Funny Historical

It’s an odd moment, isn’t it? I heard on the radio in the car yesterday afternoon, on my way to pick Cassie up and shuttle her to her dance lesson, that the House voted down the economic bailout. All while the experts (such as they are) talked fiscal apocalypse. And the yellow leaves out the window on the right fluttered down, dislodged by a gust of late September wind. And the red pickup entered the traffic circle despite its not really being his turn. And when I got to the school, the after school program kids were out on the playground, and Cassie’s braids were flopping as she bounced a yellow ball with two hands.

It reminds me a little of one of those dreams I sometimes have in which the end of the world has somehow been announced, but for the moment all is eerie, sunny normalcy.

What does it even mean? How real is it? It’s not that I disbelieve what we hear, but it’s all so abstract. Pete points out that as a professor and a nurse, we’re both in fairly recession-proof lines of work, and I do think that’s probably contributing to my weird, muffled feeling as I listen to the news.

During Cassie’s dance lesson, I sat in the basement of the local arts facility while our sprightly little girls in black tights and leotards apparently conducted some kind of thundering elephants-vs.-water buffalo battle overhead. I watched the toddler little brothers and sisters running around the posts and thumping on the soda machine. The mothers sat mostly in twos and threes, talking about kids, and about somebody’s sister who was going out with a real loser.

I remember reading the Diary of Anne Frank in fifth grade (doesn’t that seem kind of young to read the Diary? were fifth graders older in the 70s than they are now?), and being terribly impressed with the momentousness of it all. I sporadically wrote little diary entries for the next few years--aimless noodlings, mostly--hoping that something Historical would happen at any moment. Then I could write about the Historical Times I was living in, and it would be all very important, somehow.

So are we here? Is it really 1929? (I picture us in a couple years, all getting our hair marcelled and making our own sauerkraut and playing cards around the radio.) Are we well on our way to Living in Interesting Times?

It Has Come to My Attention

Toddlers, like xerox machines, can sense when you are in a hurry.

But xerox machines don't lie down on the wet sidewalk for a little rest.

Status Post Procreation

Prozac or no Prozac (and at the moment? 40mg of Prozac daily--not the maximum dose, but more than I used to take), the battle against a sometimes breathtaking sense of futility continues. This is something that makes parenthood of small children useful. Because if you can't think of a single reason that anything is worth doing, that any purpose is worth the effort you put toward it, your nihilistic thumb-sucking is routinely interrupted, over and over again, by an urgent need to accomplish tasks that are unquestionably worth doing. Put more milk in the sippy cup. Change the stinky diaper. Say, "who's there?" and then, "interrupting cow who?" Help with the fish puzzle AGAIN. Explain that just because Roy says that he has bombs disguised as regular objects in his backpack doesn't mean that he actually does, and that I do, too, know this for a fact, not least because Roy is seven years old. Read Peepo AGAIN. Explain that yes, Miss Piggy is a pig, and Kermit is a frog, but nobody knows what Gonzo is. Fix the silver dumptruck with the brown back. (AGAIN.) Wash the mysterious sticky stuff out of the end of the right braid.

It's pretty therapeutic. It goes beyond keeping things in neutral territory, and tips the whole life balance determinedly into the positive zone. I read recently that people with children are not happier than people without children, and in fact slightly to the contrary. But I have not a shadow of a doubt that Rosie Bonner with Cassie and Emerson is a much happier person than Rosie Bonner without.

Bland It All to Heck

My boss praised me yesterday. It was brief. I think maybe it went, "You did a wonderful job with that research." And it was actually mostly just the preface to a request for me to do another similar task for her. But praise doesn't come from her too often in any context, so I have to admit I did take note.

It's an odd relationship. By my lights, she's a strange person, and it might also be surmised that by her lights, I am a strange person. That ought to be true, at any rate. There are some signs, however, that rather than seeing me as a weirdo (which she should), she sees me as not only her protegee, but as an immature, imperfect and unformed version of herself. She will help me along, teach me the ropes, and the glorious culmination will be in a decade or so, when I find that I have finally achieved a state of being just like her.

Most of me does know that this will not happen. But there are times she seems so certain, I feel the chill of it all the same.

JoAnn (let's call her JoAnn, shall we?) is our head of corporate compliance (a VP-level position within our agency), and she seems to take pride in being as bland and corporate as she can be. She's quite smart, smarter than most nurses you'll meet. She got her nursing degree, as I recall, at a secondary campus of a state school in some Appalachian state. She has an MBA, too, with a concentration in computer science. She married for the first time late in life, and I think her husband is a tradesman of some kind. She has no children.

For a person of her intelligence and position, JoAnn seems strangely impressed by people even one or two rungs above her in the hierarchy. Our home care agency is a small subset of a giant and prestigious regional health system, so there are unfortunately many rungs above JoAnn. Because of her role, she ends up going to endless meetings with these people, so I would think that by now she would have figured out, I don't know, that their shit stinks too. But it often seems not to have ever occurred to her.

Writing it out like this, it seems clearer than it does at the office. It makes me think of the first exchange between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in the movie, where he psychoanalyzes her based on her good bag, cheap shoes, and suppressed accent. JoAnn is smart enough to have gone to fancy schools, but she didn't, presumably because of her background, though I know no details. She seems to be simultaneously disdainful of and intimidated by academics. And she puts appropriateness of behavior above most other concerns.

"I've noticed that you're very chatty on the phone with the preceptors and with patients, and that's great..." (have you noticed that "...and that's great" has a similar valence to "not that there's anything wrong with that"? Is that a recent thing? I've only recently caught on to it.) "...but you have to remember that you're sitting in an executive area now, and so you really have to keep your phone conversations professional."

Eeugh. It absolutely gives me the heebie-jeebies.

She counsels me with a kind of benevolent condescension on how I have to use my hands less when I speak. ("You're very enthusiastic... and that's great...") How I have to be careful not to speak too quickly, and at all times resist the urge to be self-deprecating. How I have to use professional language in my e-mails. Then there was the whole dumb fiasco about the pregnant job candidate (see, silly me, I blithely assumed that because it was illegal and unethical to not hire somebody because she was pregnant, that there was no question of our doing it... It all came out right in the end, fortunately).

What's hard is that I can't easily get her advice out of my head. I can't just naturally be who I am without either somehow in my mind either defying her or caving in to her. I don't know what she's right about and what she's wrong about. I don't know what's style, what's truly unacceptable, and what's just her hideous, bland, ass-covering corporate-speak paranoia. It's kind of awful. I can't help but second-guess. Am I really unpolished and out-of-control, as she implies? Is my reflex inclusion of what I see as humanizing remarks and small bits of humor in e-mails and phone conversations actually just cutesy, embarrassing, inappropriate? That's not what I see reflected back in the people I interact with, but all of a sudden I'm not 100% sure any more.

I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing, and I could certainly see myself doing it for a few years. But I do wonder how my psyche will hold up under nearly daily interaction with JoAnn. I'm hanging in for now, and really nobody knows how things might change. She might get reassigned or promoted or who knows what. Even just changing the cubicle configuration, which is actually scheduled, could change the dynamic (I won't be smack dab outside her office door any longer).

In the meanwhile, maybe I'll try hard to see it as a learning opportunity. I just don't want to be learning the wrong things.

Cassie and Emerson, a Reintroduction

Cassie is now 6 1/2 and in first grade. Her hair is still light blonde, and she wears it in two braids, just as I did when I was her age. She has Pete's small, dark, slightly Asiatic eyes, though, so she's working a kind of exotic, vaguely Finnish look somehow. And she's still very tall for her age. If you dressed her in something extreme or funky, she could easily be a model in one of those contexts that require a quirky, offbeat aesthetic. (She's frankly a little pasty and sullen for anything fresh-scrubbed and girl-next-door like a Sears catalog or anything. Comme des garcons or Jil Sander would be much more appropriate.)

She loves colors (especially blue and green), making art, looking at art, Pippi Longstocking, Martha Speaks and Word Girl, summer sausage, juice pops, making her little brother laugh, making her little brother whine and cry, going to school, and making potions. She was a big, big Hillary fan (despite having parents who were kind of on the fence), but has now thrown her full support behind Barack Obama. She also thinks that Malia and Sasha are lucky because their dad is famous.

Cassie has asserted a belief in God for a couple years now, although in the last week, she did let slip that she thinks she might be believing a tiny bit less lately. The poor thing has precious little to go on for models of religious faith, although I am at least willing to fill her in about the basics of "what you believe if you're a Christian." Pete just spits nails when the subject comes up.

Cassie is wasting no time in preparing herself for her teenage years, alternating talking incessantly with periods of huffy, surly quasi-silence. She has even precociously mastered the art of flouncing into the bathroom and slamming the door when she's put out about something. I think she's kind of a prodigy.

She lobbied for a while for a dog (starting approximately one day after overcoming her longterm deathly fear of them). One day in the car on the way to swimming lessons, though, I spelled out in great detail just what kind of work having a dog was, and made it crystal clear that Daddy and Mama would not be doing the work because Daddy and Mama did not want a dog. She pondered briefly, and announced she thought she would like to get a bird.

She would also like to know why they put designs on toilet paper, since it's just going to get poop on it.

Meanwhile, Emerson has been honing his already considerable cuteness to a needle-fine point of adorability. It's kind of staggering. This is a creature who could have been specifically genetically engineered for winsomeness. He's plenty good-looking (another brown-eyed blond, but less flaxen and more sandy, and also less exotic and more all-American boy), but it's really
his personality that does it. Affectionate, ingenuous, enthusiastic, warm, humorous. And of course, since he's 2 1/2, there are the myriad charming mispronunciations ("doodles" for "noodles," "Ama" for "Grandma," "mekkah mitser" for "cement mixer") and random perfectly enunciated exclamations a propos of nothing in particular ("Go Red Sox!"). Other parents watch him play on the playground. His day care teacher assured me the other day with great feeling that it was fine that I was almost ten minutes late picking him up--"we've been having fun!"

So my thought now is, at some point in the future Pete and I are just going to have to sit him down and tell him very seriously and firmly: NO SEX WITH INTERNS IN THE OVAL OFFICE.

Rosie Boldly Goes

So last I mentioned my work, I was gearing up to become a full-time home care nurse. Then I disappeared from my blog for 2 years. The two are not entirely coincidental. Case managing as a nurse in home care was fulfilling and satisfying in some ways; intellectually challenging, interpersonally rewarding. It also ate my life.

I was working consistently between 50 and 60 hours a week, spending all stray moments (during Cassie's swimming lesson, while Emerson napped, and every night from children's bedtime to the moment when I was so sleepy I couldn't keep my head up) with my electronic charting (or occasionally on the phone with the medical supply company, or e-mailing physicians, or making up next week's patient schedule, or something). I know that there are nurses who manage to do the job in less time than that--maybe not in quite so little as 40 hours a week, but nearly. But it's a mystery to me how. Even on good weeks, easy weeks, I didn't come close.

When you hardly have two spare minutes to rub together, it takes a little while to get yourself mobilized to make change. Just maintaining the status quo takes more than you've got, really. But I did finally manage to start a job hunt, after a fashion. I also went in and talked with some of the managers and directors in my own agency. I brought a resume that showed all the nice administrative things I can do. I wrote out some hypothetical job descriptions for positions that could be created... for me. I said that I love home care, and I think that this agency really does give good patient care in addition to good customer service, and I would love to stay, but this job is killing me. Financially I have to work full-time. Is there anything we can work out?

It took them a couple weeks to get back to me, but ultimately the news is good. My role has been evolving over the last year, but at the moment I am doing no patient care. I am full-time coordinator and clinical instructor for a new educational program for nurses who just graduated from nursing school but want to do home care. (Usually new nurses don't do home care because you have to have quite a bit of independence to make the whole alone-in-a-house-with-a-sick-person thing work out well.)

It frankly feels a little--I don't know. Odd. Eerie. Friggin' weird. Clinical instructor? Somehow that implies... well, expertise. Doesn't it? And not grammatical expertise. Not vegetarian chili-making expertise. Not jollying-a-two-year-old-into-getting-his-diaper-changed-without-screeching expertise. No. Clinical expertise. It's truly slightly insane. And yet here I go, doing it. I consulted people and read a bunch of stuff, and then what did I do? I made a curriculum. Unmitigated chutzpah. And then what did I do? I made a two-day training for the experienced nurses who are acting as year-long preceptors. Me training them--that's rich. But we all go along acting as if it's perfectly normal and the accepted order of things.

And so then, a couple weeks ago, the new nurses started. Six of 'em. And now I give lectures, and make them do all kinds of hands-on exercises, and give them assignments. They have to write a clinical journal on the patients they see with their preceptor. They have to do readings I assign and answer little discussion questions. Their very first day, I made them draw my blood.

It's weirdly easy. I mistrust it, it's so easy. Because in my recent experience, real work goes against my grain. I have to be continually fighting my true nature to do my job. Doing patient care requires such an iron grasp on the details, dozens and hundreds of details, that it takes all the teeth-gritting concentration I can give it. Plus there's continually battling my sense of ignorance and inadequacy (in the context of clinical nursing, anyway).

But teaching is so strangely effortless that I have repeated unprovoked, irrational little bursts of dread--the reason being, I guess, that if work feels this easy, it is a lead pipe cinch that I am forgetting something very, very important. And so I have that lead stomach sensation of being just about to remember... remember that I never sent in my passport renewal and I have to catch a plane tomorrow; remember that my driver's license is expired just when I see flashing lights in my rearview; remember that I was supposed to pick up Emerson today and it's already 5:50; remember that Mr. S needed his potassium drawn two days ago. Something. But I never do remember the thing, the horrible thing that is going to make me feel like a total loser miserable worthless screw-up. I just feel like I'm about to remember it. Over and over again. (Ever so pleasant. Somewhat reminiscent of repeatedly hallucinating the smell of vomit.)

But you know, besides the dread bursts, it's actually going pretty well. I think. I don't know. Everybody seems engaged and happy, and they're learning stuff. And other people think we're doing a good job. And I'm getting to make up these clever little ways of teaching things and reinforcing good clinical habits. It truly is total fun. The actual stuff of it.

Plus I'm only working maybe 45 (or, well, maybe 48) hours a week. Sweet deal.

But Thanks for Asking

Somehow the subject of Ethel Merman came up. Cassie was quizzical, and Pete and I filled her in on the meaning of the cultural reference (complete with some pretty pathetic brassy-esque renditions of "There's No Business Like Show Business"). Pause for reflection. New question: "Is Ethel Merman a bad word to say if you're a Christian?"

Can it be true?

Well, it has taken pretty much all of the discretionary time that I had to figure out how to get back in to make another post. But I have great ambition to be back in the saddle, bloggish-wise. I suppose this miserable little post will be my placeholder and my pledge. See you again soon!