I miss my mom

I miss her in ways I didn't expect. I think, "I should call mom today." And then I remember that she's not there. She's not here, she's not anywhere. No where I can call, anyway.

I miss her when I go to call my dad, and my phone says "Mom & Mick" on the screen. I missed her last week after I had a tearful talk with the 18 year old daughter of a patient dying from cancer. I missed her when I had a sick, 78 year old woman who was scared, I missed her when I had a funny ER story to share with her. I missed her when I couldn't remember where Grandma was born.

At the same time, I have the weird and also unanticipated sensation that I can't believe she's dead. It's like I'm fine and then all the sudden I'm plunged into icy water. It's not sadness. I'm not sure what it is. How is it possible that she can be dead? How can my mother be dead? I have never lived one second of life without her until 28 days ago. I knew, from a certain age, that theoretically she would die, it just didn't seem likely. Now I live with the conflicting sensation that she is both dead and that her being dead is not possible.

But still, she is not here.

I lived with the reality of her mortality from the minute I heard her diagnosis. Her one doctor took me aside to make sure that I understood the enormity of her condition and that we'd get her to a leukemia specialist. I knew it when that specialist reviewed everything with us and said that he had one patient who lived two whole years while receiving cancer treatment. When your doctor is optimistic about a two year survival rate, you know this can't be good.

She did not get two years. She got seven months from diagnosis to death. Nine, maybe ten months from when she started not feeling well. Here's the kicker-the chemo was working. It was keeping the leukemia down (but not remission, there's no remission for a 78 year old with AML). It's just that it was killing everything else: her heart, her lungs, her bone marrow. Every treatment resulted in hospitalization, in blood product replacement, in fluid overload and heart failure. Every time. I'm not enough of a nurse to know oncology, but I know hearts. "Mom, why didn't they give you lasix after the transfusion?" "Mom, why are your numbers still low?"

"I don't know," She'd say, "That's what the doctor ordered." She was an old school nurse and had complete faith in medicine. You didn't challenge the doctor or maybe she didn't want to know. I only know that they only had to mention hospice once to her and she made the decision to come home. She was tired of spending every other month in the hospital and I guess she just knew. She told my brother, "Look, either the cancer's going to get me, or my heart will. One or the other." So she came home.

My mom was not my best friend. I hated every mother's day when people would post these sickly sweet things about their mom and how she was always there for them, or whatever. My mother was not always there. I said if you wanted to hang yourself, she'd make sure you had enough rope. That's an ungenerous thing to say, but she did say that she thought it was best to mind her own business and stay out of her children's affairs. I always wanted to ask her why, but I didn't want to challenge her, or maybe I didn't want to know. And she didn't really want anyone to know about her problems either. One day I was over her house and found insulin in the fridge. "Oh, yeah, that's for my diabetes." I asked her how long she had had diabetes and she just waved her hand, "For a while." It wasn't denial. When we cleaned out her stuff I found notebooks dating back at least 20 years, written in her neat, Palmer Method cursive. Dates, blood sugars, amount of insulin injected. She never wavered. She may not have questioned her doctors, she did not question her 1950's ideas of nutrition, but she was meticulous about keeping track. She probably had diabetes for a decade before I found out. It just wasn't really important enough to talk about.

She'd nonchalantly bring up information about herself, so the best thing, if you wanted to know something, was to hang out, ask a few innocuous questions and get her talking. One day, when I was about 10, she was talking with some women at a party. We had migrated into the kitchen, as women used to do, and she mentioned that she had had 2 miscarriages. I was stunned. I thought I was nine years younger because I was an accident. I never asked for too many details. Decades later we were discussing women's rights and, out of nowhere, she opened up about how hard it was to carry a dead baby inside of you for 5 months, because in the 1960's they wouldn't give a woman drugs to induce labor, nor would they do a D&C on a woman who had fetal demise. They "let nature take its course." I was horrified. She waved it away, "That's how they handled things back then."

I know she was proud of me. She told me. She was proud that when I struggled through being a single mom and finished nursing school. She told me how proud she was that I was independent. She told me how proud I was when I went back to school and got my BSN, something she couldn't see in person because she was hospitalized again.  And I was proud of her. I was proud that I had a mom who went out to work and was a nurse and did cool things, like help operate on people. I was proud that I had a mom who never batted an eye to anything I did, who I brought home, or what I spouted off about. "Just don't go on Jerry Springer and tell the whole world." Which, to my credit, I never did. Thank you, mom.

She didn't say I love you, much. A handful of times, I think I can remember them all. She always made sure I had food, had a place to do my laundry, someone to watch my kids. When I was single mom she and my dad drove all over NJ to pick up and drop off my daughter when I worked. But she did say it, now and then and before she died.

You didn't tell me a lot of things, but you showed me. And I miss you.

Entertain the Stranger

I'd much rather write this anonymously.

I don't want it to look like I'm tooting my own horn.

"If I could toot my own horn, I'd never leave the house"

Honestly, it's a reinforcement of a lesson that I kinda already knew. A review never hurts, though.

This week I turned down a job. A per diem job, to be sure. Not a major career change. I just thought that once I graduate I'll have soooo much free time I might as well take on a second job. Don't judge. So I applied for a job in Executive Health. If you don't know, Executive Health is for people who have money, or who work for companies that have money, who pay above and beyond in order to have "concierge health." That's a nice way of saying that with enough moolah, you get a sweet suite and all the doctors you possible need come to you: cardiologist, gynecologist, GI, whathaveyou. They examine you, take your blood, perform your stress test, check under the hood, all in one day. With lunch thrown in. Because VIP's are very, very, busy people who don't have time to schedule multiple doctors appointments, tests, etc. Unlike the rest of us who work two jobs, clean our own toilets, raise our own kids and still need to fit in healthcare. It goes without saying that these VIPs need their own nurse for the day. 

I'm not sure what I was thinking. I guess I thought it'd be a break away from the sweaty masses in the ER for a few hours. My husband said it might lead to networking and new possibilities. And I am, if I say so myself, gracious and pleasant and customer friendly. In the ER, they usually give me the VIPs. At which point I steal myself and do my very bestest to please, even though I rather take care of a dozen pregnant meth-heads than one rich person. 

God, I'm going to die poor, aren't I?

but rich in spirits. I mean spirit. 

In other news,  this week I offered to help my church welcome a woman and her daughter from Afghanistan. They are refugees and I didn't know anything about them except (maybe) the woman is a doctor in her own country and her daughter is 7.  My pastor gave me a hundred bucks and asked if I could buy some groceries so that when they arrived in their new housing it wasn't completely void of sustenance. Yes! I love grocery shopping. A little too much, because I wanted to buy them everything. In the interest of time and money, however, I did ask some Muslim friends what people from that part of the world might want and/or need. And then proceeded to buy twice as much stuff and probably could have bought three times more. Because really, how do you start with nothing? I mean, you need salt and oil and baking soda and I don't know, look at all the stuff that's in your pantry and imagine having to replace it all. I settled for salt and pepper, garlic and onions, some veggies and fresh fruit. Granola, cereal and two kids of yoghurt. Canned soup, carnation milk and fresh milk. Coffee and tea. Sugar. Potatoes, lentils and rice. I forget, some other stuff. Gerber daisies, because they're bright and cheerful and strawberries because they're in season. And Oreos! Because I asked the daughter, "If you were coming to America for the first time, what cookie would you want to try first?" And Oreos was the answer.

I got to the apartment which had already been furnished by churchy people and someone had dropped off toiletries, bed sheets, towels, and other basics. Being in a transitional housing apartment really brought back some PTSD  memories. The place was perfunctory and clean, dingy, but at least it didn't smell of cabbage, urine, or mildew. The furniture was pretty mish-mash, as my daughter would say. I put the groceries away but I didn't like the layout of the furniture. So I moved the kitchen table, set the chairs around it and rearranged the chairs in the teeny-tiny living room until the person on the first floor asked me to stop. I laid out the toiletries in the bathroom. Then, I looked at the bedroom and thought, no one wants to travel 16 hours from Afghanistan, move into a strange, dingy apartment and have to make their own bed. So I made the bed. Hospital corners, that's how I roll. Now, instead of feeling like you're in some strange apartment, you'll feel a little like it's a hotel. Maybe. Someone had gotten new clothes and a jacket for the girl, so I laid them out on the bed, like I was a Ladies Maid. Someone else had purchased a little girl's pink backpack, notebook and some play-do, which I put out on the kitchen table with the daisies and called it a night. At least now the apartment looked a little homey.

Then I thought about the other families living in this place and wondered how many of them had gotten this kind of welcome when they moved in? Probably zero. When I lived in transitional housing, you were shown to your bare room or apartment carrying whatever you could on your person. It wasn't prison, but it was pretty grim. God knows, you weren't there because good things were happening in your life. Wouldn't it have been nice if someone had put in a just a little pot of Gerber daisies and a welcome sign? This is my type of concierge service. If I could, I'd go around to every apartment with a loaf of bread, some coffee, flowers and maybe a nice picture or throw rug to brighten the place up. And I'd make the bed, with new sheets, because used sheets and pillows are gross. I'd leave a mint on the pillow and have a directory on the bedside table: the nearest bus route, grocery, library. People need nice things. Not expensive,  just nice. I don't know the bible verse, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't say, "give the poor the crap you don't want". It says, "entertain the stranger." Entertain. Be their host. Make it nice.

whaddya mean you're not hungry?

The pay is crap, but I feel better at the end of the day. Almost like a human being, or something.

The last few days of summer

getting buried in the sand

blanket drying in the breeze

ready for adventure

the best end to a summer's day

Muggy

Do people in non-humid climes know what muggy is? It seems like a word I've known all my life.

When I was a kid, we didn't have air conditioning (or cable, an answering machine or a microwave).

We did have a really enormous metal fan that took up the entire window at the top of the stairs, with metal bars that covered the front in concentric circles. It was no where close to being child safe. As a child I would give myself the heebie-jeebies by standing in front of it and imaging what would happen if I slipped my fingers inside the bars while the industrial size fan, big enough to power a small plane, noisily buzzed. Then I'd slide down the wooden railing to the living room below. Cause that's how we did back then.

At night, the whole neighborhood would sit on their front stoop, fan themselves and yell across the street to each other while trying to catch the occasional breeze. Ah, the 70's.

Anyway, today is really muggy. Here's a definition of muggy, if you want. But really it's like someone threw a warm, wet blanket over you and held you down. UGH.

I also found out today that a dear man from church is dying. Now the weather is matching my mood. I'm mad, mad at myself, for not getting to know him better, not spending more time with him. He is a wise and kindly person, I think I could have learned a lot from him. And now it's too late. That makes me feel sort of the same way, like I was blind sided by a big layer of hot fog and it's settled down over my whole being. And I had a fight with the husband, a discussion that turned hotter by the minute because neither of us backs down. I'm so tired of doing everything, including working on things. Couldn't I just have a day or two on autopilot, where everything is nice and lovely and goes the way it should.

So I laid down in a dark, hot room with the fan blowing on me and contemplated my existence. And I really missed my grandparents. I wish I could have known them as an adult. A middle-aged adult, not the selfish, always in an emergency, always busy snot of a 20 year old that I was then. I think by the time my grandma and I started to get to know each other, she was dying and it was too late. She knew, though, she finally knew what I was all about before she went, and accepted me, so that's something.

It all goes so fast. Sorry to be a downer, but it does. I am now at the age where I can look back and see things I should have done DECADES ago. God, I was so depressed. Why is life so complicated? Why do we fight? Why do we have to lose something before we see what it means to us? But, as usual, I got up, figured out some stuff I needed to do and did it, ate and drank something and got back to the business of living, muggy or no.

SUMMER!!

I'm on Summer Break. I know it's mid-May, but MY school is done for the summer. No school, Girl Scouts almost over. Just 36 hours a week of work....whatever will I do with all the free time?

• All the projects I've pinned all winter
• lots and lots of doodling
• writing all the blog entries and other articles I've been putting off til after finals
• read books just cause I want to
• BEACH CAMPING
• lots of hikes
• These things
• plant potatoes, sunflowers, herbs
• sit outside and drink wine
• make homemade mosquito repellent so I can do the above. 
• Find per diems so I can have more days off
• lemonade stand
• Hurricane Harbor
• Carnivals and Boardwalks
• Fireworks!
• Carnival and Boardwalk food

All the things!!Bring 'em!!

The problem with "God's" will

There's a joke about a guy whose neighborhood is flooding. While standing on his porch, a guy in rowboat goes past, "Want a lift?" he asks, but the man says, "No, God will save me." The water keeps rising. Eventually he has to go the second floor, then the attic and finally out onto the roof. Rescuers come by but he tells them, "Don't worry, God will save me." The water keeps rising. Finally, he has to climb onto the chimney. A helicopter hovers and they drop a ladder down to him. "I'm ok!" He shouts, "God will protect me!"

Then the man drowns.

Dead, he arrives at the Pearly Gates. "God!" He says, "I did everything you ever asked of me! I believed you'd deliver me! What happened?"

And God says, "Sheesh, I sent you two boats and helicopter. What more did you want?"

I'm very dubious of God's will. Well, I'm not dubious of God-I assume he's got shit figured out. But I am very, very hesitant to believe anyone who thinks they know what God's will is. When I was young and thought I knew so much, my friends and I often attributed things to God's will: as in, I'm meant to be with him, it's God's will or That speeding ticket must've been God's will to teach me a lesson. *

Now, you and I could talk long into the night about fate, determinism, free-will, and whether or not God "teaches us lessons." I will only say that in my humble experience, people (myself included) will often "filter" God's will through their own perceptions. A not-so-nice way of saying that people use God as an excuse for their own poor choices or unfortunate situations. I try not to judge, but if a romantic interest ever says that it's God's will for you to be together, run away. 

So I guess my skepticism comes from seeing the repercussions of me and people I know acting on God's will. Of course, things were a lot simpler when I was still naive enough to think I'd go through life without any regrets. And hindsight is 20/20. So a score of years later I look back at a trail of regrets and transgressions and the most I can say is that I did the best I could at the time, but not always my best. Did God's will figure into any of that? I can only hope so, that some part of my life was used towards a part of the Great Plan. I probably won't ever know and so far, God's not sayin'. 

So, you ask, why am I thinking about all this? Because I've found myself back in a position I haven't been in a long while. I see a friend who, I think, is making some pretty big mistakes in her life, life altering, no "do overs" kind of mistakes and she's rationalizing a lot of it by saying she's following God's will or at least acting in accordance to what the bible tells her. I think she's missing the bigger picture. I think she's waving the helicopter away and she's drowning. 

Tell the truth and shame the devil, right? I could say these things to her face. Some I have, nicely, tried to point out but I'm met with a blank wall of stubbornness and denial. You can't change someone until they want to change. I want to tell her, look-you were on the Titanic and it sunk. You can pray all you want for God to raise it up, please God, just send me strong ships and winches and rope and when you raise it, I'll fix it up real nice: I'll clean off the mildew and water damage and oh, yeah, about that hole...well, I'll fix that too-nothing is too big with God's help! Where are you God? Why won't you send that stuff so I can raise the Titanic? She's so busy trying to stay afloat in the freezing water and praying for what she thinks is right that she doesn't notice the lifeboat right next to her.

There are times you can plan and grow and there are times you need to get into survival mode. If that's not in Psalms, then it should be.

I try and be a friend, let her vent, support her as much as I can. That is all I can do. That is the best I can do.  A long time ago, an old-timer told me, "If you go to bed at night and can honestly say you did the best you could all day, then you've done God's will."

*****

* Dougie, another old friend and old-timer (God rest his soul), told me that God doesn't test people. But life and bad things happen and God's there if you need God. So that's what I believe, cause Dougie talked a lot but he ain't never talked shit.

What Jessa Duggar Seewald doesn't get

So Jessa Duggar Seewald has spoken.

So I enjoy watching 19 Kids and Counting occassionally. Not just in a trainwreck, OMG-what-are-they-doing kind of way, and not in a Brady-Bunch-feel-good kind of way. And I don't get most of the criticisms that people throw their way. Population explosion? I don't think a handful of families having a 12 or 15 or 19 kids is going to have much an impact, in the same way that recycling isn't going to save the world when every middle-class, lifestyle sustaining anything is bad for the environment. Just come and see how much plastic I throw out in a 12 hour ER shift that make modern medicine possible...it makes the small amount I recycle every week seem not worth it, but I digress. It's like complaining that we spend too much money on welfare when we allow our corporations to get away with paying no taxes. Whatever, most people in my opinion don't even know why they have kids. As least the Duggars SEEM to like and enjoy their kids.

Seem to. I mean, that's what happens with the cult of personality. I can barely guess at what happens behind the closed doors of my neighbors, let alone what happens in some house halfway across the country that I only know through video. And lets be clear...that's the ONLY way you, I and most of America will ever know them. Because the Duggars are very, very selective on who they let into their house and their circle. They don't even go to a public church, no matter how strict, because it's not strict enough. The only way most of America (or the world) will know them is through their TV show, blog, and books.

So, Jessa ranted on her FB page that people, particularly Christians, use the whole "Judge not lest ye be judged" (Matthew 7:1) thing is used as an excuse by not-as-Godly-as-Jessa-is Christians to excuse their sinful behavior. I wrote a whole post on the things I DO like about Michelle Duggar. But the thing is, Michelle Duggar, et al, would never give me and mine the openminded slack that I give her. She and hers are fervently praying for a world that fits their worldview. For biblical law, a "Godly" America and all the things she is against to be outlawed, like abortion and divorce. This isn't just the Duggars. Google "Dominionism" or "Dominion Theology". If you really want the Be-Jesus scared out of you, Google "Dominionism and The U.S. Air Force". They really want to take over America. It makes ISIS seem like a band of raucous frat boys.

But the part about Jessa's rant that really annoys me is how it separates her from the other. The other Christian, the other non-Christian, the sinner. Is that what Jesus did? Cause I'm no biblical scholar. But I do know that the original J-Wow was out and amongst the sinners and the lepers and the prostitutes. You know that whole, "Let he who is without sin" (John 8:7)? That whole leave your families, sell all your possessions and follow the Lord without much more than the clothes on your back. Yeah, that Jesus. And that's the whole problem with biblical literalness and fundamentalism. You have to shield your child from the world in order to accomplish it. They even use "worldly" as a pejorative: you mustn't wear that, read that, watch that-it's too worldly. It will influence you and lead you astray. It will give you ideas. If your beliefs are so easily swayed, then perhaps they are not much more than stuff and nonsense. I raised my children with certain beliefs: that people shouldn't be judged by their outward appearance, the color of their skin or who they sleep with, that social justice is a meaningful and commendable goal. I didn't want my daughter to be pure NOR did I want her to be a virgin on her wedding night, should she ever decide to get married. You body, girls and boys, is yours, to do with as you please and you should love all of it, even that 1% between your legs. Or maybe especially that 1%. Sex is beautiful, fun, probably good for your heart and whatever 2 (or 3 or 4...) consenting adults do with it is there own business. That's another value that my adult child still seems to share and I didn't have to keep her sequestered to make her believe it.

Anyway, the bottom line of my religious belief is this: it should be a force to bring people together, to create and promote community. I DO believe Jesus was a community organizer (and Pontius was a governor, LOL if you get that 2008 campaign meme). But really, are you trying to bring people to Christ or bring people together? Because it matters. What does it matter if I say, "I believe in Jesus and his Father" and then put yourself away from every unlike you so that you won't be "contaminated" by them. If that's religion, I want no part in it.

I'd rather burn in the hell I don't believe in.