child, development

In no particular order, lessons learned from our first unit in Pediatrics:

1. As much as the mama-nurses who make up my circle love to give examples of how our Real Live Kids are developing, being a mom doesn't necessarily make learning peds easier. It does tend to send one off on a greater number of tangents, to wit:

Why isn't my kid saying 2 to 3 words and responding to "no" by age 12 months, and will he ever, given his parentage (his little orange head looks not unlike my own when deliberately turning away from efforts at redirection)? ... Is it because, instead, he is throwing his energy into staging temper tantrums so sensational that I can't ever decide whether to laugh out loud or join him on the floor? .... Oh my God, ancephaly; I need to go plant kisses on my son's forehead-enclosed brain right now! .... Unless he's dissolved it by digging out and dousing himself with the hidden-but-not-locked-up toilet bowl cleaner....

2. I don't actually enjoy learning new things. Our excellent classmates staged a knitting workshop immediately following the carnage of yesterday's peds exam, but given that I had spent an appreciable portion of the week studying for a test on which, I suspect, I will soon be receiving a stunningly mediocre grade, I was less than open to the prospect of additional repeat failures. After literally two efforts to cast on, I was ready to go pick up Mac, so we could curl up together like bugs on the floor, butts up, faces buried, in an effort to dig our way out of an inelegant and disagreeable world.

It is discouraging to me, the way in which the emotional and spiritual growth I claim to make tends to be predicated on my Doing Better Next Time. When I don't, I tend to LOLCATZ my way right back to the same sullen, defensive place I had really believed I'd crawled out of. Disappointing.

3. But what can you do? From one perspective, it seems apparent to me that nursing school was a mistake. I'm not good at this, and given the choice to believe that I am good at nothing or that I happened to make an unfortunate mis-step, even I don't love sulking enough to go for the former. A lot of the goals I had built around being a nurse are probably unrealistic: my grades aren't going to be good enough to obtain them, and I don't have much of a reason to suspect that I'll be an exceptionally good nurse, though I do believe that I'll be competent.

From another: this is where I am. I like nursing. My only negative feelings about it center around the fact that I want to excel and seem to have picked a field in which I can't.

But I don't know that excellence, in and of itself, is as satisfying as I believe it is when I am fetishizing it: if it were, we probably wouldn't need to write so many biographies celebrating those who pursue and attain it.

I can't choose to be better, or smarter than I am, and I no longer have the option of avoiding the knowledge that I am neither as good nor as smart as I believed I would be. Currently, my choice is: do I want to react like a small child because I disappoint myself, or do I want to focus on the fact that, apart from my own limitations and the shitty feelings they engender, my circumstances are mostly pretty enviable?

No one necessarily wants to read a story about someone who fails, and learns to live with failure; but those stories exist. And I suspect that, told well, they can be interesting and valuable. Given the switch I have made from dealing with edited, imaginary stories to the inelegant stories that comprise actual lives, it's probably for the best that I learn to appreciate that value.