Precarious. That was my position. Precariously squatting on
the edge of the toilet bowl. The toes of my scuffed up pumps placed on each
side of the seat. They were sliding ever so slowly toward the water beneath me
and I was not coordinated enough to reposition myself without completely
falling off so tensed my thigh muscles to hold on. I silently hoped I had
grabbed my bag off the floor before she saw it and realized she was not alone
in here. She came in so quickly; I hadn’t had time to prepare myself. My phone,
which I had been playing bejeweled on until moments ago, was stuffed
unceremoniously down my bra.
The only sounds were her relieving herself (for what felt
like eternity) and the shuffle of her sketchers against the mint tile. I
gritted my teeth and tried to stay balanced on my porcelain perch, desperate
not to make a sound. One slip and she would know I wasn’t in a meeting like I
had said: I was in the bathroom for the sole purpose of avoiding her. When your
career is to keep children away from their mother because she’s been deemed “unsafe”
by the law, the space between you becomes insurmountable. And the distance
between our stalls seemed much to short.
I heard her readjust her clothing and head to sink. I
breathed a solitary sigh of relief…. Too soon. With an almighty splash, my foot
slipped into the sea of germs beneath me and I screamed as I wacked my head on the wall.
“Fuck”, I gasped, my leg still positioned in the toilet
bowl. The water had splashed all over my jeans and I was barely holding onto
the shiny, metal support bar on the wall.
“You ok in there?” she asked in a bemused tone.
I tried to disguise my voice, “Uh… yeah…. Just, just dropped
something in the… yeah”. Yeah. I just dropped my pride and any hope secrecy. No
big deal.
“Ok” she said and quickly vacated, leaving the awkwardness
air to mingle with my shame. I noticed she didn’t wash her hands. Of course she
didn’t wash her hands. Then I realized my foot was still in the toilet and I
gagged at my self-righteousness. I quickly got up, trailing water behind me,
and scrubbed my leg with paper towels. Fuck fuck fuck. My language is the least of a hundred
things my job has slowly but deliberately eroded. My job. The familiar train of
thought charged through my brain. Of
course this would happen to me. I’m cursed. I thought this was what I was
supposed to do. I hate this job. I hate everything about everything…
The train halted abruptly, its whistle resounding in my
brain: What am I doing with my life?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried since I’ve worked
for DCFS. I can’t tell you how many difficult decisions I’ve made, how many
times I’ve been called a bitch, how much responsibility I have to carry on my
young, naïve shoulders, or the many difficult positions my clients have bent my
psyche into. It’s like being told to have sex with someone you don’t know and
don’t necessarily want to be with: devastating to the emotions and hugely,
irrevocably intimate. Somehow in the act of trying to repair peoples’ lives
from the outside, the vast empty on the inside grows to insidious proportions. It’s
terribly difficult to fight how that empty sucks everything away and
simultaneously connects me to the people I've come to love and truly hate. And here I was
sitting on the bathroom floor in a government building covered in toilet water, because my love for a client and inability to accept her failure drove me to literally hide in the bathroom. Gee whiz.
It just hurts. Life just hurts. I bent my knees to my chest
and buried my nose in between my thighs. There are pieces of me that still hold
onto hope that there’s more to this life than what I see. Those pieces that have
loved unconditionally. Those pieces that helped a few people succeed in the
child welfare system. The pieces that can laugh with my friends even when the
whole world tastes bitter and incomplete. The wholesome pieces that truly love life. But I often feel exactly how I am:
in a mess I’ve created from avoiding my
problems, very unsure how to proceed, and seriously debating crawling back into
the stall I just came out of. I’m 22 years old and I’m somehow supposed to make
decisions about other peoples’ lives. I’m supposed to try and help them
surmount insurmountable problems. I’m somehow supposed to be able to deal with
the hurt and sad and empty and pain and anger and brokenness and responsibility
and failed promises and cruelty of circumstances and the injustice of the
system and the vulnerability of humankind. And somehow I’m supposed to want to
keep living….
It was there on the bathroom floor I began to laugh. It
started with a smile as I looked at my damp jeans, evolved into a chuckle as I
imagined myself balancing on the toilet and my client’s total confusion, and
solidified into true laughter as I considered how childish the situation was
and how comedic the outcome was. Precarious. That was my position. Precariously
wavering on the division of devastation and comedy. Child abuse isn’t funny
but people are.... even in situations that make most cringe. Wanna hear a story how a client offered me pizza in a bathroom that she got from her pimp? Or how two twenty something caseworkers tried to parent a foster kid on a four hour drive? Or how one of my coworker's clients likes to try to bribe government workers? Or about the accidental texts we get from clients who are high? Or how some parents like to name their kids after different STI's?
Maybe that’s the
ultimate choice for me: choosing whether to laugh or whether to cry. Because,
dang, if falling into a toilet isn’t funny, I don’t know what is.
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