Nine months' update, year 2 of grief, and another cat, obvi...
Whew, what a time to be alive, amirite? I had started a post after the last one, then got distracted, and then PANDEMIC, so it's been a bit touch and go over here. Maybe highlights?
January
Cheddarcat awesomely escaped the night I finished that post. Around 0300, Fidget woke me from the couch to tell me the cat had gotten out. He lived under my neighbor's house for TWO WEEKS. Multiple friends would lie in the dirt and call for him, beating the hoods of our cars as we left. This eventually resulted in my catching him with a trap we borrowed from the Humane Society. I would call him our socialist cat- he took his free healthcare, then went off on a rumspringer for two weeks.
Fidget left in January, traveling across the country with his best friend to stump for Bernie. He was invigorated and excited, and so, so cold. I lived my best bachelorette life, cleaning and organizing, and dancing with said cats. Sadie went through a massive period of adjustment, as her human had left, the Orange One left and came back, and now she was alone during the day while I went to work.
February
Fidget came home in the beginning of the month, causing me to stay up most of the night as they barreled home at all hours. We adjusted to living together again, and I continued to work on rehabbing my itty, bitty, skinny Cheddarcat. He was eating like a house but wasn't making much progress weight-wise.
I took Momma to a dinner theatre for her birthday to see Kinky Boots, and she really enjoyed it a lot. And then I went with 0nn and another friend to see Wicked at the end of the month. It was awesome to see theatre and the three of us decided we'd keep an eye out for future performances.
March
BWAHAHA FUTURE PERFORMANCES! Pandemic shut all of us down. I went virtual within a day and hadn't stopped working at all. Fidget and I adjusted to my working from home, and I kept Momma really, really safe. Everything was so bizarre, especially now looking back on it. I remember staying away from the stores since I had a good stockpile, then having to buy like 0.5-ply toilet paper because I had been a Good Person. Both Fidget's and my mother's anxiety went off the charts. I worked from home for both Volcano Harbor and my private practice. I started a weekly Zoom call for friends.
April
I can't remember; I just know I bought 96 fake succulents from Dollar Tree and split them with 0nn. I was attempting to craft. Things were wiggy? Oh! My coworker quit AGAIN and moved to another company, so ONCE AGAIN, I was running my program by myself. They gave me a training clinical director to accompany me in the meantime, however, I was ultimately responsible for the group.
May
We'd been adjusting to the pandemic. I bought Mother's Day brunch in a basket from a local restaurant and cooked it at my mother's condo. Both Sadie and Cheddar celebrated birthdays. Cheddar continued to pace and didn't seem to be picking up weight, but he remained lovable and goofy. We started using the stimulus funds to invest in our home, like getting gutter work done and planning other projects. I had a friend come over for what I'm now terming "Driveway Friendship" and it was absolutely excellent to see someone in the flesh that I wasn't related to.
We celebrated our second wedding anniversary very, very low-key. I took time off from work to let my brain rest since I hadn't stopped working since the pandemic started. Protests about racial injustice broke out across the world after George Floyd was murdered. I realized how terrified I was of the pandemic because I would always rather be marching, but was absolutely terrified of killing my mother. Fidget felt the same.
June
This month was ROUGH. Though I always get excited for my birthday, we ended up in an amazing clusterfail of a situation with Momma in horrible pain, very poor treatment from her treating provider, my calling out of work, and Fidget mentally collapsing. Cheddar was diagnosed with dementia (?) and told to start thyroid meds. Both cars went into the shop a day apart. Work suffered an overdose during group that I had to call 911 on and recognize the limitations of virtual treatment. Friendships were flailing, marriages got weird. We got the house power-washed and it looked brand new. I had thought things were settling, then my mother had a panic attack on my birthday. Yeah, June was a weird, friggin month.
July
One of the positive side effects of the Month of Fail aka June was that both my husband and my mother became better medicated, and subsequently, all of our relationships with each other improved significantly. I hadn't quite realized what was happening with Fidget, but his snark and humor came back. I loved him a whole bunch again.
I also went through a Supervisor Training, which left me underwhelmed and overall dragging my feet. I was Offended. Though it satisfied a professional goal, I felt like I spent way too much money on something I'll need to figure out myself. Naturally, my mother had a panic attack the second day of the training, so I flew over to her house in the middle of group and ran third hour from her office. I also started doing other trainings focusing on grief, and subsequently my brain fell out. Momma fired her housekeeper during this time due to not cleaning; Fidget and I picked up all of her chores and errands. Oh, and Cheddar finally gained some weight due to being a purrito twice daily! He does not like pills, nor does he like cheese like Socks, so here we are, wrapping him in a blanket/towel twice daily to get thyroid and blood pressure medications into him.
August
I started the month on-call and then Momma interrupted a overtime group because her A/C stopped working, so she spent the night and we watched Hamilton. There was more Driveway Friendship. We had a somewhat hilarious time trying to get Momma an x-ray, losing power, finally getting it done, the next day getting a much-needed haircut, and then having to troop up four flights of stairs because the elevator was dead. I watched the DNC and horribly missed my father. I watched the RNC and feared for our nation. I went to my practice and printed off 3974092 pages of applications and other paperwork I had been putting off for five months. I put together my new planner during three days of leave, which yielded some type of normalcy.
September
I feel like this month is always the heaviest, either time-wise or brain-wise. There was a holiday group. I made some extra money. I craved having vacation, a full week to do whatever I wanted- Fidget remained scared of people, so I knew we weren't going anywhere. We also adopted another cat! MARLEY! A 14yo grey old man cat that obviously became sick, needed subq fluids, and we're slowly rehabbing. We noticed Cheddar was becoming a Lion. Sadie had more Opinions. We saw another friend for Driveway Friendship and she made fun of us for another old cat. We continued to have Driveway Friendship with the first friend, but then it got Cold and our ass couldn't stop freezing. We decided to invest the rest of the stimulus money into household things, as well as patio furniture and a fire pit to make outdoor Driveway Friendship possible as the weather cools.
I've now been off for a solid week, which involved taking my mother to an appointment and Fidget's Big Birthday Extravaganza. I've rearranged my kitchen, avoiding my dining room table. I finally got some space toward the end of this week, toddling through my house and finally finishing and mailing off my supervisors' applications to my Board after riding my bike. The training clinical director called me on Thursday to tell me he'll be moving to another program; I'll be back to running my program alone again. I've sold some furniture to potentially buy new things. We upgraded our phones- I went through my old phone's conversations with my father. I was going to try to save them, but realized it wasn't worth saving. My father was a complicated man that extremely fluctuated between being passive aggressive and then demanding tasks through texts.
I formatted the phone last night for my mother.
Today is a strange day. It's overcast and wet, but not raining. It's been 10 years since Fidget and I started dating (!!!), which is mind-blowing to me. It's also been two years since my father died. It's strange how grief morphs over time. I find myself in this weird state, much like when the pandemic started. It's a strange sense of disassociation: did I ever have friends? Did I ever have a father? Did I ever have house parties? Was my father ever up here? I know my grief is different from my mother's. I lean into mine, while she stalwartly fights it until it collapses around her. I prepare for this day to make sure I make space for my grief, but then Grief does what It do, and I gallivant around, still having a dead father, but other things happen, too? While he's an integral part of my story, he's a piece, not my whole.
If I hadn't had so much grief training and developed a niche in it, I know I would feel guilty with how much I don't miss my father. And people will flail and say, "Such a horrible thing to say!" But really, it's not. There are times I miss him, but I don't wake up every day missing him and I'm not sufficiently haunted by him. His death is a part of my essence, much like the other various parts of me. I can honor my grief, like during the DNC, but I can't force myself to grieve on specific days when it doesn't feel right. Grief is organic. And the good things he did imbue me with, such as providing for my family or this undying loyalty, are definitely good things I can honor him with as I continue to move on in my life.
Overall, pandemic aside, I'm pretty happy with where my life is right now. There was some talk of management opportunities, but I realized I don't need to be there. I pursued supervision training to shape young clinicians; I don't need to manage people's feelings on a team. That won't bring me joy.
Also, I have diligently been keeping the journal/planner since Fidget left in January. I have realized that my undying hope that This Will Get Better is a pretty snazzy trait to have. Going through my calendars and planner, I realized it hasn't really, but I'm marginally better off with accomplishing things than I was when I last wrote almost a year ago. I've stabilized my mother, for a value of "stabilization." Fidget's better medicated and working more. Our house looks better and is getting cleaner. We've rehabbed a cat and are working on another. I do Accomplish Things. One of the reminders I've consistently mandated is that I do a lot of things pretty well and I need to give myself credit for it, instead of looking back as to how much of a failure I am because something happened AGAIN and I couldn't accomplish it when I wanted to. Quantitatively, I'm coming up aces.
The planner/scrapbook/journal Almighty Pooh Planner is a good way to not only meditate but thoughtfully journal with where I've been and what I've done. It's helping quiet my brain with tasks to be accomplished, as well as giving me quiet time to decorate within it. My house will never be totally in order, my job will always be a dumpster fire by its very nature, and cats will flail a-plenty in competition with my mother. I can have peace in This Moment and what it yields for me as it will always be very, very fleeting.
My father was very good at putting out fires. He imbued me with that as well...
... I'll continue to honor him in putting out fires of my and others' making.
January
Cheddarcat awesomely escaped the night I finished that post. Around 0300, Fidget woke me from the couch to tell me the cat had gotten out. He lived under my neighbor's house for TWO WEEKS. Multiple friends would lie in the dirt and call for him, beating the hoods of our cars as we left. This eventually resulted in my catching him with a trap we borrowed from the Humane Society. I would call him our socialist cat- he took his free healthcare, then went off on a rumspringer for two weeks.
Fidget left in January, traveling across the country with his best friend to stump for Bernie. He was invigorated and excited, and so, so cold. I lived my best bachelorette life, cleaning and organizing, and dancing with said cats. Sadie went through a massive period of adjustment, as her human had left, the Orange One left and came back, and now she was alone during the day while I went to work.
February
Fidget came home in the beginning of the month, causing me to stay up most of the night as they barreled home at all hours. We adjusted to living together again, and I continued to work on rehabbing my itty, bitty, skinny Cheddarcat. He was eating like a house but wasn't making much progress weight-wise.
I took Momma to a dinner theatre for her birthday to see Kinky Boots, and she really enjoyed it a lot. And then I went with 0nn and another friend to see Wicked at the end of the month. It was awesome to see theatre and the three of us decided we'd keep an eye out for future performances.
March
BWAHAHA FUTURE PERFORMANCES! Pandemic shut all of us down. I went virtual within a day and hadn't stopped working at all. Fidget and I adjusted to my working from home, and I kept Momma really, really safe. Everything was so bizarre, especially now looking back on it. I remember staying away from the stores since I had a good stockpile, then having to buy like 0.5-ply toilet paper because I had been a Good Person. Both Fidget's and my mother's anxiety went off the charts. I worked from home for both Volcano Harbor and my private practice. I started a weekly Zoom call for friends.
April
I can't remember; I just know I bought 96 fake succulents from Dollar Tree and split them with 0nn. I was attempting to craft. Things were wiggy? Oh! My coworker quit AGAIN and moved to another company, so ONCE AGAIN, I was running my program by myself. They gave me a training clinical director to accompany me in the meantime, however, I was ultimately responsible for the group.
May
We'd been adjusting to the pandemic. I bought Mother's Day brunch in a basket from a local restaurant and cooked it at my mother's condo. Both Sadie and Cheddar celebrated birthdays. Cheddar continued to pace and didn't seem to be picking up weight, but he remained lovable and goofy. We started using the stimulus funds to invest in our home, like getting gutter work done and planning other projects. I had a friend come over for what I'm now terming "Driveway Friendship" and it was absolutely excellent to see someone in the flesh that I wasn't related to.
We celebrated our second wedding anniversary very, very low-key. I took time off from work to let my brain rest since I hadn't stopped working since the pandemic started. Protests about racial injustice broke out across the world after George Floyd was murdered. I realized how terrified I was of the pandemic because I would always rather be marching, but was absolutely terrified of killing my mother. Fidget felt the same.
June
This month was ROUGH. Though I always get excited for my birthday, we ended up in an amazing clusterfail of a situation with Momma in horrible pain, very poor treatment from her treating provider, my calling out of work, and Fidget mentally collapsing. Cheddar was diagnosed with dementia (?) and told to start thyroid meds. Both cars went into the shop a day apart. Work suffered an overdose during group that I had to call 911 on and recognize the limitations of virtual treatment. Friendships were flailing, marriages got weird. We got the house power-washed and it looked brand new. I had thought things were settling, then my mother had a panic attack on my birthday. Yeah, June was a weird, friggin month.
July
One of the positive side effects of the Month of Fail aka June was that both my husband and my mother became better medicated, and subsequently, all of our relationships with each other improved significantly. I hadn't quite realized what was happening with Fidget, but his snark and humor came back. I loved him a whole bunch again.
I also went through a Supervisor Training, which left me underwhelmed and overall dragging my feet. I was Offended. Though it satisfied a professional goal, I felt like I spent way too much money on something I'll need to figure out myself. Naturally, my mother had a panic attack the second day of the training, so I flew over to her house in the middle of group and ran third hour from her office. I also started doing other trainings focusing on grief, and subsequently my brain fell out. Momma fired her housekeeper during this time due to not cleaning; Fidget and I picked up all of her chores and errands. Oh, and Cheddar finally gained some weight due to being a purrito twice daily! He does not like pills, nor does he like cheese like Socks, so here we are, wrapping him in a blanket/towel twice daily to get thyroid and blood pressure medications into him.
August
I started the month on-call and then Momma interrupted a overtime group because her A/C stopped working, so she spent the night and we watched Hamilton. There was more Driveway Friendship. We had a somewhat hilarious time trying to get Momma an x-ray, losing power, finally getting it done, the next day getting a much-needed haircut, and then having to troop up four flights of stairs because the elevator was dead. I watched the DNC and horribly missed my father. I watched the RNC and feared for our nation. I went to my practice and printed off 3974092 pages of applications and other paperwork I had been putting off for five months. I put together my new planner during three days of leave, which yielded some type of normalcy.
September
I feel like this month is always the heaviest, either time-wise or brain-wise. There was a holiday group. I made some extra money. I craved having vacation, a full week to do whatever I wanted- Fidget remained scared of people, so I knew we weren't going anywhere. We also adopted another cat! MARLEY! A 14yo grey old man cat that obviously became sick, needed subq fluids, and we're slowly rehabbing. We noticed Cheddar was becoming a Lion. Sadie had more Opinions. We saw another friend for Driveway Friendship and she made fun of us for another old cat. We continued to have Driveway Friendship with the first friend, but then it got Cold and our ass couldn't stop freezing. We decided to invest the rest of the stimulus money into household things, as well as patio furniture and a fire pit to make outdoor Driveway Friendship possible as the weather cools.
I've now been off for a solid week, which involved taking my mother to an appointment and Fidget's Big Birthday Extravaganza. I've rearranged my kitchen, avoiding my dining room table. I finally got some space toward the end of this week, toddling through my house and finally finishing and mailing off my supervisors' applications to my Board after riding my bike. The training clinical director called me on Thursday to tell me he'll be moving to another program; I'll be back to running my program alone again. I've sold some furniture to potentially buy new things. We upgraded our phones- I went through my old phone's conversations with my father. I was going to try to save them, but realized it wasn't worth saving. My father was a complicated man that extremely fluctuated between being passive aggressive and then demanding tasks through texts.
I formatted the phone last night for my mother.
Today is a strange day. It's overcast and wet, but not raining. It's been 10 years since Fidget and I started dating (!!!), which is mind-blowing to me. It's also been two years since my father died. It's strange how grief morphs over time. I find myself in this weird state, much like when the pandemic started. It's a strange sense of disassociation: did I ever have friends? Did I ever have a father? Did I ever have house parties? Was my father ever up here? I know my grief is different from my mother's. I lean into mine, while she stalwartly fights it until it collapses around her. I prepare for this day to make sure I make space for my grief, but then Grief does what It do, and I gallivant around, still having a dead father, but other things happen, too? While he's an integral part of my story, he's a piece, not my whole.
If I hadn't had so much grief training and developed a niche in it, I know I would feel guilty with how much I don't miss my father. And people will flail and say, "Such a horrible thing to say!" But really, it's not. There are times I miss him, but I don't wake up every day missing him and I'm not sufficiently haunted by him. His death is a part of my essence, much like the other various parts of me. I can honor my grief, like during the DNC, but I can't force myself to grieve on specific days when it doesn't feel right. Grief is organic. And the good things he did imbue me with, such as providing for my family or this undying loyalty, are definitely good things I can honor him with as I continue to move on in my life.
Overall, pandemic aside, I'm pretty happy with where my life is right now. There was some talk of management opportunities, but I realized I don't need to be there. I pursued supervision training to shape young clinicians; I don't need to manage people's feelings on a team. That won't bring me joy.
Also, I have diligently been keeping the journal/planner since Fidget left in January. I have realized that my undying hope that This Will Get Better is a pretty snazzy trait to have. Going through my calendars and planner, I realized it hasn't really, but I'm marginally better off with accomplishing things than I was when I last wrote almost a year ago. I've stabilized my mother, for a value of "stabilization." Fidget's better medicated and working more. Our house looks better and is getting cleaner. We've rehabbed a cat and are working on another. I do Accomplish Things. One of the reminders I've consistently mandated is that I do a lot of things pretty well and I need to give myself credit for it, instead of looking back as to how much of a failure I am because something happened AGAIN and I couldn't accomplish it when I wanted to. Quantitatively, I'm coming up aces.
The planner/scrapbook/journal Almighty Pooh Planner is a good way to not only meditate but thoughtfully journal with where I've been and what I've done. It's helping quiet my brain with tasks to be accomplished, as well as giving me quiet time to decorate within it. My house will never be totally in order, my job will always be a dumpster fire by its very nature, and cats will flail a-plenty in competition with my mother. I can have peace in This Moment and what it yields for me as it will always be very, very fleeting.
My father was very good at putting out fires. He imbued me with that as well...
... I'll continue to honor him in putting out fires of my and others' making.