So why would I title a post AWOL you ask? That would be because I work at this crazy place called a treatment facility. Our residents don’t always like to stay with us and sometimes they disappear from us. Big mistake for them, lots of work for me if it happens on one of my shifts. However, I bucked up and took care of everything, the mounds of paperwork, the settling people down, guiding staff. It makes me wonder just why I do this job and like it most of the time.
One success story, just one, reminds me why I do it. There are days when I feel like I talk until I am blue in the face and no one around me gets anything. Then that one client walks up to you and says Ms. C, you really made a difference, I think I get it now. WOW, those are great words. I don’t hear them all that often, alot of our clients don’t want or need to get it. They don’t necessarily want to get better, they can’t see the benefits in any of it. Crime has worked for them this long, why won’t it continue to work right? So there is no point in listening to anyone else.
I come home somedays with a bloody forehead from beating it against the wall that we call clients. The glimmers though, those keep me going back. Sometimes though the whole thing makes me want to go AWOL from life. Not ending it or anything, just a little break at a say an island with a waterfall where I can eat tropical fruit, frolic with my boyfriend and not think about the inside of anyone’s head. Wouldn’t that be the life?
I wouldn’t have to think about my crappy adoption stuff either. Thank goodness for my mom. She stepped in and handled my son’s adoptive mom like a trooper. So his adoptive mom didn’t realize I would still be sad about placing kiddo for adoption. Now really, why wouldn’t I be? It’s so great to have my mom, and adoptive mom herself to explain things like that. It means a little bit more to hear another adoptive mom say that women that place their children grieve for their entire lives. I could tell her that, but really? What difference would it make? Then it almost seems too, like I am trying to make my grief theirs, which isn’t my goal, but it would be nice if they would understand just a little maybe. I’ve really had to set some boundaries wtih them right now. I still keep in contact with kiddo. I write him a conversational letter once a month and enclose a picture. Last month it was me and my first walleye that I caught that month. This month, I’m hoping for me and dad with the cannon. Sometimes it will be a picture of me growing up too, but always something of me and my family.
So working on boundaries is a big thing for me right now. Who would have ever thought I would be the one setting them? Doesn’t seem it is very often that it is the first mom that does that, but in this case it is. Maybe someday they will all get it, and maybe they won’t, who knows?
So I don’t have to work tonight, what fun can I have? Ugh I’m so boring, probably staying home and working on a project or two, either the big cross stitch or the doily for the bedspread. Is this old age? Maybe, or maybe I’m finally comfortable in myself and just a homebody.
