I tap through my phone to the LifePlanX app. According to my schedule, I’m due to go home and spend some time doing chores. Plan the work and work the plan, that’s the saying. I wish it were always that easy, though.
I think I’ve tried every system available to humanity that’s supposed to get your life under control, but none of them have helped. My bullet journal bit the dust last winter, when I finally accepted Mom’s dementia was too bad for her to live alone. It was a beautiful notebook full of carefully hand-drawn calendars and lists, which slowly devolved into roughly scribbled pages of names and phone numbers in different color inks, a written microcosm of my resentful journey through the healthcare system.
Once Mom had been moved to Glen Lake, I put that notebook aside and turned to an award-winning, minimalist online tasker. That was abandoned five months ago, when checking through the previous weeks, I finally realized that my to-do lists confirmed what I had only dimly suspected up until then—that I was getting assigned my own projects less and less in favor of taking on tasks for others…or for one other person in particular. Todd, my marketing department manager, was blocking my advancement by giving my projects to his slimy protégé, Brent.
I turned to journaling as a release, diligently recording my feelings every day until Todd grabbed my arm during a company event and held on a little too long, while his other hand grazed my hip. No big deal, right? It was a crowded room. Just a mistake, no need to make a fuss, so I tried to laugh it off. I did the same thing the next week when he backed me into a table after I gave him the projections I’d printed out, joking that his bad eyesight meant he had to lean in close. I said nothing when he spent an entire meeting staring at me before saying he liked exotic-looking girls. That’s when I put the journal away. I had no desire to relive my days with a written record.
“Stop it,” I say softly to my phone. “Stop.”
I never say those words to Todd. When it first started happening, I convinced myself this was my issue, not his—I was overreacting or being too sensitive. I’d been too self-conscious to do anything but laugh, not wanting to cause a fuss and embarrass him or needlessly put my job at risk.
The decision to see Fred the Lawyer came to me as I curled up in bed one morning fighting nausea because of another job rejection. It wasn’t normal to cry myself to sleep every night. Something had to give.
My phone dings with yet another LifePlanX notification, triggering a Pavlovian instinct to accomplish something, anything. The message flashes on my screen. Not on track? Sit with that, said the coyote to the bear.
What the hell does that even mean?
I decide I don’t need the additional pressure of a phone that constantly reminds me of my failures. “Coyote this,” I whisper as I press the little shaky X in the app’s corner.
Yet the moment it disappears from the screen, I feel lost. I’m not proud of my dependence on these kinds of things to maintain focus (“It’s like you need a corset for your brain,” my über-organized friend Anjali said), but I do. I admit it. I love lists. I crave them. I draw visceral pleasure from anything I can put a line through, a check beside, or delete as a declaration that I have Completed a Task and am therefore a worthy, functioning human.
But until I download a new, shinier list maker, it looks like I’m on my own.
I walk to the nearest subway stop and briefly hesitate on the platform. Without the restrictions of my app-planned day, I can either go home and wallow in self-pity or visit my mom. Actually, going home isn’t even a real option, because Mom takes priority over pretty much everything.
Thirty minutes later, I’ve reached my stop and am walking the three blocks to Glen Lake. It’s a muggy June afternoon and layers of nasty, sweaty stickiness form on my skin, perfectly mirroring my internal state (level: trash goblin). I take a moment to breathe in deeply and force the negative energy away. Seeing Mom is hard enough without going in already dejected.
“You can do this.” I give myself a mini pep talk before pressing the intercom button at the main entrance. After all, it’s not like I’m the one who has to live here. I only have two jobs: to pay for Agatha Wu Reed’s single room and to look cheerful when I visit.
The door opens, but I linger at the threshold like a vampire waiting for an invitation. An older woman walks out and I step out of her way with a quick apology, immediately regretting it because I did nothing to be sorry for. It’s a bad habit that has become an automatic reflex. She’s followed by an elderly gentleman who reaches for her hand and lovingly tucks it up against his chest. I try to suppress the hungry look I know comes into my eyes as I stare at their intertwined fingers, because no one wants to broadcast their loneliness to others.
It’s not like I’m lonesome all the time or pining for a Prince Charming, but sometimes there’s a part of me—maybe twenty percent—that wants that kind of connection so badly it hurts. The other eighty percent is more sensible. I have too much on my plate to be thinking about relationships right now, and it’s much easier to only have my mom to care about. Putting another person’s concerns and needs into the mix would only make things harder.
Covering my sigh, I catch the edge of the door before it closes and step inside.
The woman at the nurses’ station looks up as I approach. We’re both familiar with each other at this point.
“How is she?” I ask.
“Eating well,” she answers in a brisk tone.
I wait, but that’s all the information that seems to be forthcoming. “How about her mental state?” I nudge politely, not wanting to nag or ask too many questions.
“Any word on the new home?” The nurse’s neat sidestep is answer enough. The entire floor knows I’m trying to get Mom into the Xin Guang private care home on the other side of town.
I shake my head. “Nothing open yet.” It could take another year for a room to open, which would at least give me more time to save. Private care is expensive.
The nurse nods with practiced sympathy, a gesture I’ve become intimately familiar with since Mom entered Glen Lake. “Something will come up,” she assures me. “It always does.”
That something will come up I have no doubt, but it means I need to have the money to pay for it, which means I need my job, which means putting up with Todd and the hell he’s making of my life. I finish signing in and head down the hall.
Glen Lake is clean, reputable, close to my apartment, and the staff are kind. Logically, I know I’m lucky to have found Mom a room here. I don’t feel lucky. All I feel is hate. I hate the omnipresent sickly smell of bleach and soup that permeates the rooms, no matter what’s served for lunch. I hate the colors—a faded mix of salmon and seafoam I’m sure someone thought was a soothing combination but instead gives the impression of a 1970s bathroom in desperate need of renovation. While I’m hovering above my pit of hostility, let me also drop in the bland, silver-framed art prints on the walls. They’re all still-lifes of snapdragons and landscapes or cutesy animal posters. In fact, there’s one by my mother’s room of an adorable little white kitten sitting next to a pink carnation that I see each time before I go in, and you know what? I hate that, too.
Most of all, I hate the lost expression I see on Mom’s face whenever I open her door.
I pause and put all of it—work, Todd, money, the lawyer—out of my mind and arrange a pleasant smile before I push open the door and see Mom sitting on a beige vinyl chair near the window, staring at nothing as soft classical music plays from the television. I watch her for a moment, my jaw clenching so hard my teeth start to ache. She used to be a woman who knit and sewed and painted. She made her own yogurt and bread. She did aerobics back when people unironically wore leotards with little elastic belts and matching leg warmers. It hurts to see her so inactive.