A Door Closes....

Well its official - those of you who have contact with me on Facebook already know, but I have lost my job. It's been a bittersweet week, as this job loss was completely unexpected. Well, I mean, hindsight is 20/20, and looking back perhaps there were signs.... but it hit me fast and hard.

Perhaps that's a blessing.

All in all, though, I have reached another milestone in my life. My first "firing." OK technically I didn't get fired, I was given the option to resign. Which when I look back maybe I shouldn't have done. Maybe I should have made them fire me? Believe it or not, there are perks to being fired! Who knew? All I knew was that being fired sounded like the greatest of evils and I wanted to avoid it at all costs. So I resigned.

And since resigning I've had the best week I can remember in the past 2 years, vacations not included.

I've tucked my kids into bed every night. Smoothed the hair from their foreheads, and kissed their soft, chubby cheeks. I've refereed their arguments. I've read them stories. I've cooked! Full meals, and even dessert!! I'm rediscovering my inner domestic goddess.

Sundays are free of the "I've got to fly today" blues. I'm sleeping in a bed with my husband again. OK that's not all its cracked up to be: I have to fight for the covers and put up with his, ahem... odors. So a King Size Bed is probably in our near future, since LuLu tends to sneak in at night and she's the human equivalent of a baby squid, wrapping her limbs around the nearest body part - usually my head.

Oh sure, I'm losing the company's property: the car, the laptop, the printer.

The BlackBerry. Sweet Jesus, not the BlackBerry!!!

Aside from the money, that's the only thing I'll shed a tear over.

A door has closed. You know what that means, right?

(~looks around for the one that's opening~)

Karma, Sweet Karma

So JeepMan got a ticket 3 weeks ago driving my company car: Failure to Obey Traffic Signal; i.e., he ran a red light. Thing is, he swears he didn't. But with only a 4-year-old and 7-year-old as witnesses, he decided he might as well just suck it up and pay. The ticket was a $29 fine, but with all the processing and BS fees, it ended up being $96.

The ticket is due this week and, interestingly, we have found not one, but TWO $50 bills this week, both with no chance of finding owners.

Karma? Seems like a pretty big coincidence to me.

Thanks, K. Won't you stay a while?

****footnote: probably explains the money part of the dream below, huh?****

Fish Conundrum

As some of you have noticed, my "About Me" has changed to "Employee/Slave to the healthcare system, soon to be emancipated." I am finally able to reveal what that mysterious blurb means: I got a new job. HOW I got the job is a post unto itself, will save that story for later. In short, I will be working for a subsidiary of a Corporate Giant, as a professional educator and on-site resource person for one of the company's medical products. It represents a "moving on" down my career path, sub-specializing, and a leaving-behind of my nursing career. Oh, I will always BE a nurse, but for the first time in 11 1/2 years I won't be practicing as one. It's exciting and scary all at the same time. More exciting though.

Anyhow, how does this relate to fish? Ahhh....that is all now to be revealed.

Some things about yourself you try so hard to believe, then one day you are forced to accept are not true. For example, I described myself for years as "spontaneous." In hindsight, I understand that I probably said that because it sounded cool. As I grew older and more aware of myself, I realized that I am about as spontaneous as a rock. The final acceptance of my non-spontaniety came when I was working nights. On my "days off" I would have plans to get all kinds of things done. Frequently JeepMan would call me and ask me to join him for lunch...with about a 15 minute heads-up. I used to get so irritated!! I like things planned, and I like to follow the plan. Any wrench in the plan should be thrown in with plenty of advance notice. I have learned to accept that "spontaneous" is not as glamorous as I thought. You can be sexy and anal-retentive at the same time.

I am Superstitious. There, I said it. I have tried to deny it for years but it just keeps knocking at the door to my inner self. I have invited it in now: not embraced it, not even given it a place at the grown-up table. Superstitious sulks at the kids' table with the other grudgingly accepted characteristics of myself like Anal-Retentive and Blonde. It's there. It's a part of me - I give up. This must be understood for the story to continue.

I bought a fish, a beautiful blue betta, this summer. If I were a good person I guess I wouldn't have bought him. But there he was, in the store, in his tiny little container with about 1/3 cup of water to live in. And Plato "needed" a fish. His betta (a gift from a friend) had just died. As Lulu had her own betta (red), Plato had been reminding me often that it wasn't fair that he didn't have one. I picked him up on an impulse, even bought a second bowl and supplies. He looked so pretty, was a good eater, and Plato and Lulu were thrilled.

For about 2 days.

Time wore on, the fish have been forgotten by everyone but me, and there they sit in their little bowls. I started reading about betta care and the universal opinion is that it is "cruel" to keep them in anything less than a 1-gallon climate-controlled tank. I keep them in 2 bowls that hold about 2 cups of water each; non-climate-controlled. I don't have room for 2 separate gallon-sized luxury fish-condos. I have gotten to the point that I despise even cleaning their bowls. JM isn't about to keep the house a balmy 73 degrees in winter for 2 fish, so they have slipped into a sort of 50-60 degree coma. They don't eat. They don't swim. BUT THEY DON'T DIE!

Plato's fish last year went into a winter coma. I thought he would surely die, but as the weather warmed up, he revived. He went on to live most of the summer before he croaked. In the ICU, we used to wait out our comatose patients, wondering if they would be "saved" by medical technology or if they were destined to die. At some point it would become obvious if it was truly their time to go. We would say at that point that they "declared themselves," and they would often passed away by the end of the shift. Well, Plato's fish declared himself but good. One day he was swimming, the next he was floating and milky-eyed.

These fish are not being so decisive. Neither am I. Here's my inner argument:

Problem: have two fish in comas, in bowls I don't want to clean, in probable state of torture, that kids won't miss if they're gone.

Obvious Solution: wait till the kids are asleep, then gently but efficiently flush them down the toilet. Hide the evidence. Play dumb when kids finally realize that fish are gone.

Problem: that's killing them, technically. Bad Karma. Bad Juju. Superstition. Bad things may happen if I murder fish.

But: could be construed as mercy killing. Euthanasia. Freeing them from cold, restrictive purgatory to swim in the warm oceans of fish eternity.

If: you believe in that sort of thing. Bad karma/juju/superstition may just say if you flush live fish, badness is returned upon you. Maybe won't get great new job...

And so it's been going, back and forth for weeks.

Now I have the job, firmly in my grasp. So why are they still floating in suspended animation on my kitchen counter?

What if something else happened? Like my plane crashed. Or my kids get sick. Superstition!!

What I need is for JM to get an idea in his head about flushing the fish. A plan that he construes with no influence by me, and which he carries out all on his own. An scenario in which I play no part. Meaning it's not going to happen. He's as clueless about the fish as the kids.

Gaaaah!

It's stupid, really. If I think about it hard enough, it follows that the mere intention of flushing them, the premeditation of it, should have caused the bad karma to be visited upon me already.
Unless karma procrastinates.

Ugh.

Think I will just wait until the fish declare themselves.

Random Acts of Kindness

Some days I start to think there can't be much kindness left in the world. I'm not talking about being polite or simply getting along with others. I'm talking about the sort of kindness that requires self-sacrifice, the kind that comes from the true part of a person that puts another's needs before his or her own.

One might think that because I am a nurse I would see these acts of kindness every day. Don't think me heartless, but I feel that what I do each day at work, while it comes from a need to make the experience of my patients positive, doesn't really count. I am being paid to do it. Would I come here each day and bust my butt to make patients happy if I wasn't being properly compensated? Uhhh, that would be a No.

Today, however, I witnessed a powerful scenario that made me believe once again in the concept of self-sacrifice.

I rode the bus to work today. As I was walking to the bus stop, thunder boomed all around me. The nanosecond I stepped onto the bus, the sky opened up and a great deluge began. Fortunately, I came prepared, and walked the block from the bus stop to the hospital under my umbrella. My head was protected, but it was raining so hard that the rest of me got pretty wet. I didn't really care about the rest as I get to change into scrubs when I get to work, but I was having a great hair day, so a dry head was pretty important.

As I approached the hospital, I saw an ambulance parked about 20 feet away from the door I use. The back doors were open and 2 paramedics were just coming out the hospital door with a patient that they were going to load into the ambulance. The patient had a blanket over his body, but no protection for his head, and the paramedics had all their hands full trying to maneuver the loaded stretcher from the doorway to the ambulance. Just as I was thinking, "That poor patient, he's going to get soaked," a woman in front of me went running over with her umbrella to hold it over the patient's head. She followed them all the way to the ambulance until the patient's head was in the vehicle. It took probably 20 seconds, and the woman ended up absolutely drenched!! I caught up to her as she ducked back under her umbrella, and told her with great admiration, "That's the nicest thing I have ever seen." She just smiled and said, "Well, I couldn't just let the poor guy get poured on. He's probably not having a great day as it is!"

As we rode together in the elevator, I wondered if I would have done the same thing. I'd like to think I would. Then again, I hate being wet when I should be dry, and I was having a really, really good hair day...

Quiet House/MIL Rant #2

Wow. It's quiet.

The kids are at mom-in-law's house. She finally got rid of her houseguest, so we let them spend the weekend there.

I guess that needs some explaining.

As you are aware from my previous posts, MIL's ideas often don't jive with JeepMan's and my ideas. Last October, she dropped a bomb: she was bringing her nephew to live with her. Her nephew, JeepMan's cousin (I'll call him LT), fit any conventional description of a "troubled" person.

LT grew up in the southwest. His father (JeepMan's uncle) is a drug dealer, currently doing jail time. LT grew up in chaotic circumstances. His mother died of heart failure, waiting for a transplant, when LT was only 13. LT's father had sporadic employment and was evicted from more than one home. They sometimes lived in hotel rooms. LT had no guidance or supervision, did poorly in school, and never had an example of a responsible person to model himself after. MIL decided he needed "a better life." Generous, right? So what's the problem?

The problem is that LT was 20 1/2 years old when MIL decided to "give him a better life."

MIL said she was bringing him here to the midwest, letting him live with her for a month, then kicking him out of her house if he hadn't found a way to make it on his own. This scenario was fraught with potential pitfalls, as JeepMan and I saw it. LT didn't have any life-skills. He didsn't have any idea of what a responsible adult was expected to do. He was so under-educated, he couldn't even get a driver's license because he couldn't pass the exam! How was this young man supposed to come to a new state with no savings or driver's license, get a job, save some money, find a place to live, and become independent within 4-6 weeks?

Well he arrived last November. About that time, we told MIL that the kids would not be allowed to come to her house and spend the weekend while LT was living in the house. Formerly, the kids would go there once a month or every other month to spend a weekend. This was great - the kids enjoyed it very much and we liked having some couple time for ourselves, too. However, we don't know LT. We have never known him. He was an absolute stranger that JeepMan just happened to be related to. He was a 20-year-old kid with a sketchy past and no guidance. We simply couldn't have our kids staying in the same house with a young man we didn't know or trust.

When MIL found out our position, she blew up. She yelled and screamed and accused my husband of being suspicious, passing judgement, and being a jerk. She made threats of legal action to force us to let the kids come for weekends. JeepMan and I were stunned and angry at her actions, but we stood our ground. Our children have had no unsupervised visits with MIL since October. We simply cannot trust strangers around our children, especially young adult male strangers with unknown morals.

MIL has calmed down since then, but we have seen her underbelly, and are certain that we would never want our children to go to her in the event of our untimely deaths (God forbid). I would like to believe that her impassioned (but certainly misguided) response to our decision was motivated by her devotion to the kids. There has never been an apology, or even an acknowledgement of the fact that we were simply being responsible and protective parents.
In fact, neither she nor us have spoken of it since it happened; it sits there between us like the proverbial gorilla in the room.

LT has moved out - 6 months later. MIL found out after just a month or two that having LT living with her wasn't going to be the experience she had romanticized in her own mind. LT didn't want her controlling him and she is, to her core, a control freak. She felt that since he was living in HER house he needed to follow HER rules and do what SHE wanted him to do. It didn't take long before he was staying out "too late," drinking "too much," and doing "too many" things she didn't know about or condone. I think in the end he was pretty desperate to get away! He now has a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant, and a coworker/girlfriend who hasn't yet tired of chauffeuring him around. After a few months of blowing his paychecks on Playstation games and fancy cellphones-and-cellphone-accessories, he and his girlfriend scraped together enough money to get an apartment together. He has been told that he cannot return to MIL's place.

I hope the best for him. He seems like a nice enough guy, though I still wouldn't trust him with my kids.

So this weekend is the first that the kids have been away for 6 months. A small part of me feels a little queasy about this. The kids will definitely be interrogated (subtly) about the weekend when they get home; this is no different than before, though. The time to ourselves is really nice every once in a while, and I think kids should spend time with their grandparents sans parents. We have stayed nearby both sets of grandparents specifically to facilitate this kind of relationship between the generations.

JeepMan and I had a nice meal together last evening, then walked around our local ped-mall, enjoying the perfect cool evening and listening to a free outdoor jazz concert. We stayed up late, then slept in this morning. For lunch, we had panini sandwiches on the patio at a little Italian deli. We went shopping, and I bought some new plants; he bought some new bolts. I puttered in my flower beds while he puttered in the garage. He is still in the garage and I am blogging. Soon I am going to take a nice hot shower (uninterrupted by peeking children wondering if they can get in with me!), then we will head out for a good dinner and maybe even a movie that isn't animated...

Life is good.

But... I can't wait see Plato and Lulu tomorrow. I'll grab them and kiss their chubby little cheeks, hug them close and press my face into each of their hair - inhale their indiuidual scents: shampoo, sweat, sunscreen, and that special Plato or Lulu musk that goes up my nose and straight to my core, exhilirating the primal mother within me.

Yeah, that'll be great too.

Doctor Drama

JeepMan thinks I baby the kids too much. While it's true that I baby them much more than he, I don't think it's excessive. Maybe I overdo a little because he doesn't really do it at all. Making up for what it lacking, so to speak. I imagine many moms find themselves doing this.

Sunday The Boss was whiny. This is nothing new. At almost 3, it's just part of her age. Also she didn't get any mommy-time on Saturday since she, Plato, and JeepMan were at the in-laws while I was miserable on the couch all day with my Kleenex and the Lifetime Movie Network. Okay, the LMN thing isn't true (I can't usually watch those movies) but the rest is.

So back to whiny. The thing that caught my attention was that the whining was all universally themed: "My ear hurts, Mommy." It always came back to this, and it was always the same ear. Unfortunately 2 1/2 year olds don't have the capability to elaborate. Why, where, when, how...these are all foreign concepts to kids of this age. And so it went for most of the day. I got a flashlight, looked in both ears. The left one looked ok and the right looked...well, different. What I wouldn't have given for an otoscope (the ear-looker thingy that doctors use)! JeepMan was watching all this with mild irritation. "She was FINE yesterday. Now Mommy is around and she's getting lots of attention..." The accusation in his voice was less-than-subtle.

At the far opposite end of the spectrum, I was contemplating an ER visit (how is it that sick kids just seem to KNOW it's Sunday?). But the $50-$100 copay loomed large in my mind. Even larger the idea that I would have to answer to JeepMan when the ER doc told me things were fine. So I put it off. But the nagging Mommy in me just couldn't let go of the idea that something wasn't right. To top it off, when I was putting The Boss to bed, I decided to attempt a final interrogation:

"What's wrong with your ear?"

"It huwts!" (big tears)

"What happened to your ear?"

"I put a stick in there!"

"A WHAT?"

"I put a stick in there!"

"A stick? Where did you get the stick?"

"Because I did it!!"

"No...uh...okay, um, can you show mommy the stick?"

"Uh, huh..." (goes to the window and points) "Out dare..."

Ugh. Now I had to really think. Go to the ER on a Sunday night at 8pm on the word of a 2 1/2 year old, or wait? I waited.

It was a long night. The Boss waking every hour or so, crying about her ear. I finally brought her into my bed (JeepMan was already on the couch due to the racket). I never let the kids sleep with me unless we are in a hotel. I found out she punches in her sleep. Between dodging her left hook and the crying bouts, I did not sleep well.

In the morning I showed up at the clinic at 8am when they opened. I have never ever done this...I am fanatical about appointments. After I explained our story, the scheduler had the nerve to say, "Well, Mondays are busy...I will have to check and see if there are any available appointments..." I am sure that she did not appreciate the kind of peril she was in at that very moment. Or maybe she did because miraculously an 8:30 appointment became available. We waited.

Funny how kids suddenly become perfectly normal when in a doctor's waiting room. My whiny, lethargic, ear-hurting child metamorphosed into a bubbly toddler. My doubts resurged. Mind you, I really hoped everything was ok with her and I was just being a hypochondriac (displaced). Secretly, though, I was planning a big IN-YOUR-FACE speech if there actually was something wrong!!

Long story short, she DID have a perforated eardrum. There was no stick in there, though, so who knows about that part of the story. She had a ton of fluid behind her left eardrum, too, so spontaneous rupture was a viable theory. She's on antibiotics now and seems to be doing a little better.

And JeepMan DID get a (slightly modified) In-Your-Face speech.

Moral: Moms, listen to that little voice. Dads, listen to Moms.