Wisdom of the Ages - Part 4 Decade by Decade

I had mixed feelings about going to my 40th High School Reunion.  It’s been so long that, of course, we are like strangers.  I have been racking my brain for memories of those years and come up with very little.  I was not a happy person in High School.  I was shy and lonely and hated who I was.  My memories of HIGH SCHOOL center around what I was NOT – not beautiful, not popular, not outgoing, not athletic – the list goes on and on.  I am ashamed at how important all of those things were to me back then.  How I wish I had just been able to be who I was and enjoy.  But now I realize that everyone was in that same period of development, the popular kids just knew how to hide their insecurities, didn’t they.   They had the same doubts and fears as any high schooler does.  But unfortunately, when I was in high school, I didn’t know that.  I imagined that everyone around me was more confident, more secure, more sure of themselves than I was.  Even if someone had told me otherwise (which my mother probably did), I would never have believed it. 

I have written a journal my entire life starting with my first kiss when I was 16.  I recently pulled the yellowed journals down from their shelves and dusted them off and started to read them.  I was deeply disappointed in myself.  In my TWENTIES I was so focused on meeting my mate and getting married that I journaled very little about my experiences in the NICU which by comparison were so much more valuable to me.  I suspect, as did a lot of women from my generation, I defined myself through my looks and attractiveness to men, my need to be loved by someone else because I didn’t particularly love myself.  My twenties were difficult as I tried to come to terms with the world and my place in it. I drank a lot, partied a lot, did things I am not proud of. And then I met and married Pop and so began the next era of my life.

In my THIRTIES I was totally overwhelmed with having and raising you boys.  By the time I was 32 I had four children under the age of 6.  I felt confident as a mother but there was still a lot of room for self deprecation and questioning.  I was way too intense and took myself way too seriously.  I was also exhausted.  But I was happy because I was doing what I had always wanted to do - raise a family.   I spent a lot of time at your grade school and had a lot of contact with all sorts of people, mostly other Moms. I distinctly remember one day another mother coming up to me in the school playground.  She was a rather annoying and negative person and was once again complaining about something the school was doing.  I remember watching her lips move and hearing in my head the wah wah wah droning of her voice.  And it occurred to me what an unhappy person she must be.  For the first time in my life, instead of feeling angry at her, I felt sorry for someone who had so little joy in their life.  It was during these years that I feel like I started to wisen up to the world and learned that the way people act is often a mirror to the way they feel about themselves or their lives. It was during these years that my compassion for other people grew enormously.

In my FORTIES I continued to learn about people - that all I had to do was figure out what type of person they were and use different approaches in dealing with them.  My nursing really brought this home. Working with the physicians is perhaps one of the bigger challenges for nurses.  There is a fine line between being a patient advocate and doing what the physician ordered.  When I started nursing in 1979 nurses still wore their white uniforms with their white shoes and hats.    If we were sitting at the charting station and a physician came along and there were no more seats, we quickly stood up and gave the physicians our chairs.  This was expected and everyone knew it.  The physicians lorded over the rest of us and we rarely questioned their orders or gave our opinion.  Nurses were to be seen and not heard, follow the physicans’ orders without questioning and on a daily basis feed the physicians’ egos.  The smart physicians and residents realized pretty quickly that it was the nurses who knew precisely what was going on with the patients since they were the ones who spent the entire day with them.  These physicians would talk to the nurses and ask their opinions but those physicians were few and far between.  Over the years I have worked with every possible type of physician, the egotistical, the fearful, the casanova,  the genius, the one who does the least to get by, the beaten feminist woman, the gentle soul, the sociopath, the elderly who should retire.  It has taken a long time but I have finally learned what each of these different personalities need and I give it to them for the sake of my patients.  I’ll build up the egotistical, give subtle direction to the fearful, ward off the casanova, pick the brain of the genius.  I’ll finish the tasks of the one who does the least to get by, and show great respect to the feminist woman, bask in the kindness of the gentle soul, avoid the sociopath and ever so gently befriend and prod the elderly to retire.  It’s about accepting people for who they are. I quit trying to change people. I quit being angry or annoyed by people’s personalities and instead learned how to accept who they were and comfortably be with them. And I hope that my friends, family and co-workers will do the same for me.

In my FIFTIES you boys were raised and I found myself trying to figure out who I was without you.  I knew I would always be a mother and a nurse but those were labels. Who the hell was I without those labels?  The other day I made a list and tried to figure out who I was.  This is it:  

I am Laura 

I am Rosie

I am Mom 

I am Tutu

I am a wife

I am a Nurse 

I am a writer 

I am a caregiver

I am a counselor

I love the outdoors and nature 

I love the feeling after spending an entire day outside and active 

I am curious 

I am brutally honest 

I am opinionated 

I am compassionate 

I am motherless 

I am an orphan

I am a sister 

I am Auntie Laura

I am stubborn 

I am moody 

I am fragile 

I am strong 

I am smart 

I feel fat and ugly a lot of the time 

I feel pretty a lot of the time 

I am too worried about my looks 

I love people 

I am shy 

I am brave 

I am a coward 

I am a Just Do It person 

I like change 

I love challenges 

I love being busy 

I love my down time 

I feel guilty when I am taking down time 

I love my neighbors 

I feel safe 

I wonder why people like me 

I enjoy entertaining 

I love to laugh 

I love to play games 

I am a camper

I am undisciplined 

I am a procrastinator

I am often confused 

I am a reader

I love to crochet 

I love power tools

I am a photographer

I am an editor

I have many regrets as a mother 

I feel like I was a good mother 

I hate Math 

I hate the short days of Winter

I love paddling 

I wish I rode my bike more 

I wish I did yoga 

I have poor posture that I have been fighting my whole life

I love chocolate and sweets 

I miss my Mom 

I love people watching 

I wish I had had a closer relationship with my Dad 

I hate having all of these material things I have to take care of 

I love my material things 

I want to try living minimalist 

I am afraid of living without my material things 

I need a job that feeds my soul 

I am a baker 

I like the feeling of a good buzz 

I wish I could give up alcohol for good

I am unsettled 

I am loved 

I am tolerated 

I want to learn how to meditate 

I am a cowboy at heart 

I like manual labor 

I am a leader 

I am full of faults 

I am a good person 

I am kind 

I am a little bit crazy

I’m way more complicated than I originally thought.

I have started my 60’s and feel even more confused and frustrated.  I truly thought that by the time I was in my 60’s I would have life figured out but alas, I do not.  I have days when I feel old and wise and I have days when I feel like I have so much to learn and accept about life.  Although I wish at times that I had it all figured out, in reality I hope that in life I will never feel “fully formed” but that it will be a constant act of growth and enlightenment until the moment of my death.