I don’t know what it is about this one teacher that makes me feel like she can just stab at my heart for some reason. For the past several days I’ve been staying mostly in bed, waiting for my body to recover from the month. Parts of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and today I’ve just been here wondering whether or not I should try to go to class. We’re supposed to watch a movie tonight and then write one of our three reflection papers on it.

So I told her that I wasn’t sick or contagious, but that I’d been feeling very run down and tired for the past several days. I debating whether or not to come to class and was wondering if I’d be able to make up the class work or access the movie from home. She said there is one copy of it in the library but another student who will be missing class for being out of town will also be trying to check it out. It’s an educational video that isn’t online anywhere. So it seemed, she said, like it would be up to me to decide on how I was feeling and whether or not I felt like I could get a hold of the movie. And I debated whether or not to even send the email in the first place. Because if it ended up going like this, then I’d just told her something more personal about myself.

It’s not like she’s not nice. But for whatever reason interactions with her can produce that sharp and sudden piercing of the heart feeling. And really I’m just tired of dealing with this and it being something that I don’t even know how to begin to explain to other people. I’m sure professors have their days when they are run down and more tired as well, and what are they supposed to do? Just not show up? I told her thank you and that I’d plan on being there.

It’s chillier outside today. It’s sunnier though after several day of clouds and it always looks nice to see the light in the trees. I didn’t stay outside very long when I took this. I’m still pretty tired and I need to go to class tonight. Something I’ve found helpful if you’re needing to guarantee you get a good nap is to put on a podcast while resting in bed. If music is playing I won’t fall asleep, especially if I know the songs that are playing.

I’ve kind of described it like your brain latches on to the song that it knows. It stays awake because it knows what it is listening to and what comes next. But when it is voices talking in the background, even if you’re interested in the topic at hand, it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing predictable for your brain to latch on to. That can’t be completely it though because even if it is a song that you don’t know you can still have a hard time falling asleep.

Josh came in and showed me a picture of his dad and asked me if he looked like that. In the picture his dad was only about a year or two older than we are now. We’ve always kind of thought his dad looked older, but some of that is just because he is the dad. I didn’t think it looked like him. But the other day he looked into the living room window while out on his walk and I said, “Oh my gosh, you just like your dad.” He did that time.

“You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.”
~Psalm 139:5~

In December of 2020 I knew something was wrong. On the first day of the month I started my Orange Theory membership and went in for one their early morning workouts. Not only was I thinking this would be a way to burn off stress and take care of myself during the busy holiday season, I was also thinking this was going to be the time where I finally got into the best shape of my life. The combination of strength training and cardio was just the thing my body needed.

The first day I ran on the treadmill and felt good while I was on it. I did the rowing machine and the strength training also. The girl showed me the three different stations and how whenever you came in your name would be on a board showing which station you’d start and then move to. During the workout you wore a band to track your heartrate. The idea was to stay in the orange. This was the zone where your body would be getting the most out of your workout.

I didn’t like seeing my heartrate that high. I didn’t like seeing my zone in the orange. Everybody’s was up there on multiple screens. The room was dark and the music was loud. I actually liked that part, and loved the intensity and sensory overload. I expected to come out of there drenched in sweat and feeling amazing. I don’t remember what I felt until I was home and sitting in our living room chair. I curled up in the chair and stared at the floor. I didn’t want to move.

That was the only time I could finish the workout. Any other time I went back that month I could not get through the treadmill part, or any of the sections without stopping. I was out of breath within a couple of minutes. And then I couldn’t get my heartrate to go down. I stepped outside where I could walk around in the fresh air, waiting to feel normal enough to go back in. The leader people would check on me and I’d say I was okay. Except something wasn’t right.

I remember being in Joann’s parking lot after another early morning disappointed that I wasn’t getting that feel-good post-workout feeling. None of this activity was anything new. I did kettlebells on my own and had been running for months. Again my heartrate would not come down. I opened the windows hoping cold air would do it. These weren’t panic attacks, but it was the closest thing I’d felt to it in a very long time. Each time I came out from a workout it took longer to recover.

After Christmas there was another event, right on schedule for it’s regular time. Something hadn’t been right then either. Every month, for five or six years, we wrestled in ways that should never have happened. Not once, not twice, but over and over until I couldn’t move. And again the next time and again the next. And then after that last time I thought I was fine again. Except during New Year’s while hosting my family I noticed I had a hard time standing up. I went to bed to lie down.

And I stared at the floor and did not want to move. I had no thoughts, there was nothing I was thinking, I just stayed there in the bed and didn’t move. Mom came in, Dad came in, my sister came in and brought me food. A couple of days later I was still in bed and read a story in the Bible about a woman who’d been oppressed by a spirit for 18 years so that she could not stand up. I suddenly realized what had happened and called my Dad to say I’d accidentally been starving myself.

No wonder I was so weak. For those three days over our New Year’s gathering I’d hardly eaten, and so I thought I’d been starving myself. I tried to eat something to replenish what I’d lost, hoping then I’d feel better. On January 6th I went to the hospital and that’s when I tend to think this all started, a little after the first of the year. But it had really been going on a while before that, the shortness of breath having started before COVID. I was able to keep doing all of the things until I wasn’t.

The kids and I didn’t go to church this morning. I wanted to talk to them about some things. These past several years in my experiences with infirmity, my son leaving the house, my father-in-law most recently passing, these have all been things that have reinforced for me the shortness of our life. Once I no longer had to work for money, I left my job for the sole reason of being able to spend as much time with them as possible. I could always be a nurse. They wouldn’t always be little.

And one of ways I wanted to use that time was for teaching them deeply in the Christian faith. I wanted to pass on the love for God that I had, for them to know the Bible, for the hope of Christ to take root in them so it would stay with them throughout their lives. And I’d seen this already in the way they’d been during our last days with Papa. And that gave me some comfort then, because especially over the last few years, I haven’t been able to be as engaged or involved with them as I once had been.

Not that I was trying to promote my own mothering. If anything by the time your child grows up, you realize then how much you lacked, how much any good was only by God’s gifts. And they all thought it was funny, at least a little ironic, how I was telling them this while we had stayed home from church. Dad had even called to make sure we were up. And we went again for Sunday School because I had to teach, and because they wanted to go to church. I agreed that I would go now too.

Yesterday I spent most of the day in bed. It was one of those where I’m super tired which I know is going to be the way that it is sometimes. It gives me time to assimilate the truths of God and know him more as he knows me. My body is his as is all he holds together. There’s so much in my head that is swirling around. It is helpful to know God is patient with me even as I am not always patient myself. But what I don’t say here I try to live out, if not on any paper, then in the light of the day.

We dropped the boys off at school and stopped by Hae’s to get some coffee. Neither one of us have been great about this, but every so often we take turns remembering that we’re supposed to be being more intentional about doing little things like visiting these coffee shops together. We get into the habit for a while, but then life gets busy again and that just seems to be the way that it goes. I really don’t even notice it most of the time.

With the kids being older and in school we have more time for these things. While we were in there UIS cross country team came in. It looked like they had just finished a workout. Of course I had to think of our son out in Nebraska and how this could have been him walking in if things had gone a different way. It’s so interesting to me how marriage unfolds across the seasons.

This evening my mother-in-law came over for supper. While at Hae’s I started googling recipes looking for colorful fall meals to serve and delight our evening company. Josh suggested we just order pizza from Rico’s like we sometimes do on Fridays. That was fine and admittedly easier. I do still want to try the nourishing fall recipe thing sometime. On the way home we stopped by County Market and picked up a few groceries.

I feel like I’ve been talking about this school thing too much, so I’m going to say a few more things and then be done for a while. I told my supervisor that I’m not going to be needing the internship after all. Today after practicum I was already scheduled to get a tour of the inpatient unit on the hospital. I had not had a chance yet to talk about the change of plans, but it was good for me to go over and see it. It confirmed for me that I would not have been happy there.

Working with other people, and overseeing them, is a difficult thing. I see this from watching my husband be in charge at the camp. The boss holds all the complaints, suggestions and problems. If the CGC is out of toilet paper, he gets the list. I don’t know if he actually shops for it anymore, but if someone else buys something, he gets the receipts. If someone thinks it’d be nice for the camp to hold a particular retreat, he’s the one brainstorming about it when I get home.

Casper was sitting outside the front door. I guess that means we’re keeping him but I don’t know yet if his name is going to stick. I don’t think it’s ever taken this long for us to settle on a stray cat name before. The kids have a poll going in their discord camp group asking a few other camp people what they think his name should be. I never did mention here that our older cat Ghost passed away last summer. We buried him on the morning of the July full moon.

A cat showed up at our window tonight. Josh and I were at the table when I heard a cat crying. I thought it was Midnight but when I went to the window to look it was a mostly white cat with light brown spots. Usually the stray cats run away when they see us but this one was acting like it was wanting people to give him attention or at least food.

We named him Casper. I don’t know if he’ll stick around or not. He seemed pretty used to people so maybe he just came over for something different to do. Tom showed up at about the same age as this one so we wonder if sometimes people don’t just drop them off somewhere and they find their way to the house since there are other cats around.

The interview I had today went well. She said she was going to offer me a position so the next step was to get set up with human resources for the things you have to do with them as a new hire. The first thing she said when we sat down was “It’s been a while.” Then I was supposed to tell her about myself and then we asked each other questions.

I asked if she could show me the resident wings. One is named Spring, and one is named Summer. I don’t remember the name of the third one as it wasn’t a season. It’s a huge place with varying levels of senior living options but the parts I would work at would basically be the areas that were more similar to a nursing home or rehab facility.

This is all a very new again experience for me. She said she was basically going to treat me like a brand new nurse because of how long it’s been since I’ve worked as one and also because of how much has changed in the field. When I was doing it we still had all paper charting and documentation. Everything like that now is done with computers.

What I’m happy about with this place is that you also have the option of working four hour shifts. The 3-7 or 7-11 evening shifts were always my favorite. You can go in and get some hours but you weren’t there terribly long. I wouldn’t ever have to work a 12. When she asked what shifts I’d work I said days, evenings, weekends, but no nights.

At some point I do have some feelings about this. This all just happened kind of fast and I know I partly do these things to myself. But I also didn’t ask for my school to close before I could graduate. I was liking that path and when I got back to the car I did feel a pang of sadness for the educational route and path I thought I was on but changed.

And when I saw the wings it looked so unfamiliar. Hospitals essentially all look the same. But the more home like environments have different hallways, different pictures, different co-workers, different residents. I didn’t like it. I didn’t love it. And it wasn’t because there was anything wrong with the place. It’s because I did not know it yet.

People are seriously weird sometimes. Two days ago I was feeling inspired and ready to just do the whole internship thing and finish my schooling. Even yesterday after practicum I sent my supervisor an email making sure we were both on the same page with what we’d talked about regarding splitting my internship between the partial hospitalization program and the inpatient hospital unit.

And then I was having all kinds of doubts. I sent my husband a text from school around 9:00PM saying that I was fine doing the classes and getting those done, but I didn’t think I wanted to try and do the internship also. I miss my family just thinking about it. And being home. And doing laundry. And being in my happy place with my people who aren’t here as much as they used to be but are still here.

So then I had this phone interview this morning with an HR person from the local Lutheran Senior Services. “Let’s go through your work history”, she said, and I went through the jobs I had listed on my resume that included two years working at Greene House Assisted Living in Seward and the long-term care unit connected with the county hospital and time as a student nurse on the post-op floor.

And all of this was over 15+ years ago. I’m not sure yet if this is going to be a problem. I did ask about the acuity level of patients and whether or not she thinks the gap in experience is going to be an issue with the specific position involved which is one that only requires a minimum of two shifts a month but you can always do more. They try to keep a pool of added nursing staff to fill in scheduling gaps.

I’m scheduled to meet with the nursing director tomorrow so we’ll see how that goes. Tonight we start our Multicultural Awareness class. It’s with the hard instructor again. I’ve basically gotten over the actual turmoil from the last class and the paper grade that for whatever reason felt like such a hard blow. The presentation didn’t end up being worth what I’d originally thought so I still was able to do okay in the class.

I’m really liking the new windows in the dining room. Truthfully I have not had time to appreciate them much over the past few weeks. This morning I had practicum from 8:30-1. I came home, ate some lunch, and have been in bed mostly since. Sometimes it’s sleepiness, where I take a 20 minute nap and I’m good to go for the rest of the day. Other times like today it’s more bodily fatigue where I’m more twitchy and have that buzzing feeling in my limbs.

It’s days like this where I really question whether it’s even possible to do this full internship thing next semester. I’ve been leaning more lately toward wanting to do it. They’ve waived several of the normal internship requirements. It means we’d be able to continue with our current supervisor and site instead of having to find a new one. We also would be able to get started on acquiring our hours this semester as soon as we fulfill our hour requirements for practicum. As of now I’ve been cruising along at a comfortable 7-9 hours a week.

But now I feel this pressure like I need to hurry up and get going. The more time I would have this semester the better. In addition we would be able to accumulate hours over break. I tried to do some math to come up with a general estimate on what my weekly hour requirement would be if I could finish practicum and get started the week or two before Thanksgiving. Not including the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s, and substracting the week of the spring intensive, it comes out to around 25 hours per week. When I calculated for a 16-week semester it came out to more around 35 but I also forgot to subtract the spring intensive week.

So school would basically turn into this nice little thing I’ve mostly been doing on the side to something that would take up a much larger part of my life. I get that people work full time 40+ hours a week all the time and still do other things in their life but that is not the life I have lived and frankly I’m not sure I could healthily do that. I also need to leave room for class time two nights a week plus the homework. I could maybe see me doing it if I lived in bed when I was home.

I don’t know. I am not needing to make any decisions this instant but I am hoping that as classes start back up again this week we’ll get a little more information regarding what our other options would be. In other correspondence it’s been said that any student who isn’t graduating would have an individualized plan already set up with a specific institution based on arrangements made by the school. I do miss the days of being more available for the wife and mom things.

The boys and I picked up pine cones this afternoon. I’d gone outside for a short walk and they were playing. I must have looked happy to see them because one of them asked, “Mom, why do you always seem so happy to see us out here?” The were filling up a garbage bag with pine cones to make a fire.

I don’t know, I said, I just like seeing you play. Then I had the idea to start collecting pine cones too. I wanted one of those massive plastic garbage cans you see in town on garbage day. It seemed like we could use them for kindling or something. I found one of the bins in the garage where we’d kept the racoons at first.

So then I started collecting my own. The pine trees outside our house are full of them right now. Pretty soon they came over to where I was and started helping me fill my bin. Another one had found two other buckets and filled them both with fallen pine needles. After that I think we still were outside for a while.

The kids are all done with their cross country seasons. After the meet this morning my mother-in-law took us out to lunch at a corner café in Petersburg. It was actually pretty nice. We go out to eat a lot it seems, or at least it seems like we have been lately. Between that, the leftover funeral food, and the nearly full gallon of potato salad that someone brought over, we’ve eaten something together almost daily for weeks.

She paid for the bill like they always do. Miles came with us because he had come to watch the meet. I have not personally asked anyone about Laura anytime recently but Josh said he asked about it on the way back to Nebraska. The boys also said that Ethan talked to her several nights on the phone while he was home. It’s apparently still something that is going on. We’ve morphed a little bit as time as gone on into a family that is open about some things and not as much about others. Even I have changed into this. It is a very weird thing to not just be able to ask and say what comes to mind.

I cleaned out the freezer this morning before the meet. It’s the whole nesting thing again where you have to prepare. I wanted to see what was in there and dig around for any leftover soup bone I’d saved from other times. Right before I got sick I’d planned on learning how to use the instant pot I’d received for Christmas. I want to try making broth in there because I’ve heard you can make it in four hours instead of 18-24.

If I am going to do this school thing then I am going to need to take care of myself. One of the first papers we had to write was a student plan for self-care. I went back and read it just to see what I’d said that my plan was. My two main things were taking care of my body and staying connected to others. At my practicum site one of the things they do in the groups at the end of the day is ask what the patients are going to do for self-care, or “acts of kindness” as my supervisor calls them. I’ve been a little amazed by how many people say they’re going to brush their teeth in the evening and not just the morning.

I wish I could go into things deeper than I do here. I think we are all dealing with the recent loss in our own way. It feels still very hard to believe that my father-in-law will no longer be with us. He has been such a present part of our lives for so long that it’s hard to imagine him never being there again. Josh and the boys played catch this evening. I asked the boys how they were doing and they said it helps knowing where Papa is.