Friday’s Child – Woe Is Not Me

Today and for the next several weeks I’m going to rehash posts from the former Prozac Palace blog. Miss Prozac and I agreed that the blog had run its course. It’s gone.
I wrote those posts for a reason and I think they should live on so I’m going to rerun my entries here on Fridays. It won’t all be rehashed material. Some material will be new.
The standing head “Friday’s Child” was chosen because the posts are put up on Fridays and they’re mostly about me when I was a child.
It wasn't until well after I'd decided this that I recalled the old nursery rhyme Monday’s Child. The original version from 1887 contains the line “Friday’s child is full of woe.”
I’m not interested in woe. I’m interested in telling how it was.

This was my first Prozac Palace from April 2007.

"What Fresh Hell Is This?"

It is said that author Dorothy Parker greeted the ringing of her telephone this way. It used to just amuse me. Now I understand it only too well.These days a ringing phone might be my sister calling me to complain about her life, her assorted aches and pains be they real or imagined, and how everyone treats her unfairly.

About 30 years ago Dawn was diagnosed with OCD, called Compulsive-Obsessive Psychosis back then. She no longer compulsively washes her hands, but this is the only diagnosis I’ve ever heard so it’ll have to do. If there are others she’s opted not to say so.

It used to be that she rarely called me. That changed in early 2006 when she started calling regularly during the full and new moons. Her schedule differs from mine so we unplug the phones between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. now. Frankly, our sleep is more important than her whining. She’ll call during the day sometimes, though, just to throw me off.

I’m not the lone recipient of these calls. We’ve got plenty of cousins and many live within an hour of Dawn so she calls them occasionally, too.
Last week she called one particular couple at least four times. Both of them have called me about it due to the escalation of calls and because they believe something about her has changed. The last call advised me that Dawn had herself taken to emergency because she’d consumed something herbal offered by a friend and it didn’t agree with her.She refused to tell the relative what she’d taken and accused the relative of not believing her.

That’s pretty common with Dawn. We’re expected to take her at her word whether it’s grounded in reality or not. It’s hard to sift through what’s real and what isn’t when she calls. And even when it’s old news, it’s still a fresh hell.
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Update: We no longer routinely unplug the phone as the calls have dropped off considerably.