Looking back at my notes, there was not much more to tell about the retreat experience, except that, as a good retreat should, it changed me. I did write one more thing the morning I left the retreat, and essentially I was scared. Besides attending the retreat, reading and writing while I was there, I also began to transcribe my handwritten journals that I had begun when Joe was born in 1985. I wrote for about 10 years formally, and then stopped, mostly keeping a journal via emails to friends, which I have also kept.
One thing was clear – even then, when my PT career was new, I had a hate/love relationship with it. I loved my first job at San Francisco General Hospital, where I was plunged headlong into a socioeconomic world I had only read about. I worked with the homeless, the drug addicted, the AIDS-ridden, the abused, the dangerously mentally ill, prisoners in orange jumpsuits, and sometimes a combination of all of the above. I worked in the burn unit, which had been my great desire since even before I began PT school. It all opened my soul in a way that only one other experience could and did.
That experience was motherhood. My love affair with PT went downhill after I became a mother. I wanted to be home with Joe. My journal speaks of me hating to leave him, and not wanting to return to “the hellhole” after a vacation. I went back and forth a few times during the childbearing years, and then decided to stay home for good after Andy and Jeff came into my life. Those years were difficult for me, no question. As job offers came through in the mail continually, I felt as if I was standing on shore, watching the career boats just sail on past me.
But I could not leave the boys. They clearly needed me around, even with my weakness as a mother, my frequent tears and frustrations, my inability to really know how to raise sons. One time Jeff asked Al “why does it seem like Mom cries every day?” Al responded, wisely, “Well, you know how you and your brothers have to wrestle very day? It’s kind of the same…”
When Al closed his business on the options exchange, and I had to return to work full time, I did it reluctantly but with gratitude that I could, literally, get a job the next day. I worked at a skilled nursing facility in my preferred area of practice – geriatric rehab. I’m very good at what I do, and have often said I get much more from my patients in wisdom and grace than I ever give as a therapist.
The hate part of the career comes because we therapists are a “cash cow” for whomever we work for. Although we are in short supply, we make the problem worse by taking on more patients than we should because of our dedication and disdain for not giving our patients what they need. This ends in burnout for therapists and probably less than quality care in the long run for the patients, and allows the money-changers to demand even more out of us and the therapists to follow. I truly don’t know where it all will end. Perhaps the entry level doctoral program will change the dynamics. I do know that it is not a battle I want to fight anymore.
So the final retreat question is, and what scared me as I left the sheltered silent retreat house, why am I here? What’s next for me? How do I personally and intimately use my talents, my heart and soul to pass on humanity to future generations? My answer to the ultimate retreat question is uncomfortable for me to verbalize, because it sounds arrogant. I will tell you my answer though, and hopefully none of you will feel it’s arrogant, because in truth, each and every one of you reading this, from my Mother to my friend Patti whom I met in Florida when I was 13 to Donna who I met at one of my skilled nursing facility jobs to everyone in between from high school and college and of course my blessed husband and sons, has been apart of why it is the answer.
The answer is to pass on my wisdom, through the written word.
I came home from the retreat and started this blog, with no desire to make money but to just write, with hopes that my experiences will inspire, or make someone laugh, or give the young people in my life understanding that life is indeed short, that there are no bad decisions, that everything we do IS our life, and that everything we do affects every other person we come in contact with and then on ad infinitum. It’s like the public service ads about STDs that say when you sleep with someone you don’t just sleep with them, you sleep with everyone they ever slept with and any diseases they might have had and vice versa. Basic metaphysics: we are all part of each other’s growth and realization of our life’s potential. No meeting, no interaction is meaningless. It can be ignored or attended to, but it is part of who we are once it occurs.
In addition, I decided to leave the DPT program because my talents and desires to continue are all but played out in that area and it is time to move on. I have begun an artistic endeavor with Terri that will, if nothing else, bring great joy to us and perhaps to the world and who knows may possibly make us a few fun tickets on the side.
It was a good retreat. I will not wait so long to do it again. Silence is golden. Thank you so much for reading about the retreat!
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