Of Angels and Devils

Well, devils come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them even manage to look like us. We wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, and we think that it is “we” staring back, but there is really a devil in there. It’s easy to see the devil in others. Our co-workers, our relatives, and the assholes that call themselves drivers, the jerks in the stores, those evil bastards that run corporations and those in government offices… Yes, the devil of it (no pun intended) is to see the devil in us. Children have a way of letting you see the devil in yourself. Oh, sometimes it’s because you’re tired, or sometimes it’s because you just don’t want to give away one more single piece of yourself, but a cross word or lack of suitable excitement at a crucial moment (or what they think is a crucial moment) or an extremely grouchy command hurled their way has a way of haunting you at night, or in the day, on the way to work. You just sit there feeling defeated. Sad and defeated in the face of one more day in the life; the miserable family life. Success meets its match in family living. Whether it’s your parents or your children, failure is a fairly regular feeling. It’s too much really, all these expectations we have of one another. Parents are the same buggers they always were the patterns are set and the relationships don’t change even over time. And children, well, children are like an impossible standard set by someone long, long ago. And it all usually all comes to a head at holiday time.

When you first start out, you want to do everything so right. For the baby. Then as the reality of the task sets in you start to associate yourself with Sisyphus. After a while you start to have some sympathy for those individuals you read about who go nuts and shoot their whole families or those who wander away from home and turn up in another city with a case of amnesia. The amount of energy required to get through the daily tasks is enormous. It’s never quite enough of anything and very discouraging. Children have far too much useless energy and parents not enough of it. We come home from work wrung out and ready for the day to end, and they come home from school with a backpack full of papers, homework that you ultimately end up doing, and just enough energy to create chaos, disorder and mayhem before bedtime. Whenever I feel like I’m sorry I had them, I feel like God is just waiting to take them from me in a horrible and vengeful way, a wandering psychopath, or child molester, an accident or drowning. Something that I’m sure will ruin me for the rest of my life and leave me wishing I were a better, more loving, kinder, more generous mother who had more energy and better craft projects. But the truth is I’m not sure I’m cut out for the job. I don’t seem to find it as easy as other people seem to, and sometimes I really don’t like them very much at all. Especially when my older daughter acts too much like her Father and my younger daughter acts too much like me. I hate it when they act like brats, when they don’t realize the sacrifices I seem to be making all the time, and don’t appreciate anything they already have at all. I hate it when I have to feel like I’m choosing between my life and theirs and I feel like that a lot. Who deemed that once they came along my life was over? Who wants to feel like an empty shell of something that once was? And why do I feel like a devil for feeling this way?

It’s a little after midnight. I’ve just finished a killer murder mystery that I started sometime after 8 pm. It’s like that when the kids are with Bob. I get a hold of a good book, and I can’t stop. I close my eyes and stare into the dark inside of my lids. I listen to the ticking of the bathroom clock and I take stock. I’m forty-one. I am a single mother and Registered Nurse. Both are two really, really bad things to be. As a nurse you are abused, overworked and unappreciated. As a single mother you are abused, overworked and unappreciated. Hmm-mm, I’m starting to see a pattern here, but my brain isn’t catching fire. I’ve made it a habit in my short lifetime to analyze the hell out of myself, if for no other reason than to find out why my life sucks so much. I think of my kids, their breath taking beauty. I think about their soft skin and the way they smelled when they were babies. I think about this crazy rotten world and think about all the sick bastards in it and I know that if anyone ever harmed them I would kill them, and then kill myself if they were gone. I know that no matter how tired, cranky, upset or evil minded they make me, they have changed my life forever and I would be a self absorbed neurotic nothing without them in it. Kids are like footprints in a pristine wilderness. Once they come along the landscape of your life is changed forever, and if they were to suddenly be gone, the wind would howl with the sound of their absence.

I think about our future and wonder what the hell I am going to do. I never intended to have kids; much less all by myself and I just can’t put all the pieces together. I hate my job with a passion that threatens to border on depression if I would let it. I now work as a surgical nurse in a small suburban hospital called K****** **** (yeah, that K*****) the K***** of one square mile and what the fuck am I still doing near it much less working in it K*****. The hospital I started in over ten years ago. Now surgical nurse is a term that sounds really, really cool and exotic…like domestic engineer. Until you realize that it’s a bullshit term like….domestic engineer. Until you realize that it is just some meaningless title that sounds good and means nothing. Like the titles they throw at the employees of banks instead of money, so someone can be elevated to the title of, “Vice President in charge of Poop Cleaning” and not receive much of a raise with their yearly performance review. At least they can tell their mother’s that they are a Vice President. As a surgical nurse I am neither surgical nor a nurse. I am a technician, a roadie for some flatulent, ego-loaded prick with the distinction of being able to carve people up, legally. I am expected to haul, tote, bow and scrape. I am presumed to know nothing and am expected to park my brain at the doors of the surgical suite. I have the distinction of wearing a surgical mask, but hey, so does Michael Jackson. Come to think of it, I think I’d rather be the Vice President in charge of Poop Cleaning. I could regal you with tales from the OR crypt but in essence it boils down to routine, mind numbing boredom interspersed with stomach turning stress when some wacko doctor turns from Jekyll into Hyde because things aren’t going his way. One of the nurses referred to it as the salt mines, but I like to think of it more like a labor camp – only we get to take breaks and we get paid. We shuffle around in blue pajama-like scrub suits that flatter no one and spend most of our time waiting for the day to be over. If you have been there a hundred years you usually have your niche, and if you haven’t you get the fun of playing with all the left over creeps no one wants to work with. The most psychotic anesthesiologists, the worst scrub techs, and the ego loaded jackasses with foul moods who call themselves surgeons, not to mention the nurses that nobody likes.

Aside from one particular anesthesiologist who really rings my bell, I hated the job from the day I said, “I do” and have been looking for a way to get a divorce ever since. Hey, wait a minute; I’m sensing one more of those pattern things. Shit, I really wish I could figure this whole “life sucks” thing out. I’m starting to think I’m missing something big, here.

The past several years have been a bitch. Actually I think it’s been the past 39 years. Yeah, that’s about right. I figure things pretty much went downhill after two years old. So, I end up hitting the wall, so to speak, only this time I’ve “been there, done that” and decide to go to a counselor. I went through Employee Assistance so it was free and end up with a former surgical nurse as a counselor! Now if that isn’t the Universe, what is? So she understands my shitty life, of course, thank God. I add her to my yoga regimen, since up till now it’s been the only thing keeping me from going under. And pretty soon, instead of jumping from the frying pan, I’m actually sitting and thinking, like they say in yoga “making micro movements to be able to hold the posture.” At least long enough for this sequence to work itself out.

This doesn't sound as useless as it sounds initially. There is something really crazy about the things Yoga teachers say. I'm not sure what it is but whatever they say when you are doing all those movements and postures just happens to start making sense after a while, I don't really know why, but it works on you and then it works in you. So after a while something starts to take hold and I start "thinking."

I begin with myself. For one thing, I get the hell out of the OR. Like life isn't miserable enough, the last thing I need to do is have trouble getting out of bed in the morning to go to work. I think about staying for the sake of being around “the bell-ringer anesthesiologist” but ultimately I hold my nose and jump off the cliff, sort of anyhow. I post out for a part-time day job in the ICU at K***** (yeah, part-time). Well, if this isn't “deja vu all over again”, I don't know what is. K***** ******, part-time. I started off that way, didn't I? So to fill in my ailing bank account I get another part-time job working in an office tower for a group of Neurologists which really turns out to be just as bad as it sounds. The up side is it's great to be back in ICU and thank God I finally feel like I'm doing something useful and challenging again. The downside is I miss “the anesthesiologist” big-time. Its one thing to have a head connection with someone, its one thing to have a soul connection and another to have a body connection, but it is so rare to have all three at once. He was so nice to be around. But, what can you do, he was married and I was harried, so be it.

The other down side is I really do hate this hospital; my ICU Nurse Manager is a baboon and, I just can’t keep scraping by financially like this. The Nurse manager at D*** turns out to be a cross between Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, she can’t keep her legs closed and pops pills and snorts coke like there’s no tomorrow. And while its fun to see if she will end up coming to work or not every day, I can see the writing on the wall - in neon sign.

The good thing about D*** is Donna. Donna is “Britney’s” secretary. Donna introduces me to Robin. Robin is a scary looking African-American-witch-doctor psychic. She scares the shit out of me by asking me why I’m not in school - while I’m on the phone making an appointment to see her for the first time. I stutter and sputter some lame excuse about the kids, and end up calling UB the next day; because, in truth, I had been thinking about it for years. So I enroll. Life! Never a dull moment.

Donna gets hit with some fall-out shrapnel and loses her job when “Britney” finally gets the axe, I quit in protest and now we are sisters in the soul. God ends up rewarding me for enduring the ICU Manager’s Baboon-like ways and I land a week-end only position in the ER.

I work every week-end and get paid for three days of twelve hour shifts – practically full-time hours!

I dutifully put in my time at UB and manage to get in two classes a semester toward my BSN, while I decide what Master’s program to apply for after graduation. Life is good, sorta. I even try to take out some of the vitriol out of the remaining relationship Bob and I are left with. It’s all good, right?

At The End Of The Day

Though his official name, etched on a glinty gold mouse shaped tag, is Mr. Jones; I have summarily nicknamed him “The Belly”. Mr. Jones has a soft pouchy, udder-like belly that appeared about three months after the ravages of the street began to fade from his demeanor. Thereabouts he also began to groom himself. Before long his beauty came out in such magnitude that awestruck visitors often asked if that was the same cat that was brought in several months back. His coat became a luxurious brownish black and his belly became not only quite a novel source of amusement for me but also an open door to his innermost affections. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only one who plays with his udder-like belly. He’s not aloof, just cautious, and most people are too brusque to discover his quiet charms. I, however, spend an inordinate amount of time brooding, and that is conducive to forming a well-laid foundation for cat affections. He will loom above me, silent and staring, waiting for a flicker of response. Usually, I will roll over and reach for his belly, which sends him into chirs of ecstasy and me out of my doldrums. If I don’t respond in a suitable amount of time, a furry head butt usually does the trick. On rare occasions he must resort to a mixed bag of feline antidepressant remedies: an audible mraou, a double-eyed squint, a flick of the tail, or a bat of the paw. He is my friend. He, who has a cat for a friend, has a friend, indeed.

Cat fed, duty done; I returned upstairs. This was the part of the day where it all unravels.

My clock springs wind down, baby’s in bed, cats fed, and I lay there wondering if I have the ability, the strength - the grace from God to do it all again the next day. I sometimes wonder what would happen if that answer was no. I sometimes wonder why that answer isn’t no. I often think about our friend, Joel, who committed suicide last year. I understand why. I’ve often thought about it myself. I never realized the finality of it until he did it. I wish he hadn’t. I wonder if he wishes he hadn’t.

For some reason, known only to my subconscious mind, I find myself thinking about an old boyfriend. Actually, I’m thinking about the night sky, the immensity of the stars and of broken hearts. He was Canadian. I like Canadian’s the way I like cats. I know they’re different from me, but I like them just the same. He was tall and thin, wore the thickest glasses I had ever seen, was brilliantly musical, intelligent and quite sensitive; an engineering student and a professional musician. For a while it was blissful and I had begun to think in terms of “contentment”. One summer week we went up to a lake cabin owned by his family. It was 200 miles North of Toronto. It was one of the most wild and beautiful places I had ever seen. Our city saturated eyes soaked in the night sky. Without streetlights, skyscrapers, cars, traffic signals, stores, malls, and buildings of every kind, the night sky reached from one end of the horizon to the other. I had never seen so much sky; I didn’t know it was possible, every inch of it full of stars. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t breathe right, I was actually afraid and had to sit down. I felt dizzy from the stars reaching to the ground all around me. I felt small, and as all power drained out of my body I first sat, then lay down, to take it all in.

We spent every night lying on the dock, head to head looking up at the sky, soaking it in, angry at the cities for stealing the view.

I never wanted to leave. One day we decided to take a canoe trip across the lake.

We arose early, the mist laid heavy on the water and the spruce trees loomed ominous in the gray dawn. It was like a painting done by one of the Group of Seven. I heard the most unusual sound, my first loon. We paddled out into the Plexiglas water, thick and still. All went well, until a hornet started buzzing around me. Now, I have fears like anyone else, some are quite irrational, some quite exaggerated. My fear of flying stinging things is both. I made the grievous error of standing up. Being a city girl unknown to me was why the expression “tippy canoe” existed. We ended up in the water, as the last audible protests emitted from my soon-to-be-former boyfriend’s mouth. Unfortunately he was wearing glasses; fortunately his hand came in contact with them in the water, and he rescued them from their potential watery grave. What happened next was one of the most deplorable things to ever happen to me. He came up startled and sputtering, looking at me in a way that implied none of what he should have, he fixed a gaze on me that even in memory, still chills. “You, Dick!” he yelled. I stared at him in amazement. I could not even speak. What had he called me! A filthy, vile word! The irreparable damage had been done, and in that moment my heart had broken. I felt it as clearly as one would feel a bone break. My heart broke open, and all my love spilled out. We walked through the water and sat on the edge of a sandy shore, miles from the cabin. Wet and cold, we shivered and stared at each other. I was too numb to cry, but my face betrayed all the pain I felt. We silently made our way back to the cabin to change clothes. All the life was drained out of me and I knew it was time to go back home. It was one of the saddest moments I have ever had in my life.

I don’t trust anyone who says he’s never thought about committing suicide.

Life is full of hard, despairing moments that cause you to lose hope, faith and love.

Sometimes you wonder. I don’t trust anyone who says that point has never come, the point of wondering. I thought about that as I remembered Joel.

I miss Joel. His death was a horrible nightmare made all the more horrible by the way it was done. Not so much in the way he ended his life, but the facts that emerged afterward indicating how long he had planned it. As near as we can guess, the plan was in the works for at least six months, maybe a year. That was the shock of it. All that time and he never asked anyone for help, methodically and systematically ridding himself of his material belongings, purging personal letters, files and papers. The end came swiftly in a weekend spent mailing packages to his friends; the last item on the list. Once packages started arriving everyone knew something was terribly wrong. A search ensued to no avail, he had already been found early that morning by the police.

What gets me, what really gets me, is that I knew. Walking in to Robert’s apartment one day, I saw stacks of cassette tapes in boxes everywhere. I asked him what was going on and he told me Joel had given them to him. Immediately, I went into a panic, I knew he was thinking of suicide. I recognized something familiar in his actions. I knew because I had seen it, felt it, in myself; the need to distribute ones belongings according to the need to give it, or to a person's preferences. When I saw him next, I pounced on him. He laughed it off with an explanation that I had to except, but that still made me uneasy. At the time I didn’t know about the other distributions: other tapes, fishing equipment, items to friends who would appreciate or need them. Anyway soon we were busy packing, moving and giving birth. Time slipped by and Joel was still around. Still, I never quite looked at him without wondering. When the call came from a concerned friend, something inside of me already knew it was too late. The shame of it was he could have called anybody, anyone he knew and he or she would have been there; he wasn’t alone. Why do we always feel we’re so alone? He wasn’t alone.