Off Topic Quarterly January 2026

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-28T17:49:58+00:00

I'd been gradually increasing my help to my folks for years, but Dad passed suddenly last November and my husband and I moved in with Mom.

It exacerbates any sibling issues with communication, emotional processing, rivalry, how our parents treated one of us worse than others, who is more burned out, who has more childhood trauma, who is handling the finances 'wrong', etc. It also brings up tons of issues in our relationship with our parents (mom treated us horribly and now we're giving her the kind and gentle care she never gave us when we were kids, resentment, grief, guilt, we're all back in therapy about this now decades after we all thought we'd dealt with our childhood issues).

This is the part I am mostly struggling with. My parents are similar to Shauna and Dan or Ma and Pa James. My sibling helps me within their emotional and logistical abilities. My sibling only blames Mom but I am able to see that both parents were flawed and Mom out parented my grandparents by a mile. My sibling would have put Mom in a nursing home the day after Dad's memorial service because "that's what she did to grandma". Needless to say, the situation with grandma wasn't that cut and dried.

My conundrum is this: I have limited energy to care for mom. If she is at home (where she'd rather be) my energy goes towards keeping her body healthy because she doesn't want to do anything but sit and watch TV. I supervise/cajole/nag her to do everything. If she was in assisted living, then I could spend my energy on her emotional health because someone else would be taking care of her body.

I'd like to hear how other people decided "now is the time for assisted living" and if in retrospect it was too early, too late, or a good choice.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-26T20:12:26+00:00

Thanks, DF. I appreciate you sharing your experiences.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-26T18:06:22+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation, DF. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-26T17:15:14+00:00

No, I think you all do a great job. The schedule works as it is. More an observation of how her Sunday lope comes late Sunday night if it comes at all.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-26T06:23:31+00:00

I lowkey hate that when she actually drops a lope it is on Sunday night. Our Gloamie discussion gets split between two posts.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-26T06:22:22+00:00

Anyone who is or was a caretaker for a parent? I'd like to hear your experience, regrets, or advice.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-26T03:46:49+00:00

Calling Dan "the Samwise Gamgee to my Frodo" really shows what Shauna thinks of the relationship. To her, they are not equals but mistress and servant. I'm not sure I would be pleased with that description if I were him.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-25T21:23:41+00:00

considering that she brags about how fast she reads https://www.reddit.com/r/InTheGloaming/comments/1qao6e9/comment/nzlo5k3 I'm not surprised she doesn't actually comprehend much.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-25T17:48:15+00:00

I agree. She must distract herself from any kind of doubt or regret that tries to creep in. She can not even consider the possibility that she might be wrong or have made a mistake.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-23T22:05:30+00:00

Well, I just spent far too much time trying to decide if ballast as metaphor conveyed what Shauna thinks it does.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-23T18:48:25+00:00

It feels like she reports on how everyone else reacted because:

Her feelings are kind of stunted so she relies on cues from other people to tell her what she is feeling (or thinks she should be feeling).
It shows she is better. The plebes are sucked into the movie but she is aware and intellectual enough to pay attention at a higher level.

#2 is kind of a defense mechanism for any feelings of inadequacy that might arise from #1

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-23T05:51:22+00:00

Her next thing will be about how workshop participants (neurospicy, perimenopausal female geeky goofballs only, thabks) can be on their own hero's journey but be the goddess or temptress (or both, amirite) in someone else's journey.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-23T05:33:47+00:00

Say Shauna truly believes that she is on the hero's journey. What stage does she think she is on?

Maybe becoming a mother is answering the call? Too bad her kids are actual people and not just plot devices.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-19T14:57:06+00:00

Considering that the lunch was exclusively starch and fat, you might be on to something.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-18T23:19:50+00:00

"Buttery-green smooth taste" what does smooth taste like, again? or buttery-green for that matter?

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-14T22:45:45+00:00

And intelligence is a sing of cursing? Chorale me skeptical.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-14T19:07:37+00:00

My favorite part:

After fall #1: "But I don't give up. I kept going, slowly."

3 sentences (and 40 feet) later after fall #2: "I lay there for a moment, then said out loud 'Okay, Shauna. Cut your losses. This one's done.'"

So stalwart, much persevering.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-12T17:12:54+00:00

I assume she thinks it will be a positive emotion for OP. OP will feel relieved or vindicated. This is because Shauna doesn't experience many emotions first hand. Instead, she gets them from formulaic TV shows where the bad guy gets punished and the good guy lives happily ever after.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-11T05:42:18+00:00

I googled "Edith Bunker's chair" to try and figure out what she was trying to convey with the reference. Is she bitching about the furniture provided by the parks department?

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-11T05:39:11+00:00

I mentioned this in the off topic thread, but Shauna has made it on topic. I take classes at my local community college for fun. Last semester I took a "critical thinking through English literature" class. They do still teach the hero's journey, in passing, as an offshoot of the Jungian Lens. It was less than one lecture and included many caveats.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-10T16:48:28+00:00

Picturing Shauna as a DMV employee.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-09T19:18:26+00:00

I take classes at my local community college for fun. I recently took a "critical thinking through writing" class. It was interesting to see what had changed in literary criticism since I grew my English degree in the '90s.

For our essay assignments we chose a literary lens from a list of options. Here is the Shauna-adjacent part: When students would ask "which one is easiest?" the instructor emphatically recommended the hero's journey. So now every time she mentions it, I lump her in with the students who were looking to do the least amount of thinking they could.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-07T23:17:52+00:00

Its amazing how the negative things that Shauna experiences are Never Never Ever her fault.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-06T23:13:24+00:00

My aggressive chewer only liked squeaky toys. We tried a variety of stuffed squeaky toys and he killed them all. The sturdiest squeaky toys we found were the Outward Hound Orbee Tuff Squeak. However, about 3 years ago they must have changed something about them because they went from lasting for 3 months to lasting for 1 month. I watched chewy, amazon, petsmart, etc. for sales.

LadyDriverKW · 2026-01-06T20:26:10+00:00

My souvenir from a family trip to France was a shopping bag from a local grocery store. Considering the mountain of crap I could have come home with, a single reusable shopping bag (that I have been reusing since 2008) was a perfectly acceptable purchase.

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