It was Wednesday night, and I was logged into the state’s IHSS timesheet portal, and the home screen says:
Recipients: There are currently no recipients to display.
The recipient in question is supposed to be my mother. I am her provider. I know I’m her provider because I have a provider number to prove it - nine digits, which I’m not printing here because I’ve given it to enough strangers this month.
Here’s what it took to get to this screen.
I don’t really remember whose idea it was anymore. I think one of Mom’s friends told her you could get free help from the government. Free cleaning services, or something like that. I heard that, and I laughed. I kind of knew what IHSS was. I knew one or two people who had done it.
But my mother took pride in her cooking. Even a couple of years ago, when I’d come home from Florida, she’d make these crazy five-course dinners. It’s just her and me. I’d say, “No, no, no, no, it’s not a big deal,” and she would still make them.
Then she said it started to hurt when she chopped vegetables.
So she stopped chopping vegetables.
And then she just wouldn’t eat.
I was home, and she wasn’t cooking, and my first thought was: oh, I grew really spoiled from Mom’s cooking.
My second thought was that this was a red flag.
On March 11th, I called Alameda County to apply for In-Home Supportive Services. This California program pays someone—usually family, about three times out of four—to help an older or disabled person at home. Mom’s Medi-Cal came through on March 18th because IHSS requires Medi-Cal eligibility.
For years, she hadn’t qualified for Medi-Cal. But in 2024 and 2025, California temporarily eliminated asset limits for certain Medi-Cal programs. So, of course, we applied. I’d be a fool if the door was only open for a year and I didn’t even bother; there’d be all these—what-ifs.
Her doctor signed a form. We submitted it and figured we’d be accepted in a couple of months. I called to check, and the woman who picked up said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” You don’t get accepted like that. Someone comes to visit you for an inspection. On top of that, there’s an orientation. Then you wait.
A social worker was supposed to come to the house and didn’t. Another one came in July, after I spent a morning at the kitchen table coaching my mother to describe her BAD days instead of her good ones, and the county approved her for twenty-one hours and forty-one minutes a week.
By then, two things were happening: I was struggling to find permanent work, and the freelance clients I had been working with were having some, shall we say… difficulties, actually paying me.
Meanwhile, finding someone Mom would actually tolerate was another problem. We’d need a Mandarin-speaking caregiver who could accommodate her very particular preferences—and even more particular politics.
Maybe it made sense for me to do it instead. At least part-time, until we found someone more suitable. It was an idea I had to get comfortable with myself…
On July 15th, we decided the caregiver—for now—would be ME.
On August 24th, I sat through a four-hour provider orientation at the Eastmont Town Center in Oakland, with my original Social Security card in my pocket. ORIGINAL, the instructions emphasized. On August 31st, I got fingerprinted.
On September 17th, I got my provider number. From the union, of all places—SEIU Local 2015 called to ask if I wanted to join and looked my number up as a kind of welcome gift. So I joined.
I’m now a dues-paying union member at a job that has never paid me.
On September 20th, I registered on the portal.
And on September 23rd, at 5:49 in the morning—the same day I logged in and found no recipients—I filed a change report on my mother’s Medi-Cal case.
The rules of being a widow on Social Security, apparently, are as follows: You may have a different income than your spouse, but when your spouse passes on, you get either your value or your spouse’s value—whichever is higher.
Dad dies in May. Mom’s first deposit at the new amount landed June 3rd. Then the check from PG&E showed up: her survivor pension, on top of it, every month!
It’s a good thing! Pretty sure it’s a good thing. Let me explain.
Because it’s also what knocked me off the tightrope. I didn’t really understand why Dad’s Social Security was so much more than Mom’s. And I didn’t know she’d get his pension, as well. They had a tumultuous relationship. They divorced, then got remarried. I wasn’t sure PG&E would honor that. Even if it did, I didn’t know if it’d be the full amount, half, a one-time thing, or ongoing...
Before this, my mother got by on very little. I even covered some of her utilities. Now she’s fine. An “over the Medi-Cal line” kind of fine.
The line for someone her age is $1,836 a month. Her Social Security alone is now less than double that amount. The county doesn’t kick her off for that. It sends a bill. It’s called a share of cost—basically a deductible that resets every month—and she pays it before Medi-Cal covers anything, IHSS included. Some of it can come straight out of what the state would have paid me.
I did the math in an email to her social worker. Twenty-one hours and forty-one minutes a week, at $22.10 an hour, comes to about $2,077 a month before taxes. Her share of the cost, by my math, would be... a lot of money. And that’s before the PG&E pension, which pushes it higher dollar for dollar—every month. Just to keep the coverage that makes the paycheck possible.
So the state would, more or less, be paying me with my mother’s money. Minus union dues. Cause I’d be in the Union now!
But here’s the important part: Mom gets nothing for her half. The only reason we signed her up for Medi-Cal in the first place was IHSS. She was happy with Kaiser. She’s still with Kaiser. She’d be paying every month for coverage she doesn’t use, so the state could pay her son less than she paid in.
Neither of us comes out ahead.
I’m happy for her. For one thing, she can pay her own cable bill. In theory, she can hire her own help for about three months.
And all Mom had to do to get the increase in benefits was to have Dad die.
There are probably nicer ways to say that.
Listen. When I still lived in Florida, my dad would dangle the fact that I wasn’t taking care of my mom in my face. He used it to justify remarrying her. “OH! NOW YOU LOOK! HAVE TO GET MARRY TO MOTHER AGAIN!” He almost insinuated that their codependence and resentment toward each other were punishment for me leaving. I mean... that’s just a whole other story for another Substack article.
I took that as well as a person can take it.
And the biggest irony, of course, is that he did help her. I don’t want to say I’m grateful for Dad dying. That’s mortifying. But the benefits have helped her. Me, not so much. And that’s fine.
...it’s fine.
To be fully honest, money has not been great for me.
I’ve had a rough time finding work. Even at a fraction of a tech salary, I’d be lying if I said the money had nothing to do with it. I wanted some small part of my income to be predictable, a little less of a free fall.
The IHSS check would never fix that. But it was the one check that would show up every pay period, no matter what else fell through. A floor.
Underneath it all is Dad’s voice. Preserving money was the discipline he drilled into my sister and me most consistently, and it still drums away: this is his money. It was never meant for us to use, at least, certainly not like this.
And now his money is what keeps Mom secure.
It’s also what made getting paid to take care of her stop making sense.
In a year, the self-doubt stopped creeping in. Now it lives here.
Getting ready for IHSS took as much out of me as everything else did. I’d finally accepted that I was becoming a paid caregiver, and that taking care of Mom counted as work, not something competing with it.
I’d accepted the identity.
And then the numbers took it back.
I’d done the math for months. It wasn’t a shock. I’d mostly been stalling on writing to her IHSS caseworker. It’s an intimidating set of questions, and she’s hard to reach. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, and that all that work wouldn’t be for nothing. I had no idea how long a process like this would take, which makes it all the more annoying that it just stops.
Now I go back to figuring out help for Mom, and some kind of stable career for me. Which is fine. But I could have started that a year ago and skipped this detour.
Mom’s assigned county social worker hasn’t written back yet, though he did point me to HICAP. So all of it: the registration, the bureaucracy of government-sponsored caregiving, joining the local union- is on hold. Nobody cut us off. At these numbers, we’re choosing to stop.
I told Mom the surface reason: we can’t do the services because her Social Security went up.
I told her this via text message using an AI script that turns everything I write into something an 88-year-old Chinese lady would understand.
I explained that I wouldn’t be paid by the state to help her, and I told her her income went up because Dad died and that it was good news for her and that I would still come by and that it didn’t mean I loved her any less, but I would just need a little more patience from her as we found the right caregivers down the line and that I would see her like always by noon the next day.
She responded the next day at 2pm, asking why I was late.
If she’s put two and two together, she hasn’t told me, or she hasn’t realized it out loud. I don’t tell her all the financial goings-on. It would bore her. She doesn’t care. Life just goes on for her, for better or worse.
Her letters from the county come in Chinese. I read them with an AI, which hands them back to me in English like it was all one language. I had it walk me through the steps I was confused about, too. Civic tech is hard. There’s very little handholding.
When Mom looks over my shoulder and sees me having casual conversations with the terminal, with brief flashes of Chinese, she kind of questions everything, shrugs, and goes back to watching her AI-generated Chinese soap operas on her phone.
The form that would officially make me her employee - the SOC 426A, Mom signs Part C, I’m named in Part A - is sitting on my desktop as a PDF. In Chinese. Unprinted. It’s supposed to be filed somewhere, yet nobody’s asked for it.
Nothing about how I take care of her changes, mind you. I’m still driving her to Kaiser. I’m still sitting in the Marina Foods parking lot while she buys the entire store. The state just wouldn’t send a check for it.
There are currently no recipients to display.
They’re incorrect. She’s right there.