My mom was a refugee after the divorce in 1993.  A simple church woman who had been a stay at home mom banking on a lifetime of conventional marital bliss was finally freed from my father's sociopathic emotional tyranny with no alimony, full custody of three boys, and half of the collegesaving fund, in the low five digits.   (and her fundamentalist doctrines forbiding remarrying)

A family friend got her a job at a doctor's office where she ran a referral desk and then began covering for everyone who called in sick when a larger hospital took over the practice.  

My brothers and I all made it through the university and my mom eventually moved into a condo, losing tens of thousands of dollars on the sale of the house in 2006, also overpaying for the new place despite being 'helped' by 'church friends'. 

The line held anyway until the beginning of 2008.  Co-workers had been blatantly mean to her for a year, standard office politics that she can't fathom, and she had become increasingly forgetful and emotional.

In August, citing an inability to do her job, promising her they would help her find a new position somewhere else in the giant hospital system if and when she got better, forced her into a leave of absence bureaucratically classified as a medical leave.    She had four months of various types of off-time accrued so she figured something would turn up, professionally or medically.

Now all of that time is gone and she is living on savings, which are down below 5 figures.  The hospital system, with 30 people applying for every job, many of them without forms of dementia, has not offered her a position and they still string her along.  Unemployment has been withheld because she was not laid off.   The hospital's insurance plan is rejecting her disability because there is no verifiable medical condition and her health coverage ends on Dec. 31.  

She is 55.  She cries when strength is required.  She gets angry and I've never seen her get angry.   She stumbles at every predicate and lives in fear of Alzheimer's disease.  She can't organize her life and lives between stacks of chaotic paper.  She can't sleep at night and sleeps randomly in the day.  The many  doctors have doubled her antidepressant medication, but they say that neither her medication nor menopause, neither depression nor ovarian cysts, neither strokes nor micro-strokes, could be the cause of her 'age-related dementia.'  

She can't learn or understand complex sentences.  Her handwriting is deterioating and she can't spell, sometimes crossing out and changing letters over and over again.   As I write this she is spending half of her savings taking a set of neurological tests that all of four of her doctors said she needed but that insurance refuses to cover.

I have found a renter that we can trust so that we can lease the place for the next six months after the turn of the new year.  Several members of the extended family and numerous friends of hers have large empty nest houses which she is welcome to stay at, but she is to ashamed to ask for anyone's help other than one church friend, whose tiny house happens to be filled with cats and boxes of junk.  

Now the question, is this a recession story? 

Consider that she voted for Bush, and every Republican ever, solely out of her belief that abortion should be illegal, that fetuses should have the same legal rights of children.   Consider that these are the same people who have been 'purging the rolls' of our social services of people who are 'able to work.'  Consider these are the same people working for a later retirement age and against universal health coverage.   Consider that they are the same people who let insurance companies salivate over the fine print, putting accountants in charge of doctors.  Consider the boom/bust housing cycle which allowed cheap sprawl houses to suck the value out of renovated family homes.  

Sure, this is my irony, my rage against an obvious class war, a nearly invisible civil war in my mom's generation, The Baby Boomer's, who I am otherwise so sick of hearing about.  Thomas Frank and Barbara Ehrenreich have thoroughly described this in terms so precise and painful my mom could neither comprehend nor cope with them.

I moved back in September after I grasped the fear, desparation and loneliness she felt in August.  She said in tears, nearly whimpering, 'You're too far away.'

Now I've been back and have been looking for jobs on my own.  Luckily I've found a good one, Tech Support will be booming as long as computers behave unpredictably.  

But there were those days in October, mom and I sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, watching the markets' crashing, her half-filled 401k being decimated, harbringers around every corner.   I helped her create a resume but she can't use gmail without my help.  I helped her find a leasee, but she can't believe she's losing her nice, modest condo and that she won't be hosting any holiday parties.   

She asked me why they won't give her a job.  She screamed that she won't see my nephews grow up and 'know who they are.'  She misses my ex-girlfriend and cries whenever she thinks about her. 

She tells me I'm too much like my dad and asks why I can't just be happy, and I'm weak, I rant about driving for 2 hours everyday through the bleak soulless intersections of St. Louis, how the damn Republicans She Voted For are responsible for sucking our lives of joy, for leaving us hanging, for making us not proud to be Americans.  

She walks upstairs and I get my perspective back and I say, 'I'm sorry mom, I wanted these last months to be happy times for us together.'

She says 'If they haven't been, it's your fault.'  And I know that's not fair and that she knows it's not fair, but still.  This is the reason I came back, because the specter of her absence overshadows everything, and she has to watch it all falling down, and now I'm called upon to make things right when I can barely keep a job and come to terms with my own failures?

Last night my paycheck finally escaped it's 7 business day hold and I started bawling on highway drive home, rethinking all of the times I hadn't been a comfort to my mom.  

So I stopped by Lion's Choice, our comfort food of choice, then went to Schnucks and got some olives and cheescake, mom's favorite, and when I got home I gave her a big hug.  

Then we watched an episode of the new Doctor Who and I paused it at every appropriate moment to expound with enthusiasm upon why it brought me joy.

I thought about ending it there on an upbeat, but really, this is 'to be continued' insomuch as I can keep posting here.  I originally intended this to be my political blog, but maybe that's the point of Recessiopression 09, the mess has gotten too personal.  

(Recessiopression = copyright 2008 Captain Xark)