It wasn't easy. On my mother's best days, she can talk to me about science, but barely, especially if she's sick. She becomes argumentative about something she feels she's an "expert" in, even though the highest work level my mom ever achieved in science was a a lab manager who ordered supplies for the rest of the staff. I should know. She spent my youth calling me on her lunch breaks to chew food loudly into my ear and gossip rudely, because she was bored.
Her compulsive habits were so bad that my brothers couldn't give her their work numbers anymore. She'd deliberately goad me into anger over my work phone, just to have the satisfaction of knowing that my reaction to her might shock my cubicle neighbors, because she did the same thing with the other weird lab rats she worked with. She complained so much about us that her co-workers were nasty to us if we happened to be at home, which is what she wanted as a revenge for being a somewhat working mother part-time.
I felt terrible for my grandparents. They'd paid for her posh undergraduate degrees after she had been on academic probation while living at home, which is so easy compared to the lives me and my brothers have that I know they did it because she's handicapped like the rest of her siblings. Ditto for my father; my mom bitched and moaned so much about being "forced" out of work to become a mother that my father paid for her to go back to graduate school, then had to sit down with her at our kitchen table to help her through her coursework after working 16-hour days at his own job, just so my delusional arrogant mother could get a job as a bottom-level lab technician who cleaned glassware all day long, in between her lengthy phone calls from work on the company's dime. Some deal, right?
A pattern formed within my mother's family that her siblings and their children replicated with the same codependent degrees of success. I thought one of my cousins was, like, an astrophysicist with a Ph.D, when really, he was just a horrible student stymied by his thesis adviser (always an excuse for their incompetence), and that's why it took him and his then-girlfriend 7-9 years to earn a Masters degree from a college I got into directly out of high school, and that included blowing off my senior year of studies. Didn't need them anymore. And so it continued...this aching annoying bravado coupled with a deep insecurity that completed the next generation of pencil-pushing nobodies with over-blown ego's, condescending conversations, and terrible attitudes. They totally fucking suck.
They don't actually do anything really worthwhile. It's all a cover-up for their mental illnesses. I worked with tons of pseudo-intellectuals in publishing. They had to have advanced degrees to be able to compete with average people in the workplace. But, perhaps the most egregious over-educating of a sick person has to be with my one female cousin on my maternal side. After graduating with some generic Bachelors degree from a local no-name school, she worked poorly at a series of doctors/dentists office in Riverside, because after living with her father who paid all of her expenses, she then moved into the exact same building as her alcoholic mother who's a nurse. Yay!
She simply switched her needy codependency to her mother instead of her father. At work, she was told numerous times that she was extremely anti-social to the patients, so, guess what my aunt and uncle decided to do? Pay for her to go to nursing school! Of course! That's what you do with incompetent mental patients. Put 'em in a position to abuse with impunity! It was one of the worst decisions I'd seen yet from my mom and her siblings, but with my elderly grandmother ailing, her family went right down with her, without her constant advice and care. I'd seen it up close, too, what the doctors and healthcare aides complained about firsthand, because I observed my cousin at Nyack Hospital when my grandmother was there.
I could read the drug name and dosage from my seat at the foot of her bed (it was clearly marked as a saline solution in her IV drip), but my cousin made a big dumb show out of trying to read it (she failed), then requisitioning my dumber aunt to go get a real nurse so she could quiz her about an obvious thing like that, but only after I supplied her with pen and paper, because she had none. We had enabled her from the beginning of the visit to the end, and she was supposed to be the one in nursing school. It was an abomination and a tragedy, but I knew my uncle was desperate for her to be economically independent enough so she couldn't be a burden on him any longer, and that I understood.
My mom is also a huge burden, even though she lies about it, and at every level: economically, financially, psychologically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, both domestic and abroad. You should try taking a mentally ill woman with Multiple Sclerosis on the road sometimes, without consulting an expert like me, and good luck with that. My life is like planning a series of small military operations, because if me and my brothers forget just one small piece of the puzzle that my mom and her family surely neglect, then our lives are ruined before theirs. They make sure that they always come first. Try it with a group of the disordered, and you can start to feel a sense of what our family "vacations" are like: brutal hard work, in addition to all the work that piles up on our office desks in our absences, because we run businesses for other people, too.
There is absolutely no way this woman from my family should be working with sick people. She cannot take care of herself. Her parents made sure of that. My uncle and his daughter are negligent of other people's needs in the extreme. She barely sent me a few sporadic, tepid, generic, cheap Christmas cards, let alone show genuine emotion for me and my family. From him? Nothing. Not one thing ever. She has also never sent me a card, or a gift, or an email, or even talked to me openly at family gatherings unless she had to. This is the woman they let graduate from nursing school?! And do you know what she told me in my grandmother's hospital room, after I noticed her lack of clear observation? "I'm not going to be, like, a real nurse. I can do the paperwork the other nurse's don't have time to do."
Two college degrees costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for my uncle to shell out—and by extension, all of us—for a mentally ill healthcare aide who wants to sit in a chair and file papers all day. That's what you get for your time, effort, and money. Does that seem worth it to you? It's like my friend Cotto; we spent, as a society, millions of dollars in free programs pretending that a man who should be institutionalized just needed a condescending "helping hand" from the taxpayers, because he's seventh generation Hispanic. It's unreal! But, that's exactly where we wound up with him and so many other sick people of the world.
It's time we stop pretending that these poor slobs need jobs. They need a home, medicine, and healthcare. But vocational training in the healing arts? You've got to be kidding me. She can't tie her own shoelaces without help. Can you imagine your grandma needing her help with an IV drip? That crazy kid can't even look at blood! And yet, some city school in "tha 'hood" desperate for cash did that very thing. They took my uncle's money in exchange for his waste of a daughter earning a diploma from yet another city school that we all paid for with our taxes. And guess what her graduation photo looked like? One short, fat, ugly, and unpleasant-looking white girl posing with a bunch of proud-ass black women from around the way, and ain't that always the way, though? Enough. It's enough. I've had enough of it.
