Strange as it may sound, I asked my mother today if she’d write me a reference for a part-time job I very much want.

This would be beyond a dream job for me. I’ve been looking for work for a while because it’s just not doable anymore to try and make Scarleteen pay me a living wage for the hours I put in, even as lean as I live. I have busted my ass this year trying everything I could think of to make ends meet with it, but it’s just not going to happen per anything I can actually do myself at this point.

The ideal, of course, has been to find something where I still am doing the kind of work that is direly important to me and my life’s work, but which will also not wear me out (or bum me out) so much that I still can’t put in close to full-time hours with the site. There are a couple options, but when this one floated across my email box today, I very nearly leapt into the air, it’s so much of something I have been wanting to do for some time now.
While it would normally be odd to have a reference from your Mom in the pile, understand that given the fact that this is in healthcare, it’s quite appropriate in this case.

The fact that my mother and I have had an incredibly strained relationship for most of my life isn’t news to anyone who has been reading here for a while. It’s been VERY slow going for us to…well, not repair it, really, we’ve just had to try and make a whole new one. The old one wasn’t reparable. But when it comes to work, that’s turned out to be one of the lone ways my mother seems to understand me, and one of the easiest ways for us to connect.

She sent me something back within the hour, I read it, and I just felt really floored.

Really, I wasn’t sure what she’d say: I simply asked her because my mother is quite literally a healthcare/infectious disease goddess in Chicago, she knows this stuff like nobody’s business, takes it very seriously, and is also critical as hell when need be, so I knew she wasn’t likely to just be nice. My mother takes her work and healthcare so seriously, I know she’d never fib, even for one of her kids, to help get us work in any given arena of it if she wasn’t damn sure we could do it and do it well. She is equally admired and intimidating as hell in her field, as I understand it and have seen for myself now and then. Once in one hospital she worked in, when I was having some health issues, she got me in, and some poor nurse was so nervous in her presence, she managed to stick herself with the same needle she’d stuck me with, and was then so doubly freaked that I had to lean over and whisper, “It’s okay: she scares the hell out of me, too.”

(Tangentially, when that happens, you of course then have to be tested for every bloodborne anything to be sure your healthcare worker wasn’t endangered. When I got a copy of all those test results for myself, I noticed I was tested for pregnancy. Ummm…okay. Though I gotta say, it sure would have been something if I not only could have gotten some girl pregnant, but done so through the sheer power of my blood alone.)
Anyway, to read my mother assessing my professional skills so objectively, and from the vantage point of knowing way more than her share about these skillset, and to see that she thinks *I* am a goddess with this stuff myself is just…..dayum. My mother seriously thinks I am hardcore hot shit these days.
She made me weep today, and in the best way possible. This actually makes this the second time or so this year that I earnestly felt both my parents’ pride in me — and both demonstrated it clearly — very viscerally, and it’s just the most incredible thing.

filed under Heather Corinna | family
posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 4:30 pm

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