the lousy times.

There is something to be said for the lousy times in my life.  The times when I worry incessantly over my sisters, or when I struggle, continuously, with things that can’t seem to be conquered.  The times when I’m exhausted at work, and can’t force myself to like the people I’m supposed to be caring for.  And all those times when I feel alone, and insecure, and unloved, and scared. 

Those times suck.  There’s no arguing about that.  They are miserable, awful times, and I hate living through them. 

However, those are also the times when I feel closest to God, and the most genuine in my faith.

For a long stretch of time, things were good.  And I don’t think I prayed or gave a thought to God for about 12 months.  I went to church because it was expected, and I played the part of the good little Christian girl who loves Jesus so that no one knew anything had changed.  But I didn’t live it, and I didn’t feel it.  I hated church.  Hated worshiping a God that I didn’t feel connected to.  Mostly all because things were good, and I could handle life on my own, and because I didn’t need God to show up in my life on a daily basis.

I’m not saying that things are “bad” now.  But every once in a while something comes along that knocks me on my tuchus, so to speak, and this is one of those times.  And, over the last few weeks, I’ve come to realize that I prefer living like this.

I’d rather live like this, struggling and worrying and feeling inadequate, because this way I need Him.  When I’m knocked down, it’s a whole lot easier for me to get on my knees, and for me to meekly say, “Hey Jesus…  I need some help with [this].”  I’d rather live like this, struggling and worrying and feeling inadequate, because it forces me to pray, and search, and seek.  To have a relationship with my Maker, and a real faith. 

And I would rather live like this, struggling and worrying and feeling inadequate, for 365 days a year, than spend just one day thinking I can do it on my own.

So I thank God for lousy times.

a sample.

It’s amazing what you can tell about a stranger, just by sitting in their kitchen for 10 minutes.

I recently applied for life insurance, worrying about my mother needing to pay off my massive student loan debt in the event that I prematurely snuff it. The insurance company that I applied through requires blood work, and the representative came by my apartment tonight, to collect a sample.

So the guy is sitting at my kitchen table, examining the fresh urine sample I just plopped down in front of him, and he says, “So I see your Bible sitting here… Are you a Christian?” He proceeds to tell me he is a retired minister, and invites me to try out a local church that he is familiar with, all the while having me sign various forms and prepping the vials that will be needed to collect my blood.

He then asks about my siblings, pictures of whom are plastered all over my refrigerator. “Are you menstruating today?” he asks. And then, “Have you ever smoked cigarettes?”

It was just kind of surreal.

I wonder how much he gets paid…

I just may be able to survive…

Grad school classes have started.  It’s been four weeks now, and they’re not nearly so scary as I thought.  Every Monday evening after work, I find myself seated in a classroom with twenty-five to thirty nurses like myself, listening to professors who seem, surprisingly, quite human.  The course work isn’t too strenuous, the time-commitment isn’t too demanding, and the in-class discussion isn’t too over my head.  I just may be able to survive these next three years…

The One Where I Write a Musical Review.

Two summers ago, my little community theater group did a review of Next to Normal, and I have wanted to see the show ever since.  Recently, I got my chance; for Christmas, my dad and his wife bought me tickets to the show.  A girlfriend and I went to see Next to Normal last week, on opening night.

It’s one of those shows, I think, that you either love or you don’t.  If you connect with the story, you think the whole concept is brilliant and cry throughout the whole thing.  If you don’t, you spend the whole time wondering what the hell is going on and who thought this would make a good musical.

If you haven’t guessed, I loved the show.  Next to Normal is about mental illness.  Specifically, it’s about a woman with bipolar disorder, and the story revolves around her and her family.  It highlights how they all deal with her depression and delusions, and I think it’s pretty darn accurate in its presentation.  At times it’s funny – the woman is crazy – and at times it’s so, so sad.  There are things the woman says which take you aback.  They make you stop and think about how very difficult living with mental illness must be – how hard it must be to be trapped inside your own head.  My favorite song, which is so awful but so true, was called You Don’t Know.  These are some of the lyrics:

“Do you wake up in the morning
And need help to lift your head?
Do you read obituaries
And feel jealous of the dead?
It’s like living on a cliffside
Not knowing when you’ll dive…
Do you know,
Do you know
What it’s like to die alive?

When a world that once had color
Fades to white and grey and black…
When tomorrow terrifies you
But you’ll die if you look back.”

And:

“The sensation that you’re screaming
But you never make a sound,
Or the feeling that you’re falling
But you never hit the ground—
It just keeps on rushing at you
Day by day by day by day…
You don’t know
You don’t know
What it’s like to live that way.

Like a refugee, a fugitive
Forever on the run…
If it gets me, it will kill me—
But I don’t know what I’ve done.”

It’s not a happy story, and it doesn’t end on a high note.  It doesn’t really end at all, to be honest.  The audience is left hanging, wondering if the women will ever get a grip on things and if her family will make it through okay.  Which is the way it is in real life.  Because there is no cure for mental illness, and no one can say with 100% certainty what the cause of it really is.

At any rate, I’m glad that there are people out there who are working to draw attention to the struggle that countless people must face on a daily basis.  If you get a chance, go see the show.  I don’t think you’re regret it.

Rough Morning.

Saturday started off as not a good day.

I left my apartment at 6:30 in the morning, and started driving to work.  It was dark and snowy and slushy, and I noticed my car pulling to the right as I navigated down my one-way street.  The warning light indicating low tire pressure was blinking on my dashboard, and so I put the vehicle in Park and climbed out to examine my tires.  The front wheel, on the passenger’s side, was completely flat.

I got stuck in the snow, attempting to reverse my car backwards down the street and into my self-designated parking space (I am learning that one-way side streets are not frequently plowed in The City).  So now I’m stuck in the snow, blocking the road, with a flat tire, and am going to be late for work.

My insurance company, with its Roadside Assistance Program, was less than helpful.  After 10 minutes of automated nonsense, I managed to reach a real person on my cell phone.

“May I have your policy number, please?” The man on the other end of the line asked.

“I don’t know my policy number,” I said. “I’m stuck in the middle of the street with a flat tire; I don’t have my policy number on me.”

“I’m sorry ma’am.  If you don’t know your policy number, there’s no way for me to help you.”

So now I’m stuck in the snow, blocking the road, with a flat tire, about to be late for work, and crying, trying to change this stupid flat on my own.  Except the jack won’t stop slipping, because of the slush and ice on the street, and I can’t even really get started.  So now I’m swearing, in addition to crying, and my hands are freezing and there’s snot starting to drip from my nose.  This is how my neighbor found me, kneeling beside my car.  A freaking hot mess.  He changed my tire for me, and directed me to the nearest service garage, where I dropped my tire off to be patched.  I owe him some homemade jam.

Things got better at work.  Except, not really.

We had gotten a new admission overnight; a sixty-something, 6’4”, two-hundred and sixty pound man with bipolar disorder, who happened to be manic.  That’s a whole lot of manic.  If you don’t know much about mental illness, let me give you a crash course: someone in the manic state is typically extremely impulsive, with pressured speech and grandiose thoughts.  Sometimes, the may become sexually inappropriate, or super focused on religion.

So this is me trying to take this man to the bathroom:

Me: Mr. Smith, the bathroom is right here

(Guides him to the door and opens it)

Mr. Smith: This?  This is the bathroom?  Where?

Me: Right here.  The toilet is right here. (Points)

Mr. Smith: (Stares)

Me: You need to sit on it.

Mr. Smith: (Starts to sit)

Me: No, no.  You need to take of your

underwear first.

Mr. Smith: How do you know this is the right

bathroom?

Me: Huh?

Mr. Smith: How do you know this is the right bathroom?

How do you know its okay to use?  Should I use

another bathroom?

Me: No, this is your bathroom.  It’s right outside

of your room.

Mr. Smith: Really? Praise God.  How did you

know this?

Me: Your room is right there.

Mr. Smith: But did God tell you that?

Me: Um, I guess I just knew.

Mr. Smith: That’s amazing.  Can I give you a

hug?

Me: No.  I’m sorry, but I can’t hug you.  That’s

the rule here.

Mr. Smith: Really?  Is it your rule?

Me: It’s the rule on the unit.

Mr. Smith: But I want to hug you.

Me: I’m sorry, but that’s the rule.  No hugging.

Mr. Smith: I have to go to the bathroom.

Me: The bathroom is right there.

Mr. Smith: Hallelujah! (Wraps me in a bear hug

and plants two, very wet, kisses on my

cheek)

Me: (Struggling to get out of his arms) That’s

enough! Go use the bathroom!

About an hour later, when Mr. Smith’s bed alarm was going off, I entered his room to see find him climbing over the bedrails.  I ended up getting groped, helping him back into bed.  “Those are some very nice breasts you have there,” he said to me, and proceeded to get all handsy.  A half hour after that, staff had to stop him from streaking down the hallway, buck naked.  A half hour after that, we found him on all-fours in one of the bathrooms, drinking from the toilet bowl.

Much later in the day, after Mr. Smith had been transferred upstairs to one of the psychiatric units, I was thinking as I worked on some paperwork…

“Will he remember any of what he did today?” I asked one of the psychiatrists working with me.

“It’s possible,” she said. “He may remember some of it.”

How awful.  How absolutely horrible.  Before he went on vacation and got his medication regimen screwed up, Mr. Smith was a fully functioning, productive member of society.   He has a wife, and a job, and lives a normal life.  I keep thinking about him, today, wondering what he’ll think when the meds kick in and he clears from his mania.  Will he remember what he’s done?  Will he remember drinking from the toilet, and laying in the middle of the hallway, naked and singing, and any of the other things he’d done on Saturday?  What a wretched, horrible, terrible disease.  And what right do I have to moan and complain over a flat tire and a “rough morning”? What was my “rough morning,” compared to his?

New Zip Code

It’s a decent little apartment, I suppose.  It’s a city apartment, with antiquated, two-pronged electrical outlets (which I’m certain are going to short out and start an electrical fire at any given time) and walls that haven’t been washed or seen a fresh coat of paint in God knows when.  The couple that lives below me smoke, and the smell of cigarettes drifts up through the floor.  The lights flicker ominously, and there is no off-street parking.  Still, it’s a decent apartment for city standards, and I’m sure it will be my apartment in no time at all.

I cried, cleaning out the oven and the refrigerator.  They were so caked in grime and dirt that I wasn’t certain I’d find actual functioning appliances beneath all the filth.  And I was scared, so scared, that I’d made the wrong decision.  Yes, the rent is cheaper and the drive is shorter to work, but I’ve just placed a whole lot of physical distance between myself and my family and friends, most of which I already felt there was too much emotional distance between already.  How do I know this move won’t end badly for me?

Still, there is hope.  I was poking around the backyard today (which I share with the couple living below me), and I’m almost confident that there’s a garden back there.  It’s buried beneath leaves and debris and who knows what else, but it is back there.  And in the spring, I’ll uncover it, and it will be mine.  And, in the meantime, I’ll work to wash and mend the holes in the walls, I’ll paint the ceilings and scrub the floors, and I’ll adjust to this new zip code.

More.

My little sister called me last night in a panic; the person she’d scheduled to paint children’s faces at the fundraiser she’d organized for today had just cancelled, and could I step in?  This is how I ended up spending four hours this afternoon dabbling in face paint, transforming small children into lions and faeries, supervising them while they jumped on inflatable bounce houses, and passing out popcorn while they watched movies projected onto a white sheet against the building’s back wall.  The fundraiser, a “Family Fun Night,” was held at the local McDonalds, where my sister is the manager.  People were asked to bring a canned food item for the local food pantry, and gift baskets were raffled off with proceeds benefitting the food pantry as well.

The event was a success, with a lot of children showing up and a fair amount of money being raised.  What bothered me all afternoon, however, was the number of children present without parents.  Little nine and ten year olds were running around, unsupervised.  One little girl, who was seven and named Madison, appeared at my face painting table all on her own.  She spent the next four hours with me, following me around like a shadow.  Her mother was at home and her sister had left her at the fundraiser unattended.  No way to buy dinner, no way to get home.  I ended up sharing my dinner with her, and when she tried to buy ice cream with some spare change she’d found on the ground, (“How many pennies and dimes does it take to make a dollar?”) I bought her that as well.  I told her we’d call her mother when the fundraiser was over, but eventually her sister showed up.  Her sister looked to be about 12.  Peanuts watching peanuts.

The whole thing has just made me sad.  My sister too.  Racheal and I were talking about it afterward, saying how angry we were with Madison’s mother.  I know that we don’t know her, and we don’t know the whole situation, but honestly… Who leaves a seven year old to fend for herself for four hours, among strangers?  I said that I was half tempted to kidnap Madison, just to make a point.  Racheal pointed out that it was doubtful her mother would even notice.

If nothing else, the afternoon highlighted the need in our little community.  For Racheal and myself, anyway.  We were left reminiscing about the local After School Program, which Racheal spent countless hours attending as a child, and at which I spent countless hours volunteering, and which played a huge role in helping us both survive our own childhoods marked by absent parents.  Madison and her sister probably had such an effect on us because they reminded us of ourselves, and they left us wanting to do more.  To give back more.

Now how does one go about doing it?

Failure.

It was his beard, initially, that attracted me.  His scruffy white whiskers made me think of my grandfather, and so I was automatically endeared to this patient.  I’ll call him Mr. Smith.  Another Mr. Smith, in the long line of Mr. Smiths I will take care of in the span of my nursing career.

His official diagnosis is Failure to Thrive.  Yes, adults get it too.  The man is 83 years old and has just survived a battle with colon cancer a month before; the fresh ostomy pouch protruding from his lower abdomen, which he hides beneath the hospital gown that hangs off his boney shoulders, is his only consolation prize.  Waiting for a nursing home bed, Mr. Smith is tired, and he doesn’t want to live.

Mrs. Smith, however, is a fighter.  She arrives on the unit every morning, marching past the nurses’ station and offering an obligatory nod of acknowledgment towards those of us seated behind the desk before heading into room 36B to rouse her husband from his melancholia.

She shaves him.  She feeds him.  She bathes him and empties the fecal material from his ostomy bag.  She prods him out of bed and forces him to sit up in a chair for several hours each day.  She pushes him around the unit in a wheelchair, cheerfully pointing out the artwork lining the walls, and fall decorations hanging from the ceiling in our dayroom.  These are all things that we, the nursing staff, should be doing for Mr. Smith, but Mrs. Smith refuses to let us do much more than manage his medications.  After 59 years of marriage, she loves him too fiercely to leave his care to strangers.

I am sitting at the nurses’ station this afternoon, when Mrs. Smith comes to the desk.  There are tears in her eyes.

“Can you feed him lunch today?” she asks me, “I have to go home.”

“Of course,” I say, startled.  And I move to grab Mr. Smith’s lunch tray off the passing dietary cart.  “Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Smith says.  And then, as the tears well up, “It’s just I have to go home.  I have to go home and I cannot come back.”

I follow her into her husband’s room, balancing his lunch tray in my hands, concerned by her sudden display of emotion.  This woman has been a picture of composure and inner strength all week, and I am unsettled by her tears.

“Do you have any family living close by, who can help you?” I ask meekly, as I busy myself with setting up Mr. Smith’s lunch before him.  I open the apple juice container, spread butter over his green beans, and cut up his roast beef with his plastic dining utensils.

“My daughters,” Mrs. Smith says, as she shrugs on her coat and dons her scarf, “But I cannot ask them to take off any more time from work.  And I am just so tired.”

And then I catch a glimpse of her face, and I put myself in her place, and I see what she is being hit with.  She is losing him.  Her best friend.  Her husband.  The father of her children.  Her partner for 59 years.  She can’t care for him any longer, and the feeling must be unbearable.  She hasn’t the resources or the strength to do it, and she must feel so guilty.  Like she’s abandoning him.  It must be ripping her heart out.

And I want to get up from my chair beside Mr. Smith to go hug her.  I want to offer to pray with her, to pray for her.

But I am a coward.

And I can only nod my head as Mrs. Smith says in a small voice, “Take care of him,” and then stare at her back as she walks out the door.

Radio Silence.

I will never understand how reading other women’s blogs can simultaneously make me feel the need to write more, and make me feel like I am a bad writer.

Project.

There seems to be an inordinate number of people as of late, who seem to be taking enormous pleasure in telling me what to do. How to act, what to feel, who to love. It’s open-season on all areas of my personal life, it seems, so if you are unhappy with the way I’m acting, feeling, thinking, speaking, et cetera, feel free to chime right on in!

Really, don’t though. Because if one more person says to me, “I’m only saying this because I love you…” or, “Please don’t hate me for saying this, but…” I might explode and go all bath-salt-induced-zombie-face-eater on their ass.

I can’t do this any more. I feel like I’m continuously being watched, and thereby constantly disappointing and/or upsetting someone.. I. Just. Want. To. Be. Left. Alone. To make my own mistakes and to live my own life.

I’m tired of feeling like I’m everyone’s freaking project.