There is an interesting thing happening as I work for the same clients week after week. Well, it is interesting to me. Here is what it is that’s developing: a possessiveness I associate with love.

As I get more familiar with a client’s house, and start to know what needs to be done and where things are and where things go, and get to that point where I can arrive at work and immediately start fixing the things that are not right—at the same time as all that is happening, the house is becoming, in a certain sense, MINE. As I take care of a client, and grow familiar with the amount of lotion it takes to cover her back, and which foot she holds up first for a sock or slipper or pant leg, and which pillows she likes to have behind her, and how she likes her coffee—at the same time as all that is happening, the client is becoming, in a certain sense, MINE.

It reminds me of when I worked in the infant room of a daycare. I was never confused about who actually owned the babies: I never felt as if I wanted to adopt them, or that the babies should prefer me over their parents. But by taking care of those babies day after day, there was a sense in which I felt part ownership in those babies. My work was forming them; my efforts improved their comfort and happiness; that time and effort and investment and care made those babies, to a certain degree, MINE.

There is huge satisfaction in this. “Possessive” is a word we tend to use with negative connotations, but in this case the meaning is stripped down, and positive. It is not particularly satisfying to invest time and effort in something that belongs to someone else: why would I take care of someone else’s house, someone else’s child, someone else’s skin? When the transfer happens, and the house, the child, the client become in a sense MINE, it changes the feeling. I am tutting over something that I want to take care of because now I am invested: if I feel ownership, if I feel POSSESSION of the item or place or person, then it is feels right to care about it, to take good care of it because I want it taken good care OF. It starts a good cycle, where working improves my feelings about working. It is also good for the client or the baby to get that kind of invested care, rather than apathetic “This isn’t MY house/baby/relative” care.

I have noticed already, however, that good possessiveness can get mixed up with the bad kind of possessiveness, the kind that involves jealousy and competitiveness. A caregiver might want to be the favorite caregiver, for example, and might, either on purpose or without really realizing it, withhold information from other caregivers in order to keep that crown. I saw it in myself recently: I found a way to coax a client to do something she’d been consistently resisting; it was hard to share that information with other caregivers. I wanted to be The One She Cooperated With, as others struggled. I liked that other caregivers were failing, and I was succeeding. Those are not feelings to encourage, or nurture, or indulge. I try to remember the caregiver who trained me, who left me a sheet full of tips she’d gradually acquired over the years: her impulse was to help the client by helping me, rather than to watch me struggle and fail in order to feel good about her knowledge and experience.

Or I’ve noticed that some caregivers want to complain that they are the only ones who do a certain task—but what they really value is the possessiveness of the complaining. If another caregiver starts helping with that task, the first caregiver isn’t then made happy; the first caregiver instead has to find a way to criticize the way the task is being done, or find another task that they’re the only one to do. This kind of possessive competitiveness can lead to some very clean client houses: “I am the ONLY ONE who washes the heating vents!!” This is where the caregiver who trained me had trouble. “No one else ever launders the curtains!,” she said, rolling her eyes at the laziness of some people, people who read the employee manual and saw the part about how we are not a housecleaning company and do not for example launder curtains or wash walls. “No one but me seems to be able to refill these supplies!,” she said, refilling them when they were only halfway used up, before anyone else would have a chance to do it.

The trick is to figure out how to harness the good, job-improving, client-life-improving parts of possessiveness, without tripping over the bad parts.

My two teenagers, especially the 14-year-old one, enjoy humor of this sort: “Photo of ginger-colored guinea pig; caption about Donald Trump’s hair finally leaving him.” “Pair of photos comparing Kim Davis to the repellent receptionist of Monsters Inc.”

I get why they like it. I have been known to snort at a particularly clever one, now and then. But I’m gradually going from “Closed-lipped smile” reactions to “Lectures” reactions, because this stuff can’t go on. It’s fun and tempting to make fun of someone’s physical appearance, but we teach children NOT to do that.

It’s bugging me more and more, I think because of the underlying message. Those jokes seem to say this: “If Kim Davis were hot, she’d have a valid stance worth hearing out; but she’s not hot, so she’s ridiculous.” “If Donald Trump were hot, he’d be a good political candidate; but he’s not hot, so he’s ridiculous.” We’re not saying those things. I hope.

I find I have to spell it out, even to myself, when I catch myself snickering. It helps to reverse it: if I picture my favorite candidate being mocked for her/his appearance, my immediate reaction is incredulity. Why would the way a candidate LOOKS be an issue? And also: Is physical appearance seriously the best argument anyone can find against the candidate? Then there must not be any REAL argument against them. This is how I am forcing myself to see it when someone mocks a candidate (or any other person) I DON’T like or support. It’s making me cranky to have to defend people I don’t like, but I feel like I am just DONE with the physical-appearance jabs. If Donald Trump is a good candidate for the job, his hair is less than irrelevant; if he’s not a good candidate, mocking his hair makes it seem as if detractors can’t think of any better reasons to call him ridiculous.

It’s definitely tempting to find a repellent person EVEN MORE repellent by shuddering at their looks. I can see the appeal of that, and I do feel it myself: if someone supporting an ugly point of view is herself/himself ugly, it feels so RIGHT and APPROPRIATE; it fairly CLICKS INTO PLACE. But that’s fairy tale stuff, to think that ugly on the inside shows as ugly on the outside, and that pretty on the outside means pretty on the inside. It doesn’t work to seriously measure the legitimacy of a point/cause/platform that way. A hot person supports it: they have a valid point and we need to consider it; a non-hot person supports it: we dismiss the cause while pointing and laughing?

No. Surely that is not what we’re doing. And it really ISN’T. We dislike the opposing cause or candidate FIRST, and then we find other reasons to dislike them, and unfortunately physical appearance is one of those things. It is, for whatever reason, a natural reaction. But it makes the mocker look shallow, and severely undermines the strength of the actual objections to the cause or candidate. As soon as someone compares George W. Bush to the MAD Magazine guy, as if that’s a legitimate point to be making, I find I’m not really taking anything ELSE they say seriously.

We are having our first interval of events where it would really make things much better and easier if I weren’t working. TWO of the kids are having medical issues of the sort where the nurse calls YOU to tell you when your appointment with the specialist/equipment is, and already I had to call out on a shift once (Edward needed an MRI, and the MRI machine is quite booked up and you take what you can get), so now I really really feel as if I’d better not do so again. Because of various changes in client schedules, my hours are down to only ten per week, which makes it even more ridiculous when I have to take some of them off. But those ten hours are in four different shifts, two of which are right smack dab in the middle of a day. It makes things tricky.

Today I am waiting for a call to tell us an appointment time, and I’m trying very hard NOT to do the thing where I waste a lot of time thinking of all the things that COULD be wrong with it, when none of those things are yet the case. (They could call while I’m at work and can’t answer my phone. They could say, “Your appointment is at [time when I am still at work].” They could call and say the appointment is the NEXT time I have to work. I could miss the call AND the appointment. I could say, “Oh dear, but I have to work then!” and they could imply that I don’t sufficiently prioritize my child’s health.)

Because maybe instead it will be one of the many things that would be GREAT! Maybe they will call right after I get home from my shift, and they will suggest an appointment on a day I’m not working, at a time that would be perfect!

Anyway. It would be a lot easier if there were no job schedule to work around. I’m finding it stressful to figure this out. And that’s on top of the medical stresses. One of them is that the medication Edward takes for his Crohn’s disease has apparently stopped working, so now we start again with trying medications and reading horrifying lists of side effects and going to closely-spaced appointments, just when we had gotten to the cruising altitude of auto-refills and twice-yearly check-ups.

The other is that William fell and wrenched his knee, and it’s swollen and the doctor winced when he saw it and I got the impression I should have taken him to the emergency room the day it happened instead of waiting for the next morning, and when they did an x-ray they found bone cysts. Bone cysts. What even ARE bone cysts. They’re halfway through his shin bone; the doctor said if they spread much further, the bone could just snap as William is walking along. Anyway, we will need to see specialists about both these issues, the knee and the bone cysts, and I don’t feel as if I understand even what is going on yet, so I’m looking forward to the appointments but also nervous about managing them with my job.

One thing I really wish is that my workplace was the kind where I could try to fill my own shifts. I’ve had jobs like that before, and while it’s hard to say to a co-worker, “Please please pleeeeeeeease can you work for me 1:00-3:00 today, I will OWE YOU,” or “Listen, can I trade my 1:00-3:00 shift today for your 1:00-3:00 shift tomorrow?,” it is easier than saying to a boss, “I’m sorry, I suddenly can’t work 1:00-3:00 today.” The tone. The tone of voice a boss uses when an employee calls out. It’s the WORST.

If your child is invited on a pretty spectacular playdate, along the lines of “Our family is going away for the weekend to stay at a cool place and do cool things, and we invite your child to come with us”—do you do…anything? I mean, if Elizabeth’s friend invites her to a movie, I get anxious because I think, Do we pay for her ticket? do we send money for snacks? (I usually go with no and yes, respectively, but it’s a guess.) When the event is something MUCH MORE than that, I am proportionately more anxious about it—though also less anxious, because I don’t even know what the options are, the way I do with movies. I think I probably need to make it clearer what’s involved. It’s not like a trip to Disney. It’s more like a trip to a family-owned vacation house, with outings for mini-golf and ice cream cones and dinner out.

So that is the first question: Do you do ANYTHING different, or, if this hasn’t come up before, do you think you WOULD do anything different?

And I guess the second question is: What are the options, if any?

For example, I wondered if I should send money for them to order take-out one night. But maybe they already have dinner plans, and that would kind of mess it up.

I could say the money was for “a treat—pizza or ice cream or something,” and let them decide. But is it kind of awkward to hand someone a lump of cash? It seems a little awkward. And how MUCH cash. And I don’t want her to think that if we do something with HER child, we expect to receive a lump of cash. But I think it’s safe to say that we are not going to do anything reciprocal here, so perhaps it will not come up.

Are there LESS awkward things I could do?

Here is something I would not have predicted: it seems EASIER to get the nudity over with EARLIER in the caregiver/client relationship. I would have thought that it would be more comfortable for two people to get to know each other a little first. It seemed clear to me, when I was sent to a new client, that the client might prefer not to strip down on our first session together, but might instead want to wait until I’m more familiar.

But actually, getting to know each other first seems to make it MORE awkward. With the clients who needed help with a shower the very first day we met, our roles are so clear: I am the caregiver, and I help with showers. That’s my job. I’m still just a generic, polite set of scrubs to them. Whereas if we wait, because the client feels shy with a stranger, it feels MORE awkward with time. Now we know each other, almost in a SOCIAL way. We’ve chatted, many times. Now it’s one person taking off clothes in front of another person.

I can only speak for myself, of course, and only from the caregiver role. Maybe the clients are feeling completely different about it. On the other hand, I’m thinking back to when I was in the hospital after my c-sections, and nurses saw me naked. There was a hurdle to get over, but then it was over. And I think it worked mostly because one nurse was almost interchangeable with another: I wasn’t there long enough to get to know anyone.

I had a good dream last night, where first I was able to use my new mad eldercare skillz to assist in an emergency situation, and then I got kissed by a guy I think is cute. But then I ruined my own dream, first by turning out not to have gloves on in the emergency situation (even though in the dream the first thing I said after “Can I help?” was “Okay, I’ll go put gloves on”), and then by thinking, “Wait. If this guy would cheat on his nice wife with so little apparent struggle, not even a series of tortured conversations about it first, then I’m not even interested in him anymore.”

I have a new coffee maker, a Black & Decker programmable one that was on sale at Target for $39.99. I love it and was going to say so in a post, but then I went to the site to get a photo/link, and the reviews were pretty bad: things like, “The coffee tastes/smells like plastic” and “It leaks.” I’m not having trouble with a plastic taste/smell, and it’s not leaking, but it made me nervous about recommending it. What if I happened to get a non-defective one, but in general this model is very prone to defects? Or what if I recommend it, and then a few weeks later it leaks all over the counter, but by then you’ve already bought one?

ANYWAY. I didn’t think I cared about it being programmable, and I wasn’t planning to use that feature, but I’ve programmed it pretty much every day since I bought it. It is pretty delightful to get out of the shower and smell fresh coffee brewing. And in the morning it’s like, “Urg, I have to make the coffee,” or there are other demands roiling around me that take priority. But in the evening it’s common for me to be puttering in the kitchen, and it doesn’t feel like too much of a burden to get the coffee set up for the next day while I’m there.

But this is a story of how dim I can be, especially before coffee. Because this morning the kids got up earlier than usual, and so I was up earlier than usual, and I went to the kitchen and the coffee maker hadn’t started yet. And I thought, “Aw, I have to wait ten minutes before it starts brewing.” To my credit, it didn’t take longer than a minute before I realized I could just hit the start button myself.

I have to get a new phone, which I’m not happy about because the ONLY REASON I need one is that you know the little thingie the charging cable plugs into? THAT broke. I hate when it’s something like that. But also Paul says my phone is about 7 years out of date anyway, so I think he’s glad of the excuse to replace it.

The only upside is that I got to choose a new phone case. I liked my old one a lot, but it had a couple of pieces broken off of it, and it won’t fit the new phone. I know some of you like to see people’s phone cases, so here’s the case I used to have:

(image from EBay.com)

And here are the two I ordered for my new phone:

(image from EBay.com)

(image from EBay.com)

I feel I should say, though, that there weren’t many OPTIONS. It’s an Android phone, and there just aren’t as many cases available for those. So these are not necessarily The Cases of My True Heart—more like, my favorites from what was available.

I want to talk next about yearbooks. I have to make a decision about them. For TWELVE CONSECUTIVE YEARS we will have at least one child in high school. High school yearbooks cost $60, and that’s with the early-ordering discount. Let’s not even address that craziness, because that’s an unchangeable feature of this decision. What I want to address is this: what should my yearbook strategy be? Here are some of the factors:

When I was in high school, ordering yearbooks was VERY VERY IMPORTANT to me, one of my favorite parts of the whole school year. I still have all four yearbooks, although I find I only really need the junior and senior ones; the freshman and sophomore ones live in the basement, but the junior and senior ones are on a bookshelf. Yearbooks are NOT very important to the two kids in high school right now. But THEIR yearbooks ARE important to ME. That is, I want those yearbooks for myself, to look up their friends and my friends’ kids and so forth.

When I was in high school, ordering yearbooks was up to me: if I wanted them, I could pay for them with my own money. But they were only $20-25 then, and I think the senior one was free.

Also, my parents didn’t care AT ALL about my yearbooks, whereas I DO get excited about my children’s yearbooks.

So those are some of the then/now issues.

Another issue: sometimes more than one child will be in school at once. For example, this year Rob and William are both in high school. When the little ones are in high school, some years there will be THREE in high school at once. Spending $180 on three copies of the same yearbook feels…not right.

It’s hard to figure out. I’d thought what I’d do is just buy a yearbook each year, and have it belong to the household. This plan results in 12 total yearbooks. But then no one gets to take their yearbooks with them when they leave home. And no one gets to have their friends sign their yearbooks.

Or I could decide to buy a yearbook for each child each year. That would be 20 total yearbooks, and they could have their friends sign them. But then they’d take the yearbooks with them when they left home, and I wouldn’t have any. I don’t ACTUALLY NEED any, but I do want them. But I don’t want them badly enough to make it 32 total yearbooks; I can always ask a child to scan a page for me if I really need it.

Wait, I think I’ve figured out what I should do. I think I should buy one yearbook for each of the 12 years we’ll have at least one kid in high school, and have those be Household Property. And then I think I should buy each kid their own senior yearbook. That would be 17 total yearbooks, and I’d have access to a set, but they’d have something for their friends to sign senior year.

I’d be interested to know what you’d do. I’d also be interested to know if you have your high school yearbooks, and if your experience is the same as mine: i.e., that you use the senior one a LOT to look people up, and the junior one SOME to look people up (people who graduated the year ahead, mostly), but that the freshman and sophomore ones are not as useful.

I’m not sure how long ago it was, but it was probably about 15-18 years ago, and here is what happened. I was driving along in my neighborhood, and the guy behind me was acting really aggressive: tailgating and also doing that thing where someone goes way to one side of the lane or the other, as if they want to communicate that they’re STRAINING to get around you. We came to an intersection with a red light, and we were the first two cars to arrive. As soon as we came to a stop, he jumped out of his car and took a step toward my car.

I froze. I was stuck. What could I do? The light was RED. Fortunately for me, all the guy did was grab his windshield wiper and flick it—apparently something was stuck in it. Then he got back into his own car.

Here is what this experience showed me, vividly: I have a LOT of trouble, a potentially DANGEROUS amount of trouble, separating my ACTUAL possible moves from my PRESUMED possible moves. James Bond does not have this problem. Is someone in his way when he is trying to drive fast through a tunnel? Pish, he can drive right up the side of the tunnel, no big. But there I was, at an intersection, frozen in place because of THE COLOR OF A LIGHT. There was NO ONE ELSE in the intersection! NO cars. I could have 100% safely driven away from the guy behind me, just by running the red light. But that idea did not even OCCUR to me until much, much later, so it’s lucky I didn’t need it.

It’s not even that I thought, “Oh, I can’t go because that would be illegal.” (If I HAD thought that, I would have quickly realized that NO POLICE OFFICER would fault me for doing it in a situation where a possibly dangerous person was approaching my car.) It was more as if the light’s redness rendered me physically incapable of movement.

Since that incident, I’ve worked to force my mind to understand that SOME restrictions are actual (if there is a cement wall, and you drive directly into it, it will stop you), and SOME restrictions are not (red lights do not actually disable your car). As I’m driving along, I think to myself things such as, “If a car came into my lane, I could DRIVE INTO THAT YARD. Cars DO work on grass, even though in normal circumstances you’re not supposed to do that.” “In a real emergency, I could TURN LEFT here, even though that would mean going the wrong way on a one-way street.”

I realize not everyone has to work at this. Where I get derailed and/or stuck, other minds quickly and easily see the possibilities. In some cases, this leads to people being jerks and breaking rules for their own convenience, like when someone drives in the shoulder to get around all the cars waiting their turn in a lane. But in general, I think being able to see possibilities like that is a huge gift, and it’s one I wish I had. Practicing it is good for my brain, I’m sure, the way doing crosswords and logic puzzles it, but it hasn’t led to any massive brain-restructuring: I still have the kind of brain that struggles with this.

All of this is to say that I had another mind-blowing “Wait, a red light DOESN’T ACTUALLY STOP ME” moment yesterday. I was with a client who’d been widowed after more than 40 years of marriage, which sounds like a nice long marriage to me. Then she mentioned that it was actually her second marriage, which began when she was older than I am now. Normally it seems to me that life is rather short, but the idea that I could potentially divorce Paul, marry someone else, and have a FORTY-YEAR marriage with that second person, it rocked me back on my heels.

Which is what led me back to the idea of actual vs. presumed possibilities. It occurred to me on the way home that, if I wanted to, I could ask Paul for a divorce, meet someone else, marry them instead, make my children someone else’s step-children. There are lots of things about that idea that I don’t want (like, all of them), but it’s mind-boggling to realize I LITERALLY COULD launch onto that path, if I wanted to and/or if circumstances changed unexpectedly.

Or I could wait until Paul left for work, then go to a sperm bank, fill out a bunch of paperwork, turn over a bunch of money, and try for another baby. I don’t want to do that, and it would likely end my marriage. But I LITERALLY COULD. (Or rather, I could launch onto that path: obviously the insemination might not work.)

Or we could move to a totally new state, somewhere we’ve never even been and have no reason to want to live. We could just GO. In, say, three months, the whole thing could be a done deal.

I could buy tickets for an international trip, without even asking Paul. I WOULDN’T, but I COULD. I could just go, and let him deal with it.

I have some money of my own. I could get it in cash, and throw it into the wind. Or I could rent a building and buy some merchandise and start a business. Or I could get a secret apartment.

I could have a fling. It wouldn’t be a GOOD idea, but it is LITERALLY POSSIBLE to do it. The red light is a STRONG SUGGESTION, but it’s not a cement wall.

I could take a hammer and put holes in the living room wall. Tons of holes. I’m not inclined to do that, but there’s nothing physically preventing me from doing it.

I could rip up a library book. Just rip out alllll the pages. I realize this is not the sort of thing James Bond would have on his list of Truly Shocking Possibilities.

I could walk out of the house naked. I’d likely be arrested after a short while, but there would be a period of time when I would be outdoors, naked, in public. Again, I have no inclination to do this, but it’s startling to realize it’s literally, actually, seriously a choice I am physically able to make.

I could go to the animal shelter today, right now, and bring home another cat. Or a DOG. We could have a dog by dinnertime tonight.

I could adopt a child. I could adopt a whole sibling group and change the structure of our family forever.

This whole line of thought reminds me of that stage many parents go through after having a new baby, when many of us have the highly-unpleasant realization that it is LITERALLY POSSIBLE for bad things to happen to the baby—which causes many of us to have a lot of trouble picking up knives, carrying the baby past railings/windows, carrying the baby up and down stairs, driving with the baby in the car, etc.

Or I remember going out for groceries while Paul watched the kids, and realizing I could just keep driving. Right past the grocery store, right out of the state. I didn’t REALLY want to, but it was boggling to realize I LITERALLY COULD. People DO.

There is a sense in which these thoughts are alarming: knowing I have the power to make decisions that would be destructive is…well, I’m going to stick with the word alarming. But it’s also exhilarating: there are LOTS more choices than I am currently considering, and it’s nice to know they’re available if I need/want them.

Do you remember awhile back we talked about things we don’t want but can’t get rid of because otherwise we will keep buying them? For example, I need to keep two headbands (one wide, one narrow) among my possessions forever, because otherwise I will think a headband will be cute on me and I will buy another one. I need to keep a couple of tank tops for the same reason: they are just never going to look right on me, but if I get rid of them, I will forget that they don’t look right on me and buy more.

I thought of another example: hair-removal lotion.

(image from Amazon.com)

If I don’t keep a container of Veet or Nair in the bathroom closet for ALL ETERNITY, I will keep purchasing it. Because for some reason, I periodically think, “Hey, instead of spending 30 seconds shaving my underarms, which is no big deal, why don’t I cover them with NASTY-smelling lotion and sit there in the bathroom with my elbows sticking out for 10 minutes, then try to get the stuff off in the shower, then find that not all the hair is removed, but then not be able to shave or use deodorant for a couple of days because the skin feels weird and irritated and sort of unpleasantly, stickily smooth? All for the huge, huge benefit of ‘lasting up to twice as long as shaving’? How about THAT great idea?” –Swistle, who is spending the day discreetly sniffing down the neckline of her shirt.