$#%@
On June 10th, my mother had an acute stroke to the Broca's area of her brain.
She's making remarkable progress, but the damage is severe. The right side of her body barely works, she can't see on her right side, she speaks mostly gibberish, and she has "impaired impulse control", meaning she acts like a toddler.
Theoretically, I have her power of attorney. I say theoretically, because we can't find it. It's not on file with the state, her former lawyers, or anywhere to be found in either house.
Mom didn't have insurance. The hospital counseled me to hide her assets as quickly as possible and that they'd give me thirty days to do it... to sell her house to myself, to take her name off our joint accounts, etc. Unfortunately, without the power of attorney, my hands are tied... I can't even get her name off the things that are actually just mine.
The thirty-day deadline was bad enough -- but the rehab center that Mom needs to go to doesn't have the same liberal policies as the hospital, and they want her financial information now and call me all day long about it while I stall
I can do absolutely nothing right. My boss wants me cranking out ads, my mother's friends think I ought to be spending 24 hours a day in the hospital with Mom... oh, except when they want me to show up at one of their parties to efficiently update them on Mom's condition. Her friends came to me with dire warnings about how the hospital in Georgetown blew and I needed to have her moved to Charleston. I did some research and discovered that there was a hospital in Chattanooga ranked #1 nationally for critical care and announced that I'd move her there, and quicker than you can say "backstab", I was in a showdown with a bunch of Steel Magnolias who thought I was just horrible for wanting to take her away from them. And after I held my ground and pissed them all off, the funding fell through anyway.
My boss had his assistant call me last Friday and tell me I was fired if I didn't work all weekend, so I drove back to Chattanooga that afternoon in a panic with my mother's cat shoved in the Jeep. Discovered on Monday that the time I'd spent in Georgetown keeping up with client e-mail and posting ads had been considered unpaid leave, and that my boss would let me go back to Mom provided I worked until Wednesday and was back by Monday. It's $100 in gas one-way to go back and forth.
I was already putting half my checks straight into Mom's account, but her expenses way outstrip that; she's been selling off her retirement fund to pay her bills in Georgetown, and it's an account that, without the power of attorney, I have no access to. That means that somehow, my dinky salary is supposed to pay two $1000 mortgages, two light bills, two water bills, two cable bills, two cable modem bills, etc. Not to mention the hospital bills, the dog and the three cats, my brother... and the omgwtfpwned expensive laptop I just had to buy, since the only way my boss agreed not to fire me was if I agreed to buy one, transfer my work computer to it, and continue to do my job (video editing, photoshop, etc) from wherever.
My phone rings off the hook with Dad's family and Mom's friends. Lectures and guilt-trips and new things to worry about, more things they want me to handle, baby I know you have so much on your plate but when you get a chance...
Roughly forty-seven million times a day, it pops into my head -- I want my mommy. She's the one who knows about all this financial and legal crap, she's the one who talks me down when I'm on a cliff like this, she's the one who makes the decisions. She's my best friend, she's the whole reason I'm living the life I've been living.
And I can't have her. I can have something that looks like her, a frightening alien creature that talks like a Sim and says the same word over and over and over and claws the air and grabs things from my hands to stick in her mouth.
I feel like a five-year-old standing in the middle of the Interstate. Everything's so much bigger than me and going so fucking fast and the odds are almost certain that I'm going to get clobbered if I move, or even if I don't. I'm just cowering between the cars wishing like hell someone was coming for me.
No one's coming. No one can come. This is all on me, and I just have to deal with it.
But God, this is one of those times I wish I wasn't single. I come home from the hospital and I lie in the center of Mom's bed and I hug her pillow and wish someone was holding me and I feel so fucking alone it burns.
I'm moving to Georgetown to take care of Mom full-time, as much as I can and keep my job. I'm hoping that if I demonstrate I can work just as fast remotely as as I do in-house, my boss will let me stay there. There's a precedent for it... the person who had my job before me phoned it in from Jersey. If not, I'll try to find another job I can do from home.
My great hope is this: that if I spend the six-month recovery window absolutely busting my ass, I can get mom back to the point of self-sufficiency, and move back to Chattanooga secure in the knowledge that she's okay and can get back to the life she calls "paradise".
At any rate, I need to hit the road and get back to Georgetown...