Our father is a nurse.
And before his current gig he worked, for the longest time, doing home health
care. For those of you unfamiliar home
health care involves a nurse, or someone equally qualified, visiting patients
at home and doing a variety of tasks.
This could range from something as simple as checking up on them and
making sure they are still alive to changing bandages and all the other things
nurses do to patients. Saving lives and
breaking hearts and all that shit.
Except instead of being at a hospital these patients are more or less
well enough to be at home.
Specifically, for my father, this involved him driving all
over NW Ohio and visiting people from all walks of life. He would visit rich, white old people in
their awesome houses, recuperating after a major operation. He would get the Medicaid and Medicare
patients living in the hood, in horrible conditions and on the brink of abject
poverty. He would visit really nice, warm people. He would visit nasty, bitter people. He would visit crazy motherfuckers,
threatening him with violence and the like.
And he saw anyone and everyone in and between such extremes.
He would and did make friends. For some of the people he visited he was the
only contact that they had with the outside world. If you are getting home health care chances
are you are well enough to be out of the hospital but not well enough to make
regular trips back and forth to the hospital, or anywhere else really. Add in meals on wheels and similar programs
with a dash of daily or weekly assisted living workers and that person never
has to leave their home.
Combine this with
a pinch of poverty and a heaping spoonful of children that don’t give a fuck
and you get some really, really lonely and sad older people. And my father, being the charming,
gregarious, fun loving jokester that he can sometimes be, had many such people
drawn to him. And he, if they weren’t
dicks or douchebags, was drawn to them as well.
After the divorce we didn’t get to see our father like we
used to. Instead of being with him all
of the time, such time was cut by half.
And again according to the courts we were to be with him for at least
three days a week and every other weekend.
The only problem was that my dad’s schedule did not often match up with
that of the courts and my mothers. He
could work up to 14 hours a day. If he
was on call he could and did have to leave in the middle of the night. Shit was hectic for him on the work front. As a result, visiting Dad usually resulted in
a take your kids to work day. Except
such days occurred more often than not.
Far, far too often.
Looking back I think we would have had never seen my father
if we had told my mother what we did when we were with him. Because on such days when we were with him,
and he had to work, we all went to work together. This may sound like fun, and it sometimes
was. However, another aspect of home
health care is the time.
The god damn time. So
much time. See, some of these visits,
the checkups, lasted maybe fifteen minutes at most. A drop in, a nice chat to make sure things
were kosher and they weren’t going to die, and then back to the road. However, other visits, many visits, lasted
far longer. Half an hour, an hour,
maybe, god forbid, even three. All this
time, for us, was spent in the car.
Waiting.
As you now know the experience of time for children is drastically,
fundamentally different than it is for adults.
An example of this shift in experiencing time would be church. Catholic mass only lasts roughly about an
hour. However, when I was younger church
seemed to last forever. It was, at that
age, pure hell. I would always
frantically check the clock on the back wall as mass drug on, put there merely
to torture me and other young souls that had the capacity to tell time. Where was God at to answer my prayers to make
time hurry the fuck up? Seconds turned
into minutes, minutes turned into hours and hours turned into days. I can still think back on going to church
with my mother and how utterly horrible it was.
Not horrible in the physical sense, shit it was a pretty nice church to
be at; your typical run of the mil upper middle class Catholic church. Rather it was horrible in the mental sense
and it can all be traced back to time.
But now, as an ‘adult’ one hour is a breeze. I close my eyes and it is over. And this is due to my changed perception of
time.
So now you have a better understanding of why home health
care with our father was so fucking horrible.
Yeah we got to spend time with him, when he was driving, but it really
wasn’t worth all the time we spent in the car.
Three little kids, children, left to their own devices. Alas, this was also before the advent of cell
phones, or iPads, or laptops and the myriad of other modern day distractions
that help us limp through our days.
Nope, it was just three kids in a fucking car. For hours.
We didn’t even have books.
And the cars that we were in. Another aspect of home health care is that
you do a lot of driving and subsequently put a lot of miles on one’s
vehicle. As such, my father was always
buying beaters, piece of shit cars that he could and did subsequently beat to
shit. During his stint as a home health
care worker I can remember him going through at least eleven vehicles. And the problems with these vehicles were
enormous. But that is a story best left
told for another day.
So what did three children do while waiting for their father
in a car? Nothing, for the most
part. And it was an excruciating amount
of nothing. Looking back I believe it
would have been an interesting psychological and or sociological experiment to
gaze upon. We could have broken ground,
shed light and tackled modern day problems.
Solved some shit. What happens
when you leave three children, of average intelligence from an average
socio-economic bracket alone to their own devices in a room with nothing to do,
not a god damn thing, for extended periods of time and all that. At least something would have come from all
the time that was spent in the car.
Maybe, looking back, it wasn’t in vain.
Maybe we could have made a difference.
Because, besides doing nothing, the boredom eventually
starts to take a toll. The first fifteen
minutes or so aren’t that bad. Our
father, in normal dad fashion, would always promise us once we arrived at the
next house that it would be a quick one, that he should be done in ten to
fifteen minutes. And since we were all
at the age when we believed everything our dad said we took his words at their
face value. We did not yet know just how
much he extends, and reinvents, the truth.
Or as others call it flat out lying.
So we would sit and wait, hoping, praying, that this indeed would be a
quick trip.
At the onset of thirty minutes things begin to change, and
drastically. At this point, on average,
we have given up all hope of our father coming back. We know were in it for the long haul. Any noise we hear, a door shutting, a car
passing by, garners our immediate and undivided attention. We are all hoping that it is the sound of our
dad leaving the house and coming back to the fucking car. It never is.
Restlessness begins to set in.
Our conversations amongst ourselves become more heated. We are starting, at this point, to regress
back into our wild, primal selves. We
are turning into animals and beginning to turn on one another.
At about an hour things in the car become hell. Or as close to hell as we at that age could
imagine it. We are all hungry at this
point, thirsty. Our basic needs are
failed from being met. The restlessness
starts to crescendo before reaching a frenzied pitch. Most children of this age are by nature
boundless balls of energy, all potential, and it knows no bounds. We were no different. Also, at least one if not all of us has to
urinate. We whine amongst ourselves,
some pray to a God that never gives answers, others give up all hope and retreat
inward. Others, angry at their
predicament, lash outwards. This usually
happened between me and Iris.
After the hour point the car turns into pure anarchy. Iris and I at this point are usually
screaming, yelling, spitting, and crying at one another. It was a verbal all-out war that sometimes
spilled over into fisticuffs. Collateral
damage was guaranteed. We would say the
most hurtful, devastating things to one another. Looking back I now realize two things; that I
had the capacity at that age to be so cruel, and that children in general can
be cruel, spiteful, hateful creatures and overall pieces of shit.
When Iris and I would fight in the car, even being so young,
it was never the ‘you’re stupid, no your stupid’ kind of shit. We would rather take each other’s most
personal secrets, the innermost demons, the darkest moments of one’s life up
until that point and use it to our advantage.
And such secrets where venomously spat out at one another with the usual
cunts, fucks, shits, and bitches peppered in.
It was pure psychological war and no one ever won.
So to recap: after an hour we had given up on our father,
were starving, had to violently urinate, were attacking each other, mainly
verbally but sometimes physically, lil bro Luke was crying and usually Irisel
and I were as well at some point. And
this all occurred in a tiny, suffocating, dirty piece of shit little car.
And this would rise and fall, rise and fall, depending on
how long we were forced to wait for our dad to finish his work. We would fight until exhausted, take a break
to get our bearings, and then start the process all over again. Again and again and again. And by the grace of God, no the universe, we
would finally see him appear. Smiling as
he briskly walked up to the car. Any any
ill will, all the hate and anger would almost instantly vanish because we were
all so fucking excited that dad was finally done. The nightmare was finally over, for now. Just another fifteen houses to home health
care up before dad can call it a day.
And we can go home.
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