Most days I walk through life questioning my own bias and intention. Only a few short years of motherhood helped me see how biased we all are. I mean this in the sense of looking back at photos of my own three newborns and wondering what the hell I ever thought was so beautiful about those bald underwater creatures with the misshapen heads and sunken eyes.
The Nurse knows her patients don’t see what she sees when they gaze down upon their loved ones asleep there in a hospital bed.
I retain a keen awareness of this personal bias along with my tendency to make excuses for the behavior of my lovely children which this summer, vacillates on a spectrum between inconsiderate and blissfully unaware of how the real world works. Even on the worst days I know they are monsters of my own creation and I feel mad as hell, but only at my previous lack of awareness and the usage of what turned out to be some rather ineffective teaching methods.
I spent my 12th summer on this planet babysitting three children, including an infant who all belonged to one of my neighbors in the apartment complex. I provided this childcare for forty hours per week and the woman didn’t even pay me. Actually it was my own mother who paid me to help out her friend who happened to be an actual single mother. The term single mother is often misconstrued, to some it means hot and easy target, while others see a bitter and scorned woman, but to me it will always mean a hard working mother who could use some help.
It pains me that my own children, who now range in age from 16-22, cannot manage to stay on top of changing the damn litter box or loading the dishwasher. By the way I have never been a single mother. There’s a huge difference between a single mother and a divorced one, and I absolutely know this. It would be inappropriate for me to use this term to describe myself for many reasons. It would certainly be an insult to my ex-husband/co-parent, not to mention the actual single mothers of this world.
The following summer my parents tasked me to spend my summer days with my grandmother Alice. She and my grandfather Rocky lived about 150 steps from us in the apartment complex; they were both in their early 60’s and Pop Pop Rocky was a few short years from retirement.
In 1989, my thoughts were not short, but my hair was long even back then. I still love the Kid Rock song All Summer Long, even though I’m no longer attracted to the artist I once thought was so trailer park hot. Sweet Alice was dying her slow cancer death that summer, not that anyone bothered to make sure I understood this would be my final summer with my grandmother.
This time, I got to sit in another little apartment and helplessly stand and watch my grandmother gasp for air each time she tried to walk from the living room to the kitchen. She was tethered to this monstrosity of an oxygen tank that sat parked in the hallway, next to one of those mid century modern bar cabinets that I always thought was hideous, but today I would kill to have. Of course I knew Alice had cancer, and was told she refused chemotherapy because she didn’t want to lose her hair. Now as an adult and Registered Nurse, I now know this means my grandmother received a palliative round of radiation to buy her some precious time on earth. There would have been little or no benefit to her losing her hair, but my young and undeveloped brain registered this as she didn’t love us enough to try to live.
Have I mentioned my own 1960’s Motorola stereo cabinet? Maybe I should start with how I damn near lost my mind when the pandemic real estate market thrust me back to living in an apartment complex and I found myself sleeping on the floor. The apartment complex from my childhood had no central air conditioning, so my sister and I often slept on the concrete floor of the living room if my parents weren’t in the mood to let us sleep in their bedroom which had a window unit. My preference was to sleep upstairs because the next door neighbor liked to sit outside, smoke cigarettes, and toss back a few beers. Jesus Christ that man could sing and he would belt out his favorite songs for the neighborhood. My personal favorites were his loud and booming renditions of Amazing Grace and the national anthem. After several encores, he would feel satisfied enough to retire to his bedroom, but not before stopping to say goodnight to his kids and bounce them off the walls for a few minutes. Thankfully he did this only with his fists and I know things could just always be worse.
There’s nothing wrong with apartment life, it’s just not for me. The only item on my dream home wish list was central air conditioning. In my mind, everything else will always be considered a bonus. These days I sit and listen to my children complain about living in a house with one bathroom, but I do love my fireplace and have never once hit my children.
The circumstances that ultimately resulted from 2020 will always be the absolute best thing that could have ever happened for me. Now I won’t lie, it took me a full 2 years to be grateful in a way I’d forgotten how to be grateful in. I felt absolutely certain about my life’s meaning and purpose and remembered why I worked so damn hard in the first place. Eventually I realized I had forgotten who I was at my core and my basic truth will always be that I am strong, I am love, and I am worthy.
I do always seem to have a kind of delayed emotional response though, along with a high tolerance to witness some suffering and this incredible ability to hold myself together. These are all fantastic qualities to possess as a Trauma ICU Nurse, so I simply thrive and come alive in the work environment.
Sure my work as a nurse and added pandemic gave me this undeniably enlightened perspective, but I already knew to only ever work with and through this current of life, never against it. The best way to hate my job is to fight the inevitable. Every rule and policy can be followed, every last piece of evidence-based practice can be practiced and every off label therapy thrown to the wind like a motherfucking Hail Mary, and still the patients sometimes die. I always complete my due diligence with passion and know that I control my part in all this.
On a personal level, I learned that when my higher than average thresholds have been exceeded, a condition exists somewhere within me that I need to take a look at and address.
My fuse is so very long, but I used to go home after work and quickly unravel over the sight of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink. This summer the sight of the dirty dishes does not bother me in the slightest and I smile over how far I’ve come since 2020. Believe me I learned to help myself and I do, but I don’t write about my personal and effective methods because that’s not my purpose for this publication. The litter box does bother me though and when I explained the potential health threats posed to the kitten he adores so much, my son got his shit together and cleans the litter box in a way that makes his borderline psychotic/hygienic nurse mother feel quite proud of the parenting job she’s also doing.
Laugh out loud, the Nurse sure knows how to promote the benefits of cleanliness and proper hygiene.
The more I write this publication, the more I realize how fucked up it all is. Once upon a time I would have said I was fucked up, but I would never say those words to myself again. Now I sit here and write about the synchronicity of life and when you read that statement, please know I laugh at the sometimes cruel irony. Approximately 3 months after my grandmother died, my grandfather married a woman named Grace, it was not amazing, and he moved away.
Despite all this enlightenment, I actually still spent the first half of 2023 asking myself if I was losing my mind. This after buying this money pit of a fixer upper and realizing I had clearly suffered more than one visual hallucination and a few delusions of grandeur during the home buying process. If you could only see what my job entails—the manual labor, the intensity, the calculations, the complex equipment, the dozens of wires and tubes connected to compressed gases and environmental toxins, then my confidence in my ability to do anything I put my mind to, might make more sense.
The Nurse knows we’re all humans who are capable of learning new things and new ways to do things with love. Our lives are filled with lessons. No I didn’t always like the teaching methods, but I am the one who actually gets paid to learn and my patients benefit from all of this learning.
This is why my publication is free.
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This is a photo from 2023 taken of my living room. On the left is the vintage stereo cabinet which was left behind for me by the previous homeowners, who loved music as much as they love nurses. The day I closed on the house and made this discovery, I thought it was a bar cabinet for a second. I wasn’t disappointed at all when I saw the record player though. I squealed and clapped my hands like a delighted child and let the tears roll down my cheeks.
It’s rarely easy for me to trust the process, but I know the beat somehow always go on.
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I love how you weave the wisdom gained through living life, direct, strong, compassionate, retrospective and proudly free. 💜