Still More Driving

I dropped A. off in the morning and picked her up in the afternoon for therapy. She was somewhat late in the morning and really late in the evening, and for whatever reason, it just hit me wrong today. Possibly because I’d scurried around and stripped and made beds and ran the eufy in the bathroom and just generally did a lot and felt extremely … I don’t know. Like I have been working too hard, for sure, but also the shorts arrived the night before and I couldn’t even convince A. to try them on and it just felt like a lot.

I think it’s really easy to respond to someone taking care of the things around one with criticism and complaint or silence and general unhelpfulness. The longer the caretaking goes on, the more this seems to happen. I know it is not just me, and I know I definitely own part of this, so I finally told A. (and then, to be fair, R., because they are two peas in a pod in this way) that I was doing a whole lot and having to work around their obstruction. I had a clear example with CS of how negotiation on house related stuff could be working (they were not always this easy to deal with, but this past few days they have been clear about what they want, and what they don’t want, and they have been responding in a timely fashion, enabling me to come up with a solid furniture plan for their seating area, and area rugs in both K and C’s rooms) to contrast with what it’s like to try to talk to my own daughter and husband. Everyone is very clear that they definitely are excited to be moving to the new place, and everyone is actually working (except possibly A., who does not have enough stuff to need to be curated anyway) to figure out what is moving and clearing out stuff they do not want to be bringing to the new place, so this is not a motivational problem. R. and A. are really avoidant about a lot of things, so I put on the table the possibility that this isn’t really a choice on their part, that instead this is a much more significant disability than I had realized and they actually aren’t capable of being any other way.

That turned out to be an unpopular frame. I’m not interested in motivating protestations of doing better that go nowhere, however, so I made it very clear what I was considering for dealing with the the house related obstruction (mostly if they say “not now” or “later” it’s going to be interpreted as “I decline to participate in the decision making” unless they schedule on the spot when exactly later is. I preface requests to participate in decision making with “are you interruptible / do you have time to chat” and I’m also careful about time of day/ whether people have eaten / look like they are in a terrible mood etc). R. is really persistently dealing with difficulties visualizing the space and what we need in the space by delaying, so I asked him how many months he wanted to live in a house with rooms unusable because they had no chairs or whatever in them. I also discussed just how long did he think it was going to take to move the art in the house and install it in the new space. Again, just wants to put it off. And I’m like, absolutely we are not doing that, with some reminders of what happened when we moved from NH to MA.

I had A. leave the therapist a message saying we were going to be late (This happened before the conversations with R.) when it was clear we’d be over 15 minutes late, and I did not go in with her. I was really mad, and I felt like me being in the room with her was not helping. She’s comfortable enough with the therapist now, that she wants to talk to her, and if she really wants to do this, now’s the time. And she did!

I got a walk with M.

I had a long phone convo with J. (which if I’m being fair, probably also contributed to where my head was today).

I’m sure happy about how yesterday’s elections went. I mean. Could not have been better. Woot!