Year: 2018

We went to Edda’s IEP meeting this morning.  This was the first meeting with her new team at the high school.  These folks have been working with Edda for about 5-6 weeks now, so they are learning about Edda’s strengths and quirks.  (She hates art.) We signed a piece of paper which said that Edda was not going to get a high school diploma, rather she was going to get a certificate of completion, the form also said that she would get modified standard assessments.  Both of those were fine, I’m at peace with not getting a high school diploma.  They crossed out the two other options on the form, one was consenting to the use of restraints and the other was the use of isolation.  You know, Rett Syndrome sucks and everything would be so much better if Edda didn’t have Rett Syndrome, but it’s also kind of like – oh, thank goodness we are not in the restraint/isolation-procedures-at-school territory.  They tried to cut some services, we (meaning Jeremy) gently held our ground.  At the end of the meeting, the transition specialist came to talk to us about adult services.  Edda’s going to be able to go to high school until she’s 21.  And then we enter the world of adult services – something that is daunting, but will happen as sure as time marches on.  They are trying to help us along, even though I don’t want to think about it at all.  The transition person said that our goal for the next couple of years should be to just go to various community meetings that discuss DDA services and financial planning and other things (demystifying Medicaid! exciting.) offered by various organizations and not really do anything else, so by the time you’ve heard it 3-4 times, one will be over the denial and ready to do something.

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Ever since I lived in Austin, I have a soft spot in my heart for country music.  I’ve been liking this song recently.

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Do you know how many times a day I’m asked at the hospital where I’m from?  Like 17,000.  Hey Doris – where are you from?  Usually it’s a patient, but sometimes it’s staff.  I know lots of Asian people hate this question, but really, I don’t mind if it’s asked with the right tone and usually it is.  Though I do like messing with them.  I first tell them “I was born in Baltimore.” which is true but entirely unsatisfying to the question asker.  Then they look at me, head tilted trying to figure out how to rephrase the question (but I like to stop them before they ask, no, I mean where are you really from? To which the true answer would be – “I’m really from Rockville”, which probably is even more unsatisfying than the Baltimore line) and then I say, “you know, I’m consider myself American, but my parents were born in China.  And then they say, ahh, China!  I hope I represent all of China well.

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Vince stayed home sick today.  He’s congested and everything.  Booo.  Tomorrow is the PSATs.  He will have to go into it at less than 100%.   I’ve been trying to get Vince to read more NYT articles out loud to me to bring his youtube dominated youth experience up to SAT level reading (with spotty success).  He gets to pick the article.  So we skip over all the political articles and head on over to the articles about the pot-smoking dad or animals freed from animal cracker jail.  The other day, he read an article about the Instant Pot and came across this line: “After the rice and shrimp had cooked for a mere three minutes, Ms. Ram twisted the vent, which sent forth a rush of spicy vapor with a companionable whoosh.”  Vince totally stopped at that line (after stumbling over “mere” and “companionable”) and declared it was too pretentious to continue.   It’s about the Instant Pot, a completely non-pretentious thing and turned it into something it’s not.  I’m like- the NYTimes is nothing if not pretentious, keep going!   By the way, we did get an Instant Pot the other day after our slow cooker died, and I took it on it’s maiden voyage where I managed to not only cook the frozen block of chicken, but accidentally managed to pressure cook the weird absorbent pad is often stuck to the bottom of a package of frozen chicken thighs.  Whoops, hopefully not too much polymer ingested.

The boys hiked an unexpected 14 miles on Saturday.  The day involved: impassable roads from a landslide, a blocked parking lot, a weird encounter with a couple who provided parking at their house, mosquitos, a marathon, chafing and then, finally, no water at the Saturday night campsite which meant that they aborted the mission and all came home Saturday night.

It was nice to have them all home on Saturday night.

One of the reasons I took on the nursing job (there are many) now is because I sensed that my marriage needed a rebalancing.  It’s hard to explain, but I think that marriage is all about power, who is basically “more important”.  It doesn’t really matter what the outside world thinks – it’s not really about status outside the marriage, it’s how power is managed within the relationship.  Maybe I shouldn’t generalize.  Maybe I should just say this about my own marriage.  It’s not at all that we were ever in a rocky place or even slightly unhappy place, it’s just nice to take turns who is generally accommodating and who needs the accommodation.  We’ve done this back and forth – let’s see a bunch of times already:

Moving to San Jose 1996: Doris
Moving to Austin 1999: Jeremy
Moving to Taiwan/NY/Singapore/NY 2002: Jeremy
Moving to MD 2007/getting jobs in DC: Doris
Working from home for Doris 2010: Jeremy
Getting the nursing job 2018: Doris
(maybe Jeremy would disagree with this list.  lol.)

I, for many years, had done most of the accommodating.  Since I worked from home, I did all the appointments, the house repairs, the kids shuttling/scheduling and Jeremy knew that I would take care of it.  Not that, at moments, I didn’t yell at him for not doing his “share”, but it was so much easier for me to take care of this than for him.  (I would, about once a year, get resentful for going to all the dr. appointments and make him promise take off a whole morning to do a dental appointment or something and then in the morning tell him to forget about it and I would go ahead and take the kid/kids).  When the 2016 election rolled around, I could see that Jeremy was prepping to try to get a job within the (Clinton) administration and that would require hours and hours of time away from us, but when it turned out that wasn’t going to happen – I basically decided it was time for me to be accommodated in the marriage – at least until it is possible to get an pro-environmentalist in the WH (soon, right?  fingers crossed).  So Jeremy is doing the dental appointments, the early half-day pick ups, the IEP meeting, the emails to Edda’s new team at school and this weekend, he’s taking Vince and various Boy Scouts on a 2-day hike/backpacking trip.

Everyone was grumpy today when I came home at 5 pm.  Jeremy had picked up Edda early from aftercare – so he left work at 3pm to make the 4pm pickup time.  Jeremy hadn’t eaten and was starved.  This weekend backpacking trip was haphazardly organized because Jeremy didn’t know he was leading it until Tuesday night and then he was mad that he was going to have to give up not only a good biking weekend, but also a weekend with me where I wasn’t going to be working at the hospital.  Vince was mad because it’s mid-terms now and he’s worried about some grade and because he’s worried, he broke our cardinal “no-work-on-Friday” rule and did homework on Friday afternoon instead of going out with friends or taking a nap.  At 5pm, the boy scouts still needed some rations for the trip and we needed dinner.

Jeremy seemed frazzled and I asked if I should take Vince grocery shopping and he said – yeah, and can you pick up dinner too?  Maybe Popeye’s?  So Vince went and bought some Hungry Man soups while I waited in line for fried chicken.  When Vince and I pulled into the driveway, Vince was like – I see Dad in the doorway waiting for the chicken.  I said – dad?  you mean max, right?  Vince said – nope, Dad is totally waiting in the doorway for the chicken.  We had fried chicken for dinner (Jeremy said, I feel much better now), I gave the boys a quick hug and kisses and now it’s just me and Edda at home.

I’m strangely “on vacation” this week.  It’s strange because I’m still working and the house is still running on its regular schedule, but I’m completely and totally relaxed in a way I haven’t been since about mid July.  I closed out the fiscal year at one job, the other job is a week of boring but kind of necessary classroom training with a regular business schedule. I’ve already done my first two weeks on the unit on my own and I’m still OK and I know if I did the first two weeks, I can keep going.  I’m sleeping like a rock (now that I’ve written it down, I know it will disappear), I’m going to sleep early, I’m sleeping in, I’m coming home and having dinner with the family.  I backed off on everything, exercising less, I’m eating luxuriously,  ignoring email, and generally having a good time.  Ha ha ha, this is how I like my vacations.  I’m trying to catch up on book club. Vickey already finished Watership Down.  I’m on page 15.  I was going to give up on this, but Vickey said that she wanted to talk about the ending with me, so maybe?  I’m not sure.

Wowza.  Fr*nces won the Nob*l Prize.  Not only did she win the Nob*l Prize, but I was a grad student in the lab at the time when she was first developing the idea/technique that would win her the award.  Many, many group meetings where I listened to directed evol*tion mini-lectures.  I often was unhappy at those meetings, I knew then that I wasn’t supposed to be in graduate school, but I was not sure where I should be instead.  I often wished Franc*s would serve cookies at the group meetings (which I think were scheduled every Friday afternoons).  I guess I would have liked to have known then that this would happen now because maybe I would have been more, uh, attentive? grateful? aggressive with my pipetting? or ambitious and less depressed, angry and lonely.  I was only depressed, angry and lonely at the science.  I was falling in love with Jeremy which was fabulous, so it was a dichotomous experience.  (I did not work on the Nob*l Prize winning research, I worked with Vidya on another project, which ultimately failed, but sealed my friendship with Vidya, which, in my opinion overall was a good trade).

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Tied with this news about Franc*s is a backwards look at the trajectory of my scientific career.  Each time there is an news article about how women are not represented in science or in the boardrooms, how to encourage confidence in young girls regarding STEM, how to make science interesting, blah, blah, blah, I feel often, that I’ve failed in my life’s mission.  That I was given such a strong push and encouragement – my mother, the only female engineering student in her class in college, my college senior thesis advisor, the first female tenured in our department, and now my graduate advisor who won the Nob*l Prize (5th women in Chemistry!) and I married into a family who knows all the ins/outs of academic life and finally, Jeremy, who, if I had told him early on I wanted to make a go of it at an R1 university or run a large company, would have said, yeah – go for it, I will support you 100%.  There was really nothing stopping me except whatever limitations I had placed upon myself.  Why didn’t I do it?  Why am I doing what I’m doing?  Often I think what I’m doing is lame, that I didn’t live up to my potential and all the opportunities that were offered to me.

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I still struggle with helping Vince with his physics homework.  At least it’s motion, once you get into e & m, I’m toast.

Our new fridge can fit an entire large pizza box in it – no problem.  So if you want some leftover pizza in the morning, c’mon over, we are ready for you. I mean, before we owned this fridge, we’d leave it out on the counter overnight and it was 50/50 whether Max would get to it before you could.  Now we are 100% sure (or maybe 99%) sure it will end up in my tummy and not the doggie’s tummy.

Since my schedule at the hospital is still unpredictable – I didn’t know I wasn’t working this weekend until 4 days ago and by then we had arranged for Eliana to work today because Jeremy wanted to do a bike race in Virginia.  And then I didn’t want to cancel Eliana’s hours, so she was by most of today to hang out with Edda.  Because she was here, I got to go for a run, grocery shop and really declutter the house.   Thank goodness.  The house was really getting to be embarrassingly disgusting. 

Jeremy actually left Saturday night to a hotel about 2 hours away.  The race started at 8 am today Sunday – the Alpine Gran Fondo.  He was excited.  He was optimistic.  Trying to get into the top 10% overall, which he thought was doable.  He had a fast friend that he had kind of arranged to ride with, the weather was going to be great.

He rode almost 7 hours.  In this type of race, they count only the uphill parts of the course.  At the very start of the race, his bike computer suddenly died (and then tried to come back to life, but got stuck in an unending reboot loop) which was unfortunate, because although he managed to turn on Strava on his phone to record the race, his bike computer is connected to a power meter on his bike, but the phone is not – so he lost all the power information that he usually has and he didn’t find his fast friend and he did the whole 110 miles by feel which is not something he usually does.  So, he feels like it was a good ride under the circumstances.  He thought he could have done better, but it’s hard for him to day because he has no data to compare to his other rides. 

Molly (and her mom Lauren) came over in the afternoon for a bit.

Rory too.  He knows more Chinese than I do. 

I came home Friday night to find the house filled with boys playing Magic the Gathering.  It’s homecoming weekend, but I think none of these boys are planning on going.  We had a few parents stop by to check out the “party” – I’m actually pretty flattered because I know some of these parents run strict households, but they let their children hang out at our house and even sleep over. 

I spent a few minutes tonight talking (again) about sex and consent to Vince like a dutiful, modern, feminist mother as the NYTimes tells me I should.  (We teach our girls, but not our boys! Various articles lament.) He went through the whole thing before I could really even start: neither of us can be drunk, I have to ask it it’s OK, if at any point she seems unsure or says no – everything has to stop.  I know about consent, mom!  We didn’t talk about sex in conjunction with love.  Sex is so much better with love than without love.  I’ll get to that next time, though I feel like I’m losing time for these lessons with Vince, not that I couldn’t tell him years from now, but that it’s almost time that is he’s got to figure out this complicated stuff now on his own. 

Speaking of love, Jeremy’s off tonight for a big bike race tomorrow morning. He spent the day with his other love, his bicycle – repairing it in various ways that he explained to me, but I could not quite understand because I do not love bicycles.  He wanted to add more gears before this race and he almost did the whole thing himself with specialized biking tools that he ordered online, but he made it like 95% through the repair and then he got stuck and sped off to a bike store to have them do the final few steps.  They complimented him on his attempt (you almost got it!) and did the last bit and didn’t charge him and sent him back home, happy as a clam.  I always send Jeremy off to bike rides (or races) with a little prayer that will protect him and send him back home to me in one piece.  I know he’s riding hard and pretty fast on roads (though quiet) will have traffic on them.

I found my high school junior year calendar.  (When I work in the hospital, I lose track of all things that go on outside – then I come home and Jeremy asks, did you hear what happened today?  And I’m like – of course I haven’t heard and then we launch into the upsetting twilight zone that is the United States which now somehow involves handwritten high school calendars).  It’s interesting to flip through my own calendar and seeing my old handwriting knowing that Vince is in his junior year now 30 years later.  The most interesting thing I found was this:

 

On Valentine’s Day in 1989, I was supposed to read for English class “Why I Want a Wife” which must be referencing – the “I Want A Wife” essay that appeared in the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine.  I’m pretty sure I think I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now I want to remember who the English teacher was who taught the class.  I found her name, but I can’t recall anything about the class.  I think it’s an appropriate juxtaposition – the essay was written in 1971, I read it in 1989, now it’s 2018 and we are all still, unbelievably, at it.  I’ve been very lucky as a woman.  Somehow I’ve been free of harassment and mistreatment by men.  My old boyfriends?  All good guys.  I have had almost no trouble with my relationships with men, but with women, especially in groups of women when I was younger, I have had trouble figuring out how I was suppose to act or what I was suppose to do.  Which is why this go around at the hospital has been extremely reassuring from a female group dynamic kind of way.  Of course, most of the nurses on the floor are female and as I transitioned to the floor on my own, I was worried that I’d be on my own that my old, expected patterns of awkward female group interactions would still hold true for me, but it’s not the case.  I found a gem of a unit.  All the nurses go about their day, passing each other all day and everyone asks – are you OK?  did you eat?  did you take a break?  In my youth, I’d be embarrassed to ask so many questions.  But now, it’s no joke, I need to ask the questions to know how to take care of people – I ask questions all the time and I’m not embarrassed.   There is a saying in nursing that “nurses eat their young” referring to a tradition of hazing of new nurses, but I’m not experiencing it.  I did cry in the middle of my shift on Tues.  I have often felt like crying at the hospital, but I’ve never actually cried, but I did on Tues.  Nothing terrible was happening, but I was just overwhelmed.  My charge nurse took one look at me and said – go take a break, I’ll get your new patient settled in and it’ll be fine.  Come back in 30 minutes.  So I did and it was fine.

Jeremy and I had a rare Saturday night date – we did our traditional: a dinner at A&Js, then REI, then Whole Foods and finally Ben & Jerry’s (out at 5:30 pm, back to the house by 9 pm).  I’m liking the cherry garcia flavor these days.  At A&J’s we looked at the following week’s calendar and realized that the next time we’d probably have dinner together would be the following Saturday, so it was just as well that we were out on Sat. night.

We had bags of groceries walking into the house, and we come home to realize that the fridge is finally, completely broken.  The fridge was at 68 degrees, the freezer was at 49 degrees.  I hate the weeks when you have to spend vast amounts of unpredictable amounts of money.  This is going to be a $3000 week.  A new fridge and Vince’s Mac laptop also finally broke after 6 years.  So a new laptop and a new fridge this week.  I told Vince that he was lucky that we have enough $ to cover both the laptop and the fridge this week because if we only had half the money, the fridge would have priority over his new laptop and he say, yes, I understand that the fridge would take priority over my laptop.

We put all the dairy stuff in our wine fridge.  Jeremy is looking to buy a fridge from Home Depot right now, the earliest delivery date is in 10 days?  Hmmm…can we go 10 days without a fridge?  Also, Jeremy called Ben in Sweden to wish him a happy birthday, but went through the regular T-mobile line and apparently we just got charged $80 for the 15 min call.  I was like – you didn’t Skype him?  Argh.  Please send heartfelt thoughts to my patients this week – that I’ll be able to give them good care, I’m starting again tomorrow.