Feel Like I Have No Time For My Residents!

[Skayda]

So, for the past six months I've been working for a woman who owns two adult family homes for elderly and developmentmentally disabled adults. I work three 24 hour shifts in a row from Friday to Sunday. The first few months I would always try to engage the residents in some activity even just visiting with them because they don't have anyone around on the weekends and most are younger than me, in their early thirties.

But, every time I'd come to work my boss would present me with a list of household chores to get done by Sunday night. It wasn't so bad at first. Then she started adding things.

Until it's become par for the course for her to hand me a six page list of things to get done which include deep cleaning the downstairs areas and her personal areas of the home that the residents don't even enter that I feel like I'm just cleaning what she, as the owner and person who uses those rooms only should be cleaning. It's not light housekeeping by a long shot.

I am deep spring cleaning every time I work at her place and I stress out before I come to work because I just know she is going to find something I didn't do right or add something new she wants done. The house is so clean it doesn't look like anyone even lives there. She will serve dinner at 4:00pm and send them to their rooms to bed right after.

So the living room and dining room are never used by the residents. The only areas used by the residents are the kitchen, hall bathroom and their bedrooms. But, because I only have so much time to finish with all the housework, 90% of which is my boss' mess from her own stuff not mess she made after taking care of the people, I don't have any time to spend with the residents and it really makes me sad.

Okay, I guess this was a vent post. Deep breaths. I feel better after having wrote it and one nice thing about her; she recently gave me a raise! So, now, I'm making $10.50 an hour! (Even though she was going to offer a new caregiver who didn't even have all her paperwork in order and was a NAR not a CNA $12.50 an hour, more than she pays both myself and her resident manager at her second AFH!) But, still, a raise is a raise. I'm grateful!