Meanwhile, my state governor continues to push “personal responsibility” in not requiring (or even allowing) businesses and schools to impose a mask mandate or require the COVID-19 vaccine, even for elementary schools where the entire student populace is under twelve years of age and can’t get vaccinated. This state is seriously going to turn into The Stand at some point, probably sooner rather than later. If we don’t spike with the most confirmed diagnoses in the entire country at some point, I am honestly going to be surprised.
I tried hard, y’all. I really and truly did try here.
After managing to stay off of prednisone long enough to get the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shot, and then managing to stay off of prednisone for fourteen days (long enough to produce satisfactory antibodies, or so we’re hoping), I had to go back on prednisone — my spirometry clearly demanded it, and in no uncertain terms. That begs the question of how robust my immune system really is after staying off of prednisone for as long as I did and then practically bouncing back onto it, but it’s not as though I had that much of a choice given that we are in the middle of a global pandemic that the United States is not responsibly handling. I mean, just look at the Delta variant sweeping across it, and look how many governors we have who say that masks should be “personal responsibility”, refusing to mandate them in probable large part because they want to get re-elected and think that imposing a(nother) mask mandate would hurt their chances at said re-election. It’s really absurd. And we are living through what may be the worst of it.
I hate the fact that I needed prednisone to begin with, but in this case it absolutely was what it was.
Some memories that I have of my mother…
Content warning: some of these may be distressful for people to read. You’ve been warned.
· being held down on the toilet as a small child, as I was screaming, to the point that my mother dug her nails into my skin and left marks where she had done so (marks that stayed after she was done and had to heal)
· her turning the television set off in the living room by ripping the cables from the wall, grounding me from going outside, turning the lights off in the kitchen, and crying in her bedroom to the point that she was screaming because I continued to struggle with the conventional grip of a pencil and continued to use “rock grip”… I eventually did learn how to write correctly, but a lot of that took longer than it should because of the trauma of this, and my mom’s over-enthusiastic one or two attempts to get me to learn to write normally
· telling me to my face while I was a child that I was the reason she wanted no more children
· always being told that I was bad, or how bad I was, when all of it was age-appropriate behavior
· never, not even once, being told how good my behavior was at any point in time, even when I tried
· not being interacted with beyond what she had to do with me, making it clear that she did not actually want a child and wanted to do no more than the bare minimum parenting while she kept the house clean
· not being shown affection as a child at any point that I could remember
When I say that I am extremely interested in, and motivated by, forgetting about my mother, I mean it.