34 Weeks: Alone in the Apartment

Kelly has been out of town since Wednesday morning. It's 8pm on Saturday right now. Today's activity has mostly consisted of sitting. My main activities of the day have been reading, watching television, surfing the net, jumping on my Urban Rebounder, talking to the baby to encourage her to wait until Kelly is home to come out and stressing out about being sued by the girl that lived downstairs from us in 2009 whose apartment was flooded when I accidentally plugged the toilet and it overflowed. Days 1-3 without Kelly were okay as I was working.

 

I never really anticipated the financial hit I would take by switching to a weekday day job from my regular weekend shifts at Detox. In charge pay and shift differential make quite a difference at the end of a two week period. I was lucky enough to be called in for an overtime shift at UBC on 1W Friday. That day went by incredibly fast. I felt overwhelmed the whole time I was there even though I really only had one patient all day. I realized that I am severely out of practice in acute psychiatry (1W is not even very acute). I'm hoping and praying that there are full-time openings at UBC for when I return to work in January.

It's interesting the reaction that I get from some people when I tell them that I'm returning to work in January and Kel is going to take the rest of the 52 weeks to raise our baby girl. I sometimes get the feeling that people think I'm making a bad decision, or a wrong decision by returning to work...perhaps this is because they assume that Kelly's salary is higher than mine though...I don't really want to explain to them the specifics of what a university educated RN makes in contrast to a Traditional Knowledge Educator.

I'm finding more and more that there's also not much support when I tell people that Kel and I are planning on trying for baby #2 early next year. My experience is that people are really negative when I tell them we want to have more than 2 children. I am starting to get a little irritated by people telling me that kids are expensive and take lots of time, as if I'm not anticipating these things, as if I haven't already talked to people that have done it (like my mom) successfully. I'm still trying to get used people very openly telling me that Kel and I are not going to be able to do it or that we'll change our minds once baby girl is born. Thus far only my one male coworker at Detox has had a positive reaction which largely resulted from the fact that he and his wife are raising three children, both employed full-time and with little help from their family.

I am becoming increasingly irritated and finding it increasingly insulting that my coworkers that don't have any children treat me as if I am a naive youth. Yes I understand that I have only been a nurse for 2.5 years but I don't think that you understand that my 2.5 years of full-time nursing aren't the entirety of my life experience. It is interesting that people ask few questions about my life experiences, clearly making assumptions about me, my age, my life experiences, my insight into what it's like to be a parent, my ability to perform my job etc. etc. and so on and so forth. Should I openly volunteer this information? I'm not sure if I should as I find that maintaining personal boundaries are important in the workplace to avoid being caught in the machine of the toxic workplace. And so, the more I work and the more sites I work in the more I see that people love to judge and complain and see the negative rather than the positive. It happens those that have been working in their job for years and (frighteningly) to those that are new to a workplace or fresh out of school too. 

It's so easy to be caught up in that negativity. It's funny because I tend to save everything up for when I get home and then have a complain fest with Kelly. Fortunately I won't have to listen to coworkers complain about anything for 4 months starting whenever baby Danda-Davision decides to bless the world with appearance.

I really wish I had some Brie and crackers right now.

Love,

Michelle D.

p.s. http://www.freecycle.org/ is the best website ever for when you want to give away that stuff that you no longer need but still could be useful to someone else instead of taking it to the dump, or when you are looking for a specific item but would rather recycle someone's old stuff than buy it brand new.