Worried Mothers

Today, while I was taking a shower, or rather, attempting the freezing uncomfortable struggle that B calls "a shower," the buzzer started going off at our front door. Weird, you can't even get to our door without a key to open the one downstairs in the street. I'm naked in the tub though, so there isn't much I can do about it. While I cling to life against frost bite the person outside, seemingly very impatient, is pressing the door bell over and over and over again. B is, of course, asleep- and, as I've said before, if it don't wake the dead it aint gonna wake B.

By the time I was out of the tub and had a towel around myself the person was gone but had left a note under the door. It was from B's mom. oh yeah.. I did send her an enraged email last night about B lazing about all day.

The night before I lost my usual chipper and caring composure when B was still asleep at 9 pm. I was SO FRUSTRATED WITH HIM that I screamed and kicked a box across the room at him. He still didn't stir.

I simmered down a little, and, like I used to do with K when he was in a similar funk, I prepared an offering of food. That finally got him up. Then, while he ate, I asked him if it was his medication that made him so tired. When he said yes, I told him that he needed to change his prescription. The drugs weren't helping him if they were making him sleep away his life. He explained that they were good because he didn't have stress and worries while he was asleep. I insisted that the only cure for his depression in the long run is to lead an active lifestyle.

Then he gets irritated and whimpers "Pleeease Lea, I iz knowing what iz good for me, okay?"

Then I loose it. I yell at him that "No, you obviously have no idea what is good for you!" I try to explain further that drugs that make him sleep instead of facing his problems are only prolonging his depression. Then I storm out, cry, and write a frustrated letter to his mom. whoops.

So I send her text saying that the door is unlocked and she comes back. I hide upstairs while I hear her crying in the kitchen with B. Dang! Looks like I stirred things up a bit.

Fortunately when I showed my timid face in the door I learned that she had come for other reasons as well. While B had been spending his life asleep, he'd been neglecting his adult duties; paperwork involving hospital stuff and rent stuff and work stuff that I couldn't really understand, so his mom had come to get some of it straightened out.

I ended up having to take her around the town to various places in centre ville to drop off paper work for B. She tried to talk to me about his problems and I explained the best I could, but she doesn't speak any English and my French is still terrible.

Anyway! I did notice when she jokingly called me B's nurse. So that's my life abroad, I guess. Laaaaaame. I mean, hurray, I'm helping someone by living with them, I suppose, but I'm starting to feel like I've been baby sitting depressed jobless men for the last 6 years of my life.

So, to perk myself up, I posted some more adds around town as an English tutor and sent some emails to piano teachers asking if any would risk giving lessons to an illiterate. I look forward to a more active life! I do I do!!!