Bug

The evening of my last post, the moral punishment for my griping about my kids was visited upon me in the form of a virus bearing body aches and temperatures in the 101s. I spent a few days on the couch being useless, stewing in the same stinky pajamas for more than 48 hours of it.

This morning I had no fever, and I was supposed to teach, so I decided to venture in to work for a few hours, a little pasty and bedraggled but functional. Cassie, meanwhile, can't seem to figure out whether she's about to throw up or not, and we kept her home today. (The vomiting never materialized, and I'm wondering whether we might have been playing it a bit cautious. One of the interns was telling me that her mother's rule was, "I don't care if I just watched you throw up--if you don't have a fever, you're going to school.")

Pete was at home with Cassie in the morning, and so I dropped Emerson off at day care on my way in to my office. As I was walking out the preschool door, I ran into one of Emerson's classmates being carried in by her daddy. She recognized me immediately. "Thass Em'son's Dad, too!" she exclaimed.

Yeah. Thanks, kid.

Motherhood, Joys of

Tomorrow is Columbus Day (a holiday of almost unmitigated bogusness, if you ask me, but of course nobody did). This means one long day of non-stop parenting. (It's sort of a trade, because Cassie had Friday off too, for some Teachers' Professional Day whatsihoosie, and Pete did the honors that day because I had to teach. But as you might notice if you look closely, that was just the 6-year-old, which is significantly different from the 2-year-old and the 6-year-old. And plus? She spent a big chunk of the day with the 8-year-old who lives next door doing some fabulous activity supervised by the 8-year-old's dad. I don't even remember what that activity was, because all I keep hearing from Cassie is how he got them slushees afterwards, which was apparently just about the high point of Cassie's life up till now. Anyway, I am hereby putting in for extra parent points. Thank you.)

Now, you know by now that I am very into the progeny of me. I think that Cassie and Emerson totally rock, and sometimes I just look at them and think how ridiculously lucky I am. They are just exactly what I wanted for Christmas, and motherhood is all I wanted it to be. Okay. So that.

But a whole day--a whole day. Oof.

Emerson! EMERSON!! NO THROWING DIRT! Cassie, would you please... yes, that's really nice, sweetheart, but what I'm trying to... Emerson! NOT IN THE STREET! Cassie, if you walk ahead, I think that Emerson will want to catch up with... Carry you? Okay, Em, for a little while, I can carry you... THANK YOU CASSIE, THAT'S GREAT. YOU CAN STOP NOW! Yes, sweetie, we are going home. We're going home now. Yes, you can play with your trucks at home. That's a good idea. Sure, the yellow one. Absolutely. No, Cassie, I think that this is less than a mile. I'm sorry that you're exhausted. Maybe you'll want a nap this afternoon? Cassie, I can't hear you when you talk while you're walking away from me. No, sweetie, I didn't really think that you wanted a nap. It was kind of a joke.

I mean, it's kind of great. It is. But also? It totally fries every nerve ending I have. By the end of a day, my mouth is a little line, and I can't seem to focus my eyes, and no amount of Prozac seems that it could ever be enough. I am so, so, so not built to be a full-time mom. It saps my strength, it saps my sanity, it saps my will to live.

There are people who can do it. There are people who like doing it. And I wish them godspeed, bless their green-blooded little alien hearts. But what I have to say? Thank all that is good and wholesome for my own gainful employment. If I were a housewife in the 50s, I would definitely have ended up either addicted to mother's-little-helpers or hospitalized in a facility with "Lawn" in the name after being found curled in a fetal position in the linen closet whimpering.

Casey-Fink

So you know how I'm now the teacher of a nice little group of 6 new graduate nurse interns? I have them in "class" 2 or 3 days a week, and they're out seeing patients with their very own preceptor the rest of the time. We're (=I'm) going to be tracking a variety of outcome measures for the program, and today I gave them the Casey-Fink Graduate Nurse Experience survey. (Yeah, I know, whatever--but it's quite well validated!) And it turned out that they're a half-dozen happy little clams, those new grads of mine. I'm so pleased. They love their preceptors and feel all supported and glad they chose to go into home care and stuff. And it so happened that we had our class session on "Interpersonal Issues in the Workplace" today, and when I mentioned in part of my preamble the old saw that "nurses eat their young," (gruesome saying, isn't it?), most of them said they had experienced that kind of thing (i.e., hostility from experienced nurses) as nursing students during their clinical experiences in the hospital, but not one of them has experienced a single speck of it at Our Home Care Agency.

So my heart is full, and my face is all beam-y. I'm just so, so pleased.

You know, quite near the root of the reason I went into nursing originally, there is the experience that I had of a decade of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome during my early 20s-early 30s. The few times that I had an interaction with a really human, empathetic health professional during that time were tremendously important to me. Alongside those experiences were the less positive ones (though thankfully nobody ever went so far as to tell me it was all in my head, or some of the other things that many people with CFS have heard). The combination of the two made me want to do it right, to give the kind of health care that I wanted to get. It somehow made it feel like it could make up the difference, that in doing for others, I'd be doing for myself. It doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense, I admit, but for some reason the emotional calculus is very solid in my head.

And that's similar to how I feel about this program. I want to make it right for a little group of new nurses--to have their entry into the profession be welcoming, well supported, with reasonable and realistic expectations and a thoughtful, stepwise initiation to the necessary skills and knowledge. Nursing is both important and (if you do it right) incredibly complex. It seems worth, to me, the very best introduction you can provide. So how cool is it that I get to make that happen? That it's actually working?

Um, okay, I'll tell you. It's cool. It's very, very cool.