I was snooping around in the Facebook profiles of my ex-husband’s family, as one does if one is like me, and I had a sudden and electrifying thought. I was looking at a picture of my ex-husband’s sister with her husband and children, and I realized that her little girls would have been MY NIECES if I’d stayed married to my ex-husband. I would have known those little girls, and very well! I would have been Auntie Swistle to them! I would have snuggled and smooched them! I would have known their birthdays! I would have bought them MANY A GIFT, starting with all the things I would have bought during their mother’s pregnancy! I would have LOVED them. And yet, as it is, I don’t know them at all, not even their names. They’re utter strangers, and I have no connection to them at all. It is weird to think of that missed relationship, and it highlights the weirdness of the whole category of relatives-by-marriage.

I was thinking about why it is that maybe 99/100ths of my conflicts with my boss occur entirely in my head. I will give you an example, even though I know it is possible to argue or see the other side with any one example. This is just to give an idea of the SORT of thing I mean, and it should be understood that these examples are CUMULATIVE, so that I didn’t make any assumptions the first many, many times I felt cranky about something, but instead gradually acquired the impressions I currently hold. Nor should it be assumed that ANY time ANYONE says something to me, no matter how casually, I’m meticulously analyzing all the possible meanings it could have. (“The clerk said to have a good day! DOES SHE ASSUME I HAVE NO TROUBLES???”) No: it is that when someone is driving me crazy, I like to try to put my finger on WHY they are driving me so crazy. And I am definitely not saying that if someone ELSE in a different context were doing the same thing, it would drive me crazy. I further realize that the current cultural ideal, successfully achieved by SO MANY, is not to waste a moment thinking about how anyone else thinks or feels, but that is not compatible with my temperament type; and so if you find that frustrating, let me assure you from my lying-awake-agitating position that I HEAR YOU (and yet don’t need to hear it again).

Finally we arrive at the example: if I say I can’t take an extra shift because I have plans, she will respond “Okay, have fun.” Nothing wrong with wishing someone fun! It’s a positive thing! Not only does she not resent me not being able to fill the shift for her, she goes FURTHER and hopes I will have fun!

But what it tells me (again: OVER TIME, with multiple types of examples, not just after one incident and/or with the one example I mentioned here) is something about the way she perceives the situation. When I tell her I have plans and so can’t work, does she imagine that I will be going to the dentist, visiting a terminally-ill relative in the hospital, helping out a parent who has Alzheimer’s, taking a child for medical tests, going to see a lawyer, attending a meeting with a counselor/principal about my teenager in trouble, going to an AA meeting, or working a shift at another job? No, and we know that because we would not say “Have fun” to someone going to any of those things. If I’d said, “Sorry, I can’t—date night with my husband!,” it would be perfectly appropriate for her to say, “Oh, that sounds nice! Have fun!” But instead it’s “I need you to fill a shift” / “I’m sorry, I can’t” / “Okay have fun.”

Paul says, “Well, probably she’s just saying it without thinking.” Yes. I am sure she IS saying it without thinking. I don’t think she’s thinking, “What’s the sickest burn I can do without being called on it?” No. The very POINT is that she’s saying it without thinking—which is what (combined with many other clues) reveals how she IS thinking. This makes Paul roll his eyes, but listen: some of us are interested in how computers work, and some of us are interested in how market economies work, and some of us are interested in how transportation systems work, and some of us are interested in how chemicals work—and some of us are interested in how people work. I am INTERESTED in this.

Anyway, through many hundreds of assorted examples of this type, I have gradually acquired a good picture of the way my boss sees the situation: she sees herself trying so hard to get ANYONE to help her, and NO ONE WILL, because we DON’T CARE. We are all off partying (as opposed to handling other duties and responsibilities), while she scrambles frantically to take care of the elderly, and we WON’T HELP HER because we DON’T WANT TO WORK. It doesn’t matter if we’ve already worked ten hours that day. It doesn’t matter if she’s calling half an hour before the shift starts and very few of us just sit around twiddling our thumbs in case we’re suddenly needed at work. It doesn’t matter if we just got home from filling another shift last-minute. It doesn’t matter if we’ve made it clear we are doing the job ON PURPOSE because we WANT TO, and show up to ALL our scheduled shifts. It doesn’t matter if we’ve in fact worked more hours that week than she has. It doesn’t matter that she never fills a shift HERSELF. The way she seems to see things in her head is that we’re all off having fun while she’s trying to hold everything together all by herself.

I don’t ACTUALLY KNOW this is how she sees things. Her words and behavior are consistent with this theory, but I don’t KNOW. But this theory helps me to understand why I DREAD all interactions with her: deliberately or not, truly or not, she COMES ACROSS as someone who thinks of things this way.

I have recently put on a little weight, for unknown reasons. That is, it isn’t that I think to myself, “Well, it’s probably that new ice cream flavor I discovered—I CANNOT stay away from that,” it’s that it feels to me that I have been eating and exercising at the same rates as usual, and yet here is some extra weight, enough to bump me into the next-size-up pants. It could be aging, it could be Candy-Crush-related sloth, it could be unnoticed nibbling—WHATEVER. It’s not something I would have mentioned except I found something by accident that I wanted to pass on, in case it would work for you too in a crisis.

It happened while I was doing my hair. This requires looking in the mirror, something I would increasingly prefer to avoid. There was literally no way to hold my head that would flatter my underchin. And then I accidentally parted my hair too severely and made the whole hairdo too tight. I looked in the mirror and thought, “I look like a boy. A FAT boy.” And something about that phrasing resulted in an instinctive, immediate, internal demand to know WHAT if anything was wrong with fat boys, and it was in their defense and mine that I looked at myself fiercely and replied with hot protective indignation, “SO WHAT IF I DO?” And my chin went up and my eyes went bright and I looked so much better—but more importantly, I FELT so much better.

I have been using that reply every time I have a negative thought about my appearance. It’s a technique that, for me, nips in the bud those kinds of damaging and useless thoughts, before they really get on a roll. Standing at the mirror saying mean things to myself and making myself feeling sad isn’t going to help. So what if I look bigger? So what if I look older? So what if I look kind of lumpy in these pants? SO WHAT IF I DO?

I’m so frustrated this morning. We SWITCHED labs, AND I’ve started reminding the nurse when I call that a test kit needs to be sent as well, and we STILL arrived at the lab this morning to find no test kit. Furthermore, the lab technician said, “Yeah, I saw that when the lab orders came. I was like, We can’t do this without the kit!” What I wanted to say was “AND DID IT NOT OCCUR TO YOU TO CALL ANYONE, ANYONE AT ALL, TO MENTION THAT THERE WAS NO KIT OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.” Because of course it DID occur to her. But it was not her fault and not her job, and so she chose not to, and what would I expect her to say in response to my question? “You’re right! Next time I’ll do that!” No. She is not going to say that.

ARG.

Then, the gas light was on in the car, so we stopped for gas, and as we were leaving it occurred to me that the price had been more than double the number of gallons—but it should have been LESS than double, at $1.79/gallon. I checked my receipt, and it says I chose the highest-priced gas, which was $2.47/gallon. I have NEVER made that mistake before, NEVER. I nearly drove back to the gas station to check the buttons, but Edward was going to be late for school so I just went on ahead, but I can’t believe I paid 68 cents/gallon more than I should have, and naturally with a nearly-empty tank so it was 18 gallons. That’s over $12 wasted.

A guy who was leaving the gas station the same time as me was texting, and first he pulled out right in front of me without glancing up, and then he drove right through a red light. WHAT IS THIS MADNESS. As I was waiting in the line to drop Edward off at school, I was idly watching all the cars leaving, and SO MANY PEOPLE were texting while driving. WHY. WHY. So many times when I’m out driving I see another car weaving or repeatedly veering over the line and I think, “What is going on, are they drunk or something?” and then no, they are texting. And they MUST be unaware that they are repeatedly crossing the yellow line, or else SURELY they wouldn’t do it. But HOW are they unaware? They MUST be thinking they are driving JUST FINE. It is LITERALLY AGAINST THE LAW now to text while driving, but people are STILL DOING IT and THEY THINK THEY ARE DRIVING JUST FINE WHEN THEY ARE LITERALLY RISKING OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

I don’t know if this is common knowledge already, but if it ISN’T, I will tell you that if you find a mysterious pill, say under the bed in your teenager’s room, you can search online for the numbers/letters printed on the side of the pill and find out that it’s a perfectly unexciting prescription he took a decade ago for summer camp, and maybe you should vacuum under the bed more often.

********

I finally got out of bed tonight after lying there for an hour and a half fretting pointlessly. The fretting is miscellaneously useless (the landlord who unfairly kept our security deposit 20 years ago; the phone call I need to make; the cleaning I should do for an upcoming get-together; politics), but mostly it is about work. I feel stuck. I love the client I spend the most hours with, and I feel as if I CAN’T leave her (I don’t want to / she doesn’t want me to). I feel quite bonded to the client I spend fewer hours with, and would rather not leave her. I feel as if my employer/supervisors don’t care at all what kind of job I do as long as I don’t get them in legal trouble, and that they only care about my ability to be a warm body they can plug into the schedule, and that they feel I bother them too much with the things I am SUPPOSED to bother them about.

I am gradually learning that most of the working rules are not to protect the caregivers or the clients but to protect the company, and that we are expected to break those rules. For example, someone with my level of training is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to do any lifting over 25 pounds, which means for example that I can assist a client with balancing or some positioning or an arm under her elbow, but I cannot haul her up out of her chair, or support her body weight. I am SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED to let my employer know if a client in my care needs more help/support than I am qualified to provide. And when I DO let them know? Nothing happens. Well, I shouldn’t say “nothing”: sometimes I get a snippy defensive email that makes me sorry I said anything. It’s “You absolutely cannot haul a client to her feet” combined with “We have assigned you to a client who cannot stand up unless you haul her. YOU figure out how to move her from chair to bed. Remember: NO HAULING. We value your safety / our workers’ compensation premiums!”

We are also SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED to let the office know if, for example, a client has certain symptoms/situations for more than three days. And so if it has been three days, I let them know. Then when I go back a week later, nothing has been done and nothing has changed. I let them know that the situation is still as it was, and I get back a prickly defensive email as if I’m trying to tell them their job. They say again and again “YOU are our eyes and ears!,” so I try to be their eyes and ears, but what they really mean is “If we get in trouble for something you should have told us, we have set it up to be YOUR FAULT.” (I keep my own copies of all these times I notify them.)

And there are certain things we are NOT ALLOWED to do, such as shoveling snow and trimming fingernails, and clients request these things fairly often, and are very surprised if I say I am not supposed to do them, because the other caregivers ARE doing them, and then I feel it looks as if I am only following the rules because those rules get me out of having to do work, when that is not at all my motivation.

There continue to be so many calls to fill shifts, even though I can TELL they are making an effort to call me WAY LESS, and I do appreciate that. There are also emails that go company-wide, and use very annoying terms such as “step up” to refer to volunteering to take additional shifts, and add annoying phrases such as “or else our clients cannot receive the care they deserve.” If we don’t have enough staff to cover shifts, more staff needs to be hired. I dislike having it implied that we are shirking our duty or neglecting our clients if we don’t take the extra hours. Shall I send the COMPANY an email asking them to “step up” and recruit/hire more staff, “or else our clients cannot receive the care they deserve”? (And if they’re finding it hard to retain staff, which they ARE, perhaps I could offer a few hints for improving employee morale.)

I feel incompatible with my bosses’ values and priorities. I feel as if I am an extremely good employee in all the ways that SHOULD matter (bonding with the clients, really truly wanting to make their lives easier and better, really truly wanting to do a good job and be a good value for their money), and that instead I am considered a mediocre employee because I am not very concerned about making my bosses’ lives easier by filling extra last-minute shifts and not bothering them with issues. And I also DO make their lives easier by showing up reliably for all my shifts and doing a good job, but that doesn’t seem to count at all: if it’s not something they have to worry about, it’s not something they give credit for.

I should say that after I had a talk with one of my supervisors, she really does seem as if she is TRYING to be considerate of the things I mentioned to her. But I think the problem is that she doesn’t understand it at all: she’s such a different temperament type, it’s like she’s trying hard to remember that a particular employee doesn’t want her to use pronouns. She’s TRYING, but she’s an extrovert, a phone person, a doesn’t-hurt-to-ask person, an everything-is-always-a-special-exceptional-emergency-without-noticing-it-happens-constantly person, a what’s-the-difference-if-you’re-working-for-Client-A-or-Client-B,-it’s-the-same-work-either-way person, an always-putting-out-fires-without-ever-working-on-fire-prevention person.

Anyway. You guys have come up with a lot of good ideas already (changing to a different company, going into private service, working for a nursing home instead, working more hours for fewer clients, thinking of this as temporary / a learning experience / good practice, etc.), so I guess this is more a status-update vent about how I’m feeling about things now. I feel as if I know my options, but that I don’t know which one I should do.

1. Stick with it. Keep doing the parts I like and find satisfying. Try to avoid/ignore the parts I don’t like and find infuriating/frustrating/upsetting. Think of all of it as good experience. Maybe get more training. Realize that ALL jobs have bad parts mixed with the good parts, and many have this very combination of satisfying work + impossible supervisors, and in fact many instead have the combination of unsatisfying work + impossible supervisors.

2. Quit. Maybe all at once, or maybe quit gradually by agreeing to go only to the clients I currently have, until they, er, no longer need care. But basically come to the conclusion that this is in many ways the right job for me, but is in more ways the wrong job for me. Start all over with the job-figuring-out process. Maybe don’t try to find something Meaningful this time (my friend Surely and I have a theory that difficult/crazy people are PARTICULARLY drawn to jobs where they can exploit people who care: teachers, caregivers, people in medical fields, people working for charitable or not-for-profit causes, etc.), and instead find something that doesn’t make me fret and stress and feel upset so much. Maybe don’t find anything at all, because so much additional stress is coming from trying to balance work with everything else.

3. Stay in the field, but make a change. I don’t think a nursing home would be more satisfying: one of my co-workers did that for two years, and says it’s mostly the parts I don’t find as satisfying, like bathing and toileting and dressing, but all in a big rush, with too many clients per caregiver. Good time flow, but depressing and sad; she said she switched to home care because she couldn’t keep saying, “I’m so sorry, I have to go” to lonely elderly people. I don’t think I want to do private care: I like being under a company’s insurance in case something goes wrong, and I like having staff nurses to consult, and I like not having to find someone to cover my shifts, and I like not having to figure out the taxes. I don’t really want to get further nursing training. That leaves changing to a different company, but I SUSPECT that the problems I’m finding at this company are pretty similar at other companies.

4. Don’t make any decisions for now. This is probably what I’m going with. Just…stick with it for now, with no real plans either way, until a plan seems clear. It’s a Job In The Hand, and that is valuable. Right now I have dropped to 8-10 hours a week, which is very little (though it’s spread over 4-5 days, so it feels as if I go to work a lot), and with only two usual clients, and this feels sustainable for now. (I could go for more hours to either of those two clients, if I wanted to; right now I don’t want to, for various reasons.) I DO like parts of it. I DO think I was going pretty crazy without a job. I DO leave my shifts feeling good, generally. I DON’T want to start over finding something new. I COULD stand more practice in not caring what employers think WHEN THEY’RE WRONG.

While figuring out a set of dates, I realized that when one of my clients was my age, I WAS NOT YET BORN. Then I realized that was true for ALL my clients: when they were my age, I was not born. Isn’t that weird to think about, that the caregivers who will care for us in our elderly years may not even be ON THE PLANET yet?

The DOCTORS who will care for us in our elderly years may not yet be here! They will be born, they will be potty-trained, they will go through the many years of elementary school and middle school and high school, they will go into college and then medical school, they will do all those other years of training, and they will do ALL of that long after we were already full-grown adults doing our full-grown-adult thing. No wonder older adults peer suspiciously at their young whippersnapper doctors. This child was so recently in diapers; why does she think she can lecture me about my cholesterol? I had cholesterol before she was even BORN!

I’m not sure how I heard of Twenty Feet from Stardom (Netflix link), about backup singers. I remember jotting the name of it down while at work, so I think what happened was something on TV mentioned some old footage of David Bowie found on this documentary.

(image from Amazon.com)

ANYWAY, the upshot is that I watched it, and I recommend it. It’s not so much that I found it particularly riveting (though I was interested all the way through), but more that it was about a whole industry I don’t think I ever gave a minute’s thought. And now, when I’m listening to the radio, I’m NOTICING the backup singers, and I didn’t notice them before, so it feels like I made a permanent change in how I hear music, and that’s kind of neat for a 90-minute investment of time.

Now I’m reading Can I Say, by Travis Barker of Blink-182, so I am continuing the musical theme.

(image from Amazon.com)

It’s what I like in an autobiography: a nice mix of name-dropping, personal tidbits, behind-the-scenes, shocking behavior, and transparent self-delusion. I like how the other people in his life contributed pieces of text, so you read along for awhile, and then he mentions meeting a great girl, and then there’s a section written by that girl. Or he mentions a bandmate or friend, and then there’s a section written by that bandmate or friend.

I had no idea that he and Tom DeLonge put out an album as Box Car Racer, and Tom DeLonge is my favorite Blink-182 singer, so I’ve been having fun listening to those videos on YouTube.

And there are a ton of bands referenced in the book, so I keep going to my computer to hear samples of what they sound like. And then in those songs, I notice the backup singers.

I mentioned I’ve been getting rid of some of stuff, and it’s been satisfying. I’m trying to keep up the motivation to even toss, say, one lipstick, or one pair of earrings. Sometimes it can feel as if there’s no point getting rid of one item out of a hundred, but there IS a point to it, SEVERAL points:

1. It GETS RID OF THE ONE THING. Which is better than getting rid of NO things.

2. It keeps the momentum going. If I get rid of one pair of earrings I am just never going to wear, I get a little bit of that good feeling that can come from bringing order to chaos / lessening the oppression. That can motivate me to get rid of that lip balm the dentist gave me (I don’t like the flavor), a cup full of the candy canes that were still on the Christmas tree when we took it down, and a pen that doesn’t write well. Over time, this ADDS UP—and can help bolster bigger projects such as going through the filing cabinet, or packing up a batch of handmedowns.

3. There was something else, but that second point got too long and now I’ve forgotten.

My parents have been getting rid of stuff at their house too. Two downsides:

1. It’s increasing the level of stuff at MY house.

2. My mom and I like to go shopping, but neither of us feels much inclined to purchase things when we’re working to get RID of things. I guess you could call this an upside, and OH, in fact this was meant to be point three above: Continually getting rid of things helps motivate me not to continually acquire more things. But it does take some of the fun out of the shopping trips.

Here’s something else I’ve been thinking about. We talked about using the good stuff (one of my favorite comments sections ever), and I was thinking afterward, sometimes we don’t use the good stuff because we don’t want to waste it or the occasion doesn’t feel special enough, but SOMETIMES we don’t use the good stuff because we don’t LIKE it and don’t WANT to. And THAT’S a good thing to notice TOO, because sometimes our unused good stuff can do better work at someone else’s house, which can also be a huge relief to us and our storage spaces.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is this silly phenomenon: the “I have to use up this stuff I don’t like before I can use the stuff I like better.” Sometimes that’s a good policy, if we know ourselves and know that if we don’t make ourselves use up one bottle of conditioner before we start the next one, soon the entire ledge of the tub will be lined with 1/8ths-full bottles of conditioner. But SOMETIMES it’s more like a bottle of conditioner that makes our hair look greasy, or the set of 240 address labels I ordered, the ones that turned out to be ugly. But I’ve been using them on bills, month after month, because I feel as if I have to use them up before I move on to one of the five or six sets of address labels I DO like.

At the rate I send snail mail, this is going to take some time. What if I were to…put the labels I don’t like in the trash? And use the ones I like instead? This is wasteful, it IS: no one else can use those labels. But 240 labels takes up four sheets of paper. It’s a waste, but it is a small waste. And if I spend years using these, pushing all my other labels ahead of me down the line and working with, let’s face it, a limited amount of time—I could spend three years using the bad labels, and die with three years of good labels waiting to be used. I could just SWAP those: either way, four sheets of labels get wasted, but in one scenario it’s the labels I like, and in the other scenario it’s the labels I don’t. That’s it, those labels are going in the trash.

I don’t know if it’s this way in all school systems, but in our school system there is a big change between 8th grade and 9th: up through 8th grade, a parent must go into the school and sign a child out, if the child is leaving school mid-day (like for a doctor appointment); but as of 9th, the parent can wait in the car, and the school lets the child walk right out at the time the parent pre-arranged. If you try to go in to fetch your child, the school secretary raises her eyebrows at you with amused pity, as if she is seeing you try to hold your 11th grader’s hand to cross a street.

It is an odd and sudden shift, and there is nothing about it in the handbook: you find out the first time you try to go in. That first time it’s embarrassing, but then after that it’s really lovely not to have to go in anymore. (I ITCH to be allowed to re-write the school handbooks, though. It would not be difficult to write a paragraph here and there to tell parents what is expected of them so that they don’t have to hear it from the secretary’s eyebrows.)

The other day, however, I did have to go in, because it was more than five minutes past the pre-arranged time and my child had not yet appeared. After a consultation with the school secretary, I was invited to wait out in the lobby for the child to emerge. While waiting in the lobby with very little to do, I tried to look casual by faking interest in the plaques up on the walls.

There was a really big one, put up to commemorate the people who were involved in the building of the school in the 1960s. It was super fancy, with people’s names in raised metal letters. And on this plaque, all the women’s names were instead the names of those women’s husbands, with a “Mrs.” tacked onto the front.

I have been cranky ever since, with a low simmering rage-ennui that is not passing off. The women’s own names were COMPLETELY NOT THERE AT ALL. There is no way to even know who they were, except to look up their husbands’ records and find out who those husbands were married to during the year the plaque was made! What a crappy, crappy, CRAPPY system someone came up with, and how TRULY SHOCKING it is that anyone willingly participated in it, ESPECIALLY in the name of it being the polite and proper way to do things.

When my mother-in-law was alive, she addressed my mail to “Mrs. My Son’s Full Name” just as if that were a reasonable etiquette-based thing to do and not a practice that fully redefines a woman’s identity as “whoever is currently married to this man.” It’s a system that uses one person’s name as the primary identification for that person and ALSO for A TOTALLY SEPARATE PERSON. It takes THE WHOLE POINT OF NAMES, which is to tell one person apart from another person, and OBLITERATES IT. But only for married women. Everyone else gets their own names. It makes me want to drop Paul’s surname and go back to my own family name. I really might.

I will say again that this plaque was made in the 1960s, which was only about 50 years ago. And many women still prefer to be addressed as “Mrs. Husband’s Name.” It’s so hard to imagine any man thinking it was the polite and proper thing to do to give up his bachelor’s name and go by “Mr. Catherine Wife’sFamilyName,” or that he would find that a reasonable way to be recognized in raised metal letters for his contributions.