Random Thoughts

You can’t fire me, I quit.

Today I quit a job.

It took me a month to get up the nerve to quit. During that month, I struggled to do something that felt like building a pyramid out of dry sand.

Lesson #1: Writing a “software manual” requires more skills than merely an excellent command of the English language. If that’s all the job description requires, someone’s either unclear on what they really want in an employee, or–worse yet–unclear on what they want the employee to do.

I ought to have known better. I ought to have given taking the job more thought. Instead, I applied for it in what best can be described panic, at the beginning of what would become a rather intense descent into generalized anxiety disorder. I didn’t even consider whether I could do the job, or should attempt to do the job, I just jumped at the opportunity.

Time was, all I needed was my natural grit and assertiveness; it got me more than one job in the past, starting with my first retail job in a bookstore at age 16. The bookstore manager told me that he hired me because he was afraid not to–I acted like I already had the job. That’s the way I was, confident, capable.

Fast forward thirty years. I’m older, wiser, much more experienced, and I know what I can do with the skills I have. I ought to be confident and capable in spades, with reason. But I worried that this writing job was beyond me in more than just skills. Never mind the warning thoughts, they were willing to hire me after a brief phone conversation, and so without further consideration I accepted the offer.

Lesson #2: Just because someone is willing to hire you sight unseen does not mean the job is a good fit for you.

Nevertheless, I soldiered on. It became immediately apparent that the person who hired me–the company’s Vice President of Marketing–had no clear idea of what he wanted me to create. His idea was for me to completely learn all facets of the software in question, and once I was totally familiar with it, to write a user manual. Except that he didn’t want me to write about all the features, so really it would be more of an overview. Except that it would include details on how to use the features. And it wouldn’t involve the actual users, only investors and clients. Except that there would be a section for the actual users.

With each discussion, the parameters changed.

Lesson #3: Make sure the task for which you are hired is clearly defined before you begin it.

Part of my material came from a manual already created by a company staff member–a manual the VP knew nothing about (even though it had been circulated and he had received a copy). Other staff members indicated they couldn’t understand the purpose behind what I was writing; it seemed unnecessary to them. As I attempted to gather data, my emails were unanswered, my phone calls not returned. Despite the VP sending his own emails to his staff, my requests were ignored.

Finally the stress of trying to turn dry sand into a pyramid became unbearable. With the advice of friends, and the urging of my therapist, I decided it was time to let the job go.

Lesson #4: When you take a job, make sure you have a written contract. Naively, ignorantly, stupidly, I did not.

The response I had from the VP when I emailed him my resignation along with the file containing the result of my hours of labor was typically angry, and downright punitive. Despite submitting invoices, I had not yet received any pay. Now, the VP said, he would deduct all the hours I spent in the office and multiply that by 2 to recompense the cost of what he called “training.”

Watching someone use a computer isn’t training. Training would have been being given access, as I repeatedly requested to no avail, to a functional version of the software. Whatever. He’s bitter that he didn’t get what he wanted, whatever it was that he wanted, which I honestly think even he does not know. He just knows that what I gave him needs more graphics, and an index, and he isn’t going to get any help from his own staff in finishing it.

I learned some valuable lessons. And even if I don’t get paid, at least I didn’t have to spend money on this job. Other than the cost of gas to get to and from that office, and the hours spent there and working on the manual, when I could have been doing something–anything–else.

Most importantly, I learned that sometimes sheer guts aren’t enough. At least not right now, when caution and forethought would have been a lot more useful.

I don’t know what job I will attempt next. I’m not going to worry about it now. I am going to spend the next four weeks with my daughter, helping her get ready for college. When she has left, when my home is empty of all but myself, my husband, and our youngest son, then I will see what is out there for me to do. And I will make sure it’s something within the hours I am able to work, something that I really can do, that is clearly defined, and with terms between the employer and myself spelled out in writing.

Lessons learned.

Perhaps it does taste like chicken.

I’m a big fan of Farmers’ Markets. Having been to Italy, I’m also a big fan of porchetta, and other savory meats sold by vendors in open air venues. When I’m in Seattle, I jump at the chance to buy fish at Pike Place Market. If it’s fresh caught or if it’s freshly butchered, I’m all over it.

This however is something else altogether.

It’s fresh meat allright. Fresh rat meat. According to Reuters,

The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday.

They’re not only eating rats by the thousands, they’re paying about 63 cents a pound for them. That seems cheap until you realize that the Cambodian average annual income is about $290.

Under those conditions, rats just might be their sirloin steak.

As I contemplate my own economic future, it seems ridiculous–no, downright offensive–to consider it in any way precarious. I could be homeless and penniless in America, and I still would not have to eat rats.

As the candidates for president pontificate about how bad things are in America these days, while Joe Biden tells us that America’s economic situation is “abysmal,” maybe we could all take a step back and really consider what it’s like to live in America.

Nobody here is buying skinned rats for dinner.

Pain’s easiest salve…

In my continued quest for renewed health, I have considered something that ought to be obvious: Sleep.

This is a typical night for me:

11:30 PM Go to bed. Read for about 15 minutes. Turn out light, fall asleep shortly before 12:00 AM.

1:40 AM Husband decides to come to bed, making enough noise and motion to fully awaken me. Spend about fifteen minutes trying to fall asleep again. Finally doze off.

4:46 AM Awaken for no apparent reason. Toss and turn for more than half an hour, finally dozing off again about 5:30 AM. Aware that it’s only a matter of time before youngest dog begins to whine then bark to be let out, I don’t fully go back to sleep.

6:03 AM Youngest dog begins whining to go outside. I get out of bed, go downstairs and let her and the other two dogs out, feed them, then go back upstairs.

6:24 AM Go back to bed, feeling exhausted, drowse for about half an hour.

7:05 AM Jolt awake when husband’s alarm clock goes off, blaring a talk radio station at full volume approximately three feet from my head. After about ten eternal seconds, husband hits snooze button, silencing alarm. Manage to close my eyes, after about ten minutes I get my breathing back under control.

7:15 AM Jolt fully awake again as husband’s alarm clock goes off again. Really exhausted now and shaking, pull pillow over head to muffle talk radio voices. Shove husband with foot until he hits the snooze button again.

7:25 AM Alarm clock blares once more. Stumble out of bed, head throbbing, wondering why I feel like someone took a baseball bat to me.

Well DUH.

It’s not exactly breaking news that sleep problems and depression are connected. But I’m a product of the all-nighter college years, the get-up-every-three-hours baby raising years, and the general sleep-is-a-waste-of-time society I live in. For the better part of my adult life, I’ve given myself short shrift when it came to sleep.

And now I’m paying for it. A recent study explored just how much effect lack of sleep has on a healthy person (never mind on someone like me, who’s already physically drained).

But what if you do sleep, just not enough?

That’s the focus of an NIH-funded study at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine, where four paid volunteers get wired up with electrodes and spend a week and a half sequestered in a dimly lit hospital suite. They have to stay awake until 4 a.m., then are woken up at 8 a.m. for five nights in a row. Then they’re given tests to measure the effects of what’s called “chronic partial sleep deprivation.”

“So what are you finding? What kind of effect does just four hours a night have?” Stahl asks David Dinges, the scientist in charge of the Penn study.

“Well, the first finding, and it stunned us, was there’s a cumulative impairment that develops in your ability to think fast, to react quickly, to remember things. And it starts right away,” Dinges says. “A single night at four hours or five hours or even six, can in most people, begin to show affects in your attention and your memory and the speed with which you think. A second night it gets worse. A third night worse. Each day adds an additional burden or deficit to your cognitive ability.”

It gets better.

“We took a group of young college undergraduates and we deprived them of sleep for about 35 hours straight. And then we placed them inside a MRI scanner and we showed them increasingly negative and disturbing images,” says Matthew Walker, who devised a study to look at what was going on inside their brains. “And what we found was that in those people who had a good night of sleep, the control group, they showed a nice, modest, controlled response in their emotional centers of the brain.”

“But, when we looked in the sleep deprived subjects, instead, what we found is a hyperactive brain response,” he says.

And what’s more, in the sleep-deprived subjects, Walker discovered a disconnect between that over-reacting amygdala (a region of the brain) and the brain’s frontal lobe, the region that controls rational thought and decision-making, meaning that the subjects’ emotional responses were not being kept in check by the more logical seat of reasoning. It’s a problem also found in people with psychiatric disorders.

“So you’re saying that you take someone with a severe mental disorder and a person without that disorder, but deprive them of sleep, and the brain scan will look similar?” Stahl asks.

“Their pattern of brain activity was not dissimilar. So I think what it forces us to do really now is to appreciate more significantly the role that sleep may be playing in mental health and in psychiatric diseases. And I think that could be one of the futures of the field of sleep research,” Walker replies.

By my count, I’m getting about 4-5 hours of actual sleep per night. The recommended amount of sleep for adults is 7-8 hours. I’m getting half the sleep I need, no wonder I’m half out of my mind each morning.

I’d write more on the subject, but it’s nearly 10 pm, and I’m going to go to bed.

My Mother’s Daughter

When I began this blog, I was thinking that maybe, somehow, I would recapture the zest I once had for writing.

I wanted to write something that might make others think. That might make, in some small way, a difference. Bloggers like The Anchoress inspired me with their articulate insight, and I hoped that perhaps I might emulate them.

When I began this blog, I sent the link to my husband. I hoped that he’d respond with some sort of praise. He said nothing, so I asked him a day or two later what he thought.

He said “It seems like a big waste of time.”

That hurt, but he had a point; I can’t put food on the table with this blog. And now that three of our children will be out of the house, with only one remaining at home, he believes it’s time I earned a salary again.

When my husband announced that he expected me to go back to work, the realization that all three of my oldest children will be away, living 1100 miles away from me, hit me suddenly, a blow worse than anything physical. I looked at my youngest and thought, “He will be an only child.” And I felt as though I was grieving a death. It is the end of the most significant thing I’ve ever done in my entire life: Parenting four children. I didn’t always do it well, and I wasn’t always a good parent (a few times I was a downright lousy one), but it was the one single greatest thing I’ve ever done. And I never ever regretted taking the job. I don’t want another job, just this one.

Once upon a time, I had a series of dreams for my life: Ambitions, goals, things that I really wanted to do “some day.”

The short list included;

1. Go to law school.

2. Learn to fly a single engine plane and get a pilot’s license.

3. Visit Italy.

4. Write a book and have it published.

I tried law school, and dropped out after one semester. Thanks to the experience, I have a somewhat larger vocabulary of legal terms, and $30,000 of student loan debt.

When he turned 17, I paid for my son to take flying lessons. He did well, and got to the point where he soloed.

I will never be able to attempt this; medication I must take bars me from getting the necessary medical okay to pilot a plane. Instead, I will watch my son soar as he joins the US Air Force, and one day perhaps he will pilot a plane while I am a passenger.

I took the family to Italy. It was an amazing experience, though I made a hash of the planning and put us all through some unnecessary turmoil. Nonetheless, the time I had (particularly with my two girls and my youngest son) was worth every penny, though I’ll be paying the expense off for quite awhile too.

That leaves writing the book. I have no idea if I will ever accomplish this. I did participate in Nanowrimo the year before law school, and completed a 50,000 word “novel” (using the word loosely) but that is a far cry from producing anything publishable. Part of me wants desperately to attempt this. Part of me is terrified, because attempting only to fail (like I did with law school) would be the death of my remaining dream.

Now that my children no longer need me to mother them 24/7, what am I to do with the rest of my life? What purpose is there for my days? I imagine working in an office again, and I’d rather pour coffee at Starbucks. At least I’d be able to look outside, and talk to people, and have people smile when I helped them. The idea of being in another cubicle, of being indoors from 8 to 5 every weekday while an employer shares his or her stress with me makes me feel physically sick to my stomach. I want to be home in the afternoons and evenings with my remaining son. I want to be available for him the way I wasn’t for his siblings during the years that I worked while they were small. One of my many regrets. I can’t undo my failure with them, but I can make his experience different than theirs.

I want to draw a line and say “No, this I will not do.” But I can see the numbers, and I know that my bank account is finite, and unless I earn a salary I will not be able to pay my student loan and the other bills I am responsible for (property taxes, insurance, etc.) past the next 18 months. This ought to motivate me, not terrify me. In the past I would have felt confident in taking on any appropriate job that presented itself. I would not have felt this encompassing inadequacy that swamps me now.

I have slid down into a place where sadness and loss and missed opportunities and wasted time and failure seem to color everything around me. A place where depression, panic and outright fear overcome me at times. Part of it is physiological; I’ve been unable to eat and have lost weight suddenly; I can tell when I awake in the mornings that my blood sugar is very low. Fatigue and weakness plague me throughout the day. Whether that has exacerbated my mental state, or the chemical imbalance in my brain has thrown off my entire body chemistry, I do not know. I only know that I am most certainly not myself. At times, it’s terrifying.

I hate it. I miss my normal energy and optimism, my sense that somehow there will be another chance, another choice, another path. Now though, I wonder if that thinking was only, as my husband has said, “Believing there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, and there isn’t.” He has always been the pessimist, a balance to my optimism. I fear that his ballast will now pull me under; I am empty of joy and can not counter his list of worst case scenarios.

I’m only 46. That’s not geriatric. People older than I start new careers. Beneath the fear and sadness, I know this. I know there can still be possibilities for me. I know this. My therapist said that God has good things in store for me in the future. I need to believe that. I need to feel it.

I have been praying, a lot, literally crying out to God for relief. I have to believe He hears me. He heard David; there’s surely a template for my own rescue.

I want to feel safe. To feel like I’m going to get well, because people around me won’t let me get worse. They’ll take care of me. They will help me.

I’m the one though who always does the taking care. I’m the one who gives the help. I’ve always been the one who makes sure the rest of the family gets what they need, be it a good meal or a doctor visit. In a crisis, the buck has stopped with me. Now, perhaps for the first time in 25 years, I need it to stop with my husband. I need to lean on him in a way I haven’t since our first child was born.

I told my husband what I’ve been going through (the inexplicable crying, the panic attacks at 5 am, the subsequent doctor visits, new therapist and new medication ought to have been clues). He doesn’t understand, though he’s been willing to listen. And he gave me a hug last night.

It helped.

Maybe there will be a book in this experience. God knows, something productive has to come out of so much emotional pain. I believe that, because I know I’m not the first one to go through a psychological valley like this. And there’s an odd sort of comfort in that as well.

I miss my mother. She’s been gone for a dozen years now. I was only 34 when she died. She was older than that when she gave birth to me. I think of her often, because she died in a state of profound depression. For the first time I feel some sense of understanding, some empathy with what she must have been going through.

She refused to see a doctor, and would not contact a therapist. Nobody at hand insisted she get the help that would have saved her.

That breaks my heart.

I am my mother’s daughter. But I am getting the help she did not, and I’m doing so for her sake as well as my own. I know she loved me, and I know she wouldn’t want me to repeat her mistakes. I’m getting help for my children’s sake too. I will not have them feel abandoned the way I have felt. I’m my mother’s daughter, but I am my daughters’ and sons’ mother too. And I am not through with that job yet.

Maybe Grandma shouldn’t be your babysitter…

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately. She may not have been the best grandmother in the world, but she always did what she thought best for my kids. Sometimes that meant making them eat food they hated, or refusing to let them leave the table until they finished a meal. For years I couldn’t figure out why my younger daughter, always tidy and concerned with her appearance, would insist on wearing the same underwear day after day rather than putting it in the hamper to be washed. Turns out that when my daughter was 5 or so, my mom had scolded her for putting a towel in the wash after only one use. It made a lasting impression on my daughter, that’s for sure.

My mom grew up in the depression, in a poor working class household. She never could handle waste, and washing clothing after only one use seemed wasteful to her.

She wanted my kids to appreciate what they had. She didn’t buy them games or toys, she made them clothing, sewing it herself. Thankfully, she was a good seamstress, and when they were small the kids liked wearing the pajamas, shirts and sundresses she made especially for them.

Mom had a pretty good imagination too. She knew how to tell a bedtime story, how to sing a child to sleep, and how to entertain a little one with paper and crayons or play dough.

Never in her wildest dreams though, would she have imagined doing something like this:

MARATHON, Fla. - Authorities say a grandmother was arrested for driving around the parking lot of a Marathon grocery store with her 3-year-old child sitting on the roof of the car.

Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputies were called to the Publix store Tuesday and arrested a 54-year-old woman after she was driving around with her three-year-old granddaughter on the roof of her car.

The grandmother was released from jail 15 hours later.

The woman said Thursday she would never let anything hurt her granddaughter. She says she was driving at “snail-speed” and holding the child’s leg.

Authorities say the woman told police she was giving the child some air and letting her have fun.

She faces charges of child abuse. The child is back with her mother.

I’m trying to imagine this scenario. At what point does a sober, sane, adult who presumably raised to adulthood children of her own, decide that it’s a Good Idea to put a toddler on the roof of a car? Let’s assume that Grandma set her there because she wanted to make sure the kid didn’t wander off while she hunted for her car keys. Once the keys were found, at what point does a sober, sane, competent enough to legally drive adult think that it’s a Good Idea to get in the car and begin driving it while the toddler remains on the car’s roof?

She was letting her get some air. I guess rolling down a window while the child is safely strapped into the car’s back seat wouldn’t be sufficient.

She wanted her to have some fun. I guess it would be loads of fun when the child slid off the roof. Kind of like body surfing on asphalt.

Oh, right, grandma was holding the little girl’s leg. Anyone ever try to hold onto a three year when she decides it would be fun to get away from you? It’s tough enough when you’re both on level ground. Doing it with one hand from inside a moving car while you are driving would be a nifty trick indeed.

I’ve long argued that there should be a mandatory annual road test for senior drivers. Maybe in Florida they could start this testing at age 51, and throw in a test question:

If my grandchild wants to sit on the roof of my car while I drive, it is:

A. Okay as long as I keep one hand on her leg.

B. Okay as long as I stay off the freeway and drive at “snail speed.”

C. Both A and B.

D. Grounds for having me committed to a mental institution.