I Wish I Would Have Said...

 

“But, Doctor, I’ve been waiting,”

Last night’s meeting went pretty well and I don’t want to go over it like a couple looking for common ground after a party, but I kind of hated it that Dr F told me to “Be patient” about the need for a healthcare system overhaul.  People  can be nimrods and I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be the one to cause me to chuck my re-authorization paperwork because things were going to change, I get that, but once in a while, a little credit, even though I used to be blonde and look tiny on camera, wouldn’t come amiss. I may not have major policy chops myself, but I can talk to them without them asking about all the gibberish. Doctors are just, you know, habitually patronizing, and I do forget. Even after letting one tick me off at the meeting last month. Just being himself, too.

Besides, I am the most patient impatient woman alive. For years, during my growth spurts, I waited because my body outpaced insurance as far as needing my wheelchairs replaced.

Then, I waited for other people to decide if I could go to my local middle school(where I waited out my name being misread as Alicia on paperwork for about a year and a half.  Now I know to have a trusted other person  go over any handwriting  I send to, well, The Man.  Just in time for Docusigb, et all, to make everyone look worse than I.)

In high school, it took me about two years to come into myself, never mind any debate about, you know, my  flower or anything.(Save it for college, everyone said, whether about my sex appeal or my commentaries, but very few people were interested in either. Just enough to maybe let me think I wasn’t an absolute error of a human.)

Sometimes to participate in conversations, I will recount a peripheral memory of college, but if I have one image of that time that’s consistent, it’s me carrying more than I should and probably hungry too because everything gave me stomach issues and I had to wander around with everything close at hand like the world’s palest Bedouin, waiting for a bus that sometimes decided it wouldn’t bother with the lift today.(Sorry, Michelle Obama, but for a golden ticket, that really, you know, sucked to the eleventh power, madam)

All to spend seven years on a degree people lost interest in in about seven minutes.

Trying not to be more than dark-chocolate level bitter, but between all that and the quarterly  drama the system puts me through, the pandemic aftermath(ish) that curtails an already foreshortened list of social and dare I say sexual options( I will and I hope it gives  DeSantis a pain in his gut) maybe the one thing I really know is waiting. Even if I am something  of a washout as a Namaste Lady. 

ETA: The failed promise of the ADA, unless you want to drop coin somewhere, could be a whole separate post.  I was so excited! But I was also *sixteen* and now I'm forty-nine and my dentist can still shrug when I say "your office should be more accessible.  "  Sick of waiting on that, too. I swear, sometimes I want to grab Congress and shake 'em till the money falls out.

One day, I’m gonna get a turn at something, right?

Still Wish This Would Have Happened...Poem "For Jacqueline"

 

For Jacqueline, in the event it’s ever okay to laugh about this

One day I hope I can look with a

Contented distance on the woman

Accepting anniversary love advice,

Knowing happily that she needed it more than, say,

Running shoes, support to *her own* ankles,

Being surplus to current requirements.

I doubt that you know,

Even as we both know you won a jackpot,

In the doting-spouse lottery,

That my greatest hope for the future, in that instant,

Involved escaping it.

Or giving it out, like a big set of Tupperware at Christmas,

So many gleaming days, big and small, it’s hard to know

How to fill them, if you don’t have to

Feed an army,

Or if your special needs aren’t

To scrub fruit.

You end up with more implements,

Than you can ever use.

I have to admit that while you’re talking,

Hundreds of miles away(really typing, so it’s not *as*

Rude as it sounds, though I try to listen more, just…in case)

About compromise, and I’m trying to pretend

It doesn’t sound like some shit I’ve never seen before,

Like “vertical jump shot” or “compassionate conservative”

I’m wondering if I could

Gift-wrap a couple of decades,

Or if a simple bow is sufficient

While halfway hoping,

We’ll laugh at a couples’ night

About what a funny bastard

Life still is

 

Short answer to this week's focus group...

The Beatles cover "Money" 

People need to stop treating caring professions as both something done for love, and conversely, something any idiot can do.(Guys poisoning the planet shouldn't make more than people knitting it together.)

All Up In My Feelings...

 wishing for guarantees that I can't ask for. Some make sense, like wishing I could get up in the morning with minimal fuss and drama for the next(30-ish) years, or maybe that I drop like a rock before I have to think about the clownish misery of 2024 for real---I don't know which I'd request.  Not that it's up to me exactly.  At least, not in an "Add To Cart" sense, or a "Believe, then Achieve" sense; there are choices that might lead me one way or the other, but...

Some are ridiculous, as if were hoping I could get someone good to sing at  Mom's 100th birthday.  (Although Grandma did live to be ninety+ so it could happen...would that be good?)
I wish I'd lived more, not losing time to Getting Better All The Time, depression when that didn't work, and wrangling the five-paragraph essay.

Sometimes it seems too late to have any kind of life I want, though it's not that I can't survive...it's just that I'd like to know what "thriving" felt like. Was joking with a bunkie about my state meeting, as we often do, because they are ridiculous on their faces, and because they exist to catch us, in some sense or other. As if I hear them coming up(of all things to return to pre-pandemic status) and hop back into my wheelchair saying "Psych!" or that we love talking to social workers so much(high school me says "not!") that we'd just forget the money tree in the courtyard.  You could tell we didn't need you from the *parade*. For real.

Unlike what I sardonically messaged my bunkie, though, I think they are surprised when we make it through another quarter on crumbs and fairy dust. I think we are supposed to *fail*, whatever other message they send out with that kitty poster from the seventies, or whatever they say when the tarter side of my personality bleeds through and I accidentally say something they think is negative.
They check all the time because they can't believe anyone could do so much with so little.  So there must be something crooked about it. But It's like that country-rook hit from the '80s: Looking For Scum In All The Wrong Places.Although usually I do end up feeling as though they found some here, by the end of it.  

Usually just because nobody wants to grow up, kiss ass in school, including more worry about one's permanent record than is wholesome, just to be...well, this. Along with adding in a side of "Nobody wants to work anymore" when we try to get the meager protection the system promises. Yep, midlife with a disability is a real kick. Almost gives me a deeper reason to be jealous of all the Make-A-Wish kids I grew up with. Even if I wouldn't  take Disney World gift-wrapped, now(even if I didn't know about the counselor at Disneyland.)

Bohemian Crip Watches Movies: How About You

 

Your mind won’t be blown by “How About You.” It’s not even a towering piece of representation.Although some very talented English and Irish character actors do seem to bring what they know about getting older to the table, and that is nice to watch as I’m here, closing out my forties in a body that never got to be Young Invincible.  It ticks along like a battered Timex, though at times all of that seems redundant.  The story is a simple, human one about a family-run elder-care home and what happens when the flaky sister has to hold down the fort over Christmas break, from source material from women’s fiction mainstay Maeve Binchy.  I have to admit, since my group-living situation was about being pushed around, if not full-on abused, I enjoyed the residents giving staffers some grief.  Community is probably better, though. I miss human scale movies like this.