When the social workers call...

I warn you I am not feeling insightful today, which isn't to say that I always spout great insights, but to the extent that I am privy to them in general, they feel far from me today.

I am just having a day, a not great day, not catastrophic day, but a day where I really should be working on my seemingly endless to do list (to be accomplished in a very small amount of hours in my week), but need to take a few minutes to deal with the persistent irritation gnawing at me this morning.

I swear my mother knows somehow when I am having a bad day.  Either that or I anticipate her contact and begin to have a bad day...regardless sometimes I am left with a creepy and unpleasant feeling that we are still somehow connected.  I know.  It is probably just a coincidence, but sometimes man the coincidences are uncanny.

The details of my irritating morning aside, as I'm sure we can all imagine just such a morning, I receive 2 calls from my mother in the midst of it.  They go straight to voicemail, as all calls from Massachusetts do these days.

Did I mention she is in Massachusetts?  Well, yes.  After my last post, my heartbreaking day with my mother and the homeless shelter, my mother got traveler's aid to take a one way bus to Boston.  She called up an old neighbor indicating that she was coming up for business and could she stay with him for a couple of days.  "Sure" he said.  Little did this poor guy know, she was moving in with him.

A few days later I got a call from the first hospital, Brigham and Women's.  The social worker was amazing.  Really got it.  It was a great call, at least for me.  But, of course, even when people get it, she can elude services and so, nothing came of it.

Last week I got another call, from another social worker, from another hospital.  I tried to repeat the conversation, but this social worker didn't get it as well, or was overwhelmed by my information, or shocked by my flat affect on the phone.  People call me up, understandably, and say "Please don't worry, you mother is okay, but she is in the hospital here..." and I think it throws them off when I don't show any signs of worrying and at this point probably don't sound like I care (and truthfully, when I know she is in the hospital I know she is getting meals and a bed and baths, so I may even sound relieved).

Well, now my mother is out.  She wants me to send her stuff.  She wants me to know how she is working on her "alcoholism".  She loves the alcoholism diagnosis.  It is a diagnosis that somehow fits for her and can garner enough sympathy and provides an endless group of AA participants who will buy her story and give her a couch...until they also realize that what she has goes beyond alcoholism.

I write today just to share and say that the endlessness of this sometimes just makes me fatigued.  I'm not even involved, really, aside from the occasional calls from social workers and people who say "you do know her car is in an impound lot?!" Well intentioned people for the most part, but I just don't even have the energy to call back sometimes.  I am seriously considering a form letter than can be emailed/faxed etc to the next social worker or enabler because this whole 30 minute synopsis of my mother's diagnosis is exhausting.

And now that she is out of the hospital I am frankly just wondering when the next call will come.