Category: Aging Parents

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CHANGE CAN BE A BLESSING

1 October 2022

CHANGE CAN BE A BLESSING

Constant and often difficult change defines my youth and early adulthood. My family was always moving … New York, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Europe (I was packed off to university in England to get as far away from the smothering and dictatorial control of my parents … it brought about significant changes in my development as a person), Phoenix and Dallas. The next few moves were of my choice, so they were better, but it was still change, starting all over with a new city, new job, new home, and new friends. When you are young and experience significant change, it can offer the opportunity to reinvent yourself. New friends did not know the painfully shy boy that I left behind in the last city. Sometimes change provides opportunities for personal growth. Moving to NYC with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, was a period of great change and social upheaval. After many wild years, we settled into our quiet comfort zone, pleased with the metamorphosis that has become us, and we settle into a calm peace.

Being enveloped in the status quo feels safe and comfortable, like the blanket carried around by Linus (the Peanuts cartoon character). I’ll admit, I am keen on consistency and calm, things being the same, stable, and safe. I do not even like changing planes at the airport even when I know it will get me to the destination I seek. Moving in the near future (anywhere) for retirement scares me even though I know the outcome will likely be incredible. Any degree of change, now or in the foreseeable future, ramps up my anxiety, and I have to labor to bring it down to a palatable level. Well, that, and I have medication.

One thing that has affected me very strongly in the last year is a severe deepening and dark descent into the depression side of my bipolar. These dark days last longer than my normal lulls, often passing a week or more. I have been dealing with bipolar/depression almost my entire life. I know how to read it, how to pacify it, and how to act and react in order to try to minimize its impact on my daily life. But these trips to the depths of the Bipolar Sea have been different. I had lost interest in simple things, things I needed or wanted to do, and was overall indifferent to everything. I was not suicidal, but bipolar and depression run wild in my family tree, and the suicides I am aware of in my family happened in older age. I am not going to be part of a family statistic.

My first step was to have a serious and revealing chat with my psychiatrist (NOT with Lucy from the Peanuts). It is the longest discussion we have had in a long time. My frequency and severity of bipolar episodes have worsened with age, and medications may need to be changed, or medication amounts of what I already take might need to be adjusted or increased. When I spoke with my doctor, I let her know that my medications and their amounts had changed minimally since I was diagnosed and prescribed in Switzerland 15 years ago, although symptoms presented themselves while I was in my teens and I lived untreated the bulk of my life.

I had previously been reluctant to request changes since I had remained relatively stable all of these years, but I knew that something in my body and brain was changing and becoming less stable. I mean, who wants to walk around all day every day ready to burst into tears for absolutely no reason? Plus, I realized I was manifesting more afflictions attributed to maturing persons with Bipolar, including constant sadness and fatigue, concentration issues, sleep changes, and hopelessness. My doctor, alarmed by what I was sharing, changed (actually doubled) one of my daytime medications. I am happy to say, it has made a profound impact on me and my outlook. I only wish I had addressed this sooner. But better late than never.

But that was weeks ago now. The euphoria I experienced during the first week on the increased medication was great. I felt as if I was walking on sunshine. I was happy and invincible on a level I had not experienced in quite a long time. Now, I have somewhat reverted backward. I am not beaming rays of light, but likewise, I have not fallen back into the dark caverns that haunted me so often. I am in a middle ground, neither elated nor depressed. If that is the best I can get for now, I can be content that it is not worse. This is a status quo I can live with until the next adjustments in my medications.

What do your medications and mood swings tell you? Are you in a good enough place to just keep plugging along? Are you as happy as a kid at the carnival? Or do you feel like you fell through a hole in the ice and are frantically clutching at the ice around you just to hang on?

Think about where you are and where you want to be. Only you can make a difference, and be the catalyst for the life you want and deserve.

Blessings,

Noor

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I’M ONLY A MAN IN A SILLY RED SHEET

4 July, 2022

I’M ONLY A MAN IN A SILLY RED SHEET

I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive
I’m just out to find
The better part of me

I’m more than a bird, I’m more than a plane
I’m more than just some pretty face beside a train
And it’s not easy to be me

I wish that I could cry
Fall upon my knees
Find a way to lie
‘Bout a home I’ll never see

It may sound absurd, but don’t be naive
Even heroes have the right to bleed
I may be disturbed, but won’t you concede
Even heroes have the right to dream?
And it’s not easy to be me

(“Superman,” Songwriter: John Ondrasik)

Kitchen storage cabinet made by my Great-Grandfather Otto Geschke, or his father Heinrich

I am back a week now from the annual pilgrimage to somehow rescue the farmhouse, ironically exactly a year after my last trip and posting about how that went. This was my fourth trip to the farmhouse to sort and sell some of the massive amounts of stuff inside and around it. It is incomprehensible how my father accumulated so much shit, and I mean that in a not very nice way, and managed to stuff the house floor to ceiling and wall to wall on four floors, in addition to a 30’ trailer beside it. With everything we have been able to sell already deeply discounted, $2.00 here, $5.00 there, $20.00 probably being the most expensive items, we have to deal with cheap ”garage-salers” who want to fight you over a dollar, plus the ones that get past you without paying, and the friends of my father who as if they haven’t stolen enough from him already, try pitting me and my sister against each other over prices and then do fuzzy math to get away with more for less. These people disgust me and makes trying to do the right thing by my parents even harder. I might as well have a sign at the curb that says, “Come rob me.”

Artifacts from the kitchen dig

This being the fourth year of sorting and selling, we chose to skip the dumpster and focus on what we could sell, leaving the “crap” to huge piles in corners, mostly in the basement where the endless supply of old farm tools were the biggest sellers. Opening the basement to be as safe as possible to shoppers was itself a Herculean task. It takes Superheroes, (my sister included) to accomplish what we did, often touching (gloved) the masses of now-garbage items covered in white mold, but it was still not enough. We even dug a huge pit off the back side of the kitchen to bury shovels full of rotted things we wouldn’t even touch gloved. In the end, little got buried because we became consumed with more urgent projects, but interestingly we discovered china and pottery fragments about two feet down. It must have been a kitchen garbage pit at one point because I cannot imagine an outhouse placed that close to the main house. Ironically, almost everywhere we have ever dug turned out artifacts. Right now I have a few metal/iron items soaking in a big bowl of Coca Cola. If it will eat away very heavy rust deposits and crusting off iron, imagine what it does to your insides if you drink it regularly. 

Probably the second-most Superhero task was acting as historian and tour guide of the house and grounds and extended property for the people who came, mostly out of curiosity about the house and it’s insides. I even had a couple of people ask to see the attic which for safety reasons we had as off-limits. I had reached out to several local historians and historical societies with little result. Shameful on their parts, actually, as that is the job they are paid to do. I had to act as the homestead’s most dedicated advocate in a move to find a sympathetic buyer. 

In terms of dealing with emptying the contents of the house, it’s been pretty much a shit-show. I am very angry with both of my parents for letting everything about the house and their finances get to where they are today. Most of his retirement income went into the acquisition of things we can’t seem to sell or have had to throw away. My father apparently never passed up a yard or garage sale. A lot of items still had old price tags on them. There are so many small items that rather than add price tags, my sister and I made the prices up as we were asked. We will never get the house empty, just the two of us, and we will never recover the millions of dollars that were squandered on fair weather “friends” (the vultures who kept showing up for money and freebies), crooked contractor friends, charitable gifts (but not to their own children), and junk. 

Me on a good day

Like, what was my father thinking? He let the 1838 porches on the front of the house rot until they half fell off and had to be removed. We have over a dozen refrigerators, nearly 30 ancient TVs, 20+ dinosaur microwaves, and about a dozen antique washing machines – one is so old that I think Jesus used it to wash his robes. My trips upstate cost triple what we recoup having these farmhouse garage sales. It would be cheaper to send money to my mother directly, but that then negates the fact that the house still needs to be emptied before it is sold. I saw a really great quote from Power of Positivity yesterday. Shortened: “ … this is the oldest you’ve ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be again.” It is true, and I have said it many times, I am not getting any younger and every run up there gets harder. I guess we do until we can’t.

Bottom line: There is no answer or end in sight. I have always tried to be all and do all for all. I have tried this for the last several years, including the trip to Dallas with my sisters to empty two massive storage units of my parents’ personal possessions. We have become the guardians, the babysitters. It’s a lot of weight to tow. While I am in the role, I am best served operating on autopilot. Once I leave, the walls come down. I am no longer pretending to be Superman. I have left my silly red cape in Jesus’ washing machine until the next trip. 

I returned home and my Bipolar clearly took over. I met with my therapist the next day and put my depression and anxiety at a 12 on a 1-10 scale. I returned home feeling completed defeated and powerfully depressed. I felt so bad that all I wanted to was cry for the next few days back. I was too emotional to even write. Do Superheroes cry, bleed, or give up? They should, at least occasionally. It is still a long road ahead of me.

Blessings,

Noor

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THINGS WE LOST WITH COVID

12 March, 2022

THINGS WE LOST WITH COVID

Aside from the losses of family, friends, and loved ones to Covid, the survivors now live in a very different world. Young children never knew a world without masks. There was a State law mask-mandate in New Jersey until this last week. Masks are now optional and as crowed as our city-scape is, I would guess maybe only half of all people still wear them. For some like me, it is situational. If I am in a crowd or someplace I am not comfortable with, I wear it. When Covid number rise again, which epidemiologists are certain will happen 1. Due to increased summertime travel (after two years of practically no major vacations outside the US border), and 2. The normal rise in general infections come fall and winter. I am supposed to go to a family wedding (my rare opportunity to see both of my beloved sisters at the same time) in Upstate New York in August, assuming I can get a cabin with its own bathroom. You know me, my sense of adventure and the great wild way is going to Short Hills Mall before the store doors to Chanel and Cartier are open and I am navigating oblivious women with strollers. The wedding will be at a camp ground and outdoors so I am moderately nervous about the mask thing because USNY tends to be Trump Land so vaccinations are likely hit-and-miss.

One thing that was lost, or covered up by, was simple social politeness, greetings as we pass each other walking down the sidewalk. I have always greeted strangers, or people I encountered daily, on the sidewalk with a smile and a “Good morning,” or whatever time of the day it was. You cannot see that in a mask. People stopped trusting one another and the sidewalks became danger zones where you shuffled past oncoming pedestrians as quickly as possible. This last week as I traversed the sidewalks with no mask, I went back to my normal smile and greet, and I noticed two things that that pre-covid rarely happened: almost everyone I greeted refused to make eye contact and none of them returned to greeting. People appear to not want to invest themselves in basic humanity anymore.

There is also a crowd shift, a Great Migration, taking place. Shops and restaurants in metropolitan New York have closed due to covid. Available amenities have downsized, moved, or closed for reasons ranging from difficulty finding employees to supply chain issues to difficulty maintaining enough of a retail client base to stay open. One serious trend we are seeing are the large number of families who are tired of Covid measures in congested areas like ours who are fleeing enmasse to larger houses and spaces, large yards for play further apart from the neighbors, and down payments that match trying to keep kids in private schools near New Your City and pay exorbitant rent or mortgages. Zoom and telecommuting have made such moves easier on parents who no longer need to share the breakfast table with their children as a work space.

My personal travel is hopefully going to improve this year since it has been two years since I last visited my normal haunts. I am looking at my beloved Spain, Ireland, and Switzerland. It will rest largely on quarantining laws crossing borders. All I want is to lay under a straw umbrella with my toes in the sand at Puerta Banus Marbella and order my pilpil from the nearby chirangita. Ah, one can hope. For those of you who do not want the hassles of crossing the US border, keep in mind that Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are US territories so you can come and go freely. And there is a Ritz-Carleton on St. Thomas so that you don’t have to feel like you are roughing it.

The supply chain has been severely disrupted, and although it has affected everything from clothes to cars, I am talking specifically food and groceries. I could not get my base-supply of Pellegrino for over a month. We ended up buying a Soda Stream, which is not as convenient as opening a Pellegrino, but it serves its purpose. Markets are out of lots of things. My favorite health cereal has been MIA for over a month. My flavored Pellegrino is represented by only one 8-pack each … once I buy them, the shelves are empty. Even things I would never buy amaze me. Products are lined up at the edge of the shelf, one unit deep and ten wide in order to give the appearance there is more there than there actually is. Because of this, Amazon has become my go-to. Not that I want to give this power to Bezos, but desperate times call for things that actually work.

Think of what has been important you that has been affected by covid. Have you been able to work around these issues, or have you put them out of sight/out of mind for now. 

And do not forget to smile at a stranger. It might be the only one they get that day.

Blessings,

Baer

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STILL FEELING RATTLED

I am even more convinced that those who are not Bipolar have only a foggy idea of what it really means to be Bipolar, and they have an even foggier idea how it affects those of us living with it and how it influences our behavior. 

I was typically half an hour early for work yesterday so before work began I asked for an impromptu meeting with one of my directors to discuss this procession of meetings they have been having with me. I provided her with a complete year of my normal paperwork as well as documents I created specifically for record keeping to demonstrate what my paperwork looks like normally, not the sorry state of a strained September/October Bipolar mess, and record keeping forms specific to what we are doing (she had never seen them before). It was my hope that this was enough to bring about an end to what feels like a weekly interrogation. Sadly, that will not be the way it will work, although my boss recognized that during these meetings she can tell by my face that I am very tense, anxious, and upset. My General Anxiety baseline is five out of ten and my anxiety and worry clearly rockets to the top of scale and higher during these meetings. I need to find ways to try to control emotions during the questioning, especially since we are now dealing with paperwork and answers that are six months old and my recall has been greatly diminished by time and Bipolar while my anxiety and despair are at their peaks. My anxiety and depression are always there, and it is hard to explain to friends and loved ones that it is my nature, beyond my control, to worry about things that have yet to happen, like all of the upcoming meetings I still have to have with Admin.

One sort of reassurance of the impromptu meeting was being told that I am not being targeted, that this situation and the history of events leading up to it are not about me alone. The meetings leading up to my request for my ADA rights put to light problems within the environment/people I was leaving. Another Admin took my position while they waited on my replacement. Red flags were raised and those persons will have their own set of meetings in due time.

Aside from that, life goes on. I will admit that I am learning to make new uses of weekends – especially last weekend’s four-day holiday weekend – taking naps. It is a beautiful time where my mind gets a break and refreshes itself between tasks, not to overlook my depression which also gets a reprieve while sleeping. Sleep is a beautiful friend when the brain is challenged or can’t cope. I took a nap yesterday and must have been so exhausted from my week that when the alarm went off I was completely disoriented and went into a panic that I had messed up my work schedule. Is that a clue that worrying about work often interferes with and influences even my time away?

In keeping with the theme of uncooperative and unpredictable, how about our weather lately? The week before the long Presidents’ Day weekend was nice and warm so I planned to spend the long peaceful weekend beginning prep work in the garden for spring … cutting back the roses and raking up all of the leaves I had used for bedding insulation, in addition to raking up plenty of stray leaves and dead-heading all of the ghostly remains of the Hosta and Irises. Gardening can be very therapeutic in good weather for as long as my back holds out. Plus, I still have several areas where nothing grows well and I need to plan and find new vegetation. This year I might try Bougainvillea, and maybe a fig tree. Don’t laugh, but since not even grass, peas, squash, rhubarb, and corn will not grow there, I am hoping for something less demanding of the soil that will take easier … realistic looking astro-turf?!

I’ll take ideas if you have any!

Tshuss,Noor

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TRYING TO KEEP MY HEAD ABOVE THE WAVES

As promised, there will be no rhyme or reason to what I publish and when. The last few weeks have been excessively challenging. For some unspecified reason, my paperwork for September, October, and November has been the source of interest for my bosses. I will be the first to admit that those months were jarring and atypical of work that spans 11 years there. In those months, I was going through a critical co-worker crisis, my depression went from a 3 to 8 or 9 (10 being worst), my anxiety peaked at 10, there are lingering concerns with my husband’s health, and my sisters and I are at wit’s end dealing with the needs of our aging parents, one on each coast. And now I have weekly meetings at work to “correct” future paperwork. I always go into the meeting in great trepidation, and in turn leave, feeling battered and ready to quit. I only have four-and-a-half months left in the calendar year.

Still, in the midst of this particularly traumatizing situation, I know that if they did not care they would not put time in on me. But it is hard none-the-less. I have upped my psychologist visits to every week instead of every 2-3 weeks. And I will see my psychiatrist this week, and probably increase the frequency of that as well. Since I am popping Ativan like candy, I am sure we will flex some of my meds. I just can’t wait for the time when I can spend my days calmer, arranging flowers and furniture in my new home, and tilling soil and rocks in the flower beds of my new gardens. My biggest anxiety will be avoiding cattle and rattlesnakes.

What monsters have been keeping you awake at night?

Blessings,

Noor