Don’t worry, I will update you all about my health etc soon, but i need to get this off my chest as soon as I can because I have been carrying it for far too long.
So here’s the story.
When I was growing up, both my mother and my father had full time jobs. Jobs with roughly the same salary, even… never more than a couple thou a year apart.
The difference is that in addition to her actual job, my mother did ALL of the housework. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, the whole shebang.
This was supposedly fair because my father did all the “outside” work. Lawn care, painting, gardening, and so on.
Bullshit. The amounts of labour are not even comparable. The only proof needed was the fact that my father could do all of his jobs on the weekend, whereas my mother worked like a slave every goddamned day of the week.
Can you imagine coming home from a hard day of work knowing that you still had to cook supper for six (including you), clean the table after, do laundry, and whatever other chores have piled up for you?
It was so blatantly unfair. My poor mother’s life was one of drudgery. She had very little time to just relax and enjoy life.
And the thing is, I figured this out when I was still pretty young. I knew that thewhole setup was brutally unfair.
But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to have to do the work myself.
Hence the guilt. I cannot claim ignorance. I knew what was going on and I knew it was wrong. But I selfishly decided to protect myself at my mother’s expense.
For young people for whom this setup is incomprehensible, let me lay some very messed up history on your young and impressionable minds.
When I was a kid in the 1970’s, there was a lively public debate about whether husbands should allow their wives to work outside the home.
That’s right, kids. Things were so sexist back then that a wife needed her husband’s permission to get a job that would add to the income of the household.
So from that toxic point of view, my father was actually doing my mother a favour by letting her have a job at all.
How fucking magnanimous of him. How very progressive of him.
Me and my siblings are not entirely guilty in this matter. On multiple occasions we offered to do more around the house. And I was 100 percent on board for that.
But she treated it like this was one more unreasonable demand being placed on her, and angrily told us it wasn’t worth it because we wouldn’t do it “right”.
Similarly, when one of us would try to pitch in anyway, she would get mad at us and take it away from us because if we did it, she would “just have to do it over again”.
So we tried.. But she was too impatient to endure the temporary inconvenience of having to teach us how to do things her way in order to acquire the permanent benefit of her having way less work to do.
People not being patient enough to teach people to do things is a running theme in my childhood. Not that this prevented anyone from making people feel guilty about not being able to do it for themselves.
Admittedly, that was mostly me. I knew i was an unwelcome burden on others from my first day of school.
Probably before that too, I just hadn’t had the conscious thought yet,
So we tried to help her, and she wouldn’t have it,. I still feel guilty about all the times I was silent – Xmas day looms particularly large there – but she also brought it on herself,
Plus she had to deal with Larry all the time,
But that’s a different story,.
On the plus side, I suppose I feel like less of a failure now,.
After all, I am a very ill man, and that means the bar is very low for accomplishment.
That’s a sick way of looking at it, but it’s what I’ve got.
Speaking of my wrecked health, had my over-the-phone doctor’s appointment with Doctor Chao, my GP, today.
He agreed that my symptoms sounds pretty dire, and has ordered up a chest X-ray, some lab tests, and an ECG for me,.
Seems like my problems are either cardio or pulmonary, so that should cover it.
Over the phone, it really sounded like he said ECE, not ECG, I got a laugh from my therapist. Doctor Costin, when I said ECE stood for “electro cardio encephalogram?”.
Who knows, with modern technology, maybe they can scan my brain and my heart at the same time. That’s 2/3s of Dorothy’s crew right there.
I suppose an fMRI would be needed to see if I have “the nerve”.
I’ll go do all the testing et al on Saturday, probably in the afternoon. That way, it will be easy for Joe or Julian to do the driving.
It’s not like I can walk there. Even though there’s a Lifelabs just a block away from me.
But if I could walk a block, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.
it feels weird to know that I’m a for-real invalid now, instead of just have the lifestyle of one. Being this feeble and weak makes me feel so vulnerable and small.
I keep telling myself that little has truly changed. After all, it’s not like I did much walking before now. Realistically speaking, my lifestyle can continue unchanged.
But there’s a vast difference between not exercising an option and having that option taken away from you.
Use it or lose it, I guess.
But at least I am close to getting my dream job. It’s very important that I cling like hell to that hope in this dark time in both my life and my world.
It feels fitting somehow that my greatest crisis and my greatest opportunity are coming at the same damned time.
There is no progress, there is only a shift in balance.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.