Steady ... just have to build up a routine...

Wednesday, September 26, 2012 @ 11:01 am (end)

Good morning.

This is me.  We’re almost at schedule this morning for our “New Deal.”  We woke up about 4:30 – and it’s about 9:10 am now.  So about 4 ½ hours into first organizing the day and then we put 1 ½ hour into social media, and then we put 1 ½ hours into Domestic Goddess and now we’ve got 1 ½ hours to be blogging.  We won’t go into all the intricate details of the week.  Basically the general order is:

4:30 – 6 am         Organization

6 - 7:30 am          Social media

7:30 – 9 am         Domestic Goddess

9 – 10:30 am       Blogging/Director of PPA Social Media

10:30 -11:30 am  Editing/Studying Entry
11:30 - 12:30 pm Miscellaneous (relax)
12:30 – 4:30 pm  News DID/MPD Reading/Blogging

4:30 – 6 pm         Miscellaneous (relax)

6 – 7:30 pm         Academic – primarily reading/notes or studying Adobe for making courses on multiplicity

7:30 – 9 pm         Quilting

9 – 10:30 pm       Rich

10:30 – 4:30 am   Sleeping

And then there is a short task associated with all those categories.  In Total the categories are:

Academic

Blogging

Director of PPA Social Media

Domestic Goddess

Dr. Marvin

Miscellaneous

NEWS Reading/Writing

Organization

Quilting

Rich

Social Media

I’m sure other will be added and we’ll learn to adjust the time, but for the present … most of the majors are in.  We are also using something called the task timer, so that … here, refer to picture up above!

It is like a stopwatch that reminds you when it is time to move on to something else and it also lets you know by the pie graph your percentage of time spent on which tasks.  It’s a pretty simple devise.  We might check to see if it loads on the … nope … don’t see an app for loading it on the Android OR iPhone yet.  It will take some time and I’m sure there are others on it.  We’ll see.  I think we’re going to test it in a minute by putting it on pause while we finish bringing up the load of clothes from downstairs.  So far as the domestic stuff goes - we picked up in the kitchen, filled the dishwasher and washed surfaces, then we of course did the load of clothes and then picked up the living room and vacuumed, plus washed the tables, and then we picked up in the bedroom, and emptied the suitcase that still had stuff in it from the trip to NM.  That’s pretty good for us by 9 am, right?

Good-good.  We’re back.  It’s now 9:51 am and the clothes are all put away – either in drawers or closet, or in the stack to be steamed.  I forgot to add we did the litter box AND took down and out the garbage.  We then earned 5 minutes of Rich time WOOHOO!!!!  That was a good deal.  He’s giving me trouble on putting away the suitcase, but to be fair he is now in the shower so is progressing his day too. I really like that we are both in the house doing our own work.  It wasn’t too bad doing housework while he was here.

Yesterday, with Dr. Marvin, we went into almost a FULL hour on housework.  It was terrible.  I think he gave us a few moments to just mention the girls and quilting, and he got in a few moments at the end with talking about the bill, but not much … pretty much it was a segue to leaving the office.  I think we started off something like … we had during Tuesday done Domestic Goddess things such as we steamed 9 clothes and we went through all the business and personal paperwork and sorted it to accordion files, which cleaned up the areas on top of the horizontal file and drafting table, along with having gone through papers in both file drawers that hadn’t been filed yet.  I think we’d done some pre-sorting, but for the most part it was work since the beginning of the year.  It really had to get done and now we have to spend time going back through it and looking for current bills. 

But, after that we started to talk to Dr. Marvin about the complications of having done what we did.  It seemed there was a big deal of anger in that we didn’t want to do the work while Rich was around, and we didn’t want him telling us what to do, though acknowledging that if he wasn’t there pushing us … we might not be getting the work done.  As we went along … it seemed to get darker and darker.  Dr. Marvin told us afterward that we’d been mad first at Rich, and then Dr. Marvin, but for the majority of the time, we were really mad at our father.

We have to figure it was Annemarie that was out because she was moody and quiet, but as well, Gracie was out in that we got to one position of having our arms held over our head and then we froze there for a long time.  We couldn’t let Dr. Marvin in, but we were in a space where we were trying to hold off our father’s touching us by the internal anger expressed to him without words – just facial which was turned away from him.  There were other things getting to that point in that we’d gone through a quick jump of time from when we were cleaning the rooms (dining room, kitchen twice weekly, and stairway), but at the time we were frozen we were going through the time period where my father had taken over the cleaning and woke us up on Saturday mornings to join him and my siblings.  This is something that felt very invasive of our privacy.  For a while we remember being under the dining room table just to be there and then at another time being under there to clean.  I remember now saying something to Dr. Marvin about not understanding why we had to dust the legs of the table every week.  I don’t remember where we went with that statement though everything seemed to be making us mad.  It was a terrible space.

I think what made it so terrible is going over and over a part that was fuzzy, but was about him touching us and us having to be very still.  I’m not sure at this point, but I’m thinking that the initial requirement to be still came from him, and then held by us through our anger.  We were also having trouble with not only laying on our back with arms held up, but flashbacks of being spanked bare naked and also situations where someone was using an anal thermometer.  Things were coming in and out of each other … so one scene would progress and there we would get stuck or someone would add another element, but in general it was a period of discovery.  I think Dr. Marvin might have tried to talk with us, but whoever was out was not going to talk with him.  I think in the system we wanted to figure out as much as that sense of mood was going to take us. 

I think toward the end somehow we got to a more worrisome part (Casey) who was worried most likely about how to contain the things that had been going on.  I don’t think she has a direct link, but that she was a portal for some of what had been happening.  I remember something about Dr. Marvin saying that we were safe in his office and that that would be a place we could talk about the stuff going on.  I don’t really know what his real words were and it really seemed as if he was on an outer border of what was happening.

Now we are thinking slowly into a part where we can acknowledge that something like this had been happening with Dr. Marvin before the big trip.  I think it had something to do with our father, not sure about the mother part.  Not sure what had gone on with the father part AND Dr. Marvin before, but we might ask if the two parts seemed connected.  We just have a sense that my father has been a big deal of late. 

We really didn’t think much of him over the time we were gone.  Very little time went into anything of our past though I’m sure there were feelings that long night of the wedding when we were just sitting back in a daze watching over the events - just trying to keep our foot in the door.

We had a hard time getting out of the funky space we were in leaving Dr. Marvin’s office.  The drive home was slow and methodical.  We paid attention to the traffic, and about the point of being on the expressway at Kedzie we thought to call Rich.  I don’t remember why.  Oh yeah we were wondering if he had gone to his son’s or not.  It had been an option.  I guess he did see Jon, but did not see Christopher or the baby.  We didn’t hear much back from that except Jon had looked into getting an email for Rich’s business account.  As an aside, we did talk to Rich a little about business this morning.  We went through Linked-in to show him what needed to be done next.  We told him about sections that could be filled-in and the we walked him through adding his 344 some friends who did have LinkedIn (from his AOL account) and then we showed him the list of friends who could get an email from LinkedIn suggesting that they sign-up.  We showed him where to put his skills and accomplishments and his Summary area where we could add a blurb about his business.  Rich is going to need going through his email list and sort through some people.  It’s a good first step.

We also told Rich that we’d worked him into the schedule so that for 6 hours a week (to start), we would be taking care of his social needs as Director of his Social Media campaign.  I figured that on Sunday, Wednesdays, and Friday’s we could blog, and then on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday we could work for him – and all of this would be in the time slot of 9 – 10:30 am.  It might not seem like a lot, but it seems like a lot to me.  He seems to have a grasp on what we’re offering him and he doesn’t have any complaints so far.  Just that we have to balance things out with the largest balance of time going into the NEWS DID/MPD project.  That is our main thing and it seems most of the other stuff is healthy maintenance.

Today, we are pretty close to the set-up schedule, but about a half hour off with the blogging because we stopped to take care of the clothes out of the dryer and then we stopped when Rich brought-up the mail to take care of mailing our medical bills to Medicaid.  We gave Rich yesterday the signed lease for the apartment, and then today we gave him a sealed envelope for Medicaid.  I think they are going to send us a letter saying how much we need to pay UIC, and that will be ok.  I don’t think anything really happened in August.  I forget the last time we received a Medicaid card.  I think someone from their office sent something saying if we wanted the card we had to ask specifically for it.  I think they are cutting down their time and mailing cost, but it makes things more difficult for the user. 

Ok, maybe had a little side-trip there, but going back to Dr. Marvin’s … after we left, we had called Rich as we just stated, but he said dinner wouldn’t be ready for another 20 minutes, so we stopped by at the 7-11 and bought a candy bar which we ate on the way home.  After we got upstairs we may have talked to Rich for a few moments, but mostly we got ourselves comfortable.  Then we had salad left over from the weekend with the girls, and then Rich gave us polish sausage, au gratin potatoes, and soft French bread for dinner.  I think about the time that Rich was finishing – we had already finished – the subject of therapy had come-up.  The system only said that it was a hard time and that we were talking about housekeeping and that we had been very angry.  We sorted out then that he had been a trigger, but not the one we were really angry with.  Rich was in a dismissive mood, so we refused to go further with him.  We explained that anything we said he would dismiss as something in the past and so not relevant.  He has a big breach of understanding in this regard, and we felt very frustrated that he refused to better understand so we could actually talk to him about what was happening.  His idea after dinner was that he would watch TV and that we use the computer, and then in about an hour or so, we would watch the season opener to NCIS.  BUT, we weren’t there in our head.  We were still feeling somewhat sick from the session and the room was way too noisy or distracting.  We were also too distracted to focus on computer work.  So we went into the bedroom and just laid down in the dark.  Rich came in at some point, or two to try to get us out of the room, but the system was having nothing to do with taking care of him.  We needed to take care of ourselves in a parts way which meant settling parts within the system down.  We might have dozed for about ten minutes, but most of the time seemed to be spent hyper-alert.  We were very aware that Chief had come-up to lie next to us, so it didn’t feel like we were by ourselves, but it did feel like the environment where we were younger and were inside our bedroom while the family was downstairs watching a very noisy TV.  Rich’s show had been having serious melodramatic moments where there were heavy duty bomb or gunfire scenes.  It left us feeling a bit overwhelmed.

After a while – probably about 8 pm, we came out and got our medicine and then we laid down for another half hour of not being able to sleep.  Eventually, we came out and watched the NCIS show with Rich with us laying in his lap, but what else happened not sure.  Wait … I think we talked to Linda after for a few moments, but not many … she wanted to go to sleep and we were minutes into following her though to opposite bedrooms.  And, that was pretty much of our night.

I do remember thinking that we’d been in somewhat this kind of space before, maybe more of Dr. Woollcott’s time where we had to be very conscious of holding things together or normalizing until the next appointment.  Things feel a little raw.  Dr. Marvin started something that seemed newer where he wasn’t going to give us any breaks – or if so, not many and far in-between.  I think that means mostly to us that when we try to back out of a direction that is happening, he is holding us to that … and if we’re having faulty logic like exaggerating the importance of something then he is going to nail us with more reality than we might have wanted. 

It feels like we were then brought through the wringer.  I’m thinking that Dr. Marvin does this all the time?  Maybe he’s just getting more direct.  I don’t know … it’s a little fear producing.  Maybe a lot more, but the bottom line is that we do trust him.  Just not sure what’s going to happen next.  It seems that a lot of time is being spent in a regressed state.  The parts are more locked into the past.  And, it seems that a lot of it is being done through feelings.  So when Dr. Marvin pushes us we’re getting stuck with the dreadful feelings from our past and then we live through it again.  I’m not sure what kind of time this is going to take.  If we cover all the years pressed together of negative feelings we were having … it could be a long time.  I’m not thinking Dr. Marvin is giving us too much a break – though more the sessions right before and after the big vacation were an allowance of light time. 

But, by now our timer has gone off and it is time to get started on something else.  Thanks for your patience with us.

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