"Yeah, you sleep. That's downtime."

This morning I woke up after a very quiet night to my father telling me that I had better hurry and mow the lawn since my mother had finished her weekly paperwork for her job and she and my father were going out at half past noon. I was back to doing the lawn today because my mother was home and my father doesn't want her to know about him mowing the lawn. Don't you love these little family intrigues? He swears that he told me last night that I would have to mow the lawn today, but I don't remember him saying any such thing, and I do remember everything we talked about last night. I think this morning was actually the first time it was said, despite what he may have meant to tell me.

So, I mowed the lawn in the morning, and from 12:30 on, I watched my grandmother. Doesn't sound like a lot of hard work, does it, just babysitting an elderly woman? But it's not that easy. She was having lunch when they left, and the minute that she finished eating, she started asking two questions... is it time to get undressed and go to bed, and is it time for dinner... you have to understand, she has about a two second span of memory, so even though I answered her many times, she just couldn't remember what I said. So every few seconds she would ask again, and I would tell her. This continued from the time she finished her lunch until 8 PM, when she went to sleep. It's kind of like Chinese water torture, the same two questions over and over again, every few seconds, steadily, for hours after hours... it gets to you. But yelling doesn't do any good. Nothing does. There's just no way to snap her out of the cycle.

And my parents didn't get home until 10. They had lunch out, stopped by my mother's job briefly to drop off some things that her employees needed, went bird watching for several hours, went shopping, went to church, and had dinner out. When they got home, I was told that I could have the computer "for the night." My mother is staying with my father tonight. I should explain, we have two houses... one is my grandmothers, and the other is ours. Our computer is in the one house, and myself and my father have been staying at my grandmother's house because she needs 24-hour care, and our own house is not set up in a way that would allow us to care for her... not even room for her to sleep over here, even if she could maneuver a walker through the doorways. So I'm over here on the computer, and she's staying over there with him. I have the computer all right, for as long as I can remain awake. And no rest for the weary, either, as soon as I'm off the computer in the morning (7 AM) I'll be back on-call with my grandmother at her house.

And people wonder why I need a vacation so badly when I'm unemployed.

I did bring up to my mother that I have a problem with having to stay up for 24 hours or more in a row just to have a little time to myself. I asked her why I don't get any downtime. Her response... well, see the subject line for tonight's post. That was her reply, word for word.

Well, by now I'm sure everyone is sick of my whining, I know I am, so I'm going to sign off for now... don't know if there will be any more posts tonight, I'm not sure how long I'll be staying awake, but I do intend to try to make the most of my first lengthy amount of time online for a while. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to salvage my sanity.

-Jarin