Face Forward to Go Forward

I had used the line before, but it was different this time. I’m not sure why this client clung to me (metaphorically, of course), but sometimes that’s the nature of crisis-work. There becomes a trauma-bond that they feel when you come and see them in the most vulnerable state, and then six weeks later they are crushed when you tell them that they have changed, are stronger, and need to keep moving forward without you. It’s the nature of crisis work, nothing personal, I tell them up-front, but there were those clients who had lots of feelings when it came to that final goodbye.

And so, my Family-Advocate and I, sat in the moldy smelling family room, with her mom and dad and sister and long-time therapist, and we had a final family meeting. And the dad, overwhelming nervous about the prospect of this crisis happening again, asked “what do we do if it happens again. We don’t want to go back,” and I replied:

When you’re driving you look through the windshield. You need to glance in the rear-view mirror to see where you’ve come from, and what might be behind you, but if you stare in the rearview mirror you’ll crash. You have to keep your eyes focused on what’s ahead. The forward journey. Glance back, but keep moving forward.

There was a moment of hush in the room. It wasn’t anything magical, I’d said it a hundred times, and it’s something I believe in, but in that moment it hit the family in a spot that they needed. Even the therapist, who had been working with this young lady for years, and was a long-time therapy supervisor, was stunned. I might have blushed because half the time I think I’m fucking everything up and about 1 step away from being found a fraud.

+++++++++

I thought of this experience this morning, as I buckled Potamus into the car. We’re a month early, but we turned his car seat around to face forward. His legs had been scrunched for awhile now, and we thought it best. And he was Mr. Nonchalant about the whole thing, clearly based on the picture above. And as I drove I kept catching glimpses of him in the backseat and had to remind myself to keep my eyes on the road. I could state at his wild blonde hair and intense eyes forever. I could get stuck in the nostalgia of the first car trip with him, all 7lbs, bundled up so snugly as we drove home from the hospital. I know that nostalgia, sentiment, memories are good…really good…but I can’t live there, in the past. We move forward, driving off into the sunrise, and work, and daycare, and a new Holiday-Week, and it’s okay.

 

Monday Blues

I just ate 5 packages of fruit snacks…at my work desk. Yeah, it’s one of those kinds of days.

I hate being emotionally influenced by people around me, but today I’ve felt really off and I think it’s because my boss is having some sort of emotional turmoil and I can’t quite figure it out, but it’s coming out in passive aggressive comments and energy that I feel directed toward me but know it shouldn’t be. I’m doing my work, not shirking responsibilities, and hate that he made light of me offering to switch offices for an hour this afternoon so our case manager could have a student use a working computer. His response was, “well all you do is facebook all day anyway,” which might be true on some days, but certainly not today. I dunno, the passive aggressive educational system bullshit is getting to me, though I know that it’s not about me…I can’t help but internalize the swirling dark emotions around my office and think “it must be about me.”

Maybe it’s just the Monday blues, but things aren’t rolling off my back like they should be. I’m feeling sensitive, vulnerable, like I might cry at any moment and an attempt to stave off those tears might lead me to lash out in anger (my more usual MO). Maybe therapy is working and I’m starting to feel and tears might begin leaking out in inappropriate places. Or maybe my boss was just being a jerk and I should let it roll off my back.

 

They call them mood swings for a reason…

Yesterday was amazing. My best mom-friend came and spoke to my classes about her job and how she got into the tech field. Not only was it amazing to spend from 8-4 hanging out with a friend, it was also really nice to have her get to spend time in my world. She got to meet all of the students that I complain brag about daily. And it was so lovely to have her speak to the students and to see  (and read) their reactions to her story. We wanted to inspire and inform them, and it happened exactly how we wanted!

And then, since we carpooled, she got to see our daycare routine and I got to see hers. It was this brilliant exchange of life-experience that made me really happy. Despite my introvertedness, I came home feeling chipper and full of love for my son and my job and life. It was one of those feelings where you think “YES, I got my life together!” and delude your mind into believing that this kind of awesomeness will continue.

But then I woke up today, at 5 am (after only 5ish hours of sleep) and tried DESPERATELY to get Potamus back to sleep. Which means I have very sore not-yet-fully-weaned-but-not-used-to-nursing-for-an-hour-straight nipples. Yeah. I tried for a good hour (off and on). And then we tried watching Handy Manny on our smartphone. And then I tried nursing him some more. Nada. At 7:30 ish we just got up for the day. At which point the dog went insane, chewed up 5 toys, kept barking like a maniac, peed on the floor. And kiddo? All he wanted to eat was cookies. And mandarine oranges. His poor little bum is so raw from his diet of only-oranges. I guess last night all he would eat was french fries and oranges with daddy, and he ate virtually nothing at daycare, so I don’t know if this is just a picky phase or what?

Then my phone did this weird black-screen-of-death thing and I had to go wait at the Sprint store for 45 minutes. And then he nursed for another hour to take a nap. Finally, exhausted, at 1:00 pm we were BOTH asleep in bed together and I did at least get a nap (which doesn’t negate that I got 5 hours of sleep the night before). He tended to be better once he got a nap, but he’s in this phase where he’s really testing boundaries. And I hate enforcing my stern “no hitting the tv table with your hotwheels cars” threat, because then there is tears and hitting me and tantrums. But I’m doing it and trying not to lose my shit.

And thankfully he ate some protein tonight.

So I noticed this morning, that my mood was really surly. I was tired and hungry and hungover from all the awesome of the day before. I wish that I could have hung on to the peaceful post-yoga calm from last night, and the friendship glow from yesterday afternoon. But I didn’t. I was crabby (at least internally) and I was even more annoyed with myself than the annoying things that kept happening around me. Also, my farts smelled really really bad. And that’s never fun.

How quickly my emotions can change. It feels like being on a roller coaster sometimes. And I wish I could just go with it, rather than trying to fight against it, but I rarely do.

Tell me: how do you cope with wildly changing emotions?

What motivates you?

There have been times in my life where I have been more or less self-motivated to do a lot of work. Most of those times where I was overly motivated, it was because a lack of self-confidence in myself and a worry that I was going to be canned at any second. Times where I have been less-than motivated have usually been out of rebellion because of micro-management. I don’t always like to be told just to DO something, just to DO it. Ya know?

But in this job, I have quite a lot of autonomy and am able to do a lot at my own discretion. There are a few tasks when I am in the office on Mondays/Wednesdays that I am supposed to get done, like advising students and getting progress reports done, etc. The challenge is, I am working mostly alone, which isn’t my strong suit. I like doing things as a team, or at least being around others to bounce ideas off each other. Sitting alone in my office (yes, I’ve graduated from cubicle to my OWN (shared with my co-teacher) office), which is sometimes more isolating than helpful (except for student meetings). The challenge with this job, though, is that there is also not a lot of direction. I don’t actually have a job description, per se. The way I was hired was all sorts of weird (the job was posted for Tues/Thurs teaching. Then, when they offered me the job they told me about the Mon/Wed advising for hourly. Granted, because of my friend I HAD known that would be the gig, but still, it all seems shady to me).

I have drive and ambition and when I get to work I get overwhelmed with the different things I could be doing, and end up facebooking or looking at pinterest, or mostly just surfing around getting distracted. I don’t necessarily know what to do. At home I talk with Boof about it, and I get super excited and motivated to do things, to make a plan or a proposal for a method of advising or do something, but at work I slide to the lowest common denominator, which is pushing the food around on our plate pretending that we are eating. It was like this in sports, when I played on a team and we were playing a good team, I would rise to the challenge. But if we were playing a sloppy team, we tended to play less well. Now I don’t give myself enough credit, as I did see about 7 students today, even if only for a few minutes at a time, and have been prepping for class tomorrow, but I wish I was working on some type of project, and that I could be motivated daily to do it!

What motivates you when those around you don’t seem to be doing anything? I don’t want to be an overachiever or put so much on my plate that I am overworked, but I don’t want to just sit around doing nothing.

Thoughts?

Daycare/School Day #1

I managed to wait unti 3pm to call and check-in on Potamus at daycare/school. Boof called at 10:30 and gave me a text report that eased my mind enough to get back to my crazy first-day-back-to-work. Why the college decided to have the first day back to work be the first day that students start class, too, is beyond me. But hey, we’re surviving!

When I went to pick him up he seemed surprised, but was happily munching on cheerios in his high chair. He didn’t seem abnormally clingy, and didn’t protest when I nursed him and then popped him in the carseat for our ride home. Once home we played and he seemed SO happy, even “Bollywood” dancing in his bedroom and reading lots of stories. I’m hoping that school is a good place for my extroverted little chap!

And I didn’t cry. I am sure he’ll have cranky sad days, but overall it made me feel so good that he was only sad for about 15 minutes in the morning, and did amazing at naptime (2.5 hours on his mat!). Go Potamus!

Now What? Moving on After Rejection.

I’m trying to remind myself that we are all made of sparkle dust, souls merely existing earth-bound for a period of time, and that, in cliche terms, this too shall pass, but hot damn I haven’t cried so much in months.

Yesterday Boof found out that the job he wanted, the firm we felt SO good about, the one he had built relationships with people who seemed to really get him and be excited to offer him a job…isn’t going to happen. The official rejection letter came on Saturday. We were crushed. Not just crushed because, at this moment, he has no other options lined up, and that firms are so far into their interviewing/hiring process that he has virtually no shot, but because we had felt so good about it. So good. That gut feeling that I always get when something is going to work out…yeah…that meter is clearly off now.

Square one.

In the practical reality of things, nothing has changed, save the hope that things would be different come the first of the year. Boof is still studying for his CPA exams, watching Potamus in conjunction with his own mom, and we are still scrimping and relying on our in-laws to float us indefinitely. I am still the not-quite-enough-breadwinner, the one who gets up in the dark and leaves my sleeping boys to trudge through rainy traffic to the ‘office.’

Nothing has really changed.
And we aren’t even at risk for feet of flooding like my East Coast friends.

Sparkle on.

Homeschool, Public School and Career Development

A few years ago, when working at a non-profit with my good friend Russ, we had a discussion about career development as it pertained to the youth we served. All of our kiddos were in foster care, and we were attempting to help them graduate high school and go on to college. The high school success rate for students in foster care is pretty abysmal, so our organization was trying everything it could to help these students see the value in education. But the conversation that Russ and I had, was about how school wasn’t always about education, or rather the information that we learned during the hours of 7-3, but rather the other skills that we absorbed that were important in preparing us for the working world. Russ and I participated in a leadership team that was guiding the future of the organization and yet we often found that the “leadership” wasn’t really listening to those of us that were on the front lines. I wish I could remember the study that told us, that freshman year was a great predictor in graduation rates, and how the “soft skills” that were learned were actually more important than knowing all of the presidents or when WWII started.

How does this relate to my class today?

Well, Russ and I are now both “professors” at this local college. And we re-connected a few weeks ago in a work capacity, talking about how our students are prepared or unprepared for life on a college campus. We rekindled this discussion from a few years ago, and I mentioned that in the self-reflections that I had my students write the home schooled students mentioned things like, “I haven’t taken English in over 3 years so writing this paper is hard for me,” and “I am not used to turning things in on a deadline, so I guess I have to work on that,” and ” I’m used to studying things I like.” My public school students said things like, “I am worried about turning in all of my homework,” and “I’m worried about not showing up to class like I’ve done before.”

In this way, I feel like both models have failed our children in various ways. Because, as Russ and I keep talking about, education/schooling is really (whether right or wrong) about preparing workers…drones…people to work in offices from 8-5. The byproduct of education is knowledge and a passion for learning and a curiosity for life around us. It helps to foster discussions and probably makes us better, more informed, people. I love learning about new things, but what I also learned, from kindergarten-12th grade, and then on into higher education was: show up on time, do the work you are asked to do, follow directions, interact with people, pay attention, turn things in on time, sit still, etc. All of these skills are transferable to the workplace, predominately office work of some type.

So, my home school students, who have been encouraged to study things they like and are interested in, will hopefully benefit from their education by finding a career that interests them, because they have had the empowerment to already begin to explore those interests. What worries me about my home school kiddos, is that they haven’t been forced (such  a nasty word!) to do things that they aren’t that interested in, just because “this is the way the world works,” or “this is the way we do it.” If they don’t find a career right away in the interesting field of their choice, or even if they do, will they know how to be timely in assignments that they don’t like? For my student who hasn’t ever had a deadline for things, will, at 19, it be too late for them to learn? How much harder will it be for them to conform to a mold of “normal” career development or as a worker when they have been allowed years of unbridled educational freedom? Or, can we envision a new workforce that allows for this to not be the case? (Things like, the rise of flex-time, and online work, perhaps might fit this).

And, for some of my public schoolers, who have been, seemingly broken down and lack a drive for education (the pursuit of knowledge and information), but also have not learned the soft-skills of timeliness, and turning in work that they don’t see the value in, what hope do they have? When they do come to class, they do the work (most of them), which shows a good work ethic, regardless of whether they find value in the actual assignment. When explaining the per-requisite nature of the classes for the major, I hear no grumbling like with the home schooled students, because these student seem used to the ‘jumping through hoops’ nature of the education system. In theory, though, public school does teach these skills of being on-time (and natural consequences are getting a lower grade, which would equate to a reprimand and firing at a job), sitting doing “work” for hours on end, short breaks (5 minute passing time), and being forced to do some tasks that you don’t really want to do.

I don’t know the answer, but it does seem like, in theory, our education is supposed to prepare us for our jobs, and it’s seemingly failing both sets of my students. I wonder how a mainstream teacher, not dealing with “high school dropouts” or “non-traditional students,” feels about how their students are prepared/unprepared for college work and/or work post-school. Is the disillusionment that our time is our own and we can do what we want and study what we want better to happen early in our education career (ala public school) or at the entrance into college (ala my homeschoolers)?

Blurts, Flirts and Desserts

Blurts: I have two types of “disruptive” students. The blurters tend to be well-meaning. They have something that comes to mind and they say it, without much thinking about the context of whether their comment is appropriate (during lecture) or inappropriate (during a shy person’s oral report). And blurting doesn’t just happen with their mouth…I have several students who also blurt with their bodies. They get up, mill around, pick up their guitar and begin strumming a little tune. For the most part, I recognize that learning styles come in all types, and that students, especially teenage boys, can’t be cooped up in their seat for too long. Though, this Tourettes like activity is often distracting for my more introverted students, and still needs to be appropriate. I appreciate that my students feel free to express themselves, but yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater is dangerous AND annoying. So, how can I help my word-vomit and body-blurters have a little more…self-control?

Flirts: Mah baby likes to flirt, that is, when he’s not feeling stranger danger. He definitely doesn’t discriminate based on gender, either. He equally gives doe eyes to the men AND the ladies. Though he doesn’t seem to be a huge fan of Trader Joe’s or Costco cashiers talking to him while he sits in his seat in the cart. But he saves his special flirts for his mama. And I’ve been enjoying those open mouth laughing kisses he gives on my cheeks!

Desserts: After almost 1.5 years in our house, we officially met our next door neighbor. She was helping her sister move, and brought a few leftover treats by. Yay for lemon bars and raspberry/oatmeal bars! It was nice to have an actual name to the “hi howareya?” that I’ve thrown across the fence or in passing to her husband while we have tried to round up our escaped pooch. I’m thinking of reciprocating the desserts with a sweet bottle of wine and thank-you card, but have yet to muster the energy to walk across our tiny lawn to give it to them. Because this is Seattle, I do not feel weird that my neighbor waited 1.5 years to meet me…I’m just glad she stopped by at all. Because, while we are known to be surfacely friendly (saying ‘hi’ and nodding on the street), to actually go out of our way is a pretty huge deal!

Speaking of desserts, since beginning again in the world of offices, I have noticed a strange fascination with chocolate. While I have somehow eaten my own packed lunch for the past 6 weeks, I have also begun drinking more coffee (an excuse to get out of the office) and eating more chocolate during lunchtime. Gah!

Sweet dreams ya’ll!

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About a week ago I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. The stress at work had come to a head, the fears and worry about Boof starting classes in a week, the fact that Potamus has consistently REFUSED a bottle for the past 6 weeks (leaving me running all over the county on outreaches and then running back home again within 3-4 hours to nurse him…or having Boof drive around the county following me so that little mister can eat), the fact that I am maid of honor in my best friend’s wedding and am throwing her a bridal shower and bachelorette party…200 miles away, the fact that both of my sisters-in-law are getting married 2 months apart and we are in FULL wedding planning mode around here, the fact that laundry/dishes/yardwork/searching-for-new-job-work has all been pilingpilingpiling up in stacks on the table and in corners and my mind is crammedfullofsomuchstuffthaticanbarelybreathe.

Whew.

 

Who wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown with that kind of stress, really? So I started in on self-care, big time…writing group, sleeping as much as possible, eating healthy, trying to walk…crying. It’s amazing how freeing crying can be, and how I realize that I hold so much stuff in, trying to be the strong mama raising a strong child and bearing the brunt of the bread-winning at the same time.

But then there are these sweet break-in-the-clouds moments, where the sun pokes through and I react, once again, to my kiddos in crisis with the mantra “they are in crisis, i am not in crisis.” For a minute that statement wasn’t true, but for right now it is. I have driven almost 1,000 miles in my new little car and life is feeling back to a somewhat okay balance. Sure that could change tomorrow, but for right now I am learning that a little wobbly balance is okay. And that’s a lesson I’m learning from Potamus.

Today is day 2 of him sitting un-assisted. It’s amazing to think…he will never NOT know how to sit again (barring any major head trauma or amnesia). And today he grew in leaps and bounds, as I got to see him sit, and swivel, and reach forward, and catch his balance with wide-eyed-stare, and look so proud when he didn’t topple over. He’s learning. I’m learning. And it feels so sweet.

Working mom

Today was my first day back at work. Yes it is a Saturday, and I work again tomorrow. My supervisor had a difficult time finding someone to cover this shift, and since I planned to come back Tuesday, I thought a few days earlier would be fine. And for the most part, I was right. I was backup on-call today, with my partner taking the lead. Fortunately it was a light day as far as calls went, so I didn’t have to go on an outreach. I am exhausted nonetheless, though.

Boof had to work at the baseball game, so my parents came into town to babysit Potamus if the occasion arose. Thankfully it did not, but we will see how tomorrow goes. I filled my day with paperwork and online learning that has piled up since December. I filled the rest of my time with loads of laundry. Potamus was never out of my sight, and I nursed him on demand, but I tried to honor that I was working and let my parents play and sing and rock him to sleep.

Maybe that was the hardest part.

But mentally it was good to get a taste of what is to come on a more regular basis. Fortunately not all of my days are 12 hours on-call, became I am already in bed with potamus passed out next to me. I survived my first day, and feel weepy, even though I didn’t have to lose sight of his sweet chubby cheeks.

This whole working parent thing is overwhelming and exhausting, no?