Wit and Wisdom
by Beth Broderick
“Mom, why are you hitting me?”
I always tried to reason with her: “I am trying to help you.… Come on, Mama, we can do this.”
We were trying to make one of her recipes for Easter dinner with the girls. She did not have dementia, but her COPD was very advanced, and she was not getting enough oxygen to her brain. She had confused the lime jello recipe with a canned cranberry concoction. I was trying to help her sort it out. The goal was to fill the green gelatinous goo with nuts and pineapple and cottage cheese. Yes. I agree. Ewwwww. Like I said it was HER recipe.
She threw her spoon down and gave me a sharp elbow to the ribcage.
“Because I am a useless piece of shit!” she cried.
She stormed out and went to smoke a cigarette in the small apartment which was situated behind my sister’s home. We had relocated her to it after one particularly violent episode on my brother’s property convinced us that it was no longer safe for her to live there. My brother was and is an incautious individual prone to rages of his own, but in all fairness, he had been coping with her for a good while. It was our turn again and I had years before taken a long ride in the barrel of supporting her, so I was relieved and grateful when Laura and her wife stepped up with lodgings.
Once she arrived in Los Angeles, we all settled back into the relationship that defined my early life with her: Mom bedeviling and abusing Laura and her wife, as she had the younger kids in our childhood home; me riding into the rescue to absorb as many blows as possible. Mom hating me for it. That was how we rolled when I was young, and the pattern had returned with a vengeance.
When I’m throwing punches in the air. When I am broken down and I just don’t care.
-----Sheryl Crow, “Strong Enough”
I have been angry lately. I am not good at that. Anger terrifies me; it dislodges me from my rational mind. It has been haunting my sleep and distracting my days.
Having been exposed to relentless rage for decades, I have no idea what healthy anger might look or feel like, but I have recently thrown my fair share of hard right hooks into the wind.
This is not, thankfully, a frequent state of mind for me. It is due in large part to the predictable fallout from first the Pandemic (which is not over; I have several friends who are very sick right now), then the Screen Actors Guild strike which continues to wreak havoc on many of us, and now the start in earnest of a political season that promises to be exhausting.
It’s all just pissing me off.
BELOW THE BELT.
My qualifying period for health coverage through SAG began in April of last year when we all went on strike. Except the folks that didn’t--the “interim agreement” people rich enough to take their productions overseas, or poor enough to work on non-union projects for pennies.
The strike lasted deep into the Fall, running right up to the holiday season, a notorious dry period. This was followed by the “Sundance” break in January. This leaves folks on my qualifying track with about 9 weeks to make the requirement. A bit dodgy, that. I of course made enough in residuals to make the cut, but the good people who decide such things have declared that my 65th birthday at the end of February, approximately 5 weeks before my earnings deadline, means that they won’t count. If you are 65 and older, it has been decided that nothing counts. Most of us have enough “Age and Service” credits to be allowed to buy into our program for life, but that decades-long tradition has also been eliminated.
For the first time in well over thirty years I will not be insured through my union.
We are not supposed to talk about it. That is just not done.
Ms. Ellen Barkin has been very vocal about the absurdity of this and has been relentlessly attacked for having a net worth which should afford her whatever plan she wants to buy. She did not stand up and say, “I am too poor to be treated this way.” She just pointed out that this is going to affect a lot of people, and that the new “rules” are deeply hurtful to our veteran members and also clearly unfair and frankly ridiculous.
For the record, people’s “net worth,” according to the completely unreliable Wikipedia, is always greatly exaggerated. Last time I looked, mine was said to be about three times what I actually have, but while I am nowhere near the level of Ms. Barkin by most measures. I will be able to make it work, though, It will be expensive and it promises to be a tad tricky.
I have a “pre-existing” condition called Psoriatic Arthritis. This means I need medication that is both somewhat caustic and very costly. I am grateful to have it, side effects and all, because it is keeping me upright. The poorly insured are not given the option for this kind of disease management. Many are simply given steroids and pain pills and told to go away. I had a doctor years ago when this all began who refused to switch my meds, even after it was clear that they were making things worse, not better.
“I have patients who are in wheelchairs,” he told me. “You walked in here. You are fine.”
Needless to say, I got a different doctor, switched to a less toxic (for me; everyone reacts differently) injection and kept right on walking. But boy, oh boy, did that make me mad.
So here we are again. Like so many Americans and so many many older Americans, I am being thrown to the health-care wolves. I will be fine, of course. I am resourceful, and I have options, and I will find a way to thrive, but that is not the point.
The point is that this sucks, and folks are going to get hurt in more ways than one. I am angry.
I have been trying and trying to find a way to stop my brain from wheeling around and around making the same argument against it over and over again. A pointless exercise; a waste of precious time. There is no one in particular to blame. The people who led the strike are not the same as the ones who are now using it to purge the healthcare rolls. None of them asked for my opinion and if advice from the likes of George Clooney and Tyler Perry—men who are smarter than me, men who have built empires—has been ignored, then my words will most certainly fall upon deaf ears.
The person I am really pissed off at, of course, is myself. How did I let this happen? How did I not beat the nearly insurmountable odds of it all? Why did I think that the circumstances surrounding this situation would be taken into consideration? How could I be so stupid and trusting and fallible?
TAKE A SWING AT.
Deep breaths and long walks are helping. I fell into my sisters' house Monday night and we just hung out, made red sauce from scratch, and Zoomed with our nieces. The oldest, Lauren, is pregnant, and we are all thrilled. I am distracting myself with Spanish lessons and keeping company with folks I love. I got to make dinner for one of my ‘chosen” nieces and her family last night. I held her newborn one-month old daughter in my arms and thought.
“Okay, kid. I am on it. I am going to go back out there and do all I can to secure a better path ahead for you and for my other precious niece, and all of the innocents who are heading toward us into this world.”
The future will be what we make of it. That has always been so.
My Mom let her rage consume her. When it came on, she swung wildly at whoever was in her path. I don’t like feeling mad; it makes me truly uncomfortable. But I am determined to channel my anger in a constructive way. I don’t care about the “unspoken” rule against speaking out.
Life is long. I have always been up for the fight. I am just getting started…
On we go …
P.S. This is not a plea for advice. I will find a good consultant and buy Plans BCGDQ, etc. Also, darling actors, please don’t tell me to call our very own “Via Benefits” folks. I made an appointment with them and when I called in at the determined hour, a pre-recorded voice told me that the, “wait time” on hold would be 90 minutes. Yeah, no. My time has value. My life matters, at least to me.
I know that am not supposed to speak of this, and I don’t care. I deserve better. We all do.
P.S.S. If you see Ellen B., tell her I said 'hi.' Tell her I said 'well done.'"
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Punches in the Air