When I first read this story, I thought it had to be a woman giving her teenage daughter a few bucks as an incentive to go get a job. It’s bad, but not newsworthy.
Little did I realize just how awful this actually was.
Linda Smith, 61, spent Friday morning, March 1, standing on the sidewalk at McCall Boulevard and Bradley Road in Menifee, holding up a sign saying she would give $500 to anybody who can help her daughter, 36-year-old Lisa Smith, land a job.
Wow. So now parents are stepping in to have their adult kids hired.
But then I skipped beneath the video and found that this story really is a heartbreaking one:
Linda and her daughter are close – Lisa has been Linda’s full-time caregiver since a car crash in 1996 left Linda with brain damage. While living in Portland, a drunk driver side-swiped Linda’s car while she was driving to work at a department store.
Her vehicle was badly damaged though drivable and her body seemed fine, so she continued to work. On the way to her job, she got her first clue that something was wrong: She couldn’t remember how to get there. She had to pull over and get directions.
More clues popped up during the following two weeks.
“Little things started happening, like I couldn’t read (customers’) IDs, or I couldn’t type their info into the computer,” she said.
A doctor diagnosed her with a mild case of dementia caused by head trauma, she said. Her symptoms are subtle, but they make her life very difficult.
“You don’t see how hard it is for me to tie my shoes,” she said.
When the crash happened, Lisa Smith was in South Korea working as a commercial model. She returned immediately to care for her mother.
“She was real foggy … she couldn’t keep track of things, she couldn’t remember my birthday,” Lisa Smith said during an interview on Friday.
The two lived together for the next 16 years surviving on small payments from the Veteran’s Administration, money Lisa got for being her mother’s caregiver, and Lisa’s pay from various jobs.
The pair’s lives changed in June. For the first time in nearly two decades, a doctor deemed Linda well enough to live alone. Linda could to move into her own place in the Sun City section of Menifee.
That was the good news. The bad news?
Lisa could no longer earn money as her mother’s caregiver.
Since then, Lisa has been searching for a new job.
“I’ve been working my tail off,” she said.
She has her GED, and has completed certification training in Microsoft suite at Mt. San Jacinto College. She took an additional course on how to write a resume and do an interview, hoping it would give her an advantage.
For God’s sake, someone please hire this woman. She’s not some a lazy couch sitter, she’s an angel who helped her disabled mother.
Just goes to show you can’t judge an article by its headline.
