Iowadrift

Lost

Oy, vey.  I had this whole lovely post about yesterday being my last shift at work, and what I would miss about my job, and how I loved the balance it brought to me, and how I did not love getting home at one in the merry morning after a night of handing out narcotics to shady people, and the computer up and ate the whole darn thing (the post, not the shady people) just as I was remembering to save it. 

Damn and damn and damn.

I refuse to be sat upon by a machine, though.  Which is why, though I can't re-create the post, I can at least make a list.

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT MY JOB

1) I got to walk into a room, change out of my Mom clothes and into my scrubs, and walk out in the ER.  Externalizing the change in roles from home to work was very helpful.  Also, when I hit the door and smelled that hospital smell, my brain clicked into medical mode and out of Mom mode, which was a relief.

2) I was usually so busy I forgot about everything but what I was doing that instant, which was persepctive-making.  By the time I was driving home and remembered whatever worries I'd left behind that morning (what has suddenly inspired the boys to demand I dress them alike: did I actually pay the Visa bill or just THINK about paying it: where did the Urplet hide my iPod: why do I never seem to have any underwear that fits: will our current health insurance bridge until TTD's new insurance kicks in 3 months after his start date?) the time and distance had sort of pulled said worries' teeth.

3) I liked the balance of hand skills, judgement, intuition, linear scientific thinking, and common sense my job demanded.  I liked walking the daily tightrope of trusting my own judgement while continually second-guessing myself.  I liked seeing how far I could push my skills (safely, of course!) and I liked the constant learning. 

4) I liked the cameraderie among the ER staff.  I liked being one of them.

5) I liked some of the patients.  I loved explaining something and having their eyes light up as they said, "Oh!  No one ever told me that before!"  I liked being able to ease pain.

6) I liked driving away from the house and knowing I wouldn't see my kids until the next morning.

7) I liked the paycheck.

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT MY JOB

1) I did not like spending ten hours on my feet with no time to eat or pee, while patients hurled themselves at the ER as though they were lemmings and we were the cliff. 

2) I did not like feeling as though all my years of training had boiled down to handing out narcotics to deadbeats in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

3) I did not like being cursed at by patients because I WOULDN"T hand out narcotics.

4) I developed a fiery hatred for low back pain: both treating it and experiencing it.

5) I hated suturing kids

6) I dreaded having the radiologist call me from the reading room and say, "Now, what exactly were you hoping to learn by ordering a CT on that patient?"

7) I hated driving away from the house knowing I wouldn't see my kids until the next morning.

What about you?  If you left your job tomorrow, what would you miss?  What would you be delirious with joy to leave behind?  My biggest worry now is how I will integrate the change in role: I'm still an NP, but I'm an unemployed one for the time being, and I always find that challenging--and delightful, to be sure, because I am all for long, lazy mornings in bed...no, wait, that was before I had kids: never mind.  Anyway, what challenges would you face, sans job, and how would you approach them?

Also, we have discovered that the new floor we were going to put into the basement shower before the buyers took over the house?  Is going to have to turn into a new floor for the whole damn bathroom, along with a whole new wall and a whole $4,000 more than we thought.  So, you know, you could send money, too.

8)

I Hope To Be Drinking Gin On This Porch When I'm Eighty

Why are these so blurry?  Somebody help me!  But nevermind: if you click on them they  open a window and clear up.  I am an idiot, but a happy idiot.

What I Did On My Spring Vacation

This:

1)  Closed on the house.  After the predictable last-minute drama (Wait!  It's zoned wrong!  Wait!  No, it's not!) we now own a beautiful 250 year old farmhouse on three acres of land, or rather, the bank does.  We probably own the bathroom or something.

2)  Bleached my hair.  All of it.  Peroxide-blond.  I love it.  Evidently sometimes a girl just has to let out her inner Trailer Trash.

3)  Bought three one-way plane tickets for Boston, departing April 24th.  The fourth member of the entourage, TTD, will be driving the van out, loaded with two turtles, a hamster, and two cats.  The Beloved Babysitter will drive the Subaru.  This all feels very REAL.

4)  Set up visits at three preschools for Rabbit, who is brave but teary about leaving his friends.

5)  Bought Thomas the Tank Engine underwear for Urplet, WHO IS POOPING ON THE TOILET.  Yes!  The 25 month old has begun saying, "Poop in toilet, Mama?"  at the appropriate time.  The first time he did it I thought he was...well, I just didn't register it, because it didn't seem possible.  But damn if he didn't proceed to poop in his diaper.  So the next time I hustled his delectable pink butt into the bathroom when he made his announcement, and whoopee!  After a few preliminary farts, he did the deed, and how!  He's repeated the process twice, and spent two recent mornings diaperless and dutifully piddling in the potty when I sat him on it.  SO FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FOUR YEARS I CAN LOOK FORWARD TO A DIAPERLESS EXISTENCE.  This is big.  Hence the capitals.

7)  Tried to get my head around the rapidity of the change around here.  Didn't manage it, but had fun trying.  Am now surfing the sea of transition and still having fun.

Da Boyz

The boys are getting bigger (and bigger and bigger).  I realized the other night when I picked up an untimely-awakened Urp that his head no longer fits nicely under my chin, and he is all long limbs and knobby corners, with a bottom which has gone from delicious squishiness to delectable firmness.  He talks now; he even makes polite conversation. He'll pitter-pat into the kitchen, holding up some new find like a dead ladybug, and ask, "What's that?"  On being informed that it's an insect, he'll chirp, "Oh, that's nice."   I offered him a bit of my bread salad the other day, and he peered at it earnestly, then sat back and announced, "That's disgusting!"  On the other end of the spectrum, he'll sometimes announce, "I'm delicious!" which is all too true.  He can sing the alphabet song and Row Row Row Your Boat, and he has the usual passion for Thomas the Tank Engine.  He also likes to have me dump flour or sugar into a bowl, then give him another bowl or two and some measuring cups so he can transfer staple foods from bowl to bowl, then to the floor, for half an hour at a time.  The kitchen floor after this activity is unspeakable, and so are the Urpclothes, but his happiness and seriousness are so complete that I cannot resist indulging him. 

As much as he loves sugar, he hates clothing.  The child hates shoes.  He hates coats.  He hates gloves, and snowpants, and mittens and socks.  He hates turtlenecks and most sweaters.  And forget a snowsuit: just forget it.  We have quit fighting the battle, unless we're going sledding or out for some other activity where shoelessness would result in frozen feet, but we do get some strange looks at the mall as I run from the parking lot with a barefoot, T-shirt-clad limpet clinging to my chest and yelling, "Cold, Mama!" while violently resisting my attempts to wrap him in my jacket and his Lovey.

He also throws tantrums, which distress him more than they do us because he doesn't quite know how to stop himself.  My mother says she remembers doing this as a child, and being quite frightened because she couldn't stop.  So when the Urplet hits the deck, purple and shrieking with snot pouring out of his nose and his spine arced in a bow, I stand by and wait for a break in the storm, then try to offer comfort if he can handle it.  If he can't, well, then I pick him up and remove him from the store, or wherever, if necessary; if we're home, I just go into another room and check back in a few minutes.  Presently he'll come to me sadly, thumb in mouth, and ask for Lovey and want to be held.  A few minutes later he'll sit up, smile, and announce, "Feel better now."

Rabbit is a different story.  We thought he was four, but apparently he's fourteen, because the drama in our house?  Has a distinctly adolescent flavor.  The strangest things throw him into a state of high dudgeon--a wayward pea mixed with the rice: the wrong sippy cup at dinner: not being allowed to bonk his brother on the head a third time--and then, if he hasn't managed to get himself put in time out, he puts HIMSELF into the equivalent by storming off to the downstairs bathroom, dragging a kitchen stool in with him, and locking the door from the inside by standing on the stool to reach the little hook-and-eye lock.  Then he either hides behind the toilet or amuses himself by placing my back issues of VOGUE carefully between the screen and storm windows behind the toilet.  Eventually he comes back out.

He's a much more mysterious person than Urp, more prone to silences and private joys and sorrows.  He likes to be alone in his room, playing quietly; he likes to have a door to shut (this is how we know he's definitely related to both TTD and me).  He looks out for his little brother, shepherding him through the maze at the McDonald's play pit and unbuckling his car seat belt when we arrive home, and then spends the rest of his time tormenting same by snatching toys, disturbing little worlds Urp's created with three plastic easter eggs, a metal dump truck, and a sock, and fighting for room in Mama's lap, which is not getting any bigger even though the boys most certainly are.  He veers from mature, thoughtful, sweet and funny to annoying, rude, loud, rough, and aggressive.  One moment he's cuddled in my lap, observing some streaks of cloud far overhead and concluding they are "God's footprints," and the next he's knocking the Urp's Leggo's over and zooming away, giggling maniacally and pretending he can't hear a word I say, which makes me CRAZY MAD.  Off on a car trip with just me, he trots around the grocery store happily and helps me load the shopping cart: going to bed, he moves with snail-like slowness (if snails were passive-aggressive) and just...can't...quite...bring...himself...to...do...anything...he's...told.  Until Time Out appears on the menu or I start shrieking, whichever comes first.

In other words, Urplet is now two, and Rabbit is four.

And the hardest thing for me is that now they're older, more complex, and demand more thoughtful discipline and response from me, and while I love that (I am not so much with the infants), I find it demands a balance of detachment and attachment which is hard hard hard.  On the one hand, I am attached to these children as I am to no one else in the world.  I feel their pain and disappointment and frustration deep within not only my heart but my gut, as though someone's tugging on a cable which connects me to them from a region which has nothing to do with my brain.  When they get hurt physically, the soles of my feet tingle; when they cry in sadness or disapointment, my heart breaks.  My heart often gets tired of feeling not only my emotions but theirs too.  Not that I co-opt their right to their own emotions, not at all: it's just that right now, they're so young and so close to me that their pain is sort of simple and immediate and in my face, so it's easy to experience it viscerally.

On the other hand, I'm the mother, not the child.  I'm the grown-up in this equation, and while of course I'm allowed my emotions, I'm also required to use my brain and my judgement and all that good stuff.  To survive, I need a modicum of detachment, both for my own sake--I have to be able to walk out the door to work sometimes, even when there's a child crying for me, and not have it destroy me--and for theirs (if I respond to a fraternal quarrel with some kind of thought and reason and control, things work out a lot better than if I react the way I'd LIKE to, which is to scream bloody murder and lock myself in the bedroom with a bottle of gin and PEOPLE magazine).  To be any kind of a good mother, I need skill as well as heart.

I don't have this down.  I suspect I never will.  Because it's not as though I can just make rules and that's that; there are a million factors which go into every decision, all day, every day, ranging from how tired Urplet is to what kind of day Rabbit's had at precshool to how crappy I feel after a work shift.  There's a continuum, and I slide back and forth along it, from hugs to tirades, and so do the children.  Often we collide.

But sometimes, sometimes, sometimes.....we dance.

Faxed to Death

First of all, thank you for so many wonderful, Rabbit-helping ideas about the move.  I am already working on a lot of them--the videos and pictures are a great idea, as is the decorating moving boxes and letting him fill them himself; he's very pleased--and just feel better in general with so much sensible, practical, yet imaginative advice to hold on to.  Y'all rock!

And speaking of moves...we are the Salvation Army's new best friend.  Unnervingly phallic McDonald's Happy Meal toys, paperback bodice-rippers aimed at Christian teenage girls (left behind by inlaws), tiny dinosaur slippers with red eyes that flash when you stamp your tiny feet, mugs bearing fake school crests and the legend "Psychotic State,"  approximately 1,000 matchbox cars, a menagerie of stuffed animals tending toward the ursine, and black cotton sheets left over from TTD's bachelor days: all these and more have made their way into the donation bins at the local Army store over the past weeks.  Not a cupboard, not a closet, not a drawer in this house but has been hauled into an interrogation room, strapped to a chair, and subjected to harsh questioning about the fugitives it has been harboring for lo these many years.  We are ruthless and unflaggingly energetic in our pursuit of wayward stuff, so much so that after several weeks all we have to do is fling open a closet door and the mismatched winter boots (size 3), crumpled scarves, and black knit hats which fit nobody just sigh and march themselves resignedly  into the waiting boxes.  "Cheer up," we say.  "You're going to love your new home!"

It's the fun part of moving, this lightening the material load.  We feel wonderfully stripped down, monastically so, even though I don't know which religion provides monks with thirty-gallon turtle tanks (complete with turtles), garages full of tricycles and deflated, lily-pad-shaped swim floats for toddlers, and a deviled-egg dish which can't be thrown away due to its status as a mother-in-law wedding present.  But still, the order!  Is thrilling!

Of course, there are the not-so-fun parts of moving as well, the parts which are chilling rather than thrilling (sorry:irresistable).  The endless faxing: the large amounts of money required every hour on the half hour: the lists.  We are really in the thick of it now, jumping hurdles as fast as we can--or is it jumping through hoops?  Anyway, the new house has undergone an inspection and passed with flying colors, we've gotten a committment letter on the mortgage (pause for cheers and sighs of relief), and theoretically we put the second deposit down tomorrow and sign the purchase-and-sale agreement.  Except that there's some complications with the amount of the deposit, yadayadayada, the lawyer wants to review the P+S but only just got to it on Friday, we have to be out of the house all day tomorrow for the inspection on this end, which of course was scheduled during Urp's nap, and the sellers on the other end are out of town for a funeral. 

SO...I predict a day of driving from recycling to Salvation Army to Mailboxes to bank, ditching STUFF and pestering the lawyer on my cell phone (so I know what the hell to send to whom when as far as money and documents; can you tell this is making me tense?), then printing emails, dragging them and the napless children to TTD's office to make him sign things, herding everyone through Mailboxes to overnight yet another set of documents, wiring money from the bank, and changing diapers along the way.  It will be exciting, the way watching a hamster motor around the room in his little plastic ball and bump into corners is exciting.  Bonk!

But it's worth it.  I am constantly terrified that money won't come through, our house won't pass inspection, the buyer will drop out, a hurricane will push a tree through the roof of our new house, or  [insert random disaster here].  I am kind of chasing my own tail up my own ass with the saying good-bye here while I prepare for the moving there, but honestly? I do better with transition than I do with ordinary day-to-day living, and I love the sense of being on the brink, the feeling of everything about to change.  I am almost forty and I love the idea of a fresh start, even given the "no matter where you go, there you are" factor.  A fresh start and a homecoming at once: I've never had that before.  It's truly lovely to have people waiting for us, ready to love and help and tell us how our new town does its recycling and when storytime is at the new library.  It's a new experience for me to feel I'm moving toward permanence, a permanence I want and welcome.  I will always travel, and I look forward to bringing the boys to Africa for several years in the not-too-distant future, but I feel like we may have found our home base now.  It feels more than good.  Also,it feels like maybe we should get some chickens.  Chickens!  Bawk!  Because what is an old farmhouse without chickens?