Solidarity--Yes All Women

For four and one half years, I have written strictly about myself, my own journey to find value and truth again, to reclaim who I once was and should love myself to be again.  More and more, I feel the need to stand up and publically speak about social issues, and I have held back because of my deep commitment to keep this blog anonymous.

On this topic, I really cannot.  If you haven't read the news this week, a young man in California killed six people and then himself because he was sexually frustrated by women, having turned them into objects who rejected his quest to have sex.  He also had Asperger's. 

As the mother of two teens with Asperger's, I find this trend bothersome.  One of my Asperger's children is thriving in life, the other is struggling mightily.  Yet, if either were to choose violence, it would not be because they have Asperger's.  My one struggling has told people that because they have Asperger's, they cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.  That is garbage.

Yet, boy or girl, Asperger's or not, every one of my children are aware of violence against women.  Every son I have raised gets the talk about how to respect women's boundaries, just like every daughter gets the talk on how to protect their bodies.  I do this because I was raped.

Mere weeks before I turned 17, I agreed to go on a date with the youth minister's son.  We were supposed to go to the county fair, and while I had icky feelings about him, this was a public place so I thought it would be okay. 

Then, at the last minute, he called because it had rained that day and he wanted to eat dinner and watch a movie at his house instead.  He said he mother would be there.  I was uncomfortable, and my egg donor told me I was being ridiculous and rude.  She pressured me to go, reminding me to not cause a scene and be polite at all costs.

Therefore, I was polite when his other left us alone in the house.  I was even polite when I said no to sex.  I continued to be polite as I repeatedly said no, and eventually I was polite while he ignored me and raped me instead.  I was polite until the next morning when I wasn't in a daze and really realized what he had done to me.

I got pregnant.  I got shipped to the furthest reaches I could be sent and still be in the U.S.  I got told I could not report my rape to the police.  Hell, I even got told by my father that I HAD to give my rapist's mother all of the "gifts" and letters he had left me after he raped me where he repeatedly told me that God had promised him I belonged to him.  I got told that no matter what I said, my father would always know I was partially responsible for my own rape.  I got told that my underwear missing from the drying that was in the unattached garage was just me making things up and overreacting, though four of my best pairs of underwear disappeared.

Meanwhile, my father forced me to give him blow by blow details of my rape, supposedly so he could confront my rapist and have the "facts" which was the most humiliating, re-traumatizing thing he could have ever done.  It was pointless anyway.  I was forbidden from reporting my rape, so I never even had the chance to tell my story to the authorities.  Yet, my rapist told my father that I got on my knees and begged him for sex.

Begged him for sex?  Anyone who knows me knows that that is so far from my personality it is laughable.  Even my father knew it.

So my rapist walked away with no consequences at all.  I ran into a girl a few weeks after my rape, given that I had lived in that town for two months and knew no one prior to my rape.  We compared notes and I learned that I was victim #6.  To the best anyone could tell, I may have been the first he actually raped, but he had certainly tried with two others, one of which he was chased from the house by the girl's father with a gun.  Oh how I wished I had been protected nearly half as much as that girl for years afterward.

So, I talk to my sons about how to never violate any girl's physical boundaries and never, ever rape someone.  I talk to my girls about no means no, and if no is not respected do NOT be polite.  Fight, scream, kick, yell, do whatever you must to protect your body from an assault, even if you know the guy touching you.  I've also taught ALL of my children if they ever see a girl fighting someone off, to step in and help protect her.

I was 16 and I was raped.  I have been haunted by my rape my entire life.

Know what happened to my rapist?  I looked him up last week for some reason.  He got married two years ago, to a girl the same age as the child that was conceived from my rape.  They had a baby last year.  I can only breath a sigh of relief that the baby is a boy.  And I still wonder how many more have there been after me, because there is no way I was his last victim anymore than I was his first.

Yes, all women.  We all face this risk, and we must all learn to protect ourselves.  One in four women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.  I am that one in four.  I am not alone. 

How to pay for it?

The hard reality is that going to graduate school requires money.  Since moving back to the south, I have a volunteer nursing position that I work, but it's heavy on the volunteer.  I love my job, but I won't be making a dime off of it in the near or distant future, even though I would like to continue working it throughout the next four years of graduate studies.

There is always the stand by of student loans.  Certainly if I secure nothing else, then I will use student loans, especially for this first year.  However, I would very much like to avoid more student loan debt.  Given how late in the academic year even my first graduate program made an admission decision (not based upon anything I did, nursing programs appear to run behind other programs for the most part), non student loan financial options are rapidly evaporating.

From the beginning, my intention was to apply for federal scholarship programs for healthcare workers.  There is one for providers that will pay for medical school or nursing practice school.  Then, there is a second one that will pay for nursing studies.  Both of them have a service commitment requirement that says I would have to work in underserviced patient populations for as many years as the scholarships covered. 

The problem is that the admission letter came so late that one of the two scholarships closed while I was putting the application together.  Neither of the programs would let me even start the application process until I had an actual admission in hand.  So, I lost out on the better scholarship.  The second scholarship is need based, which after my income, a severance package and a relocation package all in last tax year, my financial need appears very low, especially if you don't account for the large family (and their crazy, rapidly expanding medical bills again).

I have two days left for the second federal scholarship, the need based priority one, and one of my letters of recommendation is not sending an email link to the professor who keeps trying to help me set it up.  I am very afraid that I am going to miss the deadline on this second scholarship on this problem. 

Today, I scrambled.  I applied for the nursing scholarships at my university, even though the Financial Aid office cannot tell me if they have already been decided though they have not yet been awarded.  I researched other options and found a state nursing scholarship I have to apply for directly from the Board of Nursing.

I also found the graduate school information on assistantships.  There are teaching assistantships for the nursing department.  I truly do not know if they are reserved for the DNP program versus the MSN program, but I am applying for them just the same.

I thought I was through all of the rush and stress once I got my applications in.  We had yet another child crisis hit us and I missed 10 days on hitting the ground running on financial aid options.  Those 10 days may have eliminated the bulk of all of the non loan options available. 

The best option would be a teaching assistantship.  The deadline for those is July 1st.  They don't require recommendations from anyone else, nor are they need based.  They are academic based, which would be fantastic if I hadn't scored such a marginal GRE score when I was sick.  Even so, I think my academic record is strong enough that I should stand at least a shot at these options.  I will apply for those in addition to everything else before Thursday and then I wait and see whether I will be scraping by and racking up more debt or whether I will be able to breath this upcoming year.  Student loans will cover tuition.  It will not cover my costs that I will have to drive to clinicals two days per week and once a week to a health assessment class this fall.

It just seems to be more of the we never, ever get ahead struggle we've had all these years.  I keep reminding myself to stay focused.  In four years, I will be a nurse practitioner and half of these children will be grown.  We WILL get ahead then simply because we will be bleeding out money less and bringing in money more.  It would be fantastic if I could get either a PRN job or something other than student loans to cover graduate school for the next year.  The federal scholarships I can apply for again next spring, just not before then.

Graduate school

Despite all of the work I have done on myself, on reclaiming me, on addressing my very low self esteem, there are days that my self doubt overwhelms me. When I walked away from my sociology program as a 20 year old burn-out and instead enrolled in an Associates in nursing program, it was because I decided I didn't actually want to earn a Masters in Sociology and become a disaster relief coordinator afterall. Instead, I wanted to become a medical provider. However, I did not want to go to medical school. Oh, I could have gone. I had a top-notch GPA, I was doing fine in school, and the medical school where I had a legacy claim through the Legal Maternal Bitch and my sister was begging me to go apply to their program. They contacted me directly and through my sister at least half a dozen times, expressly communicating that they put a high priority for legacy claim students and I was a perfect candidate for their program.

I had two problems with becoming a physician. First, I didn't want to devote over a decade of my life to training, and have to choose to either miss the chance to have a large family, or walk away from that training just so I could have a large family. Second, I had encountered nurse midwives after my rape, who had changed my entire viewpoint on how you approach medicine. I knew if I was going to be an advanced practice provider, it was going to be through the nursing model of care, a model that I felt was far more holistic and saw the patient has a total entity and not the mechanics of specific disease processes. If I had known what an osteopathic doctor was, I probably would have become a DO when I was young. However, by the time I knew about that option, I had long walked away from all of that.

When I went to nursing school, I did so with the full intention of going straight through and becoming a nurse practitioner as quickly as possible. The point of getting the associates first was merely that the associates program had better pass rates on the board, and that working as a RN while completing the rest seemed like a wise financial decision.All of that changed when I met II, and suddenly the idea of a family and motherhood was no longer abstract but attainable and right in front of me. When I first left my career to devote to motherhood, I fully expected to come back in a few years. When it became clear that motherhood was a more long-term career, I incorporated my nursing into that job description by adopting special needs children.

Five years ago, when II destroyed everything about my world, I had to go back to school and back to the idea of a career. I had walked away form nursing and was nearly certain I could not salvage that dream.I considered going to medical school, but the reality that it would require too much sacrifice from my children was too high a price for me to pay. So, I considered sociology/criminal justice.

Yet, the entire time I was earning that bachelor's degree, I had a professor, someone I consider a friend now, who happened to be the academic advisor for the nursing program. He wouldn't leave me alone. He hounded me and challenged me and pushed me that I belonged in nursing, as an advanced practitioner. I told him, more than once, that I had burned that bridge and could not revive it. More than once I re-visted it, called the board of nursing, spoke with the program directors of multiple undergraduate and graduate programs going back over the question yet again--could I go back? He never let up on me for over two years.I found one way in that state to salvage my nursing, but it was going to require I pay for a re-entry program, one I would never qualify for financial aid to cover. I was wiling to ask my sister to help me, even though I would pay for that with more than just a pound of flesh, but it was the only way to salvage my nursing.

Then, Micah crashed and suddenly we were moving states. The new state had none of the requirements the former state had. To go back into nursing, I merely had to take my re-activiated original license from another state and apply for licensure by endorsement. Then, working in the infusion center for 13 months solidified my nursing. While there, I made the choice to go forward with the nursing afterall.

The voice that had badgered me for two years had been replaced by several other voices, NP and RN friends who individually and in one voice continued to hound me that I was meant to follow this path.This spring, I nearly gave up. I backed out of applying for graduate programs...and then changed my mind a mere two weeks before the deadlines.

Crashing my GRE in December because I had taken it while sick had completely sapped my self confidence. Having to push my final four credit hours to the summer term because of financial aid issues had left me weary and frustrated. I was ready to quit, ready to believe I didn't have what it takes to accomplish this dream at all anymore. Despite being told I MET the minimum GRE for the graduate programs, despite having it pointed out that all of the programs gave waivers for the requirement even based upon my GPA, I still wondered if I had what it takes.

Then, when I made that sudden change of decision two weeks before it was all due to be submitted, I made a bold step. If something is worth doing, for me it is always worth doing right. I eliminated the give-me programs from my application pile. Every single school I applied to was a top 100 school in US News & World Reports. One was lower than the other three, but it was also local which brings some distinct advantages despite being lower in the rankings than the other programs overall.

When I sent in my applications, that voice that LMB put into my head when I was so young, that voice that hounds me and tells me I'm never going to be good enough said, "You fool. What made you think you could get into a top level nursing program. You're going to be rejected by all of those programs. Three of those programs were in the top 25 schools and the other was still in the top 100. You couldn't even settle for something slightly lower. You'll fail."

Today, the voice may still hound me. I have four more years ahead of me, and they are going to be even more challenging than what I have already faced. That health assessment instructor who challenged me to do an advanced assessment under her guidance last summer, despite my only taking an undergraduate assessment course was certain that I was capable of palpating a liver, a kidney, and a pancreas. This fall, I am going to have to learn how to do that on my own, without hesitation, and most definitely without freaking out. I'm going to have to learn how to assess patients, how to diagnose conditions, how to treat the whole patient and not just the presenting symptoms.

I am going to have to learn how to actually BE a nurse practitioner.I have to learn because the first of four programs that were all reach schools, that were all 'this could be the best school of them all' sent me a letter. It started with CONGRATULATIONS. With that one word, the last step of this amazing, heartbreaking, strange journey of getting to the rest of my life starts.

In four years, I will hold a Doctorate of Nurse Practice. I will be Doctor II, unless I follow through with a niggling through of changing my name back to my maiden name, but I will still be Doctor. If any of the other four schools send me an acceptance letter, I will have to choose one over another, and at least two of them were clear that they would not make their decisions until next month. Any of these programs would have been a privilege and honor to attend. Any of these programs will make me a doctor in four years. I am in.

Now I have to quell the fear of failure, but never again the fear that I am not good enough to get in.

Frustrated with waiting

I feel like I'm stuck in a suspended animation.

The children have finally stabilized. The move back south and into a new life was harder on them than even I anticipated, but they are stable again. Those whose school tanked are slowly recovering it. They all have activities, friends, recovering school status, and they are happy. They are mostly back in grief therapy, and the two with additional mental health struggles are thriving with new therapists and an excellent Psychiatrist locally. All of the hard work was so worth it. There is no way I could have sought work in the midst of caring for those needs.

I have two classes left for the BSN. My classes start tomorrow, and I honestly staved my Death and Dying class for last, simply because I knew I would enjoy it most. This week, I apply for my degree, which I will earn in August. I started this journey 4.5 years ago, and I never imagine it would take this long, nor that this was where I would find myself.

Yet, I'm spinning my wheels. My applications for graduate school have been submitted and still no answers have come, not rejections nor acceptance letters. I have confirmed that all of my documents arrived at the programs, so there is nothing more I can do but continue to wait.

I have been job searching for a month, and finding a PRN position that will work while I'm in grad school has not been easy to find. The dream job turned out to not be advertised honestly. They advertised for 12 hours per week, but they actually wanted 32+ hours per week, which won't work if I'm going to be in school full-time.

My financial aid for grad school has been submitted, but does me no good unless and until I am admitted somewhere. There are several national scholarships for graduate nurses but they also cannot be applied to until I have an actual acceptance. I interviewed for a job last week, and the interview went fantastic....and the hiring manager is out of state until next week.

So I am waiting, waiting to see where the next several years of my life is going to be focused....or not. There is absolutely nothing I can do but keep waiting, and try not to convince myself that I was foolish to think I could do this and stood a chance to get into any program in the first place.

Small steps forward, backward, sometimes sideways

Nothing life shattering is happening now. Yet, small things are shifting around here. Most of the kids are getting stable finally (and I cannot stress how important that change is). A and E are still struggling in school. However, E was accepted into a Magnet school for fine arts for this fall--conditional to her bringing her GPA back up, and it has been the motivation she has needed to push through her mental health challenges to get back to somewhat steady ground. We know what A's struggle is, we just aren't having any luck getting him fully back to thriving. He is the most tech unsavy teenager I have ever seen. We moved him to a school that is extremely tech oriented (the children all use ipads for their textbooks are supposed to submit their assignments online. We're desperately trying to help him, as is the school and the soccer team. I think he's looking at repeating three classes in summer school. There just doesn't seem to be a way around that outcome. E will likely have to repeat her math class in summer school. Surprisingly, S is passing all but his math, which everyone expected and knew and he will simply repeat it next year.

The children have all restarted grief therapy through a local non-profit. It's wonderful for them, and it's helping everyone get adjusted so much better than I was getting it as I spun my wheels and did it on my own. It was amazing. Whey they oriented the children to the center, they each received a bag. Those bags were full of things like journals (or grief oriented coloring book for the littlest guy), tissues and other things to help them. They were also given a stuffed animal and a full sized, handmade quilt. Those blankets are beautiful and all of the children love them. They are supplied by Project Linus. Years ago, in another state and another lifetime, the girls and I did a Girl Scout service project providing blankets for Project Linus in our area. Never did I imagine that I would see Project Linus as something to minister to my own children.

E had a very bad month of March, probably the worst in both of our lives. There was a point that I thought we were going lose her, quite literally. She's had a full tune-up of her mental health status and a new therapist. Her other therapist seemed nice enough, and was making progress with her, but he seemed to fail to understand how traumatic this whole move was and did not understand the need to see her more frequently than once a month. It had a great deal to do with what led to the disaster last month, and I certainly don't blame him. However, the grief center gave me a recommendation for a therapist not only skilled in addressing grief issues in teens but specialized in ASD children. In just three sessions, she has been FANTASTIC for E. Normally it takes a lot longer to get a therapist to understand who E is and how to work with her. This one really knows the Asperger's challenge well. She truly believes we can get E stabilized and back to every other week sessions by fall. I truly hope that is the case. It hurts me to see E hurting. But, since her tune-up and starting with this new therapist, I have tremendous hope for her getting stable and happy again. I was stunned that the Magnet school gave her a conditional acceptance despite her tanking her GPA this spring. They told her she has until August to get into the required GPA range and if she cannot accomplish that, then they will put her admission on hold until she does rather than reject her. This will be fabulous for her, to allow her to express her creativity and focus on positive and healthy avenues of creativity.

I interviewed for a job today. It was mostly a let-down simply because it appeared to be an HR screening interview and generic. However, she was going to forward my resume to the hiring manager, and that is where my hope lies that I will garner the attention and eventually the job. I've applied for quite a few jobs. This is the only one that has responded. It also happens to be my dream job, so I'm okay with that. I am waiting on an admission committee somewhere to agree that the future I envision for myself is one they believe I am capable of as well. Two of them have told me I can expect to hear in June. I'm impatient and want to hear today, but I continue to wait.

Yesterday, I started another journey in this reclamation process of my life. I started a journey on aggressively and proactively conquering my health struggles. By summer, I will have taken drastic measures that I believe will help see me through many more years with my family. It's an ironic but medically necessary journey I am entering, and one I hope I will not regret when I get to the other side.

Today, after years of avoidance and research in the dark of night, I made a leap on my spiritual journey as well. I am ready to explore spirituality without feeling like I have PTSD myself, without rejecting a creator because of the creations. It's not something I'm ready to discuss, and I don't know where it will lead. But, the sheer fact that I am speaking to a religious authority of any variety is HUGE for me at this point in my life.

Little by little we are putting our lives back together. This time, we will not be uprooted again. This time we will restore and this home will be a haven for healing for this family. It has been a stormy spring, and I couldn't have worked through this even if I had the option. However, as the family is recovering, we will find our footing again and find our way back to thriving again.

The dream job

If we had stayed in New England, I was reaching a point where I was going to have to find a new job. It wasn't just that my manager was horrid, and she was truly horrid. It was that as much as I liked working with adult oncology patients, my heart is still in pediatric care. I am a pediatric nurse and, if all of my dreams go as planned, I will one day be a pediatric nurse practitioner. That's who I am. That's how I got into adopting medical needs children in the first place. I was born a pediatric nurse. It's basically the one place where my mothering instincts that cause me to mother hen everyone around me becomes acceptable and beneficial.

So, I've said for years that my dream job is to work Pediatric Oncology and Hematology, with the ability to have a focus on palliative and hospice care worked into that population. In New England, the closest children's hospital was nearly 1.5 hours away, but if I was ever going to get back to pediatric practice, it was going to become necessary. Here in the south, the nearest pediatric hospital is only slightly closer, but the winters are more mild. So, I figured down the road, when I was ready to stop denying that I was born to be a pediatric nurse, I would look that direction for a job, in the hopes that if I got my foot in the door somewhere, then eventually I could work my way into the Oncology/Hematology area where I really want to be.

It took several months to get my licensure transferred to my new state. I had this identical problem when I moved to New England and I now believe the slowdown is the state that I took my board exams in. Only about half of the US states have a compact agreement for nurses, in all other states, you have to apply for what is called licensure by endorsement. In each state that I have had to do that, I am required to have a verification from the state I was most recently (and actively) licensed in sent to the new state. However, I am forever required to also have a form from the state where I took my board exams. Once my licensure was issued for this new state, several issues came up with the children in March and I was unable to work at looking for a job until a week ago.

Despite working a very normal looking, traditional nursing position for a year, most of my background is very non-traditional. I'm skilled and I am terrific at what I do. However, if you are looking for a job where I clocked in, worked my shift, and then took my paycheck home, you simply aren't going to find that. Consequently, I have not heard back yet from the local positions that I applied for, and I applied for every per diem and float pool position that any of the local hospitals have advertised. Two days ago, on a lark, I went to the children's hospital to look at what positions they had open right now.

They had a per diem night shift position on the peds floor. I thought about it for a minute and decided that if working night shift so I don't have to accommodate childcare, I can totally to the commute, so I applied. Then I happened to look at their list again. They have a per diem position in their Pediatric Oncology/Hematology infusion center they are looking for a nurse to hire. This....this is my DREAM JOB. This is the job I thought I would have to work my wait to get to, the job that was outside of my reach because I can only work per diem while I'm in grad school. And, I fit every qualification they want....except I am not chemo certified.

I am willing to get chemo certified, and I thought that perhaps my background and strengths in infusions, in central lines, in pediatric hematology and in hospice care would boast my chances over that missing chemo certification. I figured if I got past the screening, I would explain to them that I was supposed to get that certification in December but I knew the ethical thing was to not hold off on giving my resignation and letting my employer pay for that training and then quit two weeks later. I decided the ethical response was to give my manager a chance to put someone else into that slot so they could do the work after I left. So, I gave up being chemo certified before moving to do the right thing. I didn't honestly think I would get anywhere with this application. At most, I figured it would get my name to this department and they would start seeing my name repeatedly and with time they would eventually talk to me and see how passionate I am about this specialty.

I cannot describe the panic and the excitement to open my email 36 hours later and find an email asking me to call the nursing recruiter and set up a job interview. It's not a job yet. I still might not get this job. However, they know I am not chemo certified and they still want to interview me, so they must be willing to at least consider paying to get a new hire certified. This job....it's THE job I've wanted. It's THE job of my dreams, the one I wanted more than anything, the one that is my long-term career goal. If I could convince them that I am perfect for this job, I could work it for the years I am in graduate school, and then I would be known and established to try to get a nurse practitioner job with them when I was done. It feels too good to be true!

The not 12th birthday

He had the longest fingers. I remember those fingers. I remember them splayed out against my hand when I would hold onto him. I used to think in a different life he would have been a piano player. They seemed almost unnaturally long, slender....sometimes lethal as well. When we picked him up, his foster mother had his hair in a high and tight military cut. It was horrid. The child had a misshapen head, looked like he had at least a small amount of microcephaly and ears that were too low, too far back and too odd. He looked like an "FLK;" funny looking kid, a medical slang for a kid who looks like something is very off genetically but you can't put your finger on what. So, I kept his hair longer, in a pixie cut. The longer hair hid the FLK look, and it bought him much grace for his struggles from others because he looked much younger and more innocent than when you cut his hair short instead.[p] Last night, I though I heard him holler for me. II tells me that one of the children threw up at 1:30 am, and thus he heralded in this not birthday with full blown Micah issues. It reminded me that when Micah died, a dear friend came for his funeral and her special needs son began displaying behaviors that were completely abnormal for her, including vomiting all over my house several times. But, they were so eerily normal for Micah. Sometimes, when L opens her mouth, Micah comes out in full force. When J opens his mouth, Micah comes out a lot. It reminds me that they will carry him in their very souls forever.[p] They told us the second year was the hardest. I heard them, but I couldn't comprehend it. For me, the tears came in this second year. Since the first of the year, the tears that only came in short periods of time, and only far away from the children have become an ever present reminder that my heart will forever be broken. It feels like a relief to be able to cry now. When we hit March, they started building. And as the other children have fall apart and faced struggles that felt insurmountable, often in direct relation to their own grieving, it has become a heavy burden on this entire family. I know that we are in a safe place to heal, to rebuild our lives. I also know we have to go through these struggles and pain to get to a better place.[p] Thursday night, we did intake for a local grief support organization. They were incredible, geared towards children who have lost someone they love and their caregivers, all of their services are free. Several children have been set up in group grief therapy sessions and several will be receiving individual grief counseling. They have no male therapists, so A has been referred to a male therapist who works with teens and does grief support therapy. I want a therapist to check in with him and determine does he need some more intense grief therapy work, or does he just need a check-in. For E, who has made it clear that she continues to drown and nearly lose herself in her grief, we have a referral to a therapist who not only does grief support but works with children on the spectrum. In some ways, it feels like we're starting over at the very beginning of our grief. Losing II's job, the farm and their community they had built in New England has been so very hard for all of them. But, we'll make it through this.[p] I imagine that I would have bought him an adaptive three wheeler this birthday. By this point, we would have accepted he was never going to be capable of a two wheeler and would have gotten him something for a big kid that would allow him to continue to keep pace and interact with "his kids." I imagine we would have had balloons and laughed today. He liked keeping up with "his kids" so very much. He had no idea what to do with them, but he definitely wanted to keep up with them anyway.[p] Happy Birthday, Micah-man. I wish so dearly that you could be here to celebrate. We'll send red balloons to you in heaven instead. I hope you see them and I hope you love them. It's all we really have left now.