Posts Tagged ‘mental-health’

Fallout

October 19, 2025

I am officially(ish) out. Apparently LinkedIn is failing many people, not just me, but they have gotten desperate. It’s not just the number of messages in my inbox (20-40 per 24/7), it’s not just the randomness, it’s the probability factor. Opening an email from LinkedIn is like buying a lottery ticket. Clicking on one of the internal job links is like shooting yourself in the face. I know I’ve covered this, but I’m not done.

I had a premium account, purchased last year in an attempt to rise up at least a little in the recruiter job searches. It was a waste of $175 but at the time it made sense. Renewing it would not make sense.

While I was canceling my subscription I noticed that there are MANY settings and options. This is good. I want to stop the insanity. I’m missing email that actually matters. Like from my kids and stuff. I had a field day. I went so far as to nearly put my account in hibernation mode but decided that was going a little too far. In a lot of cases, that’s the only way people can reach me. If you’re throwing AI generated spam in my direction, I don’t want it. If I’ve worked with you in the past and you want to catch up, this is the only way you’ll find me unless you actually saved my number or found me on Facebook. I don’t encourage new Facebook connections unless I really, really like you.

That said, if I ever want to receive another message out of that platform, I’m going to have to actually login and check for relevant mail. Kind of like logging into regular email but more spam because it will still be there.

So, I’ve cut my possible networking down to a ‘maybe I’ll see you, maybe I won’t’. Recruiters can still find me (except they don’t anymore) and that message will hit my inbox. I think. Do I really want it to? No. I actually don’t but I haven’t had the nerve to unplug that last open pipe. The open pipe that echoes when I speak into it.

There are articles all over the interwebs talking about the job decline after fifty, as if that’s the problem. We learned a long time ago to remove any profile reference to age or years in service. Graduation dates are removed from education (unless you’re still young enough to be padding your resume) and work history is truncated. For example, my profile confesses to job history going back to January 1997 and the only reason it does that is because I spent nearly seven years at The Castle (super cool financial software company with even cooler name than I made up that was acquired by Oracle in 2007 and we still don’t want to talk about it).

The seven years I spent at The Castle is still the largest networking base in my deck of cards. Why, you ask? Because we were and still are a seriously incestuous bunch. If we were a country, we would not be patriots, we would be nationalists. Useful if you don’t piss off too many people.

Mostly I need the right key words to pop up in search.

On the other hand, my current resume begins in 2016 which is when I became a legal entity. It details my most recent and relevant work history in the form of my biggest and best clients. That’s all I want to talk about. If you REALLY want me to back up a little more, I’ll back up to 2012 and if you push harder, I’ll go to 2006, but that’s it. Quite honestly, only the last ten years are relevant in the tech industry.

This is not an age thing. My profile pic is relatively current and it’s really good. My last boss took it as a screenshot during a Teams conversation because he said I was making ridiculous faces (I’m sure I was) but he got a good one and I popped it up. I don’t look 60. I’m not sure you could even say 50. The lighting was perfect, and I’m not covered in wrinkles for some reason (I should be, I didn’t discover the joy of sunblock until I was forty).

This is not an age thing. I have a friend who’s a dirt scientist. OK, that’s not exactly right. Soil, maybe? He has worked for the Federal Government since he graduated from college. His position was eliminated about two months ago. I think he’s thirty-six. Maybe thirty-eight. Absolutely no older. He didn’t even have a LinkedIn account. I yelled at him. Later he yelled at me.

This is not an age thing.

My almost twenty-five-year-old daughter who is in her fourth year of teaching at a NYC charter school needs to quit her job. It’s either that or jump off the GW Bridge. She doesn’t want to quit her job for a lot of reasons, none of which has anything to do with liking her job. The number one reason is her fear of not finding another job.

As an aside, I had the privilege of sitting in on her fourth grade classroom for four hours about this time last year and she is, hands down, the best teacher I have ever seen. She’s not this year. She’s flagging. Funding is drying up, there are more students in the room (35 this year I think) and the student day is 8 hours, and for some reason, of the 35, 12 are IEP students. Her day is probably closer to 12 hours. And she would interview when, exactly?

There is almost always a secondary teacher. The secondary teacher is generally a first-year mentee which means they are not permitted to interact directly unless guided by the primary teacher. I think this is a great way to bring up new teachers unless you’ve got a very full room and very tight guidelines on how the class is taught and managed. This year it’s a shit show.

Here’s the kicker. When her dad died last year, at the ripe old age of just barely sixty, she inherited his entire retirement fund (boy, did he manage to squirrel it away) in addition to receiving substantial life insurance benefits which are untaxable. She’s like her dad. She squirrels that shit away and pretends it isn’t there other than to speak with her financial advisor periodically.

That kid, sorry, that woman could conceivably quit her job and do absolutely nothing for a very long time assuming she didn’t change her current lifestyle (teacher’s salary). She could also quit her job and pursue another masters. Or take on that JD she’s still considering. She wants to effect policy and to effect policy, a JD is extremely useful. She has many choices and while she considers those choices and the damage that is done when an employee is suffering so badly, they cry on the way to work every morning (been there, did that, still picking at the scabs) she is paralyzed. In the meantime, her skills are eroding by way of trauma. Yes. It’s trauma. If you’ve ever spent time in a job where you cried all the way to work every single day and were too numb on the way home for tears, you know perfectly well those scars are still there and it took you awhile to come back.

So why is she still there? Because she is more affected by the current situation than the reality of her circumstances.

Here’s the current truth about teachers in New York City. There is a significant shortage. If you want to live in the city and you want to teach, go for it. It’s one of the few job markets that are still hopping. Even medical professionals are having to think twice. It’s not as if we have enough of them (we do not), it’s that we can’t pay them and it’s going to get worse.

Teachers in New York City are often hired in the middle of the year. Teachers that come from charter schools are greeted with an, ‘oh god, I’m so sorry’ and then marched into a classroom assuming they have a freaking heartbeat and the proper credentials.

She still can’t do it.

Back to LinkedIn. Why not just change my status to retired? Why not mention an extended sabbatical? I mean, that would dry shit up should any shit pop up. Every time something does pop up, I panic. I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to talk about it, and lord knows I do NOT want another interview that’s more likely to go sideways than not.

Remember Quiet Quitting? Now we have Quiet Cracking (my kid), Rage Applying, and something called Job Hugging (I’ll have to look into that because I do not believe it includes physical contact with another person). There was a term for employees just getting up and walking out the door, never to return. Generally young people, not brand new to the workplace, but new enough to know, omg I’m going to die if I stay here and these people are fucking nuts. I’m leaving.

I’m one of those. I’m not sure which, probably Quiet Cracking on the periphery of the job market (vs in an actual job) and I think my daughter probably falls into the Job Hugging category but I’m not sure yet.

I quit. I know I said that before, but it bears repeating (probably over and over until I let it go). I quit. There is no option on my LinkedIn profile to change my status to ‘I Quit’. Not that I’d use it. Well, maybe I would.

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The End of the World as We Know It

October 15, 2025

It’s not just me and it didn’t just start; it just took me awhile to notice.

I spent two years as a contractor at a major pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, MA. Life sciences, pharma, biotech, huddle together in and around Kendall Square weaving between the MIT buildings like offshoot vines. Biotech was booming, COVID was endemic (that’s what comes after pandemic and do let it raise the hair on the back of your neck), and the sudden influx of cash available for clinical trials was like Christmas morning if Santa unloaded the entire sack on your living room floor.

It was also mother fucking insane. Small companies grew faster than the infrastructure could keep up, and it was a contractor’s paradise.

I should explain my use of the word ‘contractor’. I am, or I was, a small business with a single employee. Me. I provided ‘professional services’, specifically the project or program management of financial software implementations. I am, or was, specifically, a Technical Project Manager (TPM) which is very different than a Project Manager. A TPM must have an intrinsic understanding of the system in question, how it works, why it works, who needs it, what they’ll do with it (hopefully), where the data comes from, how it gets from there to here and what happens to it during its travels etc. To be clear, we do what the PM does as well, but we are far better compensated and harder to find.

Billing is something called ‘Corp to Corp’ which means no more 1099s contracted directly by the company, and very clear contracts. This differs from the quasi-employee ‘contracted’ in place of an actual employee. This is very convenient if you’re not sure how much expansion and contraction is going to happen, and a subcontractor’s contract can be cancelled at will.

I, Mr. James Joyce, existed as JamesJoyce LLC for about ten years. Client to client to client. It was wonderful, spectacular, often mind-numbing, and with the exception of three short-term engagements between 2019 and 2020, the most fun I’ve had since I hit the tech industry in 1997.

I’ve been around awhile.

Let’s come back to ‘cancelled at will’. Contractors, services, or temps, I guess, fly under the radar of employment stats. That means if there is a massive influx of either sort, you don’t see it in job growth. It’s as if those contracted resources never existed. That’s OK. What’s not OK is the flip side when industries tank and the contractors go away and the job market still looks more or less stable.

There are enough of us to make a significant difference. We don’t collect unemployment; we just sort of vanish.

But that’s OK (or it should be if we really do treat ourselves like the small businesses we are). An independent contractor should have six months of liquid assets with which to pay oneself unemployment benefits. It’s called bench time. I don’t have a new client and I’m on the bench until I find one. Not unusual. During bench time, the cost of being a small business continues. The cost of medical insurance is based on the prior year’s gross earnings. Not net, gross. A contractor pays for everything, which is why our bill rates and our gross seem to confound people.

For example, Contractor Toby bills out at $35 per hour. Contractor Toby bills 40 hours a week because he is capped per his contract, even if more hours are required (they generally are). Assuming Contractor Toby takes two weeks off (he pays himself for those days), his annual gross is $70,000. Sounds OK, right? Depending on what you do and where you live, that might look pretty good. In truth, Contractor Toby’s net is less than half of that. Imagine being taxed at 52%. That’s not what’s happening. It looks more like this:

As you can see, Contractor Toby is in the hole Year 1. After Year 1, Contractor Toby will have six months of unemployment insurance, and his net income will be approximately $25,900. And that number might be OK except that an employee doing Contractor Toby’s job would likely have a corporate contribution to medical insurance, hopefully more than half; he would not have to carry General Liability and Workers Comp insurance; there might be a 401k matching program; and his company would be required to pay half of his Medicare and Social Security taxes. The other thing Contractor Toby would have, assuming he was an employee, would most likely be a higher salary. Industry standards suggest, depending on the industry I suppose, that a contract that nets $30,000 would likely pay $35,000 – $45,000 to an employee.

Contractor Toby is taking a hit, but he might be OK with that for a lot of reasons.

I used a low number for a reason. And that is a low number. That number, for a family of four, is just over the National Poverty Line. I checked. You can too.

Until the end of 2024, TPMs billed hourly between $110 and $175 per hour. Stop choking on your cheerios, we are worth that and often worth more.

Until the end of 2024, PMs billed hourly between $60 and $110 per hour. Also, worth it.

In comparison, Engineers, Developers, System Architects (the people who build the systems the TPM is managing) billed between $150 and $400 per hour. If you’re choking on your cheerios (again), these are the people building the systems that consolidate the numbers that publicly traded companies are required to submit the SEC and Wallstreet (see, Enron, 2000 something or other). And they’d damn well better be PERFECT.

These are the people who have disappeared. The first sign of trouble was when the jobs simply vanished. Literally. Nothing was moving. That’s OK, it’s happened before, you just have to wait it out. The second sign of trouble were the bill rates and the job descriptions. Bill rates dropped in half and jobs were combined. Still capped at 40 hours. The most common opening for professional services in the tech industry looked like this:

Candidate is a System Architect and performs all duties of the Technical Project Manager.

That’s a really bad idea for a lot of reasons starting with conflict of interest and compliance, but that’s OK. What it is, is almost impossible unless the project timeline has been extended significantly in which case why didn’t you contract two positions and get your system up in under a year? It’s going to cost the same in the end but that’s what happened. Or, is happening. I guess.

Then this happened. I thought it was a joke. It was not:

Candidate is a TPM, contract position pays $18 – $20 an hour depending on experience.

I about peed myself until I realized people were applying.

Everything in the tech world is high stress. I’ll just leave it at that.

Maybe those people applied for that job in New Mexico (remote) for the same reason I did. I applied to find out if it was a joke or a typo. A very perky internal recruiter was delighted with my resume and wondered when I could start. I backed her up and asked about the bill rates and she said, “I’m sure we can get you $20.”

I said, “it was great speaking with you, I don’t believe we’re a match, so sorry. Have a great day.”

And THEN LinkedIn exploded. Three things are happening. LinkedIn is literally spamming us with jobs that don’t actually exist. Some of them do but 800 people (yes, 800, sometimes more) have already applied or the position is filled. Now I, and some of my colleagues, are receiving links to construction projects. Damn. That’s the first thing.

The second and third are these: People are losing their shit and posting their frustration in all caps (well, there goes your career) and people are retiring in their fifties. We don’t do that. We work well into our sixties or even seventies having socked away a tremendous amount of valuable information and our bill rates are still rising because of that. We are retiring because we cannot bring ourselves to submit another resume, speak with another recruiter, go through another seriously weird interview just to turn around and do it again the next day.

It’s not just Biotech. Biotech just happens to be where I sat last. I was at the Big Elevator Company, I was at the Can You Hear Me Now? Company, and that two letter massive industry conglomerate that used to be headquartered in Connecticut. I was a lot of places in a lot of very different industries, and you know what? The Professional Services (tech) Industry has TANKED. I think a lot of things have tanked, but I only really know the world I’ve been sitting in. I do know that my boss at the Biotech company, who used to have a staff of four actual employees, plus half of my time (I was with Treasury too, that was fun) to run a massive Financial Planning and Analysis department is now alone. He wants to quit. He wants to be anywhere else but anywhere else may not be any better.

As an aside, he is a Naturalized American Citizen from a Latin American country (means he has a brown face) with an advanced (his third) degree from Harvard. He is as at risk as any brown face of being disappeared. Not deported. There’s a paper trail on that shit and it used to follow the Rule of Law. Not deported. Disappeared. He needs to remain gainfully employed by a company that could and would make an awful lot of noise if he didn’t show up to work. That’s fucking trapped. Like a rat in a cage.

Moving on.

I’m not retiring. I’m quitting. Seriously. I quit. This is bullshit and I can actually survive without that income stream. Also, I’m a well-educated White Anglo Saxon with access to family money if I find myself up shit’s creek, and a river of lawyers. So. I can quit. I can turn my back and walk away from the labor force with impunity. I cannot believe I have reason to have typed those last couple of sentences.

I’m going to be sixty-two in April of 2026 at which point I will do something I swore I would never do and take Social Security as soon as I can. It would be nice if it didn’t vanish but that’s a problem for another day.

In the meantime, I have been living an intentionally simple life. I don’t need much and I’m very happy where I am. You can take me out of this house, on this mountain, feet first.

What I’ve lost are my retirement dreams. And that’s OK too. I’m not willing to spend the next seven years as a wage slave just so I can go to Tierra del Fuego. I wanted to travel North. I would have been delighted to spend a fair amount of time in Israel with my friends (co-workers from long ago) but I’m not sure what Israel’s going to look like anyway. I try not to think about the possible long-term ramifications of the current conflicts.

I’d like a lot of things, but you know what? I’d like my car to not die anytime soon because that would be bad. Manageable, I suppose, but seriously, not good.

Bonus: Why are the biotech companies floundering? Why have clinical trials on drugs (ya know, like cancer?) stalled? I’ll give you three guesses and the first fucking two don’t count. If you’re seriously anti-vax, get off my lawn right now!

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Measure Thrice

October 1, 2025

I am now aware that my bed is out of alignment. Dammit. And also, the protective film is still on the outside of one of those windows and getting to it is going to be fun but not as fun as removing the wasp’s nest that is bigger than a football from the overhang at the peak of my house. Just outside the guestroom… there’s a thought. No, stop that. Thou shall not engage in wasp warfare.

I moved in before the house was finished. That was middle of June, 2024, and also, the house is still not finished but I ran out of money and it’s good enough. Except. Except it failed the blow test and I really need to resolve that. In any event, I moved in approximately fifteen months ago and failed to nest. Mostly. I did unbox and shelve the books and managed to purge between 100 and 150 of them which brought me down to under 600. I hoped.

When I say, unboxed and shelved I mean just that. Totally random. There’s a built in downstairs, one in the bedroom hallway, one in the bedroom, and another in the itty bitty guest room.

Several temporary homes ago, my youngest daughter asked if I really meant to read all these books again. I said, maybe. She asked, why haul them around? I thought about this and came up with one answer. I came up with another earlier this week. The first answer was because what I read affects how I see the world and therefore, who I am. When I walk past the shelves and run my fingers over the spines I am reminded of how I felt and what I thought when I read those books.

Many years ago, more than twenty, I’m sure, my second husband kept a log of the books I read. It should be noted that my second husband continued to give me books for my birthday and Christmas until the day he died. He researched them all year, and that guy got me. This is important.

One hundred books were logged. You read that correctly. One hundred books. Big books. Not many little books. Books that required focus and weren’t easily accessible (in other words, not beach books). When I read the list, there were at least half a dozen I didn’t recognize at all, but I believed him. There were many books I knew I’d read and I might be able to give you a basic plot line, but that was it. I consumed too fast. I left no time between the last page of one and the first of the next. I still do that. I think I do that to let go. Maybe.

This is the second reason I keep those books. As I run my fingers across the spines I notice that I don’t recognize all of the titles. Well hot damn! It’s as if I have an entire list of unread books just waiting for me to pick up. To be fair, there are one or two or twelve that I intentionally reread periodically but we won’t get into that just now.

Oh. There’s a third reason. Of all the books I have not purged, my second husband gave me eighty percent of them. How can I let those pieces of him go? I cannot.

Phew.

Where was I? Nesting. I didn’t do it. The books remained completely random and every photograph and piece of art lived in a closet or under my bed. Photographs of my children I carefully hung in gallery frames. Photographs of me and my brother. A photograph of my step-mother and another of my father that tug my heart hard. A wedding photo of my older daughter and my son-in-law.

When a person denies themselves these things they are denying themselves a home, a home base, a safe space. I hung in the balance of not there and not here and it sucked but I couldn’t move. About a week ago I started moving.

I photographed all of the bookcases, shelf by shelf, chunk by chunk and then emailed them to myself. I expanded each photograph and made a spreadsheet. Author, title, shelving title (remove The and A at the start of a title), location, and go to. I had to guess at go to based on the number of books on each shelf. Then I started pulling books from shelves and putting them sort of in order so that I new where they should land. I carried them up and down the stairs in a laundry basket and this took days.

I got to know my library all over again. Some books made me cry, some left me with a profound sense of grounding, some made me laugh (because Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins are REALLY funny), some are from other people that I will never read again but will keep forever, and there’s Stephen King’s Gunslinger series. I finally tossed all the REALLY old paperbacks that were no longer readable. I had some that belonged to my mother with her name on the inside. Books she would have read in high school or college. That was hard and I might retrieve them from the recycling bin. Maybe.

My library contains five linear feet of nonfiction. Half of that came from my father’s library (historian), a good chunk from my university years, and some I just seemed to acquire. I’m not counting the cookbooks. I have a lot of books about Israel and also Palestine. I have medical books and mental health books and biographies. Who knew?! Not me.

In all that I only have four hundred and forty books. This very exciting. This means I can acquire one hundred and sixty books before I consider myself the cat lady of books. My intention is to liberate most of my father’s Napolean collection (it’s kinda big) and anything prior to WWII. I’ll wait until he’s dead. He’d notice. He’s already lied and said he got rid of all the Napolean and then he hid those books so I wouldn’t find them. Hoarder. I’m also going to take anything by Bernard Cornwell unless I already have it.

About those paintings over my bed…

I measured THREE TIMES AND ALSO USED A LEVEL. I’m leaving them as they are for a bit. I’m not sure why. They’re very important and my second husband matted and framed them for me. Blow up the photo if you can. They are three watercolors of the same still life. I picked the flowers from the garden and stuck them in a small pitcher. I sat with my oldest daughter (the last baby wasn’t there yet) and my son on the floor with sun streaming into the woods and helped them draw out the forms. I made up their palettes, taped down the paper, and we got to work. This was the summer of 1996 which makes us five, ten, and thirty-two. I remember exactly how I felt and if I had to leave everything behind, including my books, those are the three things I’d take anyway.

There is very little white space (blank wall) in my house because the lower level, facing east is ALL window, one end to the other. The southern side is window, back door, and wood burn stove area. The west side has a little room and so does the bottom of the stairwell. This house is a story and a half which means no attic and four foot walls before the pitch begins. If the middle of the house staircase didn’t have walls on either side, I’d have a problem.

With two exceptions, everything is up. Nothing else was measured or leveled or anything except me pounding a nail into a wall and slapping the painting or photo up. It looks like this:

Bang, bang, bang and done!

One photograph with each baby in order left to right, dob 1986, 1991, and 2000.

Because I went on and on about them, here are two of the three upstairs bookcases. Why yes, that *is* the top of a china cabinet. Heh.

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Personal | Leave a Comment »

The Dancing Mask

September 20, 2025

I dare you. I double dog dare you. Ask me how I am.

Wait… hold on… there are some caveats.

In my experience, in both directions, when people ask the question, ‘how are you?’ the question is rhetorical. No. That’s not quite right. It’s a social agreement. We will ask, how are you, and what we’re really saying is, I see you. I acknowledge your presence as a sentient being. If you asked a dog, you might really mean it because, come on, dog communication is limited.

The second part of the social agreement is the answer and the answer had damn well better be, ‘I’m great! How ’bout you?’ Smile smile smile.

This is a really useful social agreement because if it’s done right, it can lift up an entire line at a busy pharmacy. What it is not, is an invitation to tell the truth, unless the truth is exactly what came out of your mouth as per expectations.

OK, we’ve got that out of the way. The next sort of ‘how are you’ has the potential to produce egregious results. You know, freaking land mines. As in, you asked and I opened my mouth and answered the question. You would think, therefore, that the asker would be at least somewhat prepared for an honest answer which would most likely include some, if not all, of the related emotions.

A friend from high school reached out via Facebook Messenger, honestly asking me how I was because in 2019 and 2020 and even 2021 it was perfectly obvious that I. Was. Not. OK. Not even slightly. I actually wrote and hit the publish button on what my cousin refers to as my Suicide Manifesto which was written in response to the number of people (80%) who reached out and shamed me versus the 10% that simply unfriended me, and finally the 10% that reached out and said, I’m here. The manifesto defends the right to die. Hard. Stop. For what it’s worth, that was the all time top hit of any post written between January 2007 and probably 2021. My blog wasn’t inactive at that point but it wasn’t at it’s all time peak either. The top posts were getting approximately 200 hits. The manifesto, published on a nearly dead blog, got over 500. I lost track of the number of times it was shared via the blog site or the Facebook link but it was astonishing.

No one said anything. There might have been one or two comments from long time readers but otherwise it was met with mic drop silence. Because, really, what do you say to something like that?

And what do you say when someone answers the ‘how are you’ question with stark honesty?

Apparently you run like hell. I did ask him. I did warn him. I did note, right up front that most people don’t really mean that when they ask the question and at that point in my life, or right that second, I was going to answer the fucking question. So I did. I’d like to say I’m sorry, but I’m not. I did warn you. I won’t get into what that kind of question is looking for at this point. It is looking for something, but not the truth.

Fast Fucking Forward to February or March of 2024. I have a new doctor. Not a PCP, not a therapist, an MD specializing in the care and maintenance of people like me. Everything from the appropriate medication to a phone call to my step-mother when I didn’t answer the phone. She was worried. It was OK, but she was worried and she did something about it.

These docs are NEVER in network because insurance companies will reimburse for either 15 or 30 minute limited sessions and THAT is not enough to understand what’s happening inside a person. Especially people like me.

I call it my Dancing Mask. I took this term from a book series called Red Rising by Pierce Brown. I won’t bore you with the story arc, but I do want to acknowledge that particular source. In the context of the story, the term ‘Dancing Mask’ is what you put on when you need to read a room, be read the way you want to be read, and navigate whatever politics or shit that needs navigating and come out winning or at least alive.

My Dancing Mask is my number one survival tool and I’ve been carefully honing the damn thing for so long I don’t know how to take it off. There are two people in this world who can look at me and see through it. My doc sees through it almost as soon as I’m in the room. My step-mother sees through it when it starts to crack. I expect she’d see a lot more if she wasn’t so very aware of my boundaries. She doesn’t pry but she is alert.

My kids don’t see it because when they have seen it, the responses, while varied, did significant damage to all of us. My youngest may or may not see it but given that her father died last year and she spent the 15 months between diagnosis and death as his primary caretaker (while working and in school full time), she may not be able to cope with the possible loss of her mother.

When I say loss, I don’t necessarily mean death, but I’m getting to that.

My doc said, one day early in our relationship, ‘I get it. Just because you’re not clawing at your face and tearing your hair out does not mean you’re OK’.

Think on the ramifications of that. They aren’t good.

If I were suffering from a terminal illness that wasn’t likely to kill me anytime soon but severely limited my capacity to care for myself, I have no doubt that my entire family would gather around (something) and talk about how to take care of Mom. Because that’s acceptable. Even if I took off the mask, clawed at my face, and tore out my hair, dealing with this would be very difficult, mostly because we don’t understand it and we sure as shit don’t discuss it.

See? Look at me. Discussing it. In an anonymous blog space referring to myself as Mr. Joyce. But still, discussing it anyway mostly because my youngest daughter said, really, Mom, you need to start writing again. Can she click the link and read any of this? Probably not. But she knows I should be.

The loss of the parent you knew from early childhood to whenever now is, is devastating. Especially if it seems to pop up out of nowhere.

My mom vanished bit by bit. None of it was a shock. Best I can tell, she’s still breathing, but that’s all I know because she doesn’t talk to any of us anymore. She can’t. It hurts that bad, whatever it is (I have a pretty good idea). So, as hard as the premature loss of my mother might be, I could see it coming a long way off. My mother’s Dancing Mask has never applied entirely to her family. God knows she tried but we saw even if we didn’t understand.

I’m betting I’ll write more about this but that’s the headline.

*note, the top of post image was ‘borrowed’ from ZTenEva’s Etsy site.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »