Misplaced Musings

Pushing Past my Ass

2012-02-08T19:25:00.000-05:00

Determined to shake this work/winter/fatigue rut I've been in. Pushing past my ass, in the words of an incredibly dear midwife friend. Walking across 12th street to the post office, I was reminded of how much more I can see when I am walking, up close on things. Not flying by in my car with the radio on, low and aimless. My craft room sits dormant, the poetry in my head drowning in prescription refills and Kenlalog injections. I will walk more.

Trying to break out any little way I can.

Thinking about a full-length collection about being a nurse. So much to laugh about. So much sadness. So many who could say more and say it all better than I. But so what?

Thinking of my virtual friend Jo, who always manages to tend to herself and express herself and all that. I am using her for inspiration. She takes a lot of pictures of herself. But, you know. If she didn't I guess she wouldn't inspire me quite so much. I am, after all, a visual person.

Thinking of Joe and how much he means to me. Tonight at the grocery, I saw a mother in an Arby's blouse with her four kids and I felt humbled. I've been given so much. Maybe at times it doesn't seem that way, but may I never forget how much I have been given.

Moment. By moment. Today at work? Sucked. Left work at 5:30 and had to go by Food Lion. Ordinarily I'd feel exhausted and sorry for myself, but this time I tried just digging the moment. It worked pretty well.

Of course, I don't have PMS this week, either.

The past few months of packing and moving have been one long exercise in pushing past my ass. It's been absolutely grueling at times. But slowly, things are settling into place and I become more able to function. I am one who tends toward fatigue, unfortunately. But somehow, I feel myself growing stronger every day. The hard things do grow us.

inept

2012-01-30T08:11:00.000-05:00

Dropping Nora off at the middle school this morning, I saw a teacher heading into the building who had 1) wet hair and 2) an above-the-knee skirt with pantyhose on. I looked down at the thermometer in my car: 34.

Some people don't seem so bothered by the cold. I wish I were one of them. I wish I were tougher. Stronger. Better with tools. Wish I never got tired.

I am looking at the million projects at our new house as an opportunity to learn some new things. So far I haven't even been able to get a set of blinds put up. Joe has managed several plumbing repairs and has learned to disassemble an entire double-hung 100+ year old sash window. Among other things.

Saturday I went out in the yard for a bit and did a little raking. There are a couple of seasons worth of leaves all around. The yard is cute and has a lot of potential. Too bad I know nothing about gardening. Regardless, we are looking forward to the springtime, when we get to see what living things emerge from the ground. Kind of a neat surprise this first year.

We are still working on cleaning out the attic. Its horribly filthy up there and it gets me sneezing something awful when I work up there. Slowly we are tossing the junk and we have scored a few treasures along the way. Nora found a huge stamp collection which she is really enjoying, and I found an amazing metal desk lamp that simply needed a new cord. I say simply because for Joe, replacing the cord *was* simple. I would have never known how to do it. Found a little table for Nora's aquarium, boxes of old letters from the 60s, and a couple more 10 gallon aquariums.

I never thought I was very good at the domestics, but it seems like I have fallen back on my cleaning skills as my most useful contribution so far to Harrison St. And it needs to be done, for sure. But how did I get to be almost 39 and suddenly feel so inept in so many areas? Sometimes it feels like the farther I go in life, the more I see undone ahead of me. Trying to fall back again on the skill of existing in the moment.

New Bearings in a New Place

2012-01-23T08:18:00.000-05:00

My new neighborhood is different from my old one. It's darker, and quieter. I sleep much better here. There is a white fence around our space which quietly states: This is Ours. So far, only the local cats dare to defy the message and lap from our birdbath at their leisure. Our own cat is still too chicken to stay out for more than a few minutes. Once the king of the hill at the old place, he's still scoping out the competition cautiously.

This place is very diverse. We have condemned, crumbling houses and we have small mansions. But everyone is friendly and waves hello. We are somewhere in the middle, of course. We might describe ourselves as Decent. Pretty good house, looks nice on the outside, but no antiques on the inside.

It's quite a process, turning a house into a home. We'd been in the other place for so long. We've been here for weeks and there is still lots of piles of stuff just waiting to be dealt with. We are learning that you just have to start putting things up like you know what you're doing. It can always be changed later. That's what makes it start to feel like home. It's nice to have more elbow room. Finally, our dining room doesn't have to be a multipurpose craft room/library/study. We put the computer in the craft room and it feels right. No more computer in our bedroom. No more TV right by the front door with people passing in front of it all the time.

Of course, there are things about the old house that were better. Much more cabinet and closet space, for one thing. We are having to get really creative in how we deal with that issue and sometimes it's frustrating. But it's all a process. Change can be uncomfortable. One must look forward.

From this spot in my craft room where I am writing, there is a window which overlooks the Johnson OB clinic. It is a place that I very much desired to work. That place had a lot to do with me going back to school to get my LPN, so that I could make a career out of working with pregnant women. And here I am today, working as a rheumatology nurse. A good job, to be sure. But not my dream. Every day now, I look out the window and I am reminded of that dream. A dream that took up 15 years of my life and countless hours and efforts. And I find that it's a good reminder, that we have to allow ourselves to go wherever we are meant to go, and that most of the time, we have no idea where that is. Yes, sometimes I envy people who seem to have the resources and the circumstances to do whatever they want. But in the end I feel peaceful. I have a loving partner and we have a vision for the rest of our life together, and the rest will work itself out.

The Lonely Soul of an Empty House

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

It is bad for a house to sit empty for more than a short while. Devoid of the din and movement of human life, it begins to decay. Grime settles onto the floor- they don't look too bad at first, but after 5 or 6 runs with the mop the water in the bucket is still turning dark gray. It takes on a smell that can only be called lonely, a smell like empty rooms and closed windows. I think houses can feel lonely. They want to be used; after all, that is their purpose.

We are moving into a lonely house. The kids can feel this, and it feels uncomfortable. It's not Home, it's cold and everything echoes. The wallpaper and the paint are not ours; they were chosen by strangers. It will take time to love these new rooms and to groom them into a place in which we feel an emotional embrace when we walk in the front door. It will take time.

The house wants to be loved. Generations of families have climbed the stairs and kissed in the bedrooms and cried in the kitchen. Now it is our turn.

The house we are leaving will not sit empty. It has a new family waiting to come in and love it. Nineteen years ago when we were just children of 19 ourselves and knew nothing about loving a house, we moved there and the house had been sitting empty. Its occupant had fallen asleep smoking on her couch and started a smoldering fire. It was her misfortune that brought us to our first home. The house was repaired and put on the market for a pittance by the elderly sibling who all the trouble was bequeathed to. That house was lonely too- it's sole occupant of 30 years had left it- but it was August and there was enough sun streaming in the windows to chase the sadness into the corners. The floors were still just as grimy and we had almost no furniture to fill the many rooms. Over the years we filled it with children and many other things, and it came to life.

This new house is going to come back to life through the touch of our hands and the sound of our laughter.It will take some time but one of these days we will walk through its rooms and realize, quite suddenly, that it feels like Home.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

2011-12-23T08:15:00.000-05:00

A day off work. I was up at 7, brewing coffee and reloading the dishwasher. I don't want to waste any of my time off lying in the bed. It has become so precious.

I was thinking recently about Christmases of recent past. Last Christmas, I had to work 7-3 at the assisted living facility. I worked every single day then. 6am on a Saturday morning would roll around and I'd feel so depressed about getting up. I still feel that way sometimes, but I am in a much better place now- I mean, I just qualified for my free life insurance!- and I am so grateful.

I am also able to understand the simple peace of having my whole family together for the holiday. I know someone whose son was just murdered. Another whose husband hung himself out in his shed a few weeks ago. People are hurting, and in years past, it was our family who was hurting. The first Christmas after Joe's brother died, his absence filled the air as much as we tried to turn from it.

I recall one Thanksgiving distinctly when I had to go visit my daughter in juvenile detention for the holiday. As I was escorted through the double locked doors, the smell of a holiday meal brushed my face. They were making a special meal for these kids in their navy jumpsuits. I had about an hour with my daughter that day, sitting across from her at a long row of plastic tables. I wasn't allowed to hold her hand. I went back out to my car and cried. There was another holiday, maybe the same year but maybe another- when we went up to Maryland for Christmas and left her behind in her cell at home. I wish now that I had kept better notes from that time- but pushing it all as far away from my heart as possible is how I survived it. We got a 5 minute phone call.

Those were sad years. And right now, people everywhere are going through it. I am choosing to feel thankful that my children are safe and well, they are home, and they are free. The daughter that gave me so much heartache has now given me a grandson. An amazing gift- one I did not want to receive. One I did not realize could fill my heart with so much love, enough to erase all the pain of the past. Enough to take my breath away.

Other Christmases of the past: People leaving bags of groceries on our porch because we were so broke. Joe having to deliver newspapers every Christmas for 10 years. Driving up to Maryland after the newspapers were done, getting there late and having a twinkling tree greeting us in the dark. The magic of little ones waking to American Girl dolls having tea under the tree, back when the gifts could come from Goodwill and no one knew or cared.

I hear people talking a lot about gifts at Christmas, and I was realizing that Joe and I rarely exchange gifts. We just don't. Back in the lean years, I spent what I had on the children. Maybe that just became habit. This year, we are giving each other a huge gift: a house. We close in a week. We'll need a new hot water heater and washer and dryer set. And it's going to be a chaotic New year's weekend for us.

But when you have one of those years where things are good, where you get to be the lucky ones for awhile, you learn to just soak it in. And when you've known those darker roads, it just makes you appreciate it all the more.

Memory

2011-12-06T19:47:00.001-05:00

Something made me think of the memory care center today, where I spent a year of weekends. I wondered if things were moving along exactly the same there after six months' absence. I thought: yes, definitely. Things don't change there. Lois is still sitting in the recliner by her bed. Helen is playing another round of solitaire with her faded red cards.

How I was going to write about it. I have begun to, but I never finished. I want to finish. Even when I think of those like Hendrix and Connie, who could write a hundred times more than I could about it. About what it's like to love them.

Tuesday after work and dinner

2011-11-29T21:47:00.000-05:00

I should go to bed. I know I should. I'm not a strong person and I don't do well when I don't get enough sleep. But the dishwasher is churning (for the second time tonight) and its dark and quiet. It feels kind of nice.

We're moving. But we aren't allowed to take any boxes over to the new house (vacant 1.5+years) so the house is slowly imploding with cardboard. But the children still want a tree so by Golly, we'll have one.

On the cusp of good things, overall. I miss writing.

Do I Still Blog?

2011-11-28T14:13:00.000-05:00

Oh yes- all the time.

In my head.

As I am drawing up syringes full of white milky Kenalog mixed with Lidocaine. As my hand swipes the spilled sugar off the counters on Thanksgiving morning. As I think about how it's coming up on seven years since Jonathan died.

Words weave themselves together in my head while my hands are busy, so busy. The words can't seem to make it onto a screen, or even a scrap of paper. The little notebook in my purse suffers from neglect and I miss the magic of seeing my words together in rows.

Jackass Blues

2011-10-18T19:20:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so get this. There is actually a decent heart inside of me. It's there. It's just that generally I seem to come off as more of a selfish, sarcastic jackass than anything else. But- I get jealous. I see my friends, those real live human beings I used to interact with, interacting with each other and I feel left out and jealous. I even get jealous when they leave stupid digital hearts on each others' Facebook walls because then I feel even more funky and disconnected.

But I still love all those people. I just have moods.

I get frustrated at work because I look around and everyone is faster than me, more competent. And worst of all: more flexible than I am. I hover around my familiar little pod (Pod G) and hope I don't have to cover for the other doctor because he might burst forth from the room and announce: Draw up a shoulder injection!

Or maybe: I need methotrexate labs!

And I will bobble around gasping until someone helps me get it all figured out, whether he likes the 21g 1 1/2 inch needle for that or not. Kick me back into my little pond where I will float around with my eyes averted with shame.

My doctor tells me she wants a 1:1 or a 2:2 and I know what that means- half Kenalog and half Lidocaine, and I can ask if she wants the short or the long needle and she tells me. She is from China. She can't pronounce Methotrexate correctly. But I find it endearing. I love her and I want to be a good assistant to her. Fuck this responsibility business and this climbing of the ladder. Right now, I just want to do my job and clock out and go home and goof off. The guy that trained me to take his place wants to go to PA school. At Yale. Good for him. I want to cut paper in my studio on Harrison St. Yeah, the one I don't own yet.

I want to be a nurse on my own terms. I am lazy. I admire every one of the Medical Assistants I work with and think in no way that I am superior to them.

I saw an old friend yesterday, for about 10 minutes. I meant to tell her that her hair looked great- I hadn't seen her in so long that her hair had grown and had faint bluish streaks in it that caused me to long for my youth. But so much had to be crammed into that 10 minutes that the part about the hair got missed. I thought about what a rotten friend I'd been to her in recent months, too tired and caught up with family to meet her on her porch for one measly glass of wine. Then to have the nerve to feel jealous when I see her reaching out to other friends- even though I'm actually happy for her.

The same goes for another good friend who apparently is madly in love. I am truly happy for her. I just...miss her. And it's not her. It's me. I'm a jackass. But not the worst jackass ever. I think I get more forgiving and loving the older I get. I'm not even (very) mad at the girl from the coffee shop anymore. Slightly annoyed at the guy at Joe's work who gives him liquor. Yes- I admit that.

I just don't know how to express myself the way I mean to. Want to. There is an okay person in here.

Sunday

2011-10-09T09:19:00.000-04:00

And suddenly last night, I slept with my hood up. Suddenly, it's getting cold. Although if I'm sitting in the car in the sun, I feel hot and I can still pretend for a minute that the days and long nights of winter are not careening toward me.

Suddenly, my daughter has applied to three colleges. She knows how to get her transcript sent over.

Time moves too fast and then when I am waiting for something it slows like caramel. Like, waiting for someone to see our FOR SALE sign out front, some young couple full of hope and the prospect of procreating, waiting for them to turn to one another and say, Oh darling.

But allowing each day to be it's own moment, at it's own speed.

i know this moment will pass

2011-10-06T07:18:00.000-04:00

Losing my writing, losing myself
in this rat wheel I am on
gogogogogogo
needs and wants pull me around
like pearly taffy
no time left to let my thoughts
sift and congeal
into meaning
who am I becoming
besides a tired person
besides numb
besides resigned
to the parts of life that are
over.

time

2011-09-24T08:57:00.000-04:00

My son. Standing on the back porch in the sun in his Donnie Darko t-shirt and orange baseball socks. He's taller than I am, and skinnier. It wasn't too long ago that we were all remembering when he was a chubby toddler, parked in front of The Jungle Book in his underwear. I sneak glimpses of him and store the images in my brain, because I know now how fast everything is slipping away. High school, girlfriend, college. Hugs become angular.

It has taken me a long time to start grasping the passage of time.

Ready for Fall.

2011-08-15T20:44:00.000-04:00

This evening is the first in weeks that it's been cool enough to put a window up. I had to bang on and force the window in my bedroom to get it to budge. I hate old windows- and yet I am attracted to every ancient house I see, irrationally so. I have none of the skills or the gumption needed to keep one going, but still I dream. Ezra and I peeped through the windows of a vacant mansion yesterday. We were killing time waiting for Maddie to do a senior portrait shoot. It was 4000 odd square feet and it's features even included a widow's walk.

The breeze reminds me that fall is once again around the corner. Ezra donned his cleats and headed to the ball field to resume a new season today. Tomorrow the kids register for school. I only have to tackle 2 schools this year and not 3, which makes me glad, but I will miss RS Payne Elementary school which was a special place for Nora to be for the past three years.

Ordinarily I am a huge fan of summer. This year, it's been too hot to camp, to hot to fire up the grill, and usually too hot to even sit outside for any length of time. I think I might be ready for Fall.

Keeping the Day Job, or: Why I Write

2011-08-13T08:13:00.000-04:00

Journal entry, 6-29-11

I am at the beach. It is my twentieth anniversary and I am watching my husband try to boogie board in the Atlantic with a board almost as old as our union. I am recovering from a year of working seven days a week. Feeling slightly shameful- know there are people everywhere who work harder than I have. But people offer me sympathy, and I take it. The waves are big today, but there is little breeze.It's been years since I've been to the ocean.The tides and waves are a mystery to me. I know I could study them and gain scientific understanding but I enjoy the mesmerizing mystery of them. Sand like brown sugar spills over and between my toes, making them look brown and healthy. Freer than they have been in a long time.

A cat came onto the beach last night. Black, with white beard and paws. He was chasing crabs in the dusk. I'd never seen a beach cat. Joe, letting his diamond-shaped kite up and up, grinning like a young boy. Other people on the beach had fancier kites, but his simple one seemed to soar the highest. It's windy and cool- how the temperature can change here in just a few hours' time.

I sat in my beach chair and read some issues of Poets and Writers magazine. Most of what I saw was disappointing. At least half the issue is ads for MFA programs or other training courses. Or, Get your book published today!!! One column caught my eye: Why We Write. A woman was telling a story about her grandmother dying. It was a good story, though I did not feel it addressed the topic very clearly. Why does she write? Why do I write?

I wouldn't mind becoming known as a writer, but I have not the resources- mental, physical, or any other- to put myself out there they way you have to these days. We are all drowning in sheer volume of people who want to be writers or who have written books. Even going to Barnes and Noble is almost more than I can handle anymore. I did enter a chapbook contest this past year. It was one chosen carefully based on what I thought might be a good fit with my work. They haven't announced the winners yet, but hundreds have entered it. I'm not lying awake at night wondering if I will get chosen. If I do, that's great. But if I don't, it doesn't mean I'm a bad writer. It just means that hundreds of people were competing. Its crazy to think of the time and money some people must put into systematically entering every contest that comes by, lured into visions of Stephen King-esque fame by said writers magazines.

Why do I write? Because I always have, as far back as my memory goes. It's how I process my world and the outer world around me. If it turns out that I am just mediocre at it- not trained enough in the craft- that's okay. I know I will still keep doing it because it is a part of me. The older I get, the more fatalistic I become. The world teeming with MFA-waving graduates shoving to get discovered. What are my chances, really? I'm a mom, I'm a nurse. I have laundry to do. Sure, I got a poem published on Anderbo. On Connotation Press. 15 seconds of fame, just long enough to repost the link on my Facebook wall and watch it dribble down my newsfeed and into oblivion.

No- this isn't why I write. My ego does hope that what I write will have meaning for someone out there. Otherwise, why publish any of this stuff? Could I actually touch someone the way Jane Smiley and Sharon Olds have touched me? I write to process the things in my life- family, love, death, old age, work. I never want to be "just" a writer. I want to be a woman who works with the public and who has children and who writes about these things. I am not capable of ordering the poems in my manuscript in some mythical, symbolic order as the magazine advised me to do to increase my chances of getting it published. I know which one I want to be first, and I know which one I want to be last. The rest is fate.

Which makes me some sort of literary hippie-rebel-castout. I have no degrees. I have a nursing diploma and a tickle in my heart and hand to put words to paper. I don't condemn those who are doing it another way. I just can't navigate it all. There's always someone with more time to write, money for a week-long writers' retreat, or better performance skills to steal the show at the local open mike.

I am not a writer. I am a woman who writes. The distinction feels important to me, somehow.

Clearing Out

2011-08-12T07:32:00.000-04:00

Joe and I are finally getting serious about putting our house up on the market. We've been looking at a few old homes around the area, and realizing ours isn't so bad. I mean yeah, that sink is sinking into the floor, but that's just details.

You do not realize how dirty and how cluttered your house is until you start seeing it with the eyes of trying to get it ready to sell. At least if you're someone like me who cleans as little as necessary on a day-to-day basis. I was working on the kitchen last night and found in a drawer a pile of those little packages of McDonalds sauce and duck sauce and soy sauce. Which will probably never get pulled out and used. I pitched them. And there's more, much more. I found Betta food and supplies from when we (once upon a time) had a Betta fish. Amazing the way it accumulates.

Recently Joe and I helped a friend move, and I was reminded of the enormity of packing your life into labeled boxes. It reminded me to start as soon as possible getting things organized and weeded out. We don't know when we'll move, but I want to be ready. And as a bonus, imagining that I'm moving makes the tasks funner than usual. Last night when I was cleaning the kitchen, I was imagining that I was getting it ready to take pictures of it.

Also at this time of year is the usual decluttering of the kids' clothes, all the stuff that no longer fits or is worn out. The kids are now old enough to do that themselves and it's great, but sometimes leaving me unsure as to what they now need. It's now up to them to let me know.

So that's my agenda for the weekend. Cleaning, decluttering, and being thankful I don't have to work the weekends anymore.

Fits and Starts

2011-08-11T21:10:00.000-04:00

Sometimes writing is just too hard. I log onto Blogger most mornings to see if anything new has been posted. I follow very few blogs, and so many days there is nothing new. I'll stare at my blog feed for a minute, try to think about what I want to write about, and then exit out. There just never seems to be a long enough piece of time to really dig into anything.

Or else someone's breathing down my neck to use the computer. Or else I'm distracted by Facebook or some other asinine time-waster.

Driving to New London in the mornings, I sometimes think of things I want to write about. I used to be better about jotting them down, but not so much these days.

I've been switching out the CDs in my car. A week or so ago, I put both of my Dido discs in. I hadn't heard them in quite a while, and hearing them caused me to remember that they were in heavy rotation about the time that Joe's brother went missing. Isn't it always amazing the way music brings back emotions? All her lines about love took on layers of meaning during that time.

I can't breathe, until you're resting here with me.
His boots no longer by my door.
I promise you, you'll see the sun again.

Some days most things seem too hard. I go to work and I work and then I drive back home. The package that needs mailing waits several days in the floorboard before I muster the energy to drop by the post office. Why? I don't know. I get in bed most nights by nine with a bag of popcorn and a book and I read. Sometimes I don't understand what I read but it's the ritual of it. And I'm noticing that waking up in the morning seems to be getting easier for me. Finally, at almost 40. Maybe I will become a morning person yet.

Everything, fits and starts.

New Job

2011-08-04T08:08:00.000-04:00

Funny how you can try and try to make something happen, but often when the time comes it slips through the back door and surprises you. I interviewed for a job on Wednesday of last week, which was nothing unusual. I've been to plenty of interviews; sometimes I go back for a second interview. Once I even went to four, but that's another story. I never seem to land the job.

So I went on Wednesday and was told I'd hear back in a week for a possible second run, and then on Friday my phone rang and it was them. Making me an offer.

Finally, I have landed the illustrious Full-Time Job with Benefits. And I am glad. It's what I've been wanting and needing. The catch is this: I am moving into a new specialty. Rheumatology.

My new title is Rheumatology Coordinator, and yes, that involves paperwork. More than I was doing before. But it also involves delving into a whole new field. In family practice, I dabbled in everything. Sure, I know a little about gout, about labs for arthritis patients. This will be a new level and I do think it will be interesting.

Just wondering if this will bump me out of women's health forever.

But don't let me take you down any dark hols- I am very happy and thankful for my new job. Getting online now to look for some rheumatology books...

Here Comes the Sun

2011-07-23T08:33:00.000-04:00

My funk finally lifted and I feel brighter. It's Saturday morning and I slept well and I have an itch to make the house look nice today. It's amazing to have the whole weekend again. I'm so thankful.

I went through a spell where there was a house I wanted to buy in the historic district. It was amazing, and the price was ridiculously low as the house was a foreclosure on the market for over a year. We looked at it numerous times as the realtor had given us the code to the lock box. Ultimately though, we had to accept that we would not be able to afford the exterior maintenance on a historic home. The outside is clapboards, which must be painted every few years, and the roof metal but not very nice and the roof job will be a doozy on that house because the back of the house is on a steep slope.

So I had to let the dream go and now I'm trying to focus on getting our house in a state for selling. I'm also now thinking: Brick house. Basement. Craft room. Time will tell. I'm not always the most patient person.

Joe and I went to the beach for a few days and I never wrote about it. I did write some on the beach, though- gritty sand on everything and pink burns on my hands from the writing and the reading. But I've hardly written since I got back.

My friend Cathy asked me recently if I would still write when I was happy. The answer to that is a resounding yes. But not sappy-happy. I hope. These days, most things are a matter of time. I have a small stack of appointments I need to make for the children, still undone. Notes on my year in Alzheimers care still half-entered into Word. Life is spinning too quickly and it scares me.

In October I will become a grandmother at the age of 38. I still don't even know how to process that information. If some of you are sitting there stunned because you didn't know, that's because I went all Southern for a bit and just couldn't talk about it.

And I have a job which allows me very little time to think, or even jot down a thought I'd like to hang onto. I like medical but it's just so fast paced. I truly want to slow down and enjoy my patients more instead of politely cutting them off because I have 3 more patients waiting to put back and a stack of prescription refills to approve and fax back, and what's that? We need an EKG in room 2. I know some people thrive on the adrenaline and the pace, but I don't. Maybe I got into nursing at too late of an age or maybe it's just who I am.

Regardless, it's Saturday and even though the temperature threatens to reach its hands up near a hundred again, I am happy.

Funk

2011-07-15T20:54:00.000-04:00

Having one of those spells where I feel in a fog. I'm tired. I don't want to do anything. I feel blank. When I have a chance to write or do something creative, even a small one, I sit motionless and waste the opportunity. It seems pointless at times. Life this week feels like a creaky treadmill, and yet- nothing is wrong. I mean, no- life isn't perfect. But I have 25 hours of work a week and a nice car that for the moment I can still pay for and I have nothing major to feel depressed about. My hormonal and emotional swings certainly feel more intense with age. Just in the past couple of years, I suffer from what I can only assume is PMS. I will feel irritable, sometimes to the point of anger, or I will tear up for no good reason. And I am not one to cry except now and again, when great heaving sobs and wails will finally spew forth from my tough shell.

Maybe sometimes, we just feel blah.

I am still in my ongoing identity crisis about my life in general, my job specifically. Some days I pop my head up and look around at work and think: how the hell did I end up here?! I don't fit in here. I'm too dreamy and creative. Linger too long in the room with the patient. Other days- ironically, like today- I feel like I do my job well and could settle in awhile. Though that involves letting go of the dream I've held for so long that I would eventually use my nursing skills to benefit women in the childbearing year.

But next week, when I'm out of my funk, I will feel positive again and the sun will come out.

Pushing out the doldrums

2011-06-23T08:20:00.000-04:00

Last night at the ball game, my daughter drew a tattoo on my thigh with a blue sharpie. This morning, I pulled a pair of red scrub pants over it. I'm not going to shower- I don't feel like showering. I'm in one of those blah moods where I am feeling stuck and unmotivated. I grab my Mighty Mouse top because I know I will need some super power today. The shirt feels like one more reminder that I don't fit in at my job.

We all get accommodated eventually to our situation and begin to complain about it. I wish it weren't true but it is. I was (and still am) so thankful to have a job. Many don't. But after a year of doing the same thing, I feel unsatisfied. I have a longing to find a job that I really belong in and feel like I make a difference. I interviewed for a position I really wanted and after weeks of waiting I find out that they are still interviewing other people. Still holding out for someone better qualified than me, even though several people that work there had put in good words for me. It can be pretty hard to accept that the world really does operate like that. I still haven't heard about the job. Maybe I'll actually get it. But in my mind, I'm moving on. I have to.

I know I need to find peace and happiness within myself and within the life that I have. It's just one of those days where things are foggy. I feel jealous of my women friends who have the luxury of staying home, although I see them complaining just as much about their situations. We all lose our perspectives at times. I feel guilty that my husband has had to support me for so many years and that sees me as useless and dependent, unable to even clean my own filthy car out. I want to be strong, powerful, colorful. I want to be what everyone wants me to be.

I've been listening to old 80's stuff in the car on the drive to and from work. Trying to tap into the strong feelings from that time. Trying to see if those feelings mean anything now, or if they are just relics of a distant past. Working on focusing on the things in my life that I am really happy about- and there are many.

End of a Long Week

2011-06-10T21:37:00.000-04:00

Today at work, I described it as "All-star Friday" because our schedule included an absolutely amazing array of frequent fliers and typically complex patients. I felt like I was in the medical version of "Mars Attacks." The other nurses realized I was right on and were chuckling. After almost a year, they are finally sort of getting used to my sense of humor and the odd things I say. One especially crazy day, I made the comment that it had been a very "tangly" day. Which makes perfect sense to me. The lab girl looked at me as if I'd spoken Aramaic. But this is who I am. Most of the time I think I'm pretty ordinary, and wish I were a bit more off the grid.

I did some really tight blood draws today- I was really on my game with that. And yesterday I flushed out a patient's ear that had something very much resembling mold in it. She said that she did get outdoors quite a lot, and that perhaps some gnats had gotten in. We'll never know. We also had the couple in their (upper) 80's who came in together saying that their blood pressures were so low because they have sex all the time.

But it wasn't really a great week overall. The time crawled and I daydreamed while counting pulses and wondered to myself if this is the end of the career road for me.

Morgan moved into her own apartment this week and I helped her get groceries this evening. I was so tired and so hungry by the time I got done. Ez and I got Japanese food and crashed together in the AC and talked about dating and what there was to do when I was his age. I enjoyed thinking back to all those times hanging out at Nite Lites, the Fort theatre and game room, and the skate jams. I tried to give him a timeline of my old boyfriends, but I noticed it was all growing a bit fuzzy.

Cleaning Binge

2011-06-07T19:45:00.000-04:00

I guess I'd have to describe my housekeeping habits as somewhere between Bad and Occasionally Mediocre. I pick up, though not faithfully, but I'm not that great at the actual cleaning bit. Basically, it's dusty as hell around here and don't even look at the baseboards and all that. But for some reason, if I'm pissed off or have a lot of things on my mind, I tend to respond by cleaning.

I've thought a bit about why this is, and I think it's because when I'm feeling vulnerable, I want to wrap myself around something I can control. And that is something I can have a direct effect on.

Today was one of those days. At work, I felt average. I felt like, even after almost a year, I'm not getting any better at my job. I got reprimanded for not having a particular form filled out for a particular type of visit, which cost the doctor ten minutes' time. I know it sounds nit picky, but I should have picked up on that and made sure it was there. I should know by now. I didn't know which vaccines were in which combination..the Rotarix, the Pediarix, the Twinrix! It's so confusing. I felt out of place. I felt bored. I counted the hours until I could leave.

And I'm dying to put in my notice at my weekend job. Each weekend I toy with the idea, think of the money, reconsider. It's a terrible game of tug-of-war.

On top of that, I've been waiting for about 2 weeks to hear about a job I interviewed for. It's a job that I am trying very hard to remain neutral about, and not get myself built up for another disappointment. But here's the catch: this is my dream job. So I clunk along at my other jobs and try to push off the restless feelings of an exciting change.

And Joe isn't here this week to distract me from my thoughts. Normally I'd pop a bag of popcorn and get on the bed and watch him on the computer and talk. But I can't.

So I respond by attacking the baby grand and it's layers of dust. I drag a damp rag beneath the long strings. Rub with a shishkabab stick. I immerse myself in this task and blow off as much of this emotional energy as possible. Then I straighten the DVDs, putting all the stray discs back in their cases and dusting the tops.

This is serious.

And I am supposing it's a very good thing that I get in these occasional modes of deep-thought and almost-angst. Otherwise the place would really fall apart.

Ariel Gore on Writing

2011-06-05T22:00:00.000-04:00

"If you don't have time to write, stop answering the phone. Change your e-mail address. Kill your television. If you don't have a baby, have one. If you have a baby, get a sitter. If you work too much, work more. If you don't work enough, work less. If there's a problem, exaggerate it. If you're broke, go to the food bank. If you have too much money, give it away. If you're north, go south. If you're south, go north. If you don't drink, start. If you drink, sober up. If you're in school, drop out. If you're out of school, drop in. If you believe you have a year to live, imagine you have a hundred. If you believe you have a hundred years to live, imagine you only have one. If you're sane, go crazy. If you're crazy, snap out of it. If you've got a partner, break up. If you're single, find a lover! The shock of the new- shake yourself awake. There is only this moment, this night, this remembrance rolling toward you from the distant past, this blank page, this inspiration yielding itself to you. Will you meet it?

-From chapter one of How to Become A Famous Writer Before You're Dead

Thursday

2011-06-02T16:23:00.000-04:00

Me, to patient: So, what's bringing you in to see us today?

Patient: My ear is really hurting. It's hurting all the way down into my neck. I got into a mess of seed ticks a few days ago, and I'm wondering if maybe one got into my ear.

Me: Gosh, that's an awful thought.

Patient: Weeeeell, it happens.

Me: (stunned silence, contemplating the logistics of digging an embedded seed tick out of a man's hairy ear canal.)

Patient: And whiiiile I'm in here, I need the Doc to look at my toe. The nail is ingrown and when I tried to cut it out myself, it got infected.

Summer Times are Here Again

2011-05-31T07:41:00.000-04:00

So it's back to summer days for awhile. The kids are all sleeping in on this official first day of summer break. It was so hot this weekend that we had all the air conditioners cranking...before June! I love the smells of the house in the summer. The heat rises upstairs and warms the wood floor up which gives off the smell of an old house. Then when I head down the stairs there is the smell of the cool air which reminds me of the birth of Madison almost 17 years ago in this very house. We had the air on as I labored with her, and later, afterward- resting under cool sheets with damp hair and my new baby prize in my arms. I have seen the summer come and go in this house for almost twenty years.

In my last post I talked about not wanting to write. And I think what I meant was that I want to write. But life has been so hectic that I am not writing. I hope to get back to more this summer. I will have a little more time in the mornings, and also I am hoping and praying with all my heart that I will get the job I interviewed for and get my weekends back.

I want to start writing down all my memories of working this past year in an Alzheimers center. I want them to be short glimpses, much like the short-term memories of the people they are about. I still can't figure out whether I write poetry or prose, but I know this: I write truth. I love to read fiction but I don't think I can write it.

Yesterday a friend of mine announced that she is not going to blog anymore. She had a variety of reasons for this decision, all of which I respect and agree with. But it's leaving me a bit sad today. We had lost contact for a few years and since we reconnected, her blog is where I would go to catch up on what's going on in her life. I will really miss it. She is a fine, funny writer so I hope she finds another place to do that.

My energy seems to wax and wane with the phases of the moon. The past couple of days were good and I am thankful. Now Nora's swim team is starting up so I will be going to the pool across town several nights a week. I'll be sure to bring a notebook.

Regroup

2011-05-20T07:20:00.000-04:00

No time to write these days. Or maybe, no space to get the words out and into the right places. Often, after I wake Madison up for school, I crawl back into bed for twenty more minutes. I feel tired. I feel that I have no excuse, and then I feel I have every excuse. Mostly, I just don't feel driven to write despite all circumstances, I guess.

Or maybe, I'm bored of my own voice, my tiresome presence.

I don't think all writers must be egocentric, or are. But you need to feel like you have something to say to the world that's worth saying and believe that you can say it well. I go through spells where I feel that way. But this isn't one of them. I'm sick and tired of working 7 days a week- this gets more painful the sunnier it gets- and a slew of job rejections have bruised my self-esteem about being a nurse. Navigating the stinky politics of a medical monopoly. I try to slither like a desperate worm, the way I'm supposed to, but I always seem to answer the questions wrong. And it feels like everyone but me has a cheat sheet.

I must have been absent that day.

Within the shabby mess of all that, writing ceases to even be an escape for me so I sit staring at Facebook, watching myself die in the reflection of myself in my computer screen. I've got to shake all that off and get back to more real life and more writing.

Moving On

2011-05-14T08:02:00.000-04:00

Nora performed in her last play as an elementary schooler the other night. One of the things I enjoy about that age group is that they haven't grown too cool for stuff yet. They were all up there on stage, singing and chopping out the cheesy choreography with full gusto. Nora had a small part, but she played it well. She used to hate being on stage when she was younger; she'd stand stiff as a board, barely mumbling the words. This time, I caught her glowing a few times. Her three years at the GO Center have been good for her. I look with some trepidation toward the middle school years but hoping this time has built a good foundation for her.

boys

2011-04-27T17:44:00.001-04:00

I gave birth to only one boy. While pregnant with him, I had a dream that he came out of me, stood up and walked away. I see that happening as he grows and changes. These days, I am surrounded by pubescent boys- sweaty and throat-cracky. They are sized like small adults but with no sense of the amount of physical space they take up. Their limbs are growing so quickly that they knock things over clumsily. Noisily.

And that one there- I'm not even sure I know his name. He just crossed into my kitchen and opened the cabinet where the glasses are kept and got one down. Made himself an ice water. It was obvious he knew where the glasses are kept. I don't mind.

I like how these boys don't hate being here. They don't yet slink past me to hide in Ezra's room and make bombs or do drugs. They tell me about how the math teacher hates them. When I tell them they have to stop calling me Mrs. Schuppe, they start addressing me as Mom.

I think now that maybe my arms will always be full of children, one way or the other. Some might say that motherhood was a mistake for me, a child of eighteen. But I guess it was just Fate. My fate.

To be a mother. As often as I have fought it.

It is a place that I know.

Graveyards I have known and loved, and why I never want to be buried in one

2011-04-26T16:15:00.001-04:00

(This is a rough draft of an essay I was working on a few weeks ago. I'm going to go ahead and put it out here since I seem to be at a standstill...)

My childhood home was next to a cemetery. A small and forlorn one, to be sure, without even a sign out front until later years. My sister and I went there often- we lived on a busy road with few neighbors, so it was something to do. A lot of time was spent there, reading the stones. I was fascinated by how much older and crumbly the stones became as I moved further to the back. I can still remember how it felt when I discovered three child's stones all in a row, all seemingly siblings who had each died at a year of age. I froze in my tracks, feeling part of a ghost story. We'd fly kites there sometimes. Not a good choice considering how we had to look both upward at the kite and downward so as to not trip on the stones. But we were kids and we made do with what we had available.

Cemeteries continued to pepper my life, as I suppose they do everyone's in some way. At one point my father got interested in geneaology and we spent most of a summer of traipsing all over Nelson County haunting the burial areas of little white country churches ion search of Fitzgeralds and their kin. Sometimes it was pretty boring. I grew tired of feeling carsick from the mountain roads, of trudging up a hill in the middle of the woods to look for 3 elusive tombstones that were rumored to be there. But in the midst of that experience I cultivated a love for the beauty there. A statue of an angel with crumbling features. The ever-popular lamb sitting docile atop the small stone of a baby.

Around the time that I got my first car, a champagne beige Honda hatchback which I later totaled- I was also taking a photography class in high school. I loved this new freedom to go where I pleased. I spent many sunny afternoons taking photos in cemeteries. It was at this time that I discovered the historic Old City Cemetery in downtown Lynchburg. I would pull over somewhere if I happened upon one that looked worthy. My old favorites, though, were the so-called "torch cemetery" and also Spring Hill, near the city stadium. My grandmother used to like telling me how she already had her plot bought and paid for at Spring Hill. She won't be buried beside her late husband, however. he chose to donate his body to science. No tandem stone for those two. But ultimately, does it matter?

I had my first date with the man I was to marry in a cemetery. We parked outside the gate, slid through to the other side and took a long walk and talked. There are few places quieter or more private, after all. We talked for a long, long time that evening and we returned to that spot many times to wander or to hash something out. One night we even took the camera and tripod to try to get some long-exposure shots.

It's an odd thing, really. How much I love cemeteries and yet cannot bear the thought of being placed in one for eternity. For one thing, the old stones and statues I love are relics of the past. I'd never have a grave that cool. Everything's all flat and easy to landscape now. Boring. But that isn't all of it. It's the vast amount of space these morgues take up. It just seems such a waste to me. I'd rather be burned to dust and scattered around somewhere. It rings out on a more practical note for me.

When our family lost a loved one a few years ago, I learned something valuable: that the ritual of the funeral is for the benefit of those left behind. Ultimately, I have wishes surrounding my own death but I want my family and friends to do what they need to do to process it all. Jonathan was gone and his body a lifeless hub. But for us, the placing of the chess book and the Bible in his coffin felt sacred. After all, this hub was all we had left of the one we'd known.As humans in a grief state, we tend to cling to this soulless body and address it as if it were still alive. The body certainly deserves respect, and in some groups the ritual of burial is a necessary part of that reverence.

It occurred to me one day that eventually, everyone who knew and loved these people will die off themselves, and then what? Acres and acres of forgotten people, taking up space. This came to light for me when I was sitting for an elderly woman for a few weeks. She was telling me how her first child was born dead. How her husband sat on the side of the bed and cried for the little lost child. She knew what cemetery it was in, and I jotted the child's name down in the margin of my notebook, intending to go and find her some lazy day. But I never did- and chances are, no one else ever will either. That baby lived in her parents' hearts and that heart is now in a grave of it's own.

I have a friend who became a widow at a young age. I asked her recently why she chose to have her husband cremated and if she regretted not having a grave to go to. Here is part of her response:

I have never even thought about going to a gravesite. I have been very happy with our decision to scatter the ashes. His ashes are scattered in the mountains and at the beach. So I figure if the boys and I need a place to go and remember him.... we can take a hike or a vacation :-)
I read a blog that is written by a gal whose fiance died. It's been a year... and she goes to "see G--" EVERYDAY at the cemetery. I keep wondering at what point she will realize that he's NOT THERE. I know that some people are really attached to gravesites... but I am just not one of them. I think tending to a grave would just be another chore to feel guilty about.
She also tells me that she and her husband discussed cremation because it's cheaper and they have certain feelings about the funeral industry and the notion that they prey on grieving people. But for me, it just seems wasteful. I wonder if perhaps we have just enough beautiful, old cemeteries to enjoy at this point.

Which brings me to a Harper's article from a few years ago that I just stumbled over recently, about the corpse industry and how body parts are hustled and "sold" for all kinds of purposes. Stay tuned.

An Easter Moment

2011-04-24T11:17:00.001-04:00

In lieu of the more traditional boiled egg, I am cooking an Easter omlette. Slices of mushrooms and onions bubble gently in a butter bath. Doesn't the smell of onions cooking always fill every space with itself? I hated onions for my entire childhood. Sometime- perhaps during one of the pregnancies- my love for them finally bloomed.

In lieu of years of church attendance on this day, we are enjoying the morning at home. I am not yelling at my children to get dressed, not hunting for shoes, not piling into the car already sweaty and stressed. They are spending time together, eating candy and laughing. Joe is sitting on the back porch in the sun, reading and drinking coffee. It's a gorgeous morning. Our grass is freshly trimmed and boasts a rich green. I'm sure Joe's family feels much disapproval- disappointment, even- at our break from church, but I have found a lot of peace within it. I don't enjoy organized religion and I can't fathom the idea of trying to convince others to believe something that I don't fully understand myself. It feels as if the church doesn't approve of one admitting that they don't. There is no room for questions.

I pop my toast up before it's fully ready, becuase I am anxious to eat. I try not to think of how I have to go to work in a few hours; instead, just soak in a peaceful moment while it lasts. It's one thing I think I'm finally mastering in my life. It all changes so quickly.

But right now, the sun is streaming in everywhere and there is new white paint on the doorframes in my bedroom and a full bottle of dish soap smiling at me from the kitchen sink.

wednesday

2011-04-20T15:23:00.000-04:00

I met a man at work today who told me how the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 went right over his head before it exploded. His eyes welled with tears as he recounted it. I tried for a moment to imagine the noise and the fear of it. But if course, I am unable. And we blow people off all the time because we don't understand the things they have seen and touched. And then I think of these Weepies lyrics:

You can ask about it, but nobody knows the way
No breadcrumb trail to follow through your days
It takes an axe, sometimes a feather
In the sunshine and bad weather
It's a matter of getting deeper in, any way you can

2011-04-04T21:25:00.000-04:00

He retreats to his room after meals, drops awkwardly onto his twin bed, and plays with himself. His roommate is wheelchair bound out in the day area, so he has the place to himself. And anyway- what else has he left in life? A few visitors on Sunday afternoons, trying to be cheerful and ignore his increasing dementia. An occasional good meal in the dining room- though those girls are always rushing him through his food so they can clear the tables. Always bossing him around to change his clothes. Even trying to wipe his ass! The nerve.

But when he's alone, there is a bubble of space where nothing else matters. How he doesn't know where he is anymore. How his wife is gone. It's a space to retreat into, and the girls let him be when he's there. If they bring his roommate in to change his diapers, he stops. Somewhere in that dessicating brain there is still a sense of dignity, after all. This is why he swats and curses whenever they try to change him. It's just not right, a bunch of women treating him like a damn infant. He's a country man; a Baptist.

Lying there in a patch of sunlight after lunch and noon pills, his mind can float off into the hollowed memories that still remain. If he closes his eyes he can ignore the little tan sign on the door reading PLEASE KEEP CLOSET DOOR LOCKED. He can block out all the shabbiness that the end of the road has led him to.

Me

2011-04-01T08:14:00.000-04:00

I linger too long in the room with the patients, because I like to talk to them.

I forget sometimes that the pee is in the wooden door.

I am too slow with the chart work.

I am too creative

for the sterility

I work in.

But let me tell you something more:
I have the heart of a nurse
and one of these days
I will find the place
I belong.

Book Review: The Mercy Papers

2011-03-29T16:21:00.000-04:00

After a lengthy dry spell, I've been doing some fiction reading. I picked a couple of books up at Ollie's the other weekend while waiting for Ezra's ball game to start. The first one, The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm, was a memoir of a woman's last three weeks with her dying mother. Yes, I really like stuff like that and also have these little fantasies about being an amazing hospice nurse. I thought the book was well done and the author very adept at conveying some of the hard parts without being glossy. Remember the opening scene of Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" where they are trying to dispose of all their mother's mucus? It's not that intense, but you get the idea.

The portrayal of the hospice nurse really bummed me out. She was made out as a narcotic-happy mercy killer who came intruding into the home with a distinct power trip and lack of empathy. Maybe she was, or maybe in her grief that's how the author perceived her. All my own dealings with hospice nurses have been so great. I wanted to call this woman up and say "Noooooo! They aren't like that!" She even nicknames her Nurse Ratched. She begins with a lovely metaphor of the hospice nurse building a boat to help the dying person sail away into death. But really, she sees this boat as built of Fentanyl and morphine. Percocet.

She says: She's building a boat to sail my mother out. She has no interest in my mother's life, the thoughts she had, the cases she won, her family. Barb will build the boat of morphine and pillows and then I will have no mother and the days will be wordless and empty.

She really hates this woman and I think Barb is an easy target for her pain.

In the end, her mother died alone in the night. Her oxygen tube had become disconnected. I found myself wondering if she'd pulled it herself, acting as her own angel of mercy. For some reason, I like to think she did.

another self-serving and dull blog post in which I whine

2011-03-16T07:59:00.000-04:00

I feel utterly exhausted today. I am fighting a cold, for one thing. I figured one would come my way eventually with all the throats and noses I've been swabbing at work. We had a nurses' meeting at 7 this morning, then I worked from 8 until 3:30 because a co-worker was out. Since I am normally the floater, there was no floater and we all plugged along the best we could. I needed to run an overdue errand after work, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I knew I still had to get some groceries, clean up the disaster in the kitchen once again, and taxi Ezra up to the ball field, plus throw some dinner together.

All day I'd had on the back burner of my mind a blog post I was planning to compose. A friend wanted all her fellow bloggers to post something today as a kind of spring jump-start back into more writing. I tried to imagine Stephen King as my muse, hunched in the humid laundry room of a doublewide trailer with an old Olivetti on a child's desk balanced on his thighs. But there just wasn't time, and I felt so spent that even the poor, pre-fame King felt smoky and distant from the 2-day-old food drying all over the dishes in my kitchen.

Now it's the next morning. I am in my scrubs, teeth still unbrushed. I have a few more minutes and one more snooze call for Nora before I have to gather myself up and leave the house again. I do like working, I just didn't realize how much I'd miss the time. The work that I do barely allows for a sneak peek at my cell phone, much less any sort of note-taking or actual writing. And to some degree, I just have to accept that, and accept this time for what it is.

However, forthcoming: Graveyards I Have Known and Loved, and Why I'll Never be Buried in One.

Spring Came Back

2011-03-07T15:16:00.000-05:00

Dropping Nora off at school, I notice how green the grass on the playground is getting. What my mother used to call chartreuse, the shade of newborn life. My friend Scott speaks of another snowstorm up his way, but I turn my face fom such unpleasant thoughts and tip my face up toward the sun coming in my car window. My cheeks are white from too much time spent indoors. But spring is coming, now. I can feel it.

The air smells like Easter all the time now- Easter in Virginia. I have spent every Easter of my life in this land and I know it's bouquet. It reminds me the most of when my big girls were little and I'd dress them up in tights that had rows of lace across the behind and shiny shoes and take them to Easter services. It was always a little cold, just like it's a little cold now, but I no longer have thermals on beneath my scrubs. Through these window panes it could almost feel like May.

A tractor trailer blows past me with snow on its hood. The chunks fly onto my windshield but it's a futile splatter. It's spring now. I hit the wipers once and it's gone from sight.

Life, death, and everything else

2011-03-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have a lot to say but all of it's jumbled, much like my whole life feels a bit jumbled these days. We've been painting our bedroom, finally, and stuff is misplaced and piled in all sorts of odd places as we slowly put it back together. My former organized self is struggling to remember appointments and meetings and insurance forms that need returning. I had to buy a gallon of milk at a convenience store this morning at 6:30 because I'd forgotten to get it last night.

Meanwhile, trying to keep the house running while working 40 hours a week is pretty amusing, considering how bad I was at it before.

Maddie just got back from New York. She had a wonderful, life-changing time in the city. She is a person full of love, and it shows in everything she does. Joe says she will never see Lynchburg the same and I'm sure that is the truth. She was stunned by the number of homeless people and by the way the cars will run you down if you don't get out of the street. By how expensive everything was.

While she was on the train home yesterday, we discovered that our black cat had been hit by a car. He was Morgan's cat and also mostly Nora's cat since Morgan isn't living here now. Nora was absolutely crushed. Morgan helped her paint a stone to put on his grave. These things are hard for kids, and harder for some than others.

I've been combing the job ads. I 'd like to have one full-time job rather than 2 part-time ones and get my weekends back. But right now there just isn't much open for LPNs in Lynchburg. So I'm trying to just keep going with the everyday working thing. I will miss the residents at my weekend job when I finally leave.

the next adventure

2011-02-24T08:12:00.000-05:00

Joe and I put Maddie on the Amtrak to New York this morning. It's amazing to help your child do something that you have never done yourself...it feels like you are promising them just a little more than what you yourself have. A hope, of sorts.

So, she's sixteen and she is out in the cold darkness, gripping her suitcase handle and waiting for the train to come. Then she is rolling it along the cobblestones toward the long line of train cars, and her face is glowing because she is about to go on an adventure. She doesn't really know what she's doing but she's following everyone else. She climbs the steps onto the train and the guide tells her to turn right and she does. She doesn't look back. She doesn't get a window seat but it's okay because her life is about to change just a little more.

And in a year and a half we'll be leaving her off at a college somewhere.

In some moments, you are able to stick your head up out of the muck of daily living and realize that the time is going by.

Finding my Place

2011-02-09T08:06:00.000-05:00

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen my current profile picture and chuckled. It's me on the night I graduated nursing school, still in my graduation outfit and wearing a green alien mask that had been floating around the house. I am peeking through the little eye slits that are meant to be hidden, and the joke's on me because it's easy to see me peeping through.

And funny, because I feel a little like that lately. An alien traveler in a land I don't quite fit into. Yes, I like being a nurse. But I got into it for the wrong reasons, if you will. I saw it as a means to an end, that end being a job doing what I love, working in womens health. Getting paid to do what I love. It sounded great, and at one point it looked like it was actually going to happen.

But it didn't, and now I find myself feeling around the landscape, trying to find a place to lay my blanket out that feels right. Is it the comfort of the physician's office with it's clean floors and free lunches, holidays off? Is it guiding people with dementia through the maze of their own minds? Or is it something else entirely, something I haven't had a chance to glimpse yet? Is this a job, or a career? Because you see- birth was my career. Birth was my thing.

And knowing that it will fall into place eventually, I still find myself swirling it around in my mouth, trying to discern the correct answer. I have never been a very patient person.

Monday Again

2011-02-07T15:36:00.000-05:00

I am requiring myself to jot a few words down here, despite the slow, sludgy feeling of my brain and limbs. Use it or lose it. I have just a few more days left to make improvements on my poems, and then off they go, like it or no. So why I am I doing this instead of that?

I've been thinking about my jobs a lot this week. About the ways in which I love and hate each one, and how I might choose between the two at some point. At my doctors' office job, I am sort of a monkey. I do the same tasks repeatedly all day. At times it's pretty dull, although I can find serenity at sitting down to a stack of lab letters, knowing I can let my mind trawl around in space for a bit as I fold the letters into thirds and lick the envelopes. But still: what's it like after 2 years? 10?

And my other job. As grueling and stressful as it can be- there is challenge and there is reward. There is decision-making, that sometimes I don't want to do. Example: Mrs.R is choking. Is she going to cough it up? Let's give her some back blows. Will she need the Heimlich? But still.

In other news, someone on Etsy finally purchased my set of 4 cards depicting executioners' rooms. I know how it sounds, but it felt good that someone else in the world might have seen what I saw in them and appreciated them. Or maybe I was just thrilled that someone bought a card for a change.

2011-02-01T07:57:00.000-05:00

Joe left at 5:52 this morning. He is headed up onto a mountain to work on a survey job on this cold morning. Too cold. I flip my hood up, cinch the strings and roll toward the clock so I won't oversleep. I have until 6:30, and isn't this last-minute sleep always delicious? I had crazy dreams all night- perhaps I ate too many M&Ms before bed.

I feel exhausted already this week. I can't really find a pattern except to say that my energy waxes and wanes. This week I have some big things on my mind so maybe that's making me wilted. Yesterday everyone was crabby at work and I could hardly wait for 2:00 so I could leave.

Yesterday Joe's dad came down and brought Ezra a lathe, which if you don't know (I didn't) is a woodworking tool. Ezra had used one to make a wooden pen on his last visit there and was really smitten with the whole thing. Joe's dad has some connections in the Annapolis Woodworkers who were excited that a young man is interested in their craft. So they gathered him up enough stuff to get him started. Humbling, the love that still exists in the world.

so much for a snow day...

2011-01-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

Had a bit of a snowstorm yesterday, which began in the afternoon and dropped large amounts of wet, clumpy snow until dinnertime when it promptly stopped. Now the main roads are fine, but of course school is canceled and Joe and I are headed to our jobs. It's a morning that I wish I were a kept woman again- not that I appreciated it at the time. But to have a free, indoor day ahead of me to do some washing, some puttering, some reading. Wow. I never appreciated it the way I do now. But- I chose to be a nurse, not a teacher, and this is what it is. Many others out there are doing the same thing today. I think 6 months of working 7 days a week is giving me a longing for a little break. Gotta get that one figured out at some point.

On the upside, I've done more winter driving than ever this year and I suppose since I haven't wrecked, I'm doing alright.

First Birth

2011-01-26T08:06:00.000-05:00

First Birth

Pushing you out of me

was terrifying-

The fear of everything- ever-

twisted up in wet searing

pressure.

Sweating in the back of my mother’s

gray Buick,

wondering if we’d make it

in time.

You didn’t even let me get my bra off

before elbowing your way out-

always your way

from that moment onward-

pushing and pressing.

Me fighting it all

like the coward I was,

strength not yet a part

of my arsenal at eighteen.

When they laid you on my belly

-not gently-

there was no empowerment.

That would come later,

after soul-shaking relief that it was done.

Nothing was ever harder

than pushing you into existence-

nothing simpler

than letting my youth fall with a plop

into the placenta pan

as I marveled over your delicate toes

and how much your nose resembled mine.

Time

2011-01-20T07:33:00.000-05:00

So much for blogging consistently this year. Or really, doing anything consistently except for going to work and running laundry. I like my job (well, one of them anyway) but I am still adjusting to the loss of time and what that means in my life.

Today, for example. I am itching to do some cleaning and purging in the house. We'd like to move this year, and we looked at an old house downtown that made me really motivated to get our house in order to sell. But here's the thing: I have to leave for work. I can't just act on these whims like I could when I was a SAHM. I get off work at 2 but I usually have an errand to run, or everyday chores that were left undone, and in a second the whole day is over.

Weekends, you say? I work. Every day.

Now, hear me on this. I am not complaining about the fact that I have a job. I like my job and the money is really great after being on one income for...ever. I just want more time. I wonder how long it takes to get the hang of how much non-work time you have and to optimize it.

I am also attempting to get my poems together for a chapbook competition and the deadline is February 15. About half of them are ready to roll and the other half I want to sit and work on....sometime.

Getting Away With It

2011-01-02T10:06:00.001-05:00

Driving north along Route 29 on New Year's Eve, we passed a brown rancher standing 60s-style with a big bay window done up in those diamond shaped window panes. It made me imagine lots of brown paneling and macrame plant holders on the other side of the glass. Another time.

It made me imagine the days when a person could get away with something, when our every move wasn't covered with the smear and stink of all these digital fingerprints.

Back in the time when you could skip school and go run around the city smoking cigarettes and feeling young and rebellious. Because the school couldn't send your parents a phone call, cell call, and email about your absence.

There was a time when you got into your car to drive somewhere and no one could reach you. Remember it? Your mother could not text message you to ask exactly how many people were riding in your car with you.

My in-laws just returned from a trip to Guinea Africa where they visited some friends who are missionaries there. She said that all the people in the village come to this missionary woman to get their wounds cleaned and dressed because the local hospital is over an hour away. Many of these people have HIV. We asked if the people come to her because she is a nurse and the answer was no. This woman saw a need and taught herself what she needed to do to help these people. They line up at her door to have her doctor their ills with antibiotics crushed into powder and packed into their wounds.

Can you imagine it? Getting away with it?

No documentation- no digital photos of the wound with the plastic millimeter measuring tool resting beside it. With the Q-tip sticking out of the tunneling. Just people, living and dying off the grid. I like the grid a lot of the time, but sometimes I just feel as if...we know too much. That perhaps our whole country has become one big Helicopter Parent.

I find myself pondering where the line is.

A Holiday thought

2010-12-24T19:37:00.000-05:00

Everyone seems aghast that Joe and I did not exchange Christmas gifts with each other. But really. We've been together for twenty years. Many of those years we were quite poor and gift giving wasn't high on the list. This year I'm working and my greatest gifts were these: being able to buy my kids gifts, money to buy food for a nice meal, an extra trip to the liquor store for a few luxury treats.

And really. I have Joe and he has me and what we have is more valuable than any trinket.

So I am content. Joyous, in fact.

Today

2010-12-21T08:04:00.000-05:00

And four in ten days.

And Time- please come back.
You're skipping too quickly for me.
I am still back here
stumbling around
trying to get my shit together.

Wednesday

2010-12-15T07:15:00.000-05:00

We lost three in a week last week. I started checking the obits since I'm only there on the weekends. A fourth is just hanging onto life, and she is a special one to me. The one I have taken the most care of, gotten up close and personal with Mortality with.

She will not see her ninety-first Christmas.

But I will be there on the holiday, and for most of them there will be little realization that it's a holiday at all but it is our obligation to play the music and keep hitting the refresh button on the idea that it's a special day. For us, I think we do this. Not for them.

Monday

2010-12-13T21:24:00.000-05:00

It is bitterly cold here in Virginia right now. I think of my mother-in-law, in a plane sailing to sunny Phoenix for 2 weeks in the heat. The first and last times I flew were with her. She emailed me from the plane today- I was sitting at the computer in paper-thin scrub pants, having just returned home from work. They have to be thin because once you are inside, moving all around, they are comfortable. But they are terribly thin.

Its a cold season but a good one, things passing that I never thought about. I cleaned out my desk yesterday and threw out lots of scabby bits from my days as a birth activist and educator. Maybe someday those dreams will reawaken but for now they are just lying lost and taking up space where new growth needs to occur. It's like when Nora's permanent teeth started pushing out through the gums, shoving the baby teeth aside for their own gain.

And my son is shaving off delicate hairs from his upper lip and doesn't want the Legos in his room anymore. And 2010 was possibly both the worst and best year of my life. And isn't it always so?

Monday. Charts. Prescriptions. Sores in mouths and coughs and EKGs and blood draws that hopefully won't end in a re-stick but twice today they do. I like being the float nurse because I can go just a tad slower (shh- don't tell) and take time to talk with the patients a little. I love thinking that our office is a place people can stand to come to when they need to. I adore the little man with the Alzheimer's who comes in with his wife. He's all of 5 feet 2 and unlike some people with Alzheimer's who become combative, this fellow is all smiles. Perhaps my work with those folks has enlarged my love for them. Well, that's a silly thing to say, isn't it? Of course it has. They are the reason I keep that job.

Holiday Distraction

2010-12-06T07:49:00.000-05:00

This whole holiday season thing always creeps up on me. Especially this year, as I continue to learn to manage my time as a person working seven days a week. I mean, BAM! Christmas is in 3 weeks? Jeez. No tree, no shopping. I finally began brainstorming a few gift ideas for the kids, but as usual, I am woefully terrible at preparing and planning. Yesterday I made a cake out of orange-and-black cake mix and frosting that I bought on after-Halloween clearance. I guess we'll always just be those weird people. I want to be the Good Mom that does the holiday decorating around the fire, mug of cocoa with a peppermint stick sitting on the mantle. But I just can't seem to get it all together for that.

In other news, Joe and my friend Jennifer and I went to an open mic at Randolph college the other night. J and I both read a couple of things we'd written. I am wanting to get used to doing a little reading and hearing my own words out loud. I have a goal of getting my poems revised and finalized and to send in to a chapbook competition I have my eye on. Joe was going to read something too, but it turned out that you had to read something original. He'll be back again- I suspect that he has missed the enjoyment of bringing words to life before an audience.

And maybe this is all why I can't enjoy the nip of the holiday spirit- because my head is lollygagging around in the clouds, thinking about words and crafts and whether that girl we met at the open mic will invite us to be in the Vagina Monologues.

Trip report: Thanksgiving

2010-11-27T18:27:00.000-05:00

It's cold for good now- no more days where you wear your coat into a place in the morning, but forget it on your way out because the sun has arrived and warmed the air around you. I just finished a long and unrewarding day at work and I have now donned my familiar ensemble of thermal shirt, green hoodie (which I am known to sleep in with the hood up around my ears and the strings pulled in), and my gray sweatpants. I went to Osakas and bought myself an order of hibachi vegetables. I plan to eat this and then throw the trash into the outdoor can so that when Nora shows up, she won't gripe about how I had it without her.

It's my last day of a string of days without my family. All my big ideas about having freedom and alone time fizzled quickly and I found myself bored, milling around the house and noticing how quiet it was. I played Ani DiFranco's "Reprieve" over and over, did some reading and writing, a little crafting- but not as much as I had thought I would do.

Last night I dragged Jennifer out to an open mic event at Randolph College. I read a few things aloud, and due to the terribly bright spotlights, and the fact that not a single person said a word to me about my poems, I never really figured out how they were received. But my friend liked them, and I liked hers, so there. And after days of being housebound, it felt good to get out and have a little adventure. I am getting older and I find I have to work a little more deliberately for those.

We were out until after 11, and I had to get up at 6 to go to work. We were short-handed at work and I walked about a hundred miles in 8 hours. This moment feels good. I have warm clothes on and a big bowl of vegetables in front of me. As my belly gets full I feel sleepy and content. And my family will return to me tonight and my man will curl up behind me under the covers and I will savor it. My kids will hug me tightly because they actually missed me, because Thanksgiving wasn't the same without me there.

oh geez

2010-11-24T19:38:00.000-05:00

But now I feel like I have some kind of emotional erectile dysfunction because I have this one day off and there is so much pressure to get the most out of it that it's making me feel uptight. Ahhh. Where is my ADD when I need it most?

A Day Off, at Last

2010-11-23T08:03:00.000-05:00

My last day off work was Labor Day. That was approximately September 2nd and also pushing pretty close to 3 months ago. Tomorrow, I get off work at 2, have the rest of the day off and the whole next day of Thanksgiving. I am beside myself. One moment the day off seems like it will be a long thing, and then I panic, realizing it will be over very quickly. And there are 10 different things I'd like to do with this day off. I feel like if I don't plan it, it will get wasted.

My family is going out of town without me because I have to work on Friday. I will be here completely alone for an entire day.

Don't feel sorry for me. Don't come by, either.

balance (surely I've used this title before)

2010-11-20T08:53:00.002-05:00

I've had a long last couple of weeks. The apron strings have been cut at work and I am expected to handle most of my stuff on my own, which is mostly good except for the things I still haven't mastered. I am drawing most of my own blood now, and the lab girl is glad to help me if I get someone who is a hard stick. This week I was told that I needed to work on returning phone calls, and then the next day told that I needed to be sure the patients came first before working on the charts. I had to cover for another nurse and hadn't been told that I needed to put an updated schedule on the doctor's desk. Whoops. I've had similar 'stepping up to the plate' moments at my weekend job, where apparently I am now expected to be the supervisor they hired me to be.

Some nights I've zoned out by 7:30 or 8. If I'm doing well, I make it until 9.

In the midst of that, I have been trying to work on some cards and keep my creative juice going. I am working on some custom gift enclosure cards for a lingerie shop that just opened in the nicer side of town. I am enjoying the challenge of trying to create something within their parameters while also creating something that reflects my own style.

I am also trying to get back to doing some writing. Maybe revising yet again this sorry little pile of poems I keep shuffling around. Starting on a memoir-type thing. But there just isn't enough time in the day for everything. My van still needs an oil change and there is laundry to do and we are out of milk again (and if you've ever known a 13-year-old boy, you know that it is not okay to be out of milk).

So I balance it all the best way I am capable of; doing the essentials and pushing the writing and creating back into a place where I can get to them from time to time. I put a notebook in my bag so I can jot some notes down and not forget things. Give thanks daily for Joe, who never complains about the mess or the lame meals I serve, and who appreciates the creative life.

The kids brought their report cards home yesterday. All 3 of them always make honor roll. I think there was only one C out of all three kids grades, and that was Maddie's Spanish 3 in which she has a South American teacher she can barely understand. They amaze me so much, because I feel like I am minimally involved in what they are doing these days and they are so good at managing it all. They are good kids and I feel blessed. Morgan also is growing up and learning to navigate the various details of life. Bills and school and commitments. She is taking EMT classes and riding on the trucks for clinicals.

I do miss spending time with my friends, and wish I had time to do it all. I just have to take this time for what it is and allow it to prepare me for whatever is next after this.

Breakfast Club

2010-11-12T20:49:00.000-05:00

Joe took off after a full day of work to West Virginia. The great Gauley River was unseasonably running, by means of an extra dam release, weeks past the 6 weeks of releases it is known for. So right now it's just me here at the computer. Many nights, I sit on the bed beside the computer with a glass of wine and maybe a bag of microwave popcorn (butter flavor, all 400 and whatever calories) and watch him do up buttons in Photoshop, then later doze off while he plays a little online poker. It's a humble life we live these days, but I am mostly satisfied.

Ezra stayed over with a friend; tomorrow they are going to all-district band auditions. Ezra says the teacher made him go because he's first-chair sax, but I think he was enjoying learning all the scales he would be quizzed on. Nora has her best bud over tonight. I bought them kits off the Halloween clearance rack for stringing their own candy necklaces (think large skull center bead), and other than that I have hardly seen them. Morgan came by to visit, which was an unexpected and nice surprise. I like seeing her become an adult and try hard to accept that she is herself and not me. She took Maddie over to my moms house to visit for awhile. So here I am, and I thought I'd tell a little story.

It's about how Nora went all Breakfast Club this week at school. No, she didn't get high in the library. In fact, she claims that she didn't even think of the Breakfast Club until later. Hmm. But anyway, what happened was that a few people in her class were being disruptive and out of frustration the teacher made the whole class sit out of recess and write a letter explaining why they were so loud and disruptive.

Apparently Nora was like, Screw this, I wasn't causing trouble and proceeded to write a little torrent with her pencil about how she thought it was pretty rude and annoying of her teacher to make her do this when only a few people were the culprits. It landed her in the office of the good principal, who called Joe to explain that Nora had hurt the teacher's feelings. Personally, I think he called because the teacher made him. He mentioned what a good student Nora was and how she never got in trouble.

But the best part was when the principal said: Nora does have a point.

And while I don't condone her being rude, I think Nora does have a point and I kind of applaud her bravery in speaking up. Of course, I feel the need to tell her that this will happen over and over in life. The Shitheads are continually ruining stuff for the rest of us. Why else would I have used paper towels to wipe my residents' bottoms for the past 2 weekends at work? Because the shitheads who don't know how to use the wipes sparingly use them all up before the budget will allow us to purchase more.

But she's young still. I want her to feel her power with the least amount of cynicism possible. I remember being almost as young as she is, and feeling the stab of injustice. Something about an 8th grade skip day and a boycott landed me in my principal's office at Sandusky Middle School way back in the day. I was itching for a cause long before I found one, I guess.

And I pray that Nora is strong in all the right ways as she drives headlong into one of the toughest phases of life.

On losing boys

2010-11-11T08:14:00.000-05:00

My son and his two friends come barreling through the front door. They've been playing football in the field across the street so their bodies still think they are outside. Talking loudly, they get up in my personal space, beads of sweat on their foreheads. They happily shout out their exploits from the football patch, about the neighbor trying to make them leave. I love this, how they still like me and have little to hide at the age of thirteen. I have come to drink that in like a prized nectar. I have been on the other side of that bridge and it's a crumbly ledge, much like I imagine Beachy Head to be.

These big man-boys are almost as tall as me now. They smell like cologne and get text messages from girls. They still fart on each other. When they are off in the neighborhood I think: they could be anywhere, doing anything. But when they are here in the house with me, sweaty space and boisterous thumps from overhead in the bedroom, my heart feels comforted.

I know in one moment, they will be gone.

Sometimes bribery is all you can exercise

2010-11-04T17:16:00.000-04:00

SO I purchased a pretty pair of toe socks- rainbow stripes with sparkly threads all over. Nora's been wanting some new toe socks. I told her they were hers- for the small price of a missing package of fifth-grade school pictures. She grinned a small, sly grin and said she wasn't sure if it was worth it.

But she wants those socks. I can tell.

In other news, I learned to draw blood this week, and I am happy to report that I'm pretty good at it for a beginner. I like to palpate for the vein and then use my mind powers to visualize what's resting beneath the skin before I make my piercing move. It's working out pretty well for me. I am also reading up on wounds and their care. Sometimes a girl's just gotta teach herself what she wants to know.

A Little Beauty

2010-11-02T15:25:00.000-04:00

There is something to be said for a little beauty.

I've been so busy working every day and grabbing groceries and keeping the laundry done that things around the house have grown messier and shabbier. Have you noticed how your eye becomes accustomed to the fan sitting in the kitchen or the pile of Goodwill stuff stacked in the living room? After a while, you just don't see it anymore.

Yesterday I came in from work and just couldn't take it anymore. The kids' bathroom upstairs was absolutely disgusting- crumbs and chunks and cat hair everywhere. I reheated a cup of coffee and began tossing and cleaning. Taking the time to put away the Clue game that had fallen open on the stair landing weeks ago.

And I think part of my problem is that I tend to give up on the house because its not in good shape. As in, why bother to clean off the porch when it's all chipped and terrible looking? But it really matters, I am discovering. I may not be able to live in my dream home right now, but I can create a clean and pleasant environment wherever I am. And it makes me happy to do so. My table top might be chipped, but I can cover it with a pretty cloth from the thrift store. My carpet might have stains, but I can still keep it vacuumed. And I am learning that I need to, for my sanity.

Wipe the counters off. Sweep. Light a stick of incense. There's much to be said for a little beauty.

Here we Go

2010-10-26T08:11:00.000-04:00

So Nora didn't want to get school pictures this year. We never buy that many, so I just blew her off, declaring that "that's what we always do." I found hers in her backpack on Friday and pulled them out and exclaimed how nice they looked.

She then stated that she didn't like them, at which point I mentioned that she could retake them on the retake day. But No, she doesn't want to retake them- she just doesn't want them.

So guess what she did?
She hid them.

Isn't this all starting a bit young? She's 10.

Catharsis

2010-10-24T12:12:00.000-04:00

The eighth steak knife
is gone from the wooden block.
Set of eight,
a gift from Anne, long ago-
we so rarely used them
so how could we have lost one?
I imagined my daughter had taken it.
She was a thief, and besides-
could not seem to stop cutting herself
with whatever she could find
to bleed out her pain.
Sweet body,
maze of scars,
I stand on the other side of the lavender door
palm pressed sweaty,
unable to push it open.
I never found the knife.
Perhaps it fell into the trash bin
after a night of wet steak and dark wine.

Labels

2010-10-21T07:56:00.000-04:00

At first, the labels repulse you. Bipolar. Borderline. Words that try to say that your child is just a diagnosis. That she will be treated like every other child with these labels. Their reality forces you to hear the news flash that you made damaged goods. That's a delicate knick-knack to place upon your mantle, at first.

Then, later- the labels comfort you. You are able to rest your drained and sad face on their softness and at least console yourself: It's not my fault. She's not just bad. She's Bipolar. Borderline.

And as she grows and learns to function somewhat in this maze we live in- a tricky feat even for those with a full set of tools- the labels become a reference point, used as needed. No longer the focal point for an entire hopeless life, but more of an explanation for certain behaviors in a life that now holds potential. The lapses between crises grow wider and you let your breath out a little more.

Lazy Indulgence

2010-10-09T11:04:00.000-04:00

I am absolutely relishing being in my pajama pants at 11 am, since I don't have to be at work until 3.

I worked 29 out of 30 days in September.

Last night I stayed up drinking wine and talking with two good friends that I've been missing. I slept in this morning until almost 9, then got up and made coffee- my own, humble, Folgers drip variety. No stomach-twisting, undisclosed brands from the coffee shops. I ate some cheese bread. Then I ate a brownie. I am relishing the pleasure of pure relaxation. I feel surprisingly guilt-free.

I've been thinking a bit about my writing habits. I was writing more consistently when I was writing on my laptop. It was mine to pop on when I pleased and I felt like no one was going to read any of it until I was ready for them to. Now I am mostly on the public family computer, which besides being in pretty heavy use, just feels too exposed. I feel vulnerable and want my words to be mine until I give them away. So I need to work that out for myself and get back to writing. I have a lot of thoughts and memories I'd like to get down.

A Good Day

2010-10-03T20:01:00.000-04:00

I had energy today. I worked 7am to 3pm, went by the store, came home and made chicken divan, did laundry, started the dishwasher, and still managed to scrub the toilet and put clean sheets on Ezra's bed. I guess it was a Super Woman kind of day. Maybe I am finally adjusting to the 56-hour work week. Or adjusting to my surroundings at my jobs- it's been tough being the New Girl in two places at once. The weekend job has been a particular challenge on every level. But somehow, I'm sticking it out. I am proud of myself.

I am accumulating so many good stories, and my town so small, that I have considered an anonymous blog to share them on. But then, how would I keep up with two blogs? My archives for September show exactly one entry. I have been doing some old-school writing during my lunch breaks- I have to take an hour lunch break at the doctor's office and 15 minutes in the lunch room with the drug reps is enough. I like to retreat to my van, slide back the seat and write awhile if I have no errands to get accomplished.

Sometimes I sit out there and wonder how I can have so much swirling through my head, and yet be unable to get any of it down on paper. I'll sit and gaze out into the country sky and it's all I can do some days. But nights like tonight, when I have my old energy back- I know that I will. I will say what needs to be said, at the time that it needs to be done. I have faith.

Short treatise on art and success

2010-10-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

Been thinking a lot lately about my papercrafting. Believe it or not. I've been working close to 60 hours a week and barely getting out the Etsy orders we've had, and my supplies are growing dusty. But in the meantime, several thought-provoking things have happened in my life.

a) I realized that I haven't been sending cards out to people much. Because lately when I make a card, I start thinking about listing it and selling it and whether anyone might want to buy it. And I don't like that. That isn't why I do what I do. I do it as a creative outlet, because it's fun, and all that jazz. I never intended to start creating things because I thought someone in the world might want to purchase them. God, no. Of course, it feels good when people like what I've made- what I've already made, without them in mind. That's the difference for me.

b) I learned the hard way recently that when people get too driven about succeeding at something, they can end up kicking others down on their way up and this revolts me. It's okay to want to succeed and to work hard, but when you lose perspective, it's time to step back and assess.

c) I signed up to get these weekly "Etsy Success" blogs and newsletters. At first, this was fine. How to make your photos more interesting and all that. Then it went to: how to use storytelling to convince people they need/want your product. Then I thought. Whoa. Whoa. When did all this become an infomercial?

Some of you like what I create and want to buy things from me. This flatters me, truly. My friend Anne has something I made in a frame- what a compliment. But to reach out to actively market what I do- well, I guess I'm just not ready. I'm afraid it won't be fun anymore. Won't be personal. I do not ever want to become, or create, a product line. Isn't that the whole idea behind the DIY, handmade movement?

I will still be at art markets now and then, and still have some things up on my Etsy shop. You can still drop by the house and dig through our buttons. The rest of the chips will have to fall as they may because I just can't do the marketing thing. I simply want to enjoy sitting at my table, smelling incense and putting things together on paper and feeling the buzz of how right they feel together. That's what it's all about.

A week

2010-09-12T00:12:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it's tough, only working somewhere on the weekends. In that world, a week can be a long time. I can return and find two more people on hospice, or find that someone has died in my absence. I know that one of these Saturdays, I will peek my head in to check on Ms.D and she will be gone. She isn't getting up at all now; her appetite is waning. I sit with her and feed her what I can at meals though I haven't much time.

She was the first woman to possess a key to a major Lynchburg department store in her time.

A week brings a fall, a set of stitches, a new rule about something. Another order for TED hose, this time for a resident who kicks and spits if we even try to change her clothes every few days. How will we get the TEDs on and off daily? Someone gets fired. Someone else hired.

So much can happen in a week.

Forgotten Treasures

2010-08-31T08:10:00.000-04:00

Ezra purged his room this weekend. All the little-boy stuff went out, at last. The girls had done something similar earlier in the summer, but they had bagged most of it into trash bags and I never saw what went out. Ezra came downstairs with boxes full of things from his young boyhood, and I surprised myself with the gust of nostalgia that hit me.

His 'special blanket'- that pale blue fleece with the scorch mark from where he got it too close to a light bulb once. Tossed out. I bundled him in that blanket so many eons ago. The gun he made from a PVC pipe, the little pillow he sewed together by hand with the most even stitches. His action figures.

Now he has his own cell phone and he wants metal cleats for juniors baseball and he is trying to be taller than me. I love the young man he is growing into. My chubby legged, only little boy is leaving. Suddenly I think of the old book we used to read: Love You Forever. I think I get it now.

Going to take some pictures of those things before they float away into time.

Hi. It's me.

2010-08-19T21:35:00.000-04:00

I'm sneaking a moment or two here while my family watches one of those Matt Damon/things are blowing up movies.

I got the kids all signed up for school on Tuesday. It only took 3 hours to hit all 3 schools: 1 1/2 at the high school, 1 at the middle school and only 30 minutes at Nora's. It's so hot and tiring, wandering around through the kid's whole schedule, making sure they know where they're going and meeting the teachers. The fun part is trying to predict in advance which teachers are going to be good ones and which ones not.

Nora is the only one really excited to go back. Ezra is only excited that he will be an eighth grader- finally the top man on the totem pole. Madison swears that someone planned her schedule out intentionally to make her zig-zag from the basement level up to the 2nd floor and back again. But she knows her school like a pro by now- eleventh grade!- and I remind her that she'll do fine.

I got the day off work for the sign-ups, and Wow. It felt remarkable to have the whole day to bounce around and get things done. It was neat to appreciate it. I've been pulling 9 to 5's at the doctor's office to get in as much training as possible before the kids start back to school. I think next week, I go to me regular hours of 9 to 2, and I won't feel as much time crunch. I mean, really, when do you get your business done? I leave at 8:35 to get there by 9. I work until 5 and don't get home until 5:30. It's a big change. But I really love it there.

I've been struggling with guilt over the drug rep lunches. I hate thinking about the ungodly amounts of money spent daily by these folks and brought to offices everywhere. Just our little office of less than 20 people gets lunch at least 3 times a week. But, gosh. It's so nice. Noon arrives and the smell of something wonderful starts filling the air and I am reminded that I have a Nutri-grain bar and a bruised apple in my purse. Anyway, abstaining from the Blood Lunch isn't going to make it go away so I partake- I mean, damn, King's Island??

And I'm wishing for a weekend off but I'm hanging in there with that job. I have a bunch of computer learning modules to do, that I guess I should be doing right now, but I'm not very motivated.

Nora and I bought a big jigsaw puzzle at Walmart tonight and I am looking forward to working on that with her. Just as soon as I catch up on some sleep and some laundry.

Learning Curve

2010-08-12T20:38:00.000-04:00

Well, hello. I just thought I'd drop in on the public for a moment. I'm supposed to be at a book club discussion right now, but instead I am at my computer in boxer shorts, drinking a Magic Hat #9 and unwinding from another day of serious learning. You see, I'm learning again.

I thought that was over when I graduated. What a laugh. Now I have not one, but two new jobs, and there is so much more to learn.

My newest new job is at a family practice, where there is an unbelievable array of stuff. Sick, well, old, young, you name it. Out comes the pharmacology text and the medical-surgical text. Even the fundamentals book has come in handy for my weekend job at assisted living. My instructors would be so proud.

I like my new job, and I think I will love my new job once I get through the learning curve. And once we all get in a routine and I learn to balance the things I need and want to do in life. Like finding time to start cutting up those encyclopedias I got.

I miss working with pregnant women. I hope to do it again someday. But these two jobs I have are really teaching me a lot of good stuff.

I miss coffee in the morning with a friend. But I love coming home and feeling tired and satisfied and content to sit on the back porch with my man and a drink.

I am currently in a tiny, tiny space between a lot of things- sort of a resting place. Swim team and all-stars is over, the kids are out of town and there is nowhere to go in the evenings. Perfect for a tired girl getting used to the working world and information overload. But soon school will start, and with it fall baseball and hopefully more swimming if we can find the dollar bills for it.

And life feels hopeful for a change.

head dust

2010-08-06T09:43:00.000-04:00

I have so many things swirling around in my head that I want to write about, and I can't seem to get going on any of them. Can't decide if I feel like typing, or hand-writing. Can't feel sure that I have the time to do it.

But I must. Time is moving so fast, and if I don't get it down it will blow away.

Sleep, I Adore Thee

2010-08-02T09:15:00.000-04:00

So, finally I am working some. It's been on an irregular schedule, though, which has been a tough adjustment. Friday evening I worked from 3 to 11pm, and then had to get up for a 7am shift the next morning. The problem with working until 11pm, at least for me, is that no matter how tired I am when I get home, my mind is ramped up from being at work and it's hard to get to sleep.

Sometimes the CNAs have to work a double shift if someone calls out or doesn't show up for work. I don't know how they do it. The job they do is so physically demanding, and working with people with Alzheimer's is also mentally demanding. A resident might follow me around all day, repeatedly asking me not to leave her. Or I might go into a resident's room to bring her to lunch and find her completely changed into her bed clothes and pulling off her TED hose. People with Alzheimer's become incontinent as well, so every 2 hours each resident must be toileted and diapers changed. It is a lot.

I am learning a lot and mostly enjoying it. But sleep has taken on new meaning for me. After pacing the halls and going here and there for 8 hours, I feel like I can't get enough sleep. I've never much liked naps; they've always tended to leave me feeling groggy and not refreshed. But yesterday I leaned my head back on the sofa and zoned out for an hour, and it was the most wonderful feeling. It was a true power nap, too. I felt great for the rest of the evening.

I hope that once the learning curve eases back a bit and I am less stretched I can do a little more writing. Of course, I am interviewing for a second job, so that may be a laughable point.

Over It

2010-07-28T09:24:00.000-04:00

Last night- I mean, this morning at three, I discovered that Nora doesn't know that trick of holding the button in the fridge to keep the light off while digging for late-night snacks. Not only can I see the fridge from my spot in bed, but I've had a string of restless, tiring nights this week. So when I saw the fridge blink open- just an inch at first, to test the situation, I kept my eye on it and sure enough, it opened again.

And I was pissed. I know it's summer and all, but it doesn't have to turn into a veritable carnival around here, does it? But it always does. The kids' rooms are upstairs and Joe and I sleep on the lower level. Who knows how many 3am pickles have been snitched from the jar?

But I wasn't nice. No. When Nora begged that she was hungry I hissed back of course you're hungry, it's three in the morning and you're still up! I denied the pickle and gave her a handful of grapes and instructed her to eat them and then GO TO BED!

The response? But Maddie's hungry, too. (In truth, Madison probably put her up to the trip down to the kitchen in the first place.) I coldly responded that they could share that handful of grapes and then GO.TO.BED!

I'm just over it. I'm tired. Nora hasn't been to swim practice once this week (which we pay for) and no wonder. It's like some flipping frat party over here, apparently. And I'm over it. Tired of waiting half the day for people to get up, Ezra wandering around the house bored because he went to bed at a decent hour.

I think I'm ready for summer to just be over. Which is a shame, because I love summer. But it was kind of a long, hot one- extra hot- and we couldn't afford to really go anywhere and hardly even went to the pool except for Nora.

Maybe it's best sometimes to leave a stale season behind and move forward.

Notes From the Memory Care Center

2010-07-22T08:44:00.000-04:00

Two residents are sitting in wing back chairs in the hallway of their unit. One, a Polish woman, is wearing pink plaid pajamas because she had a toilet accident earlier. She is conversing in Polish with the other woman, who is not Polish and is dressed for Sunday meeting. They seem to be having a rational conversation, the second woman responding in some shuffled English and nodding her head.

As I come toward them down the hall, a third little lady guides her walker out of her room and looks over to the women in the chairs. Looks at the nurses. She says, almost to no one: Do I know any of you people?

And the dressed-up lady in the chair thinks this is the funniest joke ever, and relays it to me even though I was standing right there and heard it. "Did you hear what she just said?" she cackled to me.

*******
New job: overwhelming. I don't want to be a butt-wiper, but I'm not sure I want to be the person who has to decided whether someone needs to go to the ER, either. I've been doing that at home for almost 19 years.

new job

2010-07-20T22:06:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed my first smooch on my new job today, from a Polish lady we call "Kiki." She speaks almost no English but so far, is usually smiling. I attempted to get a napkin from her that she was tearing up. She refused to give it, and since dementia sufferers can turn violent and I don't know them very well yet, I stole a small ball of napkin and left the rest to Kiki. Moments later she strolled over to me and handed me the napkin, beaming. I gave her a very happy smile and a cheerful Thank You, and she grabbed my face and gave me a real live Polish smack on the lips. What a cutie.

I have a lot to learn, once again.

sidewalk chalk

2010-07-17T12:12:00.000-04:00

We bought sidewalk chalk at Kroger yesterday. It's only July, but already they are piling summer's wares- packages of water balloons and firecrackers and brightly colored picnic tumblers- into shopping carts with orange clearance stickers on them. We bought a wide bucket full of pastel sticks for fifty cents.

Nora is out on the front walk with them now. The black cat is stretched out beside her on the warm concrete as she scrapes out her name in large caps, NORA, and then adds happy details like hearts and butterflies all around her name. She is content. I am through the glass, but I imagine her humming, like all the children used to do when engaged in something pleasant.

And I relish this moment. My last child enjoying one of her last moments of childhood, before the storms of adolescence and reality bruise her innocence forever.

Just Words

2010-07-16T10:15:00.003-04:00

It's a Prius Paradise up here in the city. Chugging along the Beltway in my stinky, gas-guzzling van, they're everywhere, their rounded beetly-shell shapes zooming coolly around and past me. Quiet colors like silver, champagne. Nothing rattling loud threats from underneath or blowing blue smoke. These are people who can afford to be responsible by using less oil. Who can afford to spend less money on gas. A slightly acrid irony, like many in the world we live in.

Once we get further south, into the farmland of Madison County and Ruckersville, the hybrids dissipate and the beaten-up FARM USE vehicles mingle with the other cars on Route 29, blowing bits of hay onto our windshields. Or the eye is too drawn to the endless fields, green as algae, to notice. Then later, down to Charlottesville, the 'Green City'- and there they are again. Swarming like gorgeous, virtuous roaches through the streets.

I realize how differently I live from a lot of people. There are times when I am proud of this and times when I detest it.

Reading two books right now. The first is "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann and it's set during the time that Phillipe Petit was wire-walking between the World Trade Center Towers in the mid-70's ('75, I think. If you have Netflix rent the documentary Man on Wire, it's really amazing.) The second is Lit by Mary Karr. It is a memoir about being an alcoholic mom.

When I grow up, I want to write a memoir as powerfully as Mary Karr can. Of course, Mary had a rough upbringing down in Texas and has many, many stories to tell. I was a '70s kid with 2 boring parents and a banana seat bike I had to borrow from my sister.

Plainsong

2010-07-07T08:37:00.001-04:00

The more time I have on my hands, the less I write and the more my brain turns to fudge. Not even counting this heat. Yesterday I had the realization of where the word slug-gish comes from. A slug was just what I felt like, oozing around the house, managing to get one lousy load of laundry going in the washer, then flopping onto the couch with a brand-new issue of Midwifery Today.

It was Joe and I's nineteenth anniversary of marriage yesterday. We sat out in the dark burning a small fire in our kettle grill, and talking about life and us. Life isn't the greatest right now and we are ready for a change. Life can really beat you down over time. A lot happens, and not everyone's pasture is mowed by a yard-boy.

We talked about writing, too, and I asked myself why I like to write so much. Why I do this. What I think I am accomplishing. If I should keep it put away in a drawer. Piles of scrambled scribblings are living in my drawers and notebooks and folders, like scraps from Granny's old quilts that just need to be reassembled and stitched together. But where to begin.

And we climbed onto our bed and laid there in the heat, a box fan blowing a few feet from us. There was nothing else to say, so Joe curled up behind me and we laid there until sleep took us.

Community

2010-06-30T10:06:00.000-04:00

I had a passing thought this morning about community. Specifically, the community my kids have been able to experience through the friendships Joe and I have with others. I was looking at pictures we took this past weekend from a camping trip we took with 4 other families. There were 6 of us, and 2-4 people in the other four groups, all hanging out, eating, playing, laughing and talking together. Getting burned together, too, but anyway. When I was growing up, my family didn't really hang out with any other families. The few trips we took, it was always just us. I can't even recall going to a cookout at the home of a neighbor or friend. I don't mean that disrespectfully towards my parents- they both worked full-time and maybe that just wasn't their thing.

But I am truly glad that my kids have had the chance to grow up in various social circles. It's a neat thing.

Heat Wave

2010-06-24T08:59:00.001-04:00

It's so pleasant in the mornings. The fans spin their white-noise and move cool air around the house, giving no inkling of how hot it's going to get later. But it will. The trick is to turn the fan so that it begins blowing out, instead of in, at just the right time- otherwise, it pulls the hot, muggy stuff in from outside. I put my hand to the fan every so often and search for the dark undertone of heat mixing with the cool air. When I feel it, the fan goes around, the other windows get shut. When it's hot like this, it's better to keep everything closed up.

I take Nora to swim practice every morning that I can get her up. She loves to swim; she looks as natural as a fish and her face takes on a calm that I love to watch. She is even calm for a while after swimming. I think of it as water therapy, and a way better value these days than the traditional kind. Last night the coach told her that she was going to get to swim the butterfly at the next meet. She just learned the fly and she loves it so she smiles.

Maddie is doing a week of lifeguard training. Two hours in the mornings, then two more in the evening. A couple of kids dropped out right away, but not Madison. Madison is developing all the tools needed to be successful in life. Isn't this all a parent really wants to see? That when they finally fly the nest, they know how to function and be happy. She doesn't ace her SOLs; she has to study hard to make good grades. But she has something far more valuable inside herself.

And Ezra is living out his final season of Little League at the majors level. All-Stars. They have a great team and they are feeling the energy that they might just win big this time. Ezra goes every single day to practice in this heat, eagerly, even missing other things to be there. It's their Golden Moment. He'll be getting his first-ever jersey with SCHUPPE across the back.

In the midst of our childrens' summer splendor, Joe and I are taking things moment by moment. The cars are enjoying taking turns breaking down, which always at least leaves us with one of them. Usually. I hear whispered rumors of job offers from not one, but two places where I would like to work. Rumors, no offers. I carry my phone around the house with me and it doesn't ring. I keep applying to nursing homes and dialysis centers but no one calls.

But this weekend, a reprieve: camping. We'll buy lots of groceries with our credit card and head out, not to the middle of nowhere but to an actual campground, where the kids will have lots of fun stuff to do and there are toilets that flush and friends to sit around with and Joe and I can push the canoe out into the lake and pretend that we are in Paradise.

Long Ago and Far Away

2010-06-17T21:23:00.000-04:00

It's been a bit of a nostalgic day. Maddie turns 16 tomorrow, so I'm thinking of when she was born and what a hopeful time it was. We were happy and having our second baby; life was pretty simple. I can still smell the cold air from the big old AC unit in the dining room, the room she was born in. How wonderful it felt to curl up on cool, clean sheets after her birth, after the bath. To be in my own home. It was the middle of the night but I couldn't sleep, could only gaze in wonder at her.

Nora wanted to get out the Legos today. No one's touched them except guests in a long time. Today, they are all over the living room rug again like the old days, the shhhhhh sound of the digging filling the room. Good days, days before drugs and razor blades, fill my mind and I want to go back, despite chaos of that time. Each season definitely holds its own demons.

Then dusk. Fireflies, I say to Ezra and Nora, and they race out into the yard with a jar. The last time they caught them, the yard was mostly brown and bare from so many feet constantly running all over. Now the yard is solid green with clovers and grass and ground ivy.

Earlier this morning, I was busy having a pity party for myself while waiting for Nora at the pool. I was mourning how little we have, materially, as I watched a lifeguard pull into the pool in a shiny convertible. First I thought: this person has more at 18 than I will likely ever have in my entire life span. But then later I thought: What then, is left to work for, to dream for?

Ezra and Nora told me they didn't want to sign my birthday card for Maddie- they wanted to make their own cards. And I felt proud of them and glad they didn't have everything, at the same time that I choked back tears that I cannot give them everything.

Help, please

2010-06-15T14:30:00.002-04:00

My wonderful, amazing daughter Madison turns 16 on Friday, and I'm feeling broke and idea-less, feeling like a rotten mother because I want to give this child the whole world and I can't.

Feed me some inspiration, people.

Household on Eggshells

2010-06-12T11:14:00.000-04:00

It was a week of broken things. The van overheating on short trips, leaving me stressed and hot as I blast the heat to try and cool off the engine. Then the Honda, unexpectedly died on me as I was trying to get my friend to an outpatient procedure on time. Nora knocked the thing off the entertainment center that picks up the Netflix signal... and broke it.

Broken stuff. Broken relationships. Dreams.

Ezra's fan died so we had to give him ours until we can pick up another one. Almost afraid to breathe- what else might break?

It's hot already this morning, and the kids are bored. No air. Nothing I want more than to stay here in this house and make it look nice. To control what I can. But I know it won't go down like that. Nora is asking to go to the pool and Ezra has a gift card he wants to spend at Dick's. I know this day is not mine, and I have to be big enough and strong enough to accept that. Sometimes I think that's the hardest thing about raising kids. That you can spend your entire Friday evening at the Little League field, and then get up and spend your Saturday running around to a bunch of places you really don't want to go. You have to wait for your moment to come.

And sometimes it does, of course.

Light and Change

2010-06-08T08:16:00.000-04:00

The house is filled with light this morning. Part of the reason is that there are still no curtains up on several of the windows from when we painted. It seems that we are consistently unable to finish projects. We get a room back to the 'livable' stage and then we quit. Which is odd, in a way, because I used to really enjoy working on making the house look nice- rearranging furniture and trinkets and so forth.

My friend and neighbor Julie and I used to inspire and help each other. We'd put all our kids in front of a movie with some snacks and we'd help each other get things done. It was a good time. Then, they moved out of the neighborhood, and then I had so much furniture that there was only one arrangement that worked. And things got a little stagnant in that area.

Yesterday, I saw a photo on Facebook of an acquaintance, taken of her sitting in front of an upright piano in her house. The piano was cluttered with all kinds of beautiful stuff and there was some neat stuff hanging on the wall beside the piano, too. It reminded me of how I used to be, and I missed it. I got up this morning to bare windows and bare walls and thought about how the speed of life can take so much of one's creative energy.

I like the light. But I want to put back the curtains, too. New ones, different ones.

tuesday

2010-05-25T17:40:00.000-04:00

The wonky-honk of 3 adolescent boys' voices drifts in the back screen. They stayed after school for a band rehearsal, and now they're horsing around with an impromptu sort-of baseball game of their own invention. I half-watch them as I put groceries away and chunk off pieces of cauliflower for the kids to munch on. Life seems pretty sweet for them, even if they are in middle school.

My oldest child is in the hospital again. Another one of her Episodes. Every time she sees a new psychiatrist, he switches her medicines all up and her body gets thrown into a chemical tornado. I wonder if it will ever end; I worry, my mind runs the gamut of feelings. And the system seems more broken than her mind.

But I want life to be happy for the rest of my crew, so I try to keep life normal. I make mac and cheese for the girls, I move Maddie's laundry to the dryer for her while I'm in the basement. I make Nora spit out the Tootsie Roll I find in her mouth at 9:30 pm. I do my best to be a good mom to them- whatever that means. Whatever that is.

I see the areas in which I've grown tired. I do my best to work on those areas, but sometimes it's no use, and I check out.

But today I'm mostly thinking about how, no matter what bad thing is going on in life, there is always beauty unfolding at the same time. There is a note from Ethel's daughter telling me that I was more than just her caregiver. There is the smell of fresh laundry. There is the awkward, wonderful music of young men laughing in the yard. A text from my husband reminding me not to drop by the bank, but that he still loves me madly, that all this Life Stuff has not yet torn us apart.

this heart

2010-05-18T14:52:00.000-04:00

this heart of mine
fistful of pipes and pumps
so much trust
in things we cannot see

as a child i was sure
my heart was doomed
like the tall chiseled grandfather
i knew only from photos
because his own heart revolted
against the pleas of his six daughters

each twinge in my bird chest
sent me crying to my mother
but it hasn't failed me yet
this heart
i keep taking the time it gives me
chambers pushing and sucking

Letting Go

2010-05-17T20:12:00.000-04:00

Bad, rainy morning. Nora missed breakfast because she took so long getting ready. Then she hit her head on the canoe while trying to get into the car in the rain. This led into a tirade about what a bad mother I am because I don't let her sleep with me at night. At the school, I pulled up behind a cherubic little Kindergartner who jumped out of the car, popped open an umbrella and gave her mother multiple kisses and waves as she headed up the sidewalk. I wondered if every morning is so idyllic for this duo, as Nora slammed the back door and clomped away with a scowl on her face.

I balanced this weight on top of the weight of being awake last night worrying about Morgan, and about the broken thermostat on my van and the next grocery bill. I stacked it all up neatly and proceeded to my next destination: helping Ethel die.

I didn't know that today would be the day, of course. But I knew it was her fifth day with no food or water, lying in an almost comatose state while being given medicines to keep her comfortable. The average dying person makes it about a week in this condition. It sounds inhumane to withhold fluids, but it's actually an advantage to be dehydrated while dying. The nerve endings shrivel up and the person is more comfortable than they would otherwise be.

As I keep watch over Ethel and help her die, I can't help but think about how I'll need to look for a job again. About how the resentment swells at times about this nursing program and how jilted I feel by its hollow promises. I am trying to let die whatever needs to die, to let new growth occur. It's not always easy.

Ethel rattles with each expiration. The Death Rattle. I talk to her- close to her ear, because she is hard of hearing at 91. I tell her she can go now. Hearing is the last sense to go. I don't know if a person needs permission to go, but I want to make sure she has it just in case.

It's pouring. I sit on the couch and check yesterday's job ads. The only place with any LPN openings is the one place I really didn't want to work. I feel defeated. I know what I need to do- I just didn't think it would get to this.

Ethel finally lets go. It is quiet and peaceful. She is showing me the way.

Sunday Reading

2010-05-16T09:03:00.000-04:00

Read HERE today.

It's my friend Jo. I like her a lot, she's funny and thoughtful.
This is a little bit about being a Mommy Martyr.

Mid-week Notes

2010-05-12T15:52:00.000-04:00

I've been writing a lot in notebooks these days, while sitting with Ethel. Some of it's just everyday rubbish- but I'm working on details lately, trying to stop skimming past everything and focus in on the everyday a bit more. There are lots of stories there if only I can slow down and look. Here's a bit from Monday morning:

Nora's mad at me again this morning. When I went into her room to wake her up for school, her floor was covered with worn clothing. Each piece had been pulled off inside-out in a twisted snake shape and thoughtlessly flung down. Her hamper stood hollow in the corner. As I attempted to bring her to consciousness, I collected up all the snakes and filled a laundry basket with them. I know I should make her do it, but it's too late now, and if I don't get these things washed, she won't have enough school clothes for the week. I haul them two floors down to the basement and start them washing. If I'm lucky, I can get them moved to the dryer before I have to leave for work.

Several snooze-pleads later, Nora comes downstairs furious at me. Not only have I moved her things, but Ive taken (and thrown into the washer already) the pair of jeans she wanted to wear today. She is in capris that are almost too small for her- she's outgrowing everything she's got, suddenly- and I am Unforgiven.

Just last week, her report card came home full of praises from her teacher. He told us that the gifted program Nora is in was 'created for children of her caliber.' Most days, I feel like I need to rate her 'caliber' on the Richter Scale. Why must so many gifted and talented people be tumultuous and unstable?

It was Mother's Day yesterday, a holiday which always leaves me with a complicated mixture of feelings. I see a lot of mothers who seem to revel in their role. Who, by a lucky roll of the biological dice, got offspring pulled from the clear, blue end of the gene pool. Parenting is a joy for them- they aren't tired, they've never had their child steal their bank card and disappear for a month. And I'm seen as a cynic because parenting has been hard for me. But I've made peace with that, as I can't expect anyone to relate to something they have never experienced.

(And Tuesday:)

Ezra's starving after his baseball game. It's 9:30 pm and we're going through the drive-thru at McDonalds. We get him 2 double cheeseburgers and they're gone by the time we get home, about a mile away. He's 13, going through the incessant eating and growth of adolescence. It reminds me of when Joe's brother was that age. he learned how to make grilled cheese sandwiches and would make himself 4, even 5 at a time. He'd drink so much milk that they started buying several gallons at a time. It would amaze me that he could consume so much food at once. He seemed so absolutely normal then- no inkling of a time bomb concocting itself within his complex brain.

(And today, I worked on a new poem. Not ready to reveal.)

All Kinds of Things

2010-05-04T18:17:00.007-04:00

Ezra's birthday today, in which my third child of four enters the teen years. His voice is deepening already, and when he's in the back yard with his friends I catch myself wondering who those guys are that I hear. Then I remember: it's my child, careening toward manhood at a sprint. No longer that fat baby of a moment ago.

People have written forever about the strangeness of time, and I see why. It just keeps going, like the beating of a heart.

Morgan is doing much better. Her episode is believed to have been brought on by stress. Tomorrow, she is traveling back to Lynchburg to try staying with my mom for a little while. For a long time, she's been living in group homes and doing 'programs' headed by lukewarm and lazy hired staff. I want to see what being around family again might do for her.

But I am afraid. Always. So many things have happened.
And love isn't always enough.
But, at least it's there.

I've been enjoying re-reading bits of books that I like with an eye toward how they are put together. I am contemplating whether I could actually write a book and what it would look like and what it's Story would be. There is potentially a lot, but it's all a huge pile of tangled yarn.

I also got two new poetry books last week. One is by Leslie McGrath and it's called "Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage." I immediately liked it; her style reminds me of my own, but much more experienced. Readable. I love it. If you like modern poetry, I highly recommend it.

The other is called "Radha Says" and it's the posthumous work of Reetika Vazirana, edited by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar. In 2003, Reetika took her own life and her 3-year-old son's as well. I had been her private childbirth instructor in 2000, when she was pregnant with her son and serving as poet-in-residence at Sweet Briar College. These poems are a bit harder to grasp than Leslie's volume, and they reflect Reetika's chaotic mental state, in my opinion. They are also beautiful and true and filled with reflections of her Indian heritage.

So, time is going by too quickly but the sun is my shoulders and my heart feels full and held.

Luka

2010-04-29T14:45:00.003-04:00

I felt a little fragile this morning. I know that I hold a lot of my feelings in; thus the 'tower of strength' image I seem to impart on people who don't know me too well. I've noticed that my mind uses a kind of Third Party Technique to help me release emotion. It uses something unrelated to the things on my mind.

This morning, it used the radio. I was driving along and Suzanne Vega's old song "Luka" came on. It's about domestic violence. So there's that, plus that powerful feeling that I always get when I hear a song that I haven't heard in a long time. So there I was, driving out of the ghetto behind Nora's school with tears running down my face.

I'm sure I looked a sight. Cause you know I was singing along, too.

But I pulled it all together, had a nice day with Ms.E and then went by the craft store for magnets. Now all I need is a huge burst of energy. This place is a wreck.

Calm before the Storm

2010-04-28T14:28:00.002-04:00

My 18-year-old daughter Morgan has mental health problems. So when she seems to be doing well, I always feel slightly pessimistic because experience has taught me that it's only a matter of time before the peace ends. The proverbial calm before the storm. If I am telling someone how she's doing well at the moment, I see them getting excited about it, thinking that perhaps this Bad Time in our Lives is finally ending.

But it isn't like that with mental illness. It doesn't end- rather, it ebbs and flows. And when things are going well, it means they're about to be going badly.

Morgan just finished her first semester of community college. She finally got a job and was working. Opened a checking account of her own, like a grownup.

But last night, she had her first psychotic episode.

I'm trying not to be too discouraged. There are several factors, including some medication changes, which may have brought this episode on, all of which are being investigated, hopefully. You see, I'm not even there to hold her. She is 2 hours away from me on a mental ward. All I can do right now is get updates from her therapist and try not to ask myself too many questions.

Will she ever be able to live a normal life?
What will happen to her?
Will the quality of her care providers decide her fate?
Will she end up in jail, mentally ill?
Or worse, homeless?

Don't think for a second that Eighteen is some magic number that your child reaches, at which point you are 'done' parenting them. They grow up, but you never stop loving them or worrying about them. And if they are mentally ill, the drama and heartache just goes on and on. I imagine it to be pretty similar in a person who has drug addiction.

There's no way to prepare for the next storm, so I am learning to take the calm that comes, and when the earth starts to shake just to ride it out. But it's sad.

What I'm up to

2010-04-26T20:34:00.003-04:00

Not as much time on the computer these days. I'm with Ms. E from 9 to 2 every weekday, the kids start streaming in around 3, and then baseball games most evenings after a hurried meal. The writing I've been doing has been on paper, in a notebook I bring with me. Sometimes I write about Ms.E but I'm also working on reaching back in my memory and writing things down with an eye toward detail.

And, after 10 years of not watching TV, I now watch it from 9 to 2 every weekday. I'm trying to avoid getting hooked on the soaps and in the process, a good idea for an article/essay has come to me, so I'm working on that, too.

Joe and I are getting a bunch of stuff ready for an art market on Friday, in the middle of all this other stuff. We are so enjoying having a thing that we do together. It is good.

The house is suffering, of course, but doesn't it always? I mean: people tell us that showering at our house is like being at camp. And I don't care. At least we don't keep placentas in the freezer anymore.

Musings on Time Going by, and Youth

2010-04-24T09:46:00.004-04:00

We went to four baseball games for Ezra this week. It's a good thing I can't see my own ass too well, or I might discover some Bleacher Print overlaying the stretch marks and cellulite. But these are the things we do for our children, and truth be told, I am enjoying it. Last Saturday morning we watched a game out in the sun and Joe commented that it was a great way to start a Saturday morning. Then he said:

I'm really going to miss Little League.

And I realized, again, that our children are growing up. I've had times when I've wanted that so badly and people told me I'd feel so sad when they were grown, and I scoffed at them. And now I have a lump in my throat thinking of how Ezra will be 13 in a couple of weeks, and only has 2 more years on our beloved fields at Miller Park. It's humbling. I can still recall the day he first ran out onto a baseball field at the age of six. He never looked back.

Last night, a bunch of his B-team friends came out to watch the game and they were all having a blast and the coach was letting kids hang out in the dugout that didn't belong there. Then a teammate took a line drive to the back of the skull and the ambulance had to be called over and they all stood respectfully in a huddle until it was all over. Joe and I observed that these will be some of his most vivid memories of his life. I tried not to think of how it could have been my son in that ambulance, how it can all turn upside down so quickly in this life.

I wasn't crazy about Ezra playing on 2 teams this season, but I find myself soaking it up, like a sun that I know will set eventually.

Good thing we have 8 more wonderful drama-filled years left with Nora.

Poetry Plunge

2010-04-19T15:17:00.005-04:00

I am taking a couple of peoples' advice this week. About a year or more ago, I was pulling together some poetry of mine with the intent of submitting it to a chapbook contest. Then after some thought (too much thought??) I decided I wasn't 'ready' for this step and kind of put it all aside. But recently, a few people have encouraged me to do something with my writing, and I think this might be the time.

I'm also taking the advice of Ariel Gore: publish before you're ready. She says our first published works will be kind of embarrassing, and that is how it should be, so don't wait.

So here I go, looking into a few chapbook competitions again. I could win $1000 plus publication of my work. Why not, then? The most I'll lose is a few dollars in entry fees and maybe some bits and pieces of my self-esteem, both of which I can handle.

Spring ( a poem)

2010-04-17T19:14:00.005-04:00

He says the whistle's been blowing over at the dairy for years,
all these years we've lived here
but somehow
I never heard it.
Not until the spring
following the winter
we almost threw it all out
and gave up on each other.
But deep down in the sorrow and
betrayal
we found each other again.
We propped open the old window
with a can of paint-
yes, that paint, the paint we were using
that horrible season, so cold-
and we made love like never before
and then lay warm and filled and
stunned
together in the new bed
and it was then that I finally heard it,
the whistle,
marking the hours and days
for so many people
for so long.

Just Thursday

2010-04-15T14:40:00.002-04:00

Guess what? They licked that soup pot bare yesterday.

Score!!

I did my writing today (and my reading) while with the elderly lady I'm watching. I love listening to her talk. She repeats her stories, so eventually I will know them well. I polished on a poem I am thinking about reading tomorrow at an informal writer's hobnob, since I have little else new to share. Blogging is great, but sometimes I think it's a real Material Hog. I journaled a bit, and I am also slowly re-reading Ariel Gore's book on writing, which I just enjoy revisiting so much. It's like the Bible for me; I can read a line or two and digest on it for awhile. Next on my list is The Triggering Town.

Mama's in the Kitchen

2010-04-14T14:58:00.003-04:00

The only time I get creative in the kitchen is when there's not much food here and I feel too lazy to go get something at the store. The obvious problem with that is my lack of base knowledge in the kitchen, which doesn't lend itself to the idea of culinary experimentation. So the results on these days aren't always pretty.

But it's cold today and I had the old standby thought: SOUP!

Soup is so great when you have shit rotting in your kitchen because, after a bit of boiling, no one knows the difference. I had cooked a chicken last night and had leftover meat, and rotting potatoes, and old carrots and slightly freezer-burned corn and peas. But I needed a broth...the broth is key in these situations, and I've learned that my family isn't keen on salt water as a soup base.

I found 2 options in the cupboard: the tomato base and the Campbell's soup base. I decided to go with Campbell's- however, what I had on hand was one can of cream of chicken and another of cream of celery. They're all kind of the same, right? I threw them in the pot with some water and wisked them into one homogeneous Siamese Soup Base. Added some garlic and basil, and then the fresh veggies. It's all simmering now, and after the veggies get soft, I'll add the frozen ones.

I must say that this one smells pretty good. For something I cooked. Must be the fresh onion. I'll whip up some grilled cheese sandwiches to go with, and the troops will be satiated for at least an hour. I love cooking.

Savor the Season

2010-04-12T16:18:00.003-04:00

It's staying warm all the time, now. Even when it's cool, you don't need a coat or anything. We dragged the metal chairs off the front porch and put them on the small porch out back. It's much better in the back, without the traffic with the people in their cars staring at us as they drive past. Mostly we hear the neighbor's dog, and the other neighbor's incessant use of power tools. The whistle marking time over at the dairy.

I feel like we're going to be out on this back porch a lot this summer. We're even going to get a fire pit so we can burn some wood while we sit out here. I think it's going to be a great summer, much nicer than the last one when I was in school all the time. Maddie will be old enough to have a job- I wonder if she will get one and this will be her first summer ever that isn't all her own. Which isn't completely true either; back when she did gymnastics, she'd spend up to 20 hours a week there in the summers.

Even with a job, I feel like there's going to be lots of time to savor the season.

Not the Yardwork People

2010-04-11T13:23:00.002-04:00

Joe and I started up on the yardwork today. We aren't those people who wait eagerly for the first spring day so we can get out there and start mulching, or weeding, or mowing. We are those people who wait until the yard is a thick and stiff 12 to 18 inches to sigh: guess we better cut the grass. Before we can even mow the back, we have to 1) pick up a million sticks from where a part of a dead tree fell over the winter, shattering like glass all over the yard, and 2) disassemble a "fort" Nora had made back there which was frightening in its intricacy and its contents.

Being the lazy and irresponsible mother that I am, I had allowed her to play there for weeks without a single inspection from me. Finally getting in there, I find what appears to be a dwelling a serial killer might have out in the woods somewhere. I wish I'd snapped some photos before I deconstructed it. Then the wheel broke on the mower, most likely from the strain of shoving through all that thick crabgrass, so the back yard never got done.

On the upside, we have tons of wood now. All we need is a firepit for the backyard and we're set.

The flowerpots on the front porch have been sitting empty for two springs now- how hard is it to buy a few flowers and some dirt? For me, pretty hard. If doing yardwork isn't something you enjoy, it can be a real discipline to make the time to get it done.

Of course, when we finally mow it for the first time and rake up the carpet of grass clippings and sweep the sidewalks, it always looks so nice with the dusk falling on the lawn. I do love the first warm night with a clean yard. I think that someday, when Joe and I live somewhere that we really love, we might finally get into the yardwork. Either that, or we'll end up in a loft.

The Changing of the Seasons

2010-04-09T08:48:00.002-04:00

More rain last night- a colder rain, which forced my short-sleeved arm beneath the comforter as the breeze blew in. This morning, still cool but with a clear sky and the assurance of sunshine. A beautiful morning, but still a hint of sadness spreads itself across a lower layer. There is a restlessness and a discontentment in the air.

The children, home on break from school all week. Sleeping in like it's summer, getting up finally to eat bowls of cereal. A change in the routine here- even for me, the unemployed one. Perhaps I will call it a change in my non-routine.

Next week, I start sitting with a 91-year-old woman in her home during the day. It is not a nursing job, nor will I receive a nurse's pay. But I am grateful for the chance to work. In between my duties with her, I hope to take advantage of the computer- and Blackberry-free time and do some reading, some writing. I will enjoy it as much as I can until the next thing comes along.

Sometimes that's all we can do.

It's been a long layover at this station. I graduated in December, and now it's April. The student loans are coming out of deferment. People are staring to wonder what I'm doing all day. It took me awhile to accept that I wasn't going to get my Dream Job. Which I had never planned to get, until the folks at the Dream Job implied that I might, and then it never happened. So I suppose there are many places I would have applied sooner, and perhaps beat my classmates to, if I have not been holding out for the Dream Job. Centra pushes 15-20 new LPNs into the job market every year, yet has forbidden us to work in the hospital settings, so we are left to scratch at each other like chickens for the medical office and nursing home positions that remain. Turnover in medical offices seems to be low- people like the hours, they like not doing shifts.

And Lynchburg is so small- in my field of interest, there is one GYN office and 3 OB offices. Of the 3 OBs, one is closing, one won't hire me because my mother works there, and the third is the Dream Job.

But it's Friday and it's sunny. I will make the bed and blow away the sad undertones with some sandalwood incense, and look forward to hearing one of our favorite musicians play tonight. Maybe slow dancing with my man. Taking each moment as it comes.

I am grateful.

Long-Winded and only Marginally Interesting Update

2010-04-06T08:36:00.002-04:00

The weather turned lovely and drug me out and away from this keyboard. Joe and I took lots of cards and buttons and set up a table at the Riverviews art market. We did okay, never quite as well as I hope but we made some sales and got to see a few friends there and enjoyed sitting together at our table, which looked quite nice, by the way. I just realized that I never got a picture of it.

Saturday we drove over an hour to Waynesboro for a baseball double header for Ezra. It was a gorgeous day and the girls had stayed home, so there was nothing to do but sit on the bleachers and soak in the sunshine. I let my back get a little burned, but it felt kind of good, kind of like a summer rite of passage. They lost both games but it didn't matter- Ezra played well and got moved in from the outfield to third base for awhile. We ate Mexican food, then made the pretty drive back through the mountains to the Burg. Joe also got a call about another business wanting some buttons, so we were excited about that.

Then it was Easter, a very low-key day around here. No, we did not go to church. We hid the childrens' Easter 'bags'- nothing excessive like what I've seen on a few peoples' Facebook pages- and enjoyed the sunshine. After this winter we've had, we basically worship the sun. We grilled barbecue chicken on our little charcoal grill and relaxed. A wonderful day.

Yesterday was equally lazy. We did finally get out and take a small hike with the kids over at Riverside park and showed them the train trestle where Joe once saw a girl jump / fall. Dropped sample buttons off to our new potential customer. Then Joe realized that his cell phone was missing and we decided that he'd left it at the Mexican place. In Waynesboro. So, Joe and I hopped in the car and took an unexpected scenic drive. And it was quite lovely. Driving back, dusk was falling on the mountains and we drove silently, holding hands and listening to the Weepies.

Last night we had out first thunderstorm of the year. It started as a strong wind blowing through, and then gentle rumbles and misty sounds. For a while, it felt like I was under the ocean and the waves were rolling over the top of me. Finally, the storm came full-on and the sky opened up to release a cold, heavy, cleansing rain. Then I remembered that the cats were outside, got up, and found a cat waiting at each door. So glad to be getting let in. Finally, the storm subsided and we all settled back into sleep, everything feeling a bit cooler and cleaner.

The kids have spring break this week and Ezra's B-team isn't meeting at all. So hopefully, I can find some things to do with them that they will enjoy on their time off. I am typically not very good with that. Later in the week, their cousins will come to town and that will be a fun visit.

And I suppose that's the stuff of my life in a small nutshell. I am hoping to get back to writing more, both on the blog and off. Got some poems I eventually want to re-re-re-re-vise, and also some new stuff to get down. It's tough to start when the path has grown weedy.