Journal: 04/30/06

The resident managers of the motel went to a wedding today and I took over early, at 10:00 AM. Sunday is traditionally slow in the afternoon anyway and with the managers gone, I took a little nap to compensate for getting up three hours early.

Tomorrow will be a fun day, it’s the national immigration boycott and mainly Latino people will join it. We gave the maids off as a gesture of support, so that means no maids tomorrow to clean rooms. Luckily, I’ll be home all day and it’s my day off, so I expect to be putting out fires in the morning. All of our maids will come in on Tuesday to clean rooms, we’ll just put the dirty vacant rooms "out of service" for the duration.

Going through the Sunday newspaper today I noticed that Mother’s Day is due two weeks from today and it gave me pause. All three of the women I’m used to celebrating Mother’s Day with are now all gone, Joann, Joann’s mother and my mother. May 14^th looks to be a long day. More on that on the fourteenth.

When My Schedule Suddenly Changes

Inertial coasting has been my life for the last three weeks. Although it looks as though I’m starting to surface from my shell-shocked state, I still have problems with radical change. Change, like when I suddenly have to stay an extra hour or two behind the front desk. Sometimes, the resident managers don’t let me know until the last minute, and it upsets my anticipated rhythm. I’m expecting to go home at 10:00 PM and now have to stay until midnight.

I know this is a petty thing, but I have been a bit fragile lately and sudden changes annoy me. I realize that I’m "on-call" all of the time, but that usually means after I go home or on my day off. Calling me at 9:00 AM to have me come into work at 10:00 AM when I normally would be in at 1:00 PM annoys me as well. Nevertheless, this annoyance factor is a new feature of my personality.

I think it is because I have been doing the "going through the motions" thing for the last three weeks and that I don’t have any real control over my space right now, I react oddly to sudden change. I rely on my time-driven touchstones so much that any deviation from the general daily plan causes me serious angst.

I hope that as I start to become motivated about taking control again, this facet of my personality will disappear. It drives me nuts that I feel that I have lost control over my life, but the grief I have been experiencing since Joann’s death completely excised whatever control I had before from me. Flexibility was always one of my hallmarks, and I have to get back there. Then, that will be a sign of recovery.