behindtheax

a little January whine

I lost the will to write. As I look around my house, I apparently also lost the will to do housework. Things are piling up around here, especially my insecurities but that’s O.K. they often drop by. Sometimes they are disguised as past mistakes that every once in awhile will find the need to tap me on the shoulder and say, “hi remember me?”

“Yes, very much so. Now please go away.”

Not that I made a ton of past mistakes. I think I am on par with the average person. No one has perfect judgment 100% of the time but out of the blue these mistakes will come visiting just to make me cringe again, over something I did five or twenty years ago. It is all rather silly but still some days they are hard to shoo away and they make me restless and edgy. I think about nursing sometimes and feel bad that I left. Not that I ever had a true passion for it but it did give me a purpose and I gained a great deal of life experiences through it.

My sister was the one who helped me decide to go into nursing. At the time I was working part time as a cashier and she was in her first year of nursing school. Her advice was – it is only two years of study, you are guaranteed a job when you get out and it pays well. Sounded good to me at the time. So, I got into the momentum of that and it pushed me along for the next ten years without too much thought on my part. I just showed up for work, did the best I could do and didn’t think too hard about if this was what I should be doing or not? When I moved to the city, I ended up working in an Intensive Care Unit for seven of those years. I am still not quite sure how that happened – it was because at the beginning when I was applying for work, these were the units that had the biggest need for nurses and one hospital had offered me a six week critical care course so I said yes, thinking to myself I rather spend six weeks in a classroom right now than jumping straight into the work force at one of these very large city hospitals. And after finishing the course I ended up staying at that hospital for almost seven years. There were days that I felt like I was in way over my head and on those days I told myself to run girl, run and never look back. But on other days it seemed like it was a great fit for me and it gave me a great sense of pride to be there. But after the girls came into our lives, I started having a problem balancing these two roles, especially with the shift work and fretting over good childcare and being sleep deprived and having no family support system here. In the end good old fashion burn out happened to me and I left nursing. I tried a few years after that to go back but only lasted four months. Greg was slightly worried about me at that point and we came extremely close to moving back east. I even had a job lined up to go back too. But it just so happened, at the same time, Greg got this great contract job which was too good to pass up and that led into another and another, so here we still are and here I sit wondering what to do with the rest of my life and feeling a little like a failure cause I couldn’t handle nursing by the end of it. These things happen when you don’t truly know what your true nature is. Now looking back I just give my head a shake – what was I doing in an intensive care unit when I was always the type of person who weighed and calculated every small mistake I ever made and deducted that sum from my self worth. So, I am not sure why I had placed myself in a job that was always dealing with life and death situations. I know I am hard on myself and that if I would simply go by work performance and past work evaluations I could still be there. Still, I lost that confidence or that momentum that had sustained me from the beginning. Once I stopped it was gone and I am finding it very hard to get going again. I love being a stay at home mom and doing the odd job here and there for Greg’s company but now I know I need to move forward. Gosh my girls are almost teens. I got to start thinking seriously what to do next.

posted by mary j. @ 11:20 AM