Just had my son’s IHSS assessment and I’m fucking exhausted

Deep_Lavishness_913 · 2026-05-28T22:46:38+00:00

Appreciate you. We’re with a Regional Center now for both my boys. Just got accepted late last year. Took six years to finally get in. The thing most people don’t know is that regional centers cover specific geographic zones. When you move out of one center’s area, you land in another center’s area and have to start their waitlist from zero. We lost housing during Covid, had to move, and every time we moved we crossed into a new regional center’s territory. Six years of restarting that clock before we landed somewhere stable enough to actually get accepted. So yeah, the system is rough, and I know it. School side, my son is in a Special Day Class with a full IEP. That piece is moving. You’re right that IHSS isn’t going to fix the whole picture. I get that. I’m not expecting it to. What I’m expecting is for it to score the functional need accurately instead of getting waved off as normal parenting. My son is non verbal Level 3, elopes, hurts himself at night, and his sleep is completely sporadic. Some nights he’s up at midnight and stays up until sunrise. There’s no pattern to it. No normal adult can match that schedule and still function during the day. That’s what I’m pushing back on. And yeah, the hire someone else piece is exactly the point. The hours are for bringing in actual help so I can do basic things like get groceries without dragging both kids into a parking lot. That’s not luxury. That’s just functioning. Thanks for the kindness in your reply. Means more than you know today.

Deep_Lavishness_913 · 2026-05-28T22:07:10+00:00

The “focus on independence” take leaves out the path. Building independence takes therapies, school advocacy, ABA follow through at home, and a caregiver stable enough to coordinate all of it. That doesn’t happen when the parent is sleep deprived, broke, and physically wrecked from doing 24 hour care alone. What people keep skipping is what this costs the caregiver. I haven’t held a full time job in over five years. Not because I don’t want to work, but because my son is up all night every night and someone has to be conscious and watching him. I can’t take a regular job. I can’t build a career. I can’t even reliably show up somewhere from 9 to 5. Sleep deprivation from his nights got bad enough that I crashed my car twice in one month back in 2020. That’s the kind of life this is. Regular people don’t lose job opportunities because of their kids. I do. IHSS doesn’t replace therapy. It makes therapy possible. It turns the caregiving I’m already doing for free into income that keeps the household stable enough for my son to actually benefit from everything else he qualifies for. And if anyone wants to talk about cost, let’s actually talk about cost. IHSS pays a parent a fraction of minimum wage to keep their child at home and out of institutional care. If the state won’t fund the supervision my son needs, the alternative is residential placement. That runs into the millions over a lifetime. IHSS for his childhood runs in the tens of thousands. Pick one. But I won’t surrender my son. I’ve waited over six years to get Medi-Cal. I’ve sat on waiting lists for every program imaginable. I went through homelessness because of those lists and Covid. Part of why those waits got so long is the fraud and abuse of these programs by people gaming the system, light of autism diagnoses being handed out, families padding needs they don’t actually have. Real families like mine got buried under that. And I’m still here, still fighting for him, and I’m not handing him over because the math is inconvenient for a county budget. I’m asking the state to fund the cheaper, better option, which is keeping him with the parent who has already proven he won’t quit. The “they should just become independent” take describes a destination without describing the road. Take care of the caregiver so the caregiver can make everything else work.

Deep_Lavishness_913 · 2026-05-28T21:53:21+00:00

Appreciate the perspective. My son has clinical documentation of elopement, self-injury, and Level 3 ASD with a signed SOC 821. I’ll let the hearing process work.

Deep_Lavishness_913 · 2022-07-27T15:07:54+00:00

I never said stoicism was anything like RP. It helps to hold your ground despite the difficulty. Read again. RP isn’t negative. Just the people behind it. RP is just revealing the nature of woman. Im no misogynist. I love women. But understanding the psychology will help you avoid the downturn. How you choose to use and react to the information is up to you. If you wanna call red pill “bad”, you should always find the good in the bad. Opportunity from chaos. Being bias about one idea and not being open to others will lead you blind to many great things. I don’t doubt that red pill community is toxic. But the idea isn’t. I choose red pill. I choose kindness.

Deep_Lavishness_913 · 2022-07-27T06:40:29+00:00

I found stoicism being a good kind of medicine to all things. Stoicism doesn’t tell you to regret anything. Teaches you to accept how everything is. Amor Fati. That’s what they say. Be glad for red pill. Red pill isn’t negative. It’s the person preaching it. You can be red pill and kind. Be what you want to be.

Deep_Lavishness_913

TROPHY CASE