To become legally qualified to take care of my mother, I have to be fingerprinted.

Not regular fingerprinted. Live Scan fingerprinted, which is a different thing. It’s also not part of the orientation either, as it is its own separate appointment on its own separate day. I learned this the way I learn everything about this program — by assuming two things were one thing and being wrong.

The Live Scan costs $67. $59, if using a card. They were very specific about this. There’s a form. The form says Live Scan on it. Then somebody takes my fingerprints and sends them somewhere and does something with them, and God knows what, and at the end of it the State of California will have determined that I have no disqualifying criminal history and am therefore cleared to be paid for the thing I have been doing without clearance since roughly 2012. 2016, if you mean the cross country trips that were actually about handling things. 2018, if you mean the year it became undeniably caregiving and I started breaking down on the inside.

AI gave me a writing exercise. List ten things I did for my mother in one week, sorted into three columns: paid caregiving, unpaid caregiving, apparently just being a son.

I wrote eleven. I didn’t notice this until AI mentioned this in a first draft. (Fuck, they’re right. -Ed.)

Three of them I never sorted at all. One I put in two columns. One I marked conditionally — paid caregiving, if it’s groceries — like there’s a version of buying my mother food that clocks in and a version that doesn’t, and I’m the one who has to decide which is which, in my own handwriting, on my own list, about my own mother.

I gave myself a taxonomy and failed the taxonomy in under twenty-five minutes.

What can I say, you guys? AI really is making me lazy.

Here’s one of the unsorted ones: My mother has a Chinese medical alert device. She has it because she has iTalkBB, which is the not-cable box she pays for so she can watch Chinese news, which she believes is not cable, which is separate from the Xfinity she also pays for and does not believe she has. I know all of this because I pay the bills. We’ve talked about this before.

It’s a Chinese version of Life Alert, basically. Gen Xers, if you know, you know. The big twist is that you don’t have to say “I’ve fallen but I can’t get up” because it’s triggered to listen for one Chinese phrase in particular: 救命—jiùmìng, help. And then — by default — it calls the first name on the device’s contact list.

Not 911. It can call 911. It doesn’t default to 911.

It defaults to me.

Two weeks ago, my mother’s vertigo was so bad she was throwing up water. Not food. Water. If you think calling 911 for a family member is stressful, try doing it while the family member who asked to go to the hospital changes her mind because she “doesn’t want to trouble anyone.” I called anyway. The medics came. She’s fine now.

But somewhere in the house there is a small plastic device, purchased for emergencies, with my phone number in the slot where the emergency number goes. A machine looked at my mother’s life and correctly identified who the first responder was.

It did not require a background check. It did not ask for sixty-seven dollars (fifty-nine, if using card). It just knew. And then it promptly got knocked off the wall and trampled on by three paramedics as they took Mom to the emergency room.

The state has thought about the supermarket, and the state has a position.

My mother shops at Marina Foods. This takes two hours. It takes two hours because she does not walk toward things — she circles. Four laps, minimum, the long way around, because somewhere in lap three she will remember a thing she wants that we already passed twice. Most of the time I’m in there with her, arguing. Not about the food. About the second of everything, the duplicate she is buying for me, the one I will not eat, the one I have told her I will not eat, the one that is going in the cart anyway.

Sometimes I stay in the car. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I play Marvel Snap.

IHSS, for the record, does list shopping-related tasks. It covers the list, the drive, the store, the loading, the unloading, the putting away. It is very thorough. And then it adds, in the flat voice of a document that has clearly had to say this before: No additional time is allowed for the consumer to go to the store.

Somebody, somewhere, priced my mother coming with me. They priced it at zero.

Like, it’s mean… but it kinda tracks? It’s not cruel exactly. It’s… efficient. If a stranger were doing this job, the stranger would go alone, and it would take forty minutes, and everyone would be fine. The two hours exist because it’s her son pushing the cart and she wants to be out of the house and she wants to see what’s on sale and she wants to buy me a second bag of something.

That’s the whole reason. That’s also the reason it’s worth zero.

Other things that are definitively NOT caregiving are as follows:

Setting up her ChatGPT so it answers her in Chinese, and giving it a personality, and naming it 小六子. (Regular readers know 小六子. 小六子 has been through some things. Just clearly not caregiving.)

Reading her mail to figure out which envelope is a real medical bill and which one is a scam, which is a distinction I am apparently the sole arbiter of in this family.

Buying her a second iPad, so there is an iPad available while the first iPad charges, which is a thing I just typed and then sat with for a while.

Explaining, repeatedly, that coffee is not water.

Worrying. Just — worrying. Sitting somewhere else in my own life at 2 a.m., typing in “migraines” into WebMD and seeing the Canva-inspired simple stock illustrations of people in various states of agony.

My father’s old phone is in the house. It’s not charged. We stopped paying the line only recently. She wanted to keep it as a memento, and I pointed out — gently, then less gently — that there is an entire room of his things in a part of the house she does not go into. She kept the phone. The room stays shut. Both of these are true and neither of them is a task.

What I am actually authorized for is housework and the cutting of vegetables.

That’s not a joke I’m making. The state’s meal-prep definition includes washing and peeling and slicing, and cutting food into pieces of a reasonable size, and washing your hands before and after. Domestic services get capped at a number of hours per month that I could look up but haven’t, which tells you something about how much I really care about all of this in the moment.

My mother’s position is that yardwork is housework. The yard is at the house. The work is in the yard.

The State of California disagrees. In this one instance the State of California is correct, with one important distinction that I found doing some research: when there is removal of grass, weeds, rubbish, or other hazardous items when they are a fire hazard. This is not gardening, but is yard hazard abatement, and can, under certain circumstances, be authorized one (1) time.

I don’t dare tell this to Mom. Could you just imagine what she’d say? “Then you can yard hazard abatement in the backyard, Ernie. For one time? OK, make it two weeks long.”

So here’s the deal: a caseworker assigns minutes. Minutes. There’s a timesheet. Twice a month I’ll sign it under penalty of perjury, swearing I performed the authorized tasks for the authorized duration. I will have because they’re real tasks. The money’s real too, and I need it.

Let’s not be precious about this. I’m poor and the state is offering $22.10 an hour. I’m going to get fingerprinted and I’m going to cash it.

Number eleven on my list was: willingly eat all the stuff she makes.

I sat down to inventory the labor I perform for my mother, ran out of labor somewhere around item ten, kept writing, and what came out was sitting at her table eating her food. She’s cooking; I’m being fed. I put it on the list anyway and then I couldn’t mark it. Not paid. Not unpaid. Maybe that’s just being her son.

She’ll make something this week. Too much of it, as always, and it’ll go into the containers, and the containers will come home with me whether or not I agree to take them. On Thursday she’ll ask if I ate it.

Except lately, she’s been too exhausted to cook lately, and it’s been me calling Domino’s. Ordering a pizza for an 88-year-old Chinese lady.

(There’s no column for that either. I looked.)

Little. Yellow. Different.

I Have to Be Fingerprinted to Take Care of My…