gone. We may sell our house to pay ridiculous cost of private university tuition. Or we may sell the house to follow a new job, if the company we work for cannot be saved, despite Jose's Herculean effort to do so. I may need to get a full time job and spend the next 10–15 years paying the aforementioned tuition. Or I may finally get my shit together and start finishing and selling books and pay the tuition that way. 

all of my plans for the future involve me waking up tomorrow with a sudden sense of discipline and adherence to routine that i have never displayed even once in my life

— Rachel McCarthy James (@rmccarthyjames) October 21, 2020

Don't you hate it when the internet sees you so clearly?

Mommy (and Daddy) Wars

Before my children started school, the only moms I knew were stay-at-home moms like me. Even after they started school, I only knew stay-at-home moms because the all-important "working moms" were too busy being valuable members of society to volunteer at school where I might meet them. And now that my children are adults (or nearly so), I don't know many people who have small children, so the whole "working" vs. useless, unemployed mom doesn't come up much.

Except that now I have a job (sort of), and my coworker Like has a son, Mason, who has severe developmental disabilities and needs full-time care. Luke struggles with child care, particularly in the Age of COVID, and I had a very short, very illuminating conversation with him yesterday.

Luke's son was born around the same time as his coworker Andy's, and Andy's wife Chris took care of both boys when they were tiny. Chris was (reportedly) the first to notice that Mason was exhibiting developmentally delays. Around the time that the boys were two, Luke told me that Andy asked him to find other child care arrangements. I don't know how Andy made the request, but Luke believes the reason is because having his wife care for the other boy "cut into his (Andy's) free time." Please imagine all possible inflected bitterness in this statement. Luke actually called Andy a dick for—reading between the lines—wanting Chris to be able to take off the same vacation time that Andy did, even if Luke wanted childcare during that time. (Which is not to say that Andy wasn't a selfish dick in other ways—he most certainly was—but expecting Chris to schedule her life in order to raise the child that Luke and his wife Katie didn't want to take care of is pretty fucking selfish too.) 

I also wonder whether Chris, who was a social worker before the children came, felt unqualified or, quite understandably, unwilling to take on the difficult task of caring for a special needs child along side her own toddler. The only time she ever mentioned the situation to me, it was in passing to criticize Katie for being an indifferent mother who seemed insufficiently engaged with her son—leaving me pondering the days when ASD was called "cold mother syndrome." (Yes, I know absolutely that being a moderately crappy mother does not cause autism, but the head still tilted when I heard that archaic term.) Everyone has a price, but I doubt that Luke could possibly have paid me enough to take on the task of caring full-time for a child with severe developmental and behavioral issues—while also caring for my own dubiously neurotypical child. (Andy Junior was no day at the beach either.)

So Luke and Katie set about finding other childcare, which is challenging for parents of a neurotypical child, and much more so for a child with profound ASD. And of course, they referred to it as "preschool." Ten hours a day for a toddler is not preschool. It's daycare. And Luke bitched about how the "preschool" they found would provide "only" ten hours a day of care, which was impossible for people who work a full eight hours plus an hour lunch plus commute. So he was bitter that he was always late to work, and his wife was always late picking the boy up, and the daycare workers were always pissed that she was late. But "fuck them" because "they didn't work hard enough for it."

The expectation that someone should provide an 11 hour day's worth of safe, supportive, enriching care for any child, much less a small child with severe, violent behavioral disturbances, at a price substantially less than a minimum wage 40 hour workweek is INSANE!!!!! Which doesn't stop parents from expecting it and being angry when they don't get it.

When Mason became (properly) school-aged, hallelujah!, they got eight hours a day of free daycare—which seems to be the main reason people send their children to school because who the fuck needs to learn to...read and do math and learn history—and then his grandmother would get him off the school bus and watch him until one of his parents could get home. That went on until the pandemic struck and the school closed and the grandmother refused to take Mason for the whole 55 hour childcare workweek. So Luke and Katie were trading days "working from home," and I, idiot that I am, volunteered to watch Mason once a week to try to keep Luke at work for a few more hours so the ever-shrinking company that supported MY family as well could keep limping along. I did that until school re-started, then agreed to watch Mason twice a week in the afternoons because Grandma had discovered that she really enjoyed doing literally anything other than taking care of her disturbed grandson in the afternoons. 

Eventually, Luke got federal money to hire a care worker and asked me to take over every day for pay instead of a couple of times a week out of the goodness of my heart. I declined because I am DONE taking care of children. It turns out, I don't really like children, and I would not be a happy teacher or daycare worker. I volunteered to do it during a GLOBAL FUCKING PANDEMIC because sometimes you need to take one for the team, not because I really missed wiping butts and being a snack bitch to an ungrateful child. And I also declined because taking money from them would have shifted the dynamic of our relationship. They would have felt that I owed them something rather than the other way around, and I do not need money that badly. (And indeed, immediately after they found someone to take the job, Luke and Katie started bickering over her time as if it was a resource that belonged to them. Note also the expectation above that Chris should be available to care for Mason when Luke wanted, at the expense of when Andy wanted family vacations, a sense of entitlement that stems entirely from Luke's worship of paid employment.) 

I filled in a couple of times when his "respite care" worker (his common-law sister-in-law who would watch Mason for money but not for free) couldn't make it, but the first time I declined to take a shift, Luke stopped asking, and I haven't seen Mason since. I can't really say I miss it, and it is partially the bitterness that THEY THEMSELVES view this as a chore that someone should have to be paid to do, because most of his own family and hers won't volunteer to do it for free, either out of familial obligation or, like me, a sense of community responsibility, with the excuse that—cue the celestial chorus—"they all 😇WORK😇."

Now that the pandemic is well on its way, but not quite, to the level of endemic, Mason's special ed school keeps shutting down, or he specifically keeps being exposed and quarantined, causing major disruption to their childcare situation, more so than any normal schools. Luke was wondering whether it was due to lack of staffing, more stringent COVID guidelines, or a greater propensity on the part of the special needs children to be exposed, or their parents to test them and declare it. In any case this is a recurring inconvenience and irritation to Luke and Katie, which is what brought up childcare yesterday.

And I quietly refused to volunteer to watch Mason, in part because I am not going to increase my own and my family's exposure to COVID, but mostly because FUCK LUKE. 

I stayed home with my kids. It was a choice that cost our family nearly a million dollars in lost income. I changed my own kids' diapers, I kept them safe from their own recklessness, I taught them to read, helped them with homework, drove them to and from school and soccer and music lessons and playdates and birthday parties. I intensively parented my son out of what might have been a diagnosable behavioral disorder. I managed my daughter's endlessly demanding chronic illness until she was able to do it herself. I was present for them for nearly two decades and they are both about to go to elite universities. (Yes, part of that is luck that they were both healthy and at least close to "normal.") And as much as I love my children, my two decades of unrelenting WORK was hard and exhausting and draining in a way that is seldom acknowledged, and it HAD VALUE, even if I didn't get paid for it. 

And I am done enabling someone else who values childcare only insofar as it is a paid activity.