Hometowns

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s topic for Tell Us About… is “hometowns”. I remember having to choose my hometown on Facebook and apparently it’s the city I was born in. That would be Rotterdam. I only lived there for nine years before moving to Apeldoorn for my mother’s work. Honestly, if I had to choose a town I’d consider “home” it’d be that, even though I don’t care for the rather narrow-minded people who live here. I guess the Apeldoorn area is only “home” to me because I’ve lived here the longest and I’d probably have felt much happier had I stayed in Rotterdam for life. No-one can be sure though.

When I lived in Apeldoorn between 1996 and 2007, I lived in two different neighborhoods. The one I lived in with my parents was a kid-friendly neighborhood built in the 1970s. One of my father’s acquaintances called it an unrban planning train wreck, because the streets were so disorganized you’d get lost even when you knew your way around.

The training home neighborhood was built in the late 1990s to early 2000s. My street was called Boomgaard, which translates to “Orchard” in English. Yes, all streets in that neighborhood had weird names like “Silent Garden”, “Banister”, etc. Then again, the street names in my childhood neighborhood in Apeldoorn were almost equally weird.

As a child and teen, I often went shopping in downtown Apeldoorn with my Mom and sister. I can’t say I enjoyed it (except for going to McDonald’s at the end), but it was manageable.

Since my parents also moved out of Apeldoorn, I didn’t revisit the city after moving to Nijmegen in 2007 until I moved back to the area when moving into the institution last year. One thing I noticed, and it’s only recently dawned upon me how bad it is, is how many brick-and-mortar stores have closed. A telling example is my mentioning to my spouse recently that The Body Shop has a store in Apeldoorn that we might be able to check out. To be sure, I did a store search on the website and guess what? It’s gone! I could really have known, since half the store buildings in Orangerie, the main shopping center, are empty. This really saddens me.

Choice of Residence

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today’s topic for Sunday Poser is how or why you chose your city, county or area of residence, or whether it was a choice at all.

I stumbled across my current care agency by chance in 2017 when trying to find day activities for once I’d be discharged from the psych hospital. After going to two different day centers with this agency and coming to the conclusion that living semi-independently with my spouse was not a viable option in the long run, I moved into the home that had a place available at the time. That’s the short version of how I ended up in Raalte.

Since knowing about this agency, I always envisioned myself living on its institution grounds. I thought I’d feel more sheltered there. This was one of many reasons I requested to look into the possibility of finding me another care home in April of 2022.

Wilp, the institution town (I’m pretty sure I mentioned it before so I might as well tell you rather than remaining vague) is right in the middle of the tricities Apeldoorn/Zutphen/Deventer. I think the town itself has a little too little to offer for my liking, since it only has a bakery and a coffee corner and that’s basically it. However, all three cities are within easy driving distance and Twello, the neighboring town, is within cycling distance. It’s too bad our home doesn’t have a side-by-side bike.

Since I grew up in Apeldoorn, I am sort of familiar with this area. Not in the sense of knowing my way around – I’d never even heard of Wilp before finding out about this care agency -, but in the sense of knowing the culture. It’s not necessarily my type of culture – a bit too conservative for my liking -, but I am okay with it.

The institution I live in is great. No, not the home, of course, but I love the petting zoo, on-site swimming pool, various day centers, etc. The fact that residents and staff all greet each other, is also awesome. It’s really like a small village in itself. And indeed, it’s more sheltered than community living in Raalte was. One drawback I need to mention though is getting mail delivered. Particularly packages cant be sent here. Ah well, I’ll get them sent to my in-laws and get my spouse to collect them and bring them here on Sundays.

Hello Monday (August 7, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this first Monday of August. How are you all? Let me share about my weekend. I’m also sneaking in a bit about today, because I don’t think I can devote a separate blog post to the topic and it needs talking about anyway. I am joining in with Hello Monday.

Saturday started out pretty good. My assigned staff came to do my one-on-one for the morning. My schedule did get somewhat distorted because she came up with the idea of us clearing out my wardrobe. I didn’t mind at first, but I didn’t realize until it was too late how overloading this was.

Then eventually, after having had a shower, getting dressed and having had breakfast, I realized I’d forgotten the steroid cream I’d been prescribed for my eczema. I asked my assigned staff to help me apply it. “I’ll show you how, then you can do it yourself,” she said. Fair enough, you might say, but by this time I was well and truly overloaded. I sighed, to which my assigned staff made a comment about me being a “big girl” and that I could stomp my feet all I wanted (I didn’t). Once she got down to showing me how to apply the cream, she kind of curtly told me to relax my hand (which, well, having mild cerebral palsy, I simply can’t), then asked why I can’t. I got quite thick layers of cream on some parts of my skin and nothing on others, but in the end it didn’t matter, as the cream she’d grabbed was the oily lanette cream rather than the steroid. I do understand my staff meant well, in the sense that she’s trying to encourage independence. However, I often don’t realize how overwhelmed I am until it’s too late and at that point, any further demands will lead to me shutting or melting down.

Saturday evening was pretty good. We had home-cooked macaroni for dinner, which I loved! I actually was allowed a second helping.

On Sunday morning, my one-on-one arrived 25 minutes late, claiming it was only 15 minutes and that it just was what it was and deal with it. Then at lunchtime, she wouldn’t leave my room after I’d finished my drink (I wasn’t eating because I’d be having lunch out with my spouse), claiming she was making up for the time she’d been late in the morning. Well, it isn’t just sitting in my room that helps me. If she could’ve taken that time to help me with an activity that needed doing rather than just “chilling”, that would’ve been appreciated, but she couldn’t.

Thankfully, my spouse arrived around 1PM. We drove to Apeldoorn once again and, after a stroll around the city, decided to have lunch at Backwerk once again. I had the same old chicken barbecue baguette. Hema was closed, so we just had a drive around, then stopped by Aldi in the town next to where my institution is (I’m pretty sure those who live in the Netherlands know which town I’m referring to, if I haven’t shared it already). I wanted to get some nuts and Tuc (a kind of salty biscuit), which my dietitian allows me to snack on later in the evening. My spouse also got apricots, so I also bought those. And of course the perpetual Kinder Bueno. Then my spouse drove me back to the institution.

Once there, it turned out one of the staff had car trouble, so didn’t arrive till 4:30PM. Of course, it was my one-on-one that got cut. One of the other staff made it sound as though they were buying us French fries and a snack to make up for it, which I considered rather lame. Then after we’d finished our fries at 4:50, the staff informed me bluntly that my day schedule would be followed from there on, so I would have one-on-one again at 6PM. I felt this was ridiculous, but had no choice, as the staff were using stupid emotional reasoning to get me to agree with them.

In the evening, I did show my one-on-one how to make beads out of polymer clay.

Now on to my cheating by sharing a bit about today: this morning, my support coordinator informed me that he was going to attend the team meeting for my new care home to answer some questions about me, but that he thought I could answer those questions perfectly well myself. I agreed and went with him. Some of the questions made me feel a little uncomfortable.

The first question I got, in fact, referred to my drinking excessive water. That happened exactly once and was an impulsive act. I decided to broaden the topic and explain about my preference for how staff deal with my impulsive or self-harm tendencies, ie. by not giving more attention than needed to the behavior but to stay supportive of my emotional needs. I did forget to mention that wounds do need to be checked, something that doesn’t always happen here.

Overall, I mostly felt validated, in the sense that at least the team didn’t respond negatively to my comments. I did find it hard to walk the fine line between being too bluntly honest about my needs and delivering a sales pitch of myself. I hope I did okay though.