Growing Pains

I open my computer and I try to write.  I sit and stare at the blinking cursor, I cower away, I come back.  I wait.  Nothing strikes.  Whoever said that writing was as simple as sitting down at the typewriter and opening a vein had it all wrong.  I've done both, so I know.  Opening veins is way, way easier.  Thoughts crowd around, a jumbled mass of things that sound like nothing more than complaints, petty grievances that raise my blood pressure, piss me off, and then are gone.  Being around other people is exhausting, I didn't even go to my classmate's celebratory end of the year party Tuesday night, after the 79 of us all slogged through ten months of classes together.  I didn't go, despite being invited, and then I turn away from photos of the fun because my heart hurts from feeling left out.

I grow my plants with a vengeance.  I can do this, I can be good at this.  It's 90 degrees, I'm pouring sweat, and I don't care.  I pull all the weeds, even the tiny ones.  I fertilize carefully, I water with an attention most people reserve for walking a tightrope.  My mind clears, I don't have to talk to anyone or be happy or cheerful or compassionate while I'm doing this.  This is my territory, these plants are my babies.  It's such a simple, straightforward process - dig, plant, tend with care, and look, something amazing happens.  The garden's timeline of weeks and months relieves my frantic soul, while I tell myself that ten years from now, I will smile at my anxious incompetent current self and think nothing of all the things that scare me now.

I don't have to be anyone special for him.  It's such a relief.  He tells me he's proud of me for getting honors and we leave it at that.  I want to hear about how he saved thousands of frogs from the stagnant pool they're emptying at the apartment complex he's working on in Georgia this week.  I want to hear about this because it's not the jumble of anxiety and exhaustion that is clouding the inside of my brain.  I go with him to look at a house he might move into, and I plan where the nursery might go, a few years from now.  I show him where I'll plant the garden, he tugs my ponytail and says with a smile, "Okay."  That's it.  I lean into him and I don't have to do anything more.

I talk to a midwife on the phone this morning about attending some home births this summer.  She asks where I'm doing my community health rotation and when I tell her she laughs, and says, "I remember doing community health.  We called it community hell for a reason.  Good luck!"  I go pull more weeds and stroke my one growing hot pepper until the tightness in my throat clears and my eyes are no longer leaking.

I sleep in his bed because the air conditioning is too good to pass up and the bed feels cavernous without him and the inside of my head is a mess again and it still would be easier to pour from my wrists than it is to figure out what I'm trying to say.

Things I Find

CT has some pretty beaches, if you know where to look.

And some wicked thunderstorms, that result in rainbows like this.

I have one more test.  One more test before my academics for the first year are kind of over - I say kind of because for most of July I'll be working (for free) as a nurse with the VNA nearby and doing some kind of massive, currently undefined project that counts very much for a grade.  But my last test is on Tuesday so I'm just trying to focus on that for right now.  In between studying, I'm planning all sorts of things to do with the 21 pounds of strawberries H. and I picked this weekend.  Rough life, I'm telling you.


An excerpt from a book I very much want to read, about becoming a nurse.

I need feminism because old man patients have groped me and I knew enough not to tell anyone.

I think it's obvious what side of the debate I'm on, but decide for yourself.

Big news in the land of diabetes research.

I don't ever want to forget Newtown (careful, this one made me cry).

Worn Out

I am so tired.

It runs through my head, it's a permanent state of being by now.  People say hi, how are you, I say fine, good, thanks, how are you?  I don't say, I'm tired, I'm just so, so tired.

I wake up feeling uneasy, like I've just been unceremoniously returned to this bed and this body in order to wake up and get on with the day.  Part of me lingers in wherever I was before and I spend all day trying to remember it.  Some nights I am unconscious in seconds, only surfacing as the sun creeps through the window the next day, my hand reaches out, searching because I can't remember if I'm in his bed with him or in my bed alone.

Other nights I fall asleep, I dream vivid ghastly dreams of being alone in the delivery room, everyone has left and it's just me.  The woman grunts and I tell her not to push, just breathe, I don't want her to tear and I'm scared, I'm so scared.  I reach out and catch the squirrel she has just delivered instead of a baby and I almost drop it because it is like looking inside of Hell and wanting to scoop out your eyes rather than remember what you've seen.  The mother reaches down and cuddles the animal with its wet fur and beady eyes and I turn, vomit, start to scream and wake up.

Some nights I float in the between place, neither awake nor asleep, for hours.  As the birds start to chirp, my body finally gives up and I sink into sleep for forty-five minutes.  The alarm rings and I want to cry.

What day is it?  What time am I supposed to wake up?  Where am I?

It takes me whole minutes to find the answers to these questions.  I feel like I'm trying to pluck them out of the air - elusive, like catching dandelion fluff to make a wish.  You open your hand, sure you had it, but there's nothing there.

Am I the same person I was when I started this?  
Does anyone here even know me at all?  
Do I know who I am anymore?  
I don't remember.  
I'm so, so tired.

A Rose By Any Other Name...

Edit: I wrote this last night after a loooong day of babysitting that reminded me a little too much of so many issues about which I stayed completely silent when I was a nanny, mostly out of fear that I would be fired if my bosses were to happen upon this blog and read what I'd said.  Reading it over today, good golly, I sound pissed.  I'm much calmer now (really).  But I still think these are valid issues.  So I'm going to post it, and I hope you all can read it knowing that most of my memories of nannying are extremely fond and that I absolutely think that when moms need help, they should get it (and be honest about it).

Recently, I've read a few things about moms (and parents, more generally) needing help.  And how that is okay (I would agree) and nothing to be ashamed of (again, right on).  It seems to rise like a rallying battle cry from some - certainly not all - mothers, particularly those who are home raising their children or who do work for money from home while raising their children.  I have no inherent problem with this.  You want to know what the very last thing I tell my postpartum patients when they're being discharged from the hospital with their brand new baby?  Not, "Put them on their back to sleep."  Not even, "You can do this!"  I tell them, "Don't be afraid to ask for, and accept help.  Don't try to do this all alone."  

But here's my beef with the whole thing - if you are hiring someone to watch your children, paying someone money to come to your house several days a week, for set hours at a time, leaving them in charge and trusting them with the health and safety of your child, if that is what you are doing, then you are not hiring a "babysitter."  You are not hiring "help."  You have not found a new "friend" for either yourself or your child(ren).  You are not "lucky to have such a sweet girl to come by sometimes."  (By the way, these are all exact quotes from people I, or people I know, have worked for.)  You have hired a NANNY.  You have hired someone whose job, perhaps career, it is to take care of your kids.  And guess what - if you chose right, she (or he) takes that job extremely seriously, and it is nothing short of a slap in the face to call it anything less than exactly what it is.

I haven't been a nanny in almost exactly a year now, and I don't miss it.  But when I did do it, it was my job.  It paid my bills.  It allowed me to live independently, to support myself, and to live in two very large and very expensive cities and not be evicted or go hungry.  And because it was my job, and it was that important to me, I took those jobs damn seriously.  I read child development books.  I asked my mom for advice.  I practiced patience, and I chose my words carefully with my charges, and I enforced consistency and responsibility and built them a solid foundation upon which to grow.  I also loved them, and even though I didn't get paid to do that, I did it anyway because how could I not?  I poured my heart and soul into raising all those kids and when people ask me what I did before Yale, I tell them I was a nanny.  I enunciate it clearly and repeat myself when they ask me, incredulously, if that's really what I did, and I don't give a shit if the person asking worked for a Fortune 500 company for two years before grad school while I was changing diapers and pushing swings.  

And one last thing - if, from what I have read on numerous posts written by mothers both about the need for help and about things that have nothing to do with that, if in fact, motherhood is hard, and staying at home is hard, and we can all agree that raising babies is hard freaking work, then guess what - it's not just hard for you.  It's hard for the person you hire, and acting like it's a walk in the park for your special "friend" or that it's something I did to amuse myself before getting back to my real and glamorous life when I left your house at 7 PM is also a slap in the face.  It's just as frustrating for me as it is for you when your baby throws their dinner on the floor.  It's just as much work for me to do three loads of laundry while entertaining two sick children as it would be for you.  Yeah, I got good at it.  But it wasn't easy.  And I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood on more than one occasion, listening to the things my bosses would say ("How are you able to do it all?" someone would ask them, while I sorted laundry in the basement, their voices clear as day through the furnace ducts.  "Oh, you know.  It just all comes together somehow!"  Somehow?  ME.  I was the "somehow.") - and why?  To appease some awful sense of guilt?  Or to make themselves feel better?  Listen, if you need help then you need help!  Own it!  If it's truly nothing to be ashamed of, and we're all raising the battle cry about not trying to go it alone, then give the person who helps you the respect they deserve by telling it exactly like it is.

Away We Went

Memorial Day weekend may have only been a paltry three days long, but I latched onto it with an intensity that bemused the boy (and me, to a certain degree).  I was determined to make a mini-vacation out of it, if for no other reason than I have been in school for a long ten months now and I just wanted a break, dammit, but nope, school goes until the end of July.

We couldn't go more than four hours away because of work and school and those other things called "real life."  Also the dog had to come (again, real life).  So my hastily planned weekend basically consisted of three things:
1) Pit stop in Waterbury, VT to go to the Ben & Jerry's factory
2) Stay in northern New Hampshire, because Franconia is pretty and there's a yummy pancake restaurant.
3) Find a B&B that allows dogs, doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and has a room.

Oh, and go hiking.  Fresh air is good for my junky lungs and I wanted to get away from people.

Despite a profound lack of sophisticated thought and planning, we had a blast.  It rained almost the entire time.  It got down in the 30's at night and even snowed three inches (yes, really).  But it was really, really nice to go somewhere different and climb through mountains and wade through a freezing river and play Trivial Pursuit on his Blackberry on the drive home.

Whenever we go somewhere other than here, there's a part of me that lights up and thinks about, Well, what if we lived here? and I have all sorts of fun imagining things like living in the foothills of the White Mountains and driving a four-wheel drive pickup truck out to births, and growing a garden and hiking with the dog.  And it's not like There is better than Here, I think it's just about it being different.  But when my neighbors (who are now my friends) with the baby say things to me and him like, "You're not moving away from New Haven after you graduate, right?" while I snuggle the baby and blow raspberries in his neck, it makes me think to myself, Or, well, I guess we could stay here and be close to Boston and New York and family and friends and I'd grow a garden somehow and as long as we get a goat someday that I can name Cooper, it'll all work out that way too.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe I'm finally realizing that where you wind up living the majority of your life isn't necessarily a conclusion that you draw with a whole lot of profundity.  Maybe it's more like where you end up and where you grow roots and where you fall in love with building your world around you.  And maybe no matter how much you love where you are, you still go somewhere different and romantic for a weekend and think, Hey, what if...

And maybe there's nothing really wrong with that at all.

Things I Stumble Upon

Sometimes I feel like a sloppy drunk, wandering around the internet.  I click on links that people post and send me and then I continue on, crashing through this virtual world, stumbling through blog posts and articles and opinion pieces.  Often I'll leave six or seven links open on my browser for days before sitting down to read them.  Inevitably, some are not worth it and I abandon them two paragraphs in.  But some are amazing.  And I finish those and then have nothing else to do about it, so I guiltily close the tab that I've been faithfully preserving for days.  But no longer, dear readers.  Now - I pass my favorites on to you (like everyone else in the blog world already does).  But I don't care.  This is a bandwagon of sharing that I am happy to board.

Embracing your microbiome.

Words matter, but love matters more.

We don't know enough about suicide, which means we suck at preventing it.  Which is scary, since it's on the rise.  One of the most important things I took away from my psych rotation was how important it is to screen - and how to go about screening - everyone for suicidality.  Yes, even happy people who are planning families and having babies and seeing their midwife for routine visits.

Something we've been talking about a lot lately in school is dying, and how we do it.  I've seen enough already in ten months to know exactly what I don't want done for me (just about everything).  Maybe this is why health professionals and doctors have the kind of deaths we all want to have.

Birth

You know what's awesome about birth, babe?

What's that?

It's like...today was one of the biggest days of these two women's entire lives, because their babies were born, and - and - you get to be there for it.  And for me - all it is is Thursday.  But for them - it's a day that they'll never forget.  I can't believe I get to be there for all of those days for the rest of my life.

Well, I can't think of anyone better to be there for them than you.

I'm so lucky.  I just can't believe how lucky I am.

So are they, he tells me.  And I laugh because this can't possibly be my life.

And yet it is.

Welcome to the world, baby girls.  Today was an awesome day to be born.

The Canyon Overflows

I spent the last six Thursdays with some of the sickest kids I've ever seen.  Tracheostomy tubes hooked up to ventilators, CPAP forcing in air that is 80% oxygen, twenty-four hours a day.  Continuous EEG monitoring because she had seven seizures in two days.  Cranial skull fractures so bad that the subarachnoid hemorrhage is causing his spinal cord to swell in its bony casing and he may never walk again.  Sick upon sicker upon sickest, and every single one had a mother.  I met them all.  I talked to them all.  I wrote my name on their white board, explained I was a student nurse and that I'd be helping out their little one that day, and I tried hard to remember their names so that I wouldn't have to call them "Mom" when asking questions or explaining procedures.  

Mothers who knew every medication their child had ever taken, who knew more about his G-tube feedings than I did (by a long shot), who could push an antibiotic and antacid cocktail into it with a smile on their face while they told me about the last 18 months of having a son born chronically ill.  

Mothers who sat anxiously by the bed of their toddler who had bounced around inside the car the night before, unrestrained by a carseat when they were T-boned at 2 AM.  Who rocked back and forth and yelled at me for not giving her baby more pain medication for the craniotomy she'd just had and then apologized in the next breath and told me it wasn't her fault and she was so scared because the DCF worker had just been here and what if she can't take her baby home with her.

Babies who fall out of third story windows.

Babies who weigh thirteen pounds at fifteen months old.

Babies who took too much heroin at their prom last night and may never wake up again.

Babies who haven't woken up in five years and who will never learn to talk or walk or smile or eat.

Mothers at their side, every single one.

Mothers who did everything right, and whose babies were born with illnesses they cannot pronounce.  Mothers who made every mistake in the book, and whose babies fell at fate's hands in the most unexpected way.

Their love was fierce, and it filled the room.  It fought for its right to exist and hold sway in this strange place of plastic and metal and tubes and beeping monitors and no privacy and none of us knowing their child the way they do.  It made them protective and questioning and demanding and sometimes difficult and utterly incomprehensible but it was holding us all in an orbit around the tiny body in the bed and it made me stagger in the face of its enormity, every single week.

And every week, I would escape to the medication room and lean my head against the racks of IV fluids and think to myself, somebody loves you like that, too.  What do you do with a love that big?  Every braid, every bath, every school form signed, every batch of brownies stirred with her hands over mine, each one a hospital bedside vigil.  Every act as filled with a canyon of love as the next.  Sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder, panicked, if she knows how much I love her.  I want to fly through the night air home to hug her and whisper in her ear that I love her bigger than the moon and the ocean and the dirt and the trees and how I can never say it enough and please don't ever leave me because you won't hear it enough times before then.

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers of the world.  But especially to mine.

It's Something in the Water Here...

My friend dropped her five-month-old off into my bleary arms at 8 AM this morning.  It's her first day of work at her new (grown up RN!) job and I never pass up a chance to snuggle her little man.  A couple hours later, the boy called me to say he was leaving for work if I wanted to come outside for a hug (the benefits of living on the same street abound).  As we were standing on my front stoop, and the dog was wondering what exactly this small squishy creature was that I was holding instead of petting him, my mouth said this:

"Sprocket, be nice to the baby.  You're going to have to get used to them, you know."

And my brain did this:

"MOUTH.  WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, SPEAKING WITHOUT MY INPUT?!"

He (the boy, not the dog) was unfazed.  He knows I want kids.  We have had this conversation before, he and I.  I honestly don't even think he noticed.  We chatted about how Sprocket had most likely never seen a baby before, and I asked him about when he'd be back tonight, he smiled at the baby and kissed me goodbye and it was totally fine except for in my brain.

Here's the thing: I am acutely aware of the intensity with which I often want children, and I do an excellent job 99% of the time of ignoring it.  But sometimes I forget to ignore it, like now, when I am finishing up my pediatrics rotation and heading into maternal-newborn, and babysitting for the cutest baby ever is not helping things.  It also doesn't help things to see classmates and friends of mine with little ones, because my brain is all like, "See?  If they can do it, so can you!"  And then I tell my brain something that I have to repeat a lot, which is, "Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD."

It's not like I'm feeling the pressure of my biological clock, or worried that there will never be another right time in my life to have kids.  It's honestly as simple as, I want a baby.  And I'm so much healthier now, and it makes me feel so good about how much better equipped I am to be a mom because of that, and hey, bonus!  I met someone I want to have kids with and shack up with and shout at from across the dinner table when we're old and grey.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to keep the baby fever comments to myself, lest I scare away the other half of this future equation.

Going Viral

The Friday before last, the little guy I babysit had a runny nose.  And so this past Friday when I woke up with a runny nose I thought oh jeeze, here we go.  So I packed some tissues and got on with my life.  Until now, that is.  My preceptor took one look at me tonight at clinical and said, "I hope you haven't gone anywhere near your patient," - I hadn't - "Why are you here?!" - because making up clinical hours is insanely difficult and calling in sick is deeply frowned upon - and, "GO HOME!"

So I'm in bed, with Lucy curled up under the covers with me and every time I pause the crappy television I'm watching online I'm surprised by how loud I'm wheezing.  Fun times.  How does a runny nose on an 18-month-old turn into a hacking cough, pounding headache, throbbing sinuses, body aches, and wheezing cold on me?

Class tomorrow is going to be awesome.  Don't worry, I'll sit in the back and wear a mask.

Okay, enough complaining.  I took some pictures this past week.  Spring has finally come to Connecticut!