Autism and Grief: April 2024

 This month we started working with our local authority's family support service.  It really helped.

Autism and Grief: March 2024

March was yet another eventful month.

Autism and Grief: February 2024

OK, so there's February which was yet another shitshow.  On Tuesday, 6th February I had to go to my local NHS Polyclinic for a hysteroscopy which turned out to be much more painful then I'd expected (although the letter did say to take painkillers beforehand, but my bloody mother poo-pooed that.) A coil was inserted which would reduce the intensity of my periods and provide birth control. I did say that I was forty-eight and recently widowed, so I had no need of the latter.

Afterwards I went back to my parents' house for a 'posh coffee' - ie one of those milk powder dehydrated ones. Mother started her high pitched barking coughing, told me that when she'd previously had panic attacks and wanted to die as a result. I started crying and my dad drove me home.

I registered Bob's death on 9th February. It was in the same venue my friend married her second husband back in summer 2022. It's also located in my Borough’s premier park.

I made an effort to get out more on guided walks around other woodlands. The verdant greens make me happy.

I ensured that I became Master Logic's DWP appointee. That was pretty painless as the EO made a home visit. On the same day I had the lock on the garage door replaced as I'd lost the key. The proprietor remembered Bob and expressed his sincere condolences. He also admired the house's high ceilings and enquired whether I wanted to remarry, which was a nice touch I thought. Of course, I didn't mention this in the subsequent 5* Google review.

I bought myself a whole load of Percy Pig merch from M&S to cheer myself up on St Valentine's Day. The mug is especially jolly. 

On the 15th February I had an appointment with my solicitor; Dad came along too. It was regarding the will and the ongoing issues with my brother-in-law's care home. Luckily as everything was bequeathed to me, the estate didn't go into probate.

On the 16th February it was my Mother's birthday. As we weren't speaking it was extremely tense. My brother and his family took Mum and Dad to a local cafe. We were due to visit Chislehurst Caves but Mum suddenly went walkabout sans phone. We thought that she'd topped herself. It was all bloody awful. She was fine but upset and confused.

On the 17th February I attended a talk in the library concerning local flight pioneers Alcock and Brown. I was particularly pleased to see the speaker open a picnic sized bottle of wine whilst stood at the lectern. 

I attended an initial meeting at a local charity which supports people with  disabilities and mental health challenges to secure work. It went well, but soon it all unravelled. At their advice I went to a Job Fair at my local job centre. It wasn't hugely productive - merely a chance for potential employers to hand out a clutch of weblinks. I did, however, manage to show an EO from the DWP my CV, but he merely stroked it and handed it right back to me, advising me to apply for vacancies on the Civil Service Gateway instead. 

My house was valued on 22nd February. I was impressed. I later made the decision not to sell. Along with my Dad, I viewed a rather dilapidated end-of-terrace house which was located a mile away from my parents' and brothers' respective houses. It was also smack bang in front of my old primary school and around the corner from my secondary school so the parking would be horrendous. The owner had gone into a care home, so the whole place needed thousands thrown at it. But, this was looming over it ...

Bullying and Disability Discrimination

My mother and brother are incredibly unsupportive about any kind of disability so I rowed with the latter last Sunday. The former helpfully suggested that I may wish not to disclose my disabilities to any future enployer. Gee thanks.

I am therefore technically still employed at the care home (well, as much as anyone can be on a pesky zero hours contract.) I attended a domestic staff team meeting yesterday afternoon and was sat facing one of the bullies. It wasn't nice, nor was the content of the meeting, quite frankly.

Anyway, today is the day I bit the bullet and made a formal written complaint about the discrimination and bullying I'd been experiencing during the six week period I'd worked there. The General Manager replied straight away, asking me to come in for a meeting next week, so I phoned the job retention officer at the local charity and sought his advice. He suggested that I make myself unavailable. I will be doing that as she made me burst into tears back in July.

2024: The Year of Crap Jobs

The problem with having a gap in one’s CV the size of the Mariana Trench is that the only escape is via National Minimum Wage (NMW) jobs. Please allow me to elaborate.

In June I attained a job in a local branch of Wetherspoons. It paid £11.67 or suchlike (NMW is, at time of writing, £11.44). This particular building contained far too many steps as it is a converted bank and bizarrely had two roof gardens!? The app made it more of a waitressing job and the shifts were all over the shop. The pub closed at midnight and clearup took 90 minutes to two hours, so I ended up getting home at half two in the morning. I managed a total of three shifts, resigning with immediate effect.

In July I forwarded my CV to a local care home. They were offering zero hour bank care work, so I was duly interviewed and offered the job on the same day. Unlike Wetherspoons I was given a whole raft of paperwork to complete and then a huge amount of online training. I attended an in-house 'moving and handling' course, finding that everyone there had worked in care since leaving school, unlike me. 

I had a really bad reaction to the CPR etraining, allied to the fact that I was being interviewed for a DfE role on the same day. This led to me seeking assistance from a local disability charity. The head of retention came along to a meeting with me, the General Manager and her deputy. It wasn't great - I was admonished for not declaring that I had bipolar and I didn't accept the job.

Time went on ... I was interviewed for office jobs and a Co-op role. Nothing succeeded. I then decided to re-look at the care home job and I started on 9th September. The first week was great - I was shadowing an absolutely lovely Care Assistant, but sadly this wasn't yo last.

My second weekend (Saturday 8am-8pm and Sunday 8am-8pm) was bloody awful. There was an absolutely foul care assistant I was teamed with on Saturday who picked on me all day. She and the senior care assistant made me accompany one of the residents to A&E, meaning that I was there for hours and ended up having to call the Deputy Manager to relieve me. On the Sunday there was a bossy Care Assistant who was a nightmare to work for so I ended up in tears, going home early. Following this, I did ask the deputy manager for Reasonable Adjustments via email, but they were never granted.

I worked there for twelve shifts in total. Although I never completed another 12-hour care shift, I didn't like it as the atmosphere was so strange, cliquey and unfriendly. I'd already changed my number to a burner phone so that I'd never see the WhatsApp messages which popped up all day every day. 

I don't regret it whatsoever.

Post #192 - Reach Out ... Be Rejected?

Now, I cannot recall whether I said that I used to be a member of the local branch of a national mental health charity's online regular quiz, music and general chat sessions?  Well, I was, but I won't name the charity in question because it'll be outing.  I left it because I got fed up with certain members' actions within the group, became bored with moaning about it to management and quite frankly, I think that I'm ready to be released back into the wild.  My bipolar and autism dual diagnosis doesn't seem to cope well with too much contact with other people with mental health problems nor others with autism.  That said, I do have a couple of excellent friends who have MH issues and we understand one another very well and I'd never abandon them, but I know them IRL and they've both known me for way over a decade.  I am a spiky person - like those darn spiny things on Mario:

There was one woman, let's call her Shaz, whom was a long-time member of the quiz group and who later on joined the music appreciation sessisons.  I really liked her and we had bantz - although it was an online group and we'd never actually met in person.  Until her recent retirement she was working, although thinking back, she might have been a permanent homeworker, but who can tell these days?  The morning session of the time before Easter that I decided to leave altogether, which wasn't a particularly nice day as the Police turned up on my doorstep following my report of sexual assault (see earlier posts ...) I offered her a book my son was gifted once on the Titanic as this is one of Shaz's  passions - she had various framed photographs and diagrams of the doomed vessel hanging on the walls of her flat.  Now I think about it ... MH problems?  Special interests?  I think that you know what I'm inferring but I won't say it ...

I passed on my deets (as the kids say) via the group leader and received a call a few days later (which I missed because I was napping).  This led to a text exchange which wasn't hugely friendly as Shaz stated that due to her physical disability she was unable to leave the house and that if I left the book in the charity's offices, her husband would pick it up.  I agreed but felt a bit, well, cheated.  I was kind of hoping that we could meet for a quick coffee but clearly she didn't want this.  When I dropped the book off this morning even the charity's receptionist seemed surprised at Shaz's rather odd behaviour, also believing that meeting up for a coffee and chat would have been much better than this rather strange way of operating.  I then WhatsApped Shaz to confirm that I've dropped the book off and then blocked her.  I know this sounds a bit odd, but if that's the way she is then I don't need or wish for any more contact as I don't want to start a row.  

Things will be better once I'm back at work as I'll just go to work, come home, contact my existing friends and then concentrate on my son.  That's the way it is.  

Post #191 - I don't even want to host my husband's belated wake ...

 ... well, I don't.  It would have taken place on a day next week which would have been his sixty-fourth birthday.  I just cannot bring myself to clean this house and prepare it for people to visit - I know that it's only really close family but I don't even really want them here if truth be told.  We would have scattered some of the ashes in one of the Royal Parks and the rest in a ruined abbey but there are so many of them that I've decided to scatter a flaskfull in each location and then either bury the rest in our back garden or line ceramic pots with them and grow nice plants on top.  

Why?  Well, that farrago that was Easter Sunday still rankles with me and I've got the grazed finger joints on my right hand to prove it.  One of the sofas is in the front sitting room and the other is in what I've called the laundry lounge - ie Master Logic's space, formerly used as the dining room/laundry/gym/art studio.  Actually, what is the point of dining rooms in today's modern world?  Surely they hark back to a time when families used to eat together, something we never do and totally alien to Master Logic's strange autistic world.