Seeds planted

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

So having planted the seeds of the idea, it appears that it may be bearing fruit at last.

I have mentioned that I have been trying to encourage my mother to agree to enrolling my Dad to attend at their local Seniors Respite Day Care Centre for more than just two days a week.

Last week I arrived as usual to help my Mom with her grocery shopping list and found her exasperated with my Dad’s eager, but mistaken, preparations to go to the Seniors’ Centre. He gets dressed and is heading out the door after breakfast to wait for the bus every morning. And he can’t understand why today he isn’t going there or in a few minutes, he forgets and has to be reminded.

This is all happening as my Mom, in her busy-doing mode, is trying to take advantage of the time to prepare a potato-salad that she plans to have for lunch upon their return from their shopping trip.

She had been thinking, my Mom announced, that it might be a good idea to send Dad up to the Seniors’ Centre for more than just two days a week, maybe even every day. I could tell that she somehow felt that even saying that was being unkind or disloyal to my father, or to her image of them as a couple that has always done everything together. She certainly can’t understand why he likes going there so much, because she found it so incredibly boring herself when we went on the introductory tour and observed some of the activities in session. But she has had to admit that my father likes going there and he likes going there without her!

She is still hesitant. There are the coffees and other programs which will resume now that September is here. Should we check those first?

Again I suggested that an hour or two out of the day isn’t enough when compared to a whole day’s program of interaction and activity that is geared for his abilities. The coffees and conversations my Mom enjoys are simply beyond him, even though he is always cooperative and tries to be involved.

When I asked Dad what he might choose, he predictably said regarding Thursdays, that Mom needs him to help with the shopping.

But Mom doesn’t need him, I pointed out, now that her good friend has been willing to help her stay on track and stick to the shopping list. I explained that Mom’s loss of her short-term memory is giving her trouble with managing the shopping.

Dad loyally said Mom is still pretty good.

Mom was pleased.

 

Posted in Journal | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

mark of the beast

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

Cycas revolutaI was pouring myself a tall gin and tonic when the phrase “it’s 5:00 o’clock somewhere” prompted me to look at the digital clock on the micro-wave and it read 4:44.  For some reason, my mind leapt to 666 and wondered if other repetitions of numbers, say for example 444, had as much ominous meaning.

I’m a great believer in the value of the randomly connected thoughts generated by a glimpse of the digital clock on a kitchen appliance. Others might call it nonsense given disproportionate importance by something related to the famous beer-glasses.

I make a full confession of my fundamentalist protestant background up front, and that I was heavily influenced by the dramatic interpretations given to the number 666 by the church of my childhood, the Seventh-day Adventists. It has been my struggle for decades to shed the anger engendered by my disillusionment with that particular church and by extension judeo-christian religions in general. But the devotion of many to what I consider belief unfounded in anything real, continues to interest me.

For example, archaeological evidence of beliefs in a feminine goddess as the ground of all being is very, very old and can be shown through time to have been altered or extinguished in various ways by the forces of history, yet subversively reappearing repeatedly in the imagery of various mythologies and religions in later times.

Surely, we are continuously struggling to reach towards a more balanced understanding of the universe and our meaning in it. Even through the ages of a masculine mythology and the literalization of its principles of conquest and power, there continues to be an unquenchable human longing for the nurturing feminine principle that is older than recorded history.

The Bible, arising out of an Iron Age idealogy of domination and war, is only one stop along the journey of the evolving human mythologies, but it seems to have been rather over-vigorously and enthusiastically embraced by our western culture.

As a mythology and value-system, what we unconsciously or unconsciously believe about ourselves and our world is not necessarily better than what preceded it, and might even be a deterioration or erosion. In fact, much of the most damaging values held by our societies might be attributed to the perversion by judaeo-christian-islamic religions of the ancient pagan myths out of which they arose.

And of all the books in the Bible, The Book of Revelation, which seems like a nightmare of pagan symbols, is unbelievably rich in mythological creatures from much more ancient stories of gods, goddesses, dragons and serpents. It’s rather like the pinnacle of a Biblical mythogical-mash-up gone mad.

It is not difficult to notice a pattern of interpretation amongst the various eschatological views that seems to be motivated by hatred of the other, the supposed bearer of the dreaded number 666, by the one doing the interpreting.  Despite the Adventist church having abandoned the interpretation of the number being attributed to the Papacy, I can assure you that plenty of Adventists (who are Protestants) still believe this to be so.

So leaving the wonderful 666, I wonder about other numerical patterns.

Some lingering scrap of memory is a mention my mother made years ago about the meaning of numbers in Hebrew poetry as she understood it from a course she took at the University of Toronto.

Another exhausting idea is the mathematical symmetry of the books of the Bible.

And then! Recent alarms have even been raised by some wonderful kooks about the numerical connection of Obama to the magical number 9 of alchemy and satanism. I kid you not! (alchemy and satanism going together by definition in the minds of some; and I’m terrified of the feeble-mindedness that makes the further links to being black and Obama)

Or leaving religion altogether, we could explore such fun things as Fibonacci numbers (who the hell is Fibonacci?), the Golden Mean, and phyllotaxis (sounds kinky, doesn’t it!).

There’s fun to be had by turning the 6 upside down and placing it facing another number 6. Oh yeah! How could I forget the adolescent giggles of that prurient discovery?

If you aren’t careful, you might be tempted to generalize and see a “divine” numerically consistent pattern in everything, but that ain’t necessarily so.

Just like the supposed natural reproductive patterns of the animal world being evidence of a God-given dictate that humans should pair off 2 by 2 and — by necessary extension — male and female.

Is it some flaw in human reasoning that wants to generalize a pattern over all of creation? Just asking. And of course in so doing, the meaning we want to attribute to our pet idea is supposed to be proved by the numbers! (The proof isn’t in the pudding, it’s in the numbers! Of course! How silly of me to think otherwise!)

In the meantime, numbers like the 11th hour of 11.11 mean something very sad to us. Probably arbitrary, however. Just like 9.11 means something altogether different in some parts of the world, or is even — shock! horror! — utterly meaningless. Really.

In the meantime, it’s now 7:10 pm or put another way, 21:10 hours. That must mean something…

Posted in Journal, Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Eating invasives

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

Ahhh! ‘Tis the season of blackberries here on the west coast. I have waited and waited. They began ripening at the beginning of August and are now reaching their luscious peak!

There is an art to waiting for the exact right moment to pick blackberries. It isn’t when they turn black. You have to wait until the shine goes off the berries and they almost appear slightly grey or dusty. Then they slip into your hand and if you are not careful, another berry adjacent to the one you’re picking falls to the ground for every one you manage to pick!

The blackberry patches are at least as menacing as Sleeping Beauty’s thickets of climbing roses! Canes can grow from 5 to 10 meters in length and as they arch over, wherever the tips touch the ground, the take root. In this way, they can hop-scotch along and quickly cover a vast area. It is not wise to venture into a blackberry patch in bare feet or light summery clothing, as I did today. Still, gingerly reaching in through the thorny canes (and watching out for stinging nettle as well), I managed to pick nearly 2 litres of the intoxicating berries. 

In the Lower Mainland area of BC, we generally see either the Himalayan blackberry (Rubus discolor) or the Evergreen or Cutleaf blackberry (Rubus laciniatus.) They are both invasives, the Himalayan having probably travelled from Asia to England, the Evergreen originating in Europe. They were brought here by the people who made their way here from Europe.

Efforts to eradicate these invasives is difficult. They are a concern because their vigorous growth in disturbed areas and along waterways particularly at lower elevations can form such dense thickets of this single species of alien that it crowds out diverse native systems and prevents larger animals from reaching water-holes. 

But the most amusing method tried for eradicating the invasive blackberry species may also be the most successful:  the introduction of goats. I’m not sure however how you go about containing goats!

Of all the delicious ways to eat blackberries, I think my favorite is in a port-laced sauce poured over a minty panna-cotta. (Recipe to Follow)Reserve a few of the fattest, juiciest berries to decorate the plate just before serving the panna-cotta and you have a light, tasty and gorgeous dessert!

Blackberry is also a well-known herbal remedy. The best herbal remedies were foods first, and blackberries are superbly nutritious. The berries are mildly laxative, but the roots and leaves can be used to treat diarrhea and dysentery. The leaf is milder and makes a nice tea. Rather nasty to dig up, if you do brave the raspberry thicket to dig for roots, do it in the early spring or fall. The younger, tender roots are easier to cut up and contain more of the beneficial tannins and are usually prepared into a tincture.

Posted in Journal | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Memories and lies

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

My poor Mother says somebody told her that her best friend says she is a liar.

Of course, it’s not true, that my Mother is a liar, but she doesn’t always tell the truth. Not anymore, due to not having all the facts straight. I think there’s a big difference, but she remains with the hurt feeling of being called a liar.

I have of course, in my curious reversal of roles, tried to show her that what people say about her best friend may not be true, may simply be malicious gossip. Besides, I know her friend and wouldn’t think she would say such a thing. I suggested that hearing this from “the horse’s mouth”, so to speak, would be a different thing, even encouraging her to go and talk with her friend.

Also, having trouble with short-term memory, my mother sometimes tries to work out a story of what might have happened. Saying what you think to be true and being mistaken, is not the same as lying.

None of my arguments can remove the hurt my Mother feels, however. She is so ashamed it is affecting her relationships with her friends. She still talks with her best friends from time to time, but when she remembers being called a liar, she retreats in misery into her own home and her own shrinking life, her cooking and her reading.

However, it is difficult to deal with my Mother’s short-term memory loss, let me tell you, not just for her, but for others as well.

An example of this is our continuing saga of The Hearing Aids!

Back in November, 2010, I persuaded my Mom with some difficulty to get her hearing checked. On learning the results, she went through a period of denial and bargaining until she was finally reconciled to the benefit that wearing hearing-aids might bring her.

So, anyway, my Mom was finally persuaded to get some hearing aids. She had difficulties at first, as anybody would, in adjusting to wearing them.

Contrary to the very good advice she received with the hearing aids, she started wearing them only when “she needed them”, if she went out. She didn’t think she needed them, say, when she was at home. It had been suggested that the brain benefits from the input of all this auditory information that people with good hearing must deal with and filter all the time. But Mom decided that it was just annoying, when for example, she wanted to read in peace.

Nothing I could say impressed her with the importance of being able to hear well at all times (unlike my Father, who is content to have some help putting the hearing aids in in the morning and only takes them out when they whine when his head hits the pillow at night, reminding him to take them out.)  Mom got into the habit of taking the hearing aids out at odd times and placing them….well, wherever!

Added to that was the fact that she had difficulty putting the hearing aid in correctly on the left side and worried at it so much that her left ear got quite sore.

So, inevitably one day, so the story goes (patched together from her fragments of memory) at a party at the seniors’ home next door, she was seated next to the television. One of the young girls working in the nursing home even came along and turned the volume up, can you imagine! ( Part of hearing loss is that sounds at the other end of the spectrum are too loud and annoying.)

Now, my mother had had several options, which I vainly and foolishly tried to point out. Each option had some reason for why it wasn’t one for her.

She could have moved to sit somewhere else. There were no other places to sit.

She could have turned the television off or turned the volume down. She didn’t know how.

She could have asked somebody to turn to volume down or turn it off — it was a party, after all and I stupidly assume people go to parties to talk to each other, maybe? No, she would never do that, that being rude to people who want to watch television.

She could have insisted on her dignity and right to be at a party where the television does not hurt her ears. Blah blah blah.

She could have lowered the volume on her hearing aids. She didn’t know/remember how to do that.

So, she thinks she put the hearing aids in her pocket, but she must have missed, because the hearing aids fell onto the floor, didn’t they?

And then, an elderly gentleman next to them at the table spilled his coffee. There was a big to-do. The floor was mopped up and that must be where the hearing aids went!

Chapter 2:

Mom said she didn’t like Stuart, the guy who sold us the hearing aids. Just something about him. She didn’t trust him. Not that she had anything against him personally, you understand. He seems like a nice guy. Just that there was something about him.

I suspected Mom was embarrassed to say she had lost the hearing aids.

Then she said she clearly remembered that Stuart had said that if she lost a hearing aid, it would be just too bad, that she would have to pay full price for replacements. Not true, but she was digging in her heels now and nothing was going to make her go back to Stuart.

I thought I’d let it lie for a while and try again when she might be more receptive.

Chapter 3:

Suddenly, she told me her friends had taken her to see “two ladies” who were much nicer and thousands of dollars cheaper than Stuart. Her new hearing aids would arrive in a couple of weeks.

“Meh,” I thought. “Whatever. At least she has hearing aids.”

Chapter 4:

Not too long after that, she lost one of the new hearing aids. She thinks she brushed it out of her ear in the motion of pushing her hair behind her ears, or in removing her hat. She had decided, she told me fait accompli, to call Stuart and had scheduled an appointment for him to get a new replacement hearing aid.

“Just one?” I asked. She thought I was incredibly stupid.

“Of course just one!” she snapped.

“But,” I tried to point out. “The new hearing aids that you got from the ‘two ladies’ are probably different from the ones you got from Stuart. Remember, you went to the two ladies after you lost the hearing aids from Stuart? Mini-marvels of computerization, hearing aids these days are made to talk to each other.”

“I never lost any hearing aids!” she was indignant, then uncertain. “Anyway, we have been going to Stuart for  years. I’ve had these hearing aids for years!”

“No, you haven’t.” I tried to explain patiently. “Dad got hearing aids years ago from Stuart. You got yours just before Christmas last year, but you lost them. It hasn’t even been a year yet. Then you went to the “two ladies”…”

“But I don’t like those two ladies,” my mother interrupted. “Just something about them. I like Stuart better. I just trust him. Are you sure I haven’t been wearing hearing aids for years? It just seems like I have had them for a long time!”

“Are you going to wear the one hearing aid you have from the ‘two ladies’ when you see Stuart?” I asked.

“No, of course not!” My mother thought she had it all worked out, smiling mischievously. “I’ll just tell him I forgot the other hearing aid at home. I’ll just put it in my pocket before I go in to see him.”

Chapter 5:

So, her unsuspecting friends took her to see Stuart and she came home, vindicated, because it only cost her $400.00 to get the one replacement hearing aid. (Take these numbers with a large grain of salt, unless you manage to see the receipts.)

Of course, the hearing aid was quite different from the other hearing aid from the “two ladies”, but my mother wore them, the mis-matched pair, insisting that they worked perfectly.

Sigh.

Chapter 6:

Then, a short time later, she was chagrined but also pleased to find the missing “new” hearing aid, in a pocket somewhere.

So for a while, she had 1 and 1/2 pairs of hearing aids. The batteries of a size differing from the ones my Dad requires for his hearing aids drove her crazy. Stuart had wisely chosen hearing aids for the both of them, my Mom and Dad, that would have used the same sized batteries. But now, remember, the hearing aids my Mom has from the “two ladies” are different. The batteries became the next big issue, the difficulties of putting the hearing aid in her left ear abating somewhat.

“He just pushed it in!” she declared, widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows. “It hurt terribly for a minute! But it’s fine now.”

Are you confused yet? I’m not sure myself, but at this stage of the Hearing Aid Saga, it was almost dangerous to my health to try to sort things out. So if she is actually wearing the hearing aids, who knows which ones? and do they have batteries that work?

Chapter 7:

Suddenly one day, she found a pair of hearing aids (hers, from Stuart) in the pockets of a pair of my Dad’s pants that she was ironing. She says she had put the pants through the wash and found the hearing aids in the pockets while ironing them. Later, she also said she found something rattling around in the wash, or was it the drier, and it was the hearing aids. Who knows.

Back to Stuart we went again, because she didn’t think the hearing aids worked properly now, having gone through the wash and everything. And it was amusing in some way (yup, ahuh, it was… and I am not going crazy, not at all!) to think that now my mother was in possession of 2 and 1/2 pairs of hearing aids.

Chapter 8:

But no, she wasn’t. She only had one of the hearing aids from the “two ladies” and that was missing the ear-piece. I suspect Mom had tried to clean it — as she tends to be a bit obsessive about doing that — and unawares dropped the end piece. The other hearing aid?

“Well,” she shrugged. “It wasn’t working, so I threw it out. I mean I must have…”

Well, the hearing aids from Stuart work fine, by the way, probably not having had to survive the wash at all. We will never know for sure, however. The batteries were dead and nearly dead, respectively.

“But I change them whenever I don’t hear them ringing if I put my hand over them like this, to check,” my Mom exclaimed. She does check them obsessively, perhaps changing the batteries several times a day, I’ve noticed.

Stuart tried to explain that unlike my Dad’s, with less correction in my Mom’s hearing aids, the “whine” test is not always accurate. It would be better to just get on a weekly routine or listen for the beep-beep that the hearing aids give as a signal…

My Mom’s reaction:  blah, blah, blah.

Stuart slipped me a gizmo for testing the batteries.

So now, we actually have the 1 pair of hearing aids, working, from Stuart, and one each of …I know. You are totally confused. It would be 2 pairs, if the two hearing aids of the second pair were from the same set or from the same supplier, but they are not.

Epilogue:

I removed the “extra” hearing aids and the now not-required different-sized batteries from their house, hoping to eliminate at least some of the confusion.

But now we come to one of the other big issues. It involves a rather indecently expensive amount of dental work both my parents need. Some of it, surely is purely cosmetic and optional, but much of it I was convinced by the dentist was prudent, probably really necessary.

“Why are you so eager to spend my money?” my mother asked, quite indignant. She was dead set against having anything but the most basic fillings done.

“I don’t like that woman,” she continued, again widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows meaningfully. “I don’t trust her. I’m sure she’s a nice woman and everything. Just something about her. Besides, dentists are all just after your money.”

“We had the second consultation with her expressly so that she could explain what she wanted to do, Mom. Do you remember? I thought she made very good sense. She showed me all the x-rays. I didn’t think most of the work she wanted to do was unreasonable at all.” (Yeah, I know what she heard was .blah, blah, blah)

“Hah!” my Mom was scornful. “They are just after your money, dentists! Do you think they will do that work for nothing? Why are you so eager to throw away my money? That’s your inheritance you’re wasting!”

“This from the lady who just throws away hearing aids when they do not work, rather than taking them back to be repaired.”

“Well, hahaha,” my mother laughed. “I never cared about money anyway!”

This is another exasperating side of my mother. Lately she often makes the claim that she was always a care-free, irresponsible, spoiled child-woman who let her father and then my Dad completely look after and worry about “such things”. And that? It’s not completely true either.

 

Posted in Journal, Stories | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

About obedience

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

Recently, a gentleman acquaintance in sharing reminiscences about his years in public health administration, puzzled at why during an anticipated crisis, the public nurses refused to administer the flu vaccine.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I can understand that!”

“Who else should do it?” He was genuinely surprised.

The lack of imagination and the rigidness of such hierarchical thinking would be amusing if it weren’t so sad and destructive.

The other side of the coin, of course, in the nursing profession as I have experienced it, is that the profession as a group in Canada, has for decades pushed on its practioners the requirement of a university degree to qualify to practice. I’m all for the benefits of education, but the motivation at times to describe one’s work as a “profession” is little more than a grasping for status and money. Or to be even more harsh, it’s an attempt to avoid the dirty nitty-gritty of the actual work of nursing.

Early on in my career, when nurses with degrees were less plentiful, I was amused to encounter a recent university graduate who arrived on the floor ready to give orders to what she considered her “inferiors”> She was quite shocked to be expected to empty bedpans. She thought “somebody else” did that. (Again, the question that was asked was: “Who?”)

In deeming bed-baths and emptying bed pans beneath her, she was, in my opinion, missing the some of the best ways of actually assessing her patients’ status. The formal interviewing, vital-signs-taking, and even the physical exam cannot give a better picture of a patient’s health or recovery than the subtle observations a good nurse can make while assisting a patient in such mundane tasks of daily living.

(If you don’t believe me, I could cite – chapter and verse – my Mother’s conversations with her family doctor, her Case Worker, or my siblings who do not live nearby, in which she intentionally seeks to mislead them all: “I’m fine! We’re just fine. No problems!” She is nearly 90; things are no longer just fine, just like they used to be. Imagine if they took her words at face value and ignored their intuition and their other observations of her behaviors!)

While I am suspicious, as I have said, of attempts to avoid the hands-on aspects of any work, I understand and applaud the striving for professional autonomy.

Nothing is worse than managers with no or barely any more education than you (or education in fields completely different from yours)trying to tell you how to do your job. Let me count the ways! And again, I also have had the experience of being the new grad and finding myself up against somebody in the job with the closed mind of 10 years experience — the first year repeated 10 times. Sigh: there is no room for a conversation!

There is always that tension. Sadly, there are foolish people on both sides of the equation, the ignorant managers who do not trust their people to know their jobs, who micro-manage or mis-manage. And then there are those who resist any moves to change the ways the work has “always” been done, or who react with what I call the “idiot no” to every request, wherever it comes from.

So, does obedience have any place in today’s world? I highly suspect that it does not, in most situations. Even in the emergency situation of the codes back in my days on the floor, the best codes were a cooperative affair with each one playing their role and talking to each other, trust me — and I don’t mean best for way the nurse or respiratory tech, but for the patient’s outcome. (I’m trying hard here to imagine situations where it would — maybe in emergency situations? But even there, I would laud the fire-fighter, for example, who is able to think independently and to think fast on his/her feet!)

But people are impatient. They are not willing to have that conversation. They want it done yesterday. If they wanted it done today…you know the old joke. They want obedience! Whether it’s managers, customers, or the workers themselves making their demands. And they take it personally when their way is opposed.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Where do organizations and the people in them lose their way?

I think it is because the organizations do not have clear values, goals and a well-communicated corporate ethos. They may claim they do, but on so many levels, they  act contrary to their values and goals and thus they put the lie to the pretty posters and ads, consciously or unconsciously.

The easiest and most common pitfall I’ve seen is the managers and mini-managers (people who aren’t really administrators in actual fact or job description, but aspire to be) who like to give orders. They are decisive, all right. They are sure they know how everything should be done. And they can make decisions. But too often they are the wrong decisions and contrary to the vision of the corporation, or even just plain and silly contradictory! But hey, a decision is a decision, right?

So back to the public nurses and their refusal to administer the flu shot under the jurisdiction of my aforementioned acquaintance.

I don’t know the circumstances of that particular situation, so I can only guess at some of the factors at play.

One I’m sure of is that the nurses in question were being asked to do a mammoth job with minimal resources. Another is that any suggestions they tried to offer were pooh-poohed and dismissed out of hand. This is not a gender issue that I’m talking about. This happened during the SARS epidemic, for example. Nurses on the front lines very early on raised the alarm and were ignored, repeatedly! It is well-documented, but the forces underlying the facts have never been addressed.

I have seen it so many times on committees on which I have served that I think it must be an iron-clad law: the workers who will be delegated to do the work clearly do not know anything about the job, the economics of the industry, the realities of the corporate budgets, or the current research and theories related to their field; we invite them to participate in developing practices and projects, but their input is obviously inferior so we will mostly ignore it — nicely, of course — and ram our newest and most vocally defended pet project through. This can be a committee of 60 people, you understand, and only 2 or 3 people actually have a voice.

What an opportunity lost! No input from those presumably 60 intelligent people you invited to participate — what, for appearances sake only? To soothe those who complain about the autocratic style of your administration? And do these people participate in the hopes of being heard because they too care about the goals and values of the corporation or do they participate just to fill expectations about their attendance at meetings — it will look good on the resumé?

Unfortunately, I also must point fingers at my peers. They are so anxious to be heard that they participate in these meetings with only the agenda of being heard. Again: no conversation. Nearly every word is in opposition to conversation. It gets everybody exactly nowhere. I understand the defensiveness, but it’s a vicious cycle. Energy gets dissipated in argument when everybody is already so tired. The opportunity to work towards constructive change, inspiring imagination and creative problem solving are a pipe dream that may get mentioned, but never seems to happen. Feeling already abused and disrespected, people perpetuate the frustrations by coming to the table defeated, tired and angry, only able to take a defensive and obstinate stance. Justified or not, is not the issue; but that’s where we get stuck.

One’s stance in any situation does not have to be reactionary. It can be chosen to be pro-active, positive and cooperative. Sadly, there seems to be a tradition and history of opposition between administrators and those they administrate. It seems massively difficult to over-come.

I have only once in my career encountered an administrator who actively and thoughtfully cultivated the participation of her staff and tried to empower them, to enlist their massive professional knowledge and skills. Many of my peers never did trust her or her style, perhaps being indoctrinated in the more dictatorial style of most nurse-managers I and they had known thus far (their own nightmare manager stories aside!).  Or perhaps they were simply waiting for her to offer just another variation of the usual and had no expectation or hope of anything better.

Her role in my life was unfortunately brief due the endless power-struggles  corporate re-structuring that passes for economy these days. In such corporations, managers rarely stay in their positions long enough to carry through even the best-laid plans. Their position is re-structured or they move on to further their own careers, the program or purported goals and values of the corporation be damned.

(It’s so short-sighted as to be laughable! In my experience, major re-thinking of theoritical frame-works and program-structures occurred nearly annually, sometimes more often, begging anybody to ask why the new ideas and theories were so quickly no longer relevant, if they were ever relevant at all. As we used to say, a bed-pan is still a bed-pan. Sure you can try to call it something else…But again, I digress and will save my riff on bed-pans for another day! I’ll bet you can hardly wait!)

How can constructive, inclusive conversations ever take place in such corporate working environments?

There you have it, my rant of the day. Obviously, I have kept returning to this in my thoughts for many years in my working life so I could say lots more, but I’ll spare you!

Posted in Journal, Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Life and family

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

Laying out my dirty laundry Sharing some of my difficult experiences, in the hopes that either the process itself will bring clarity or somebody can give me some insight, I still feel like I’m laying myself open without any sense of discretion.

That said, here goes.

My Dad attends a respite day-care centre for seniors two days a week. It was incredibly difficult for me to persuade my Mom that he might enjoy it there, that he was quite noticeably bored for hours at a time at home while she can still enjoy reading, that he needed some outlet to stimulate his mind. As she is not bored, she couldn’t see how anybody else could be.

During an initial visit to the centre with both my Mom and Dad, Mom immediately decided she would definitely not like the place. I had to remind her that this was not about her and what she might like, but what Dad would like. Then, she was convinced that Dad would not do anything without her. It was not easy or kind, but I had to point out that sometimes I’m afraid that her opinion about his dependence on her has more to do with her reluctance to let him have an independent life in any form. The dog-in-the-manger syndrome.

This took weeks of talk, but finally we got him registered for two days a week at the centre.

Now, he likes it so much that right after breakfast every single day, he wants to go outside and wait for the bus even though it doesn’t arrive until nearly 10:00 am, and only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It breaks my heart! He’s like a kid who loves kindergarten.

So, I have suggested to Mom that since he looks forward so much to his days at the centre, we might consider enrolling him for more days. She is against this idea because she thinks he looks forward to the afternoon coffee hour that she feels compelled to attend a couple days a week, or the exercise hour that is presented to them through her Finnish seniors’ community once every two weeks. And so it goes… No accounting for the many hours in each of those days when Dad has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do.

They are nearly 90, my Mom and Dad. His vision and hearing make of television mostly an annoyance. He cannot read and he can’t carry on a normal conversation, being really lost in repetitive recollections of his childhood and the war years. (“It must be due to those Russians that I lost my hearing…”)

That’s sort of the background.

So last week, we had been invited to the annual barbecue held at the respite care centre. Mom had said she would go. I had reminded her that that was also her usual grocery shopping day. Still, whether she actually “heard” me or not, she had insisted she would go. So I RSVP’d that we would all attend.

Then, when reminded of the “double” booking and the date was upon us last week, she had a difficult choice to make: attend the barbecue or go shopping as usual. No matter that I explained that other arrangements could be made for her shopping trip, but that this barbecue only happens once a year.

The shopping trip takes place thanks to a bus provided by a local Finnish community organization and any seniors from the nursing home or from the seniors apartments who wish can get on board for a minimal fee once every two weeks.

The first excuse she tried is that they will cancel the bus arrangement if she doesn’t go. I said that I thought that her missing one trip would not jeopardize the continuation of the service for everyone else. She missed my sarcasm, I know. She kept insisting that I didn’t understand! Finally I said, “Mom, you are just not that important!”

If she was that concerned that they would throw out the whole scheme because she wasn’t there to prop up the trip, I then suggested, she should go to the office and explain that she was missing only this one trip because she had a more important engagement.

She chose to ignore that too, becoming even more fixed in her idea that she must get the groceries on this particular day, by those means only, and no other. Adapting her plans to make somebody else (ie, Dad) happy would not be allowed room in her thinking.

So I gave up.

In the end, I attended the barbecue with my Dad alone. We were early and took part in a modified mini-golf/croquet game in which we had three tries to put the ball into some pigeon holes. Dad was most anxious to see if I was enjoying myself. From time to time, he would lean over and whisper to me about some of the other clients.

“She is so cute. She never goes anywhere without her little doll.”

“He’s…he’s…he always talks strange.” 

“There are many people here today I don’t usually see. I don’t know them.”

“I usually come here on another bus, a small bus. How are we going to get home?”

It was a real pleasure to see how much he enjoyed the day. He simply lights up as the staff and some of the other clients recognize him. I can easily understand how this place makes him feel special and important. I also enjoyed meeting some of the other family members of the clients who were at the party. And I must say, some of the people and their stories are fabulous!

One elderly gent in particular made me smile. He sat opposite us at the table and several times staff or a volunteer would come to speak with him, greeting him warmly and they would reminisce together about some recent event, a family visit, grandchildren.

After they left, the gent would invariably raise his eyebrows and grin across the table at me and declare confidentially:

“I have no idea who that was!”

There was a lively bit of dancing by a very elegantly dressed Portuguese lady who later engaged me in a torrential one-way conversation in Portuguese in which I caught an occasional word that I thought meant “house”.

Nodding vigorously, the lady was delighted, in floods of more Portuguese, in my feeble attempts at participating in our conversation!

When we returned home from the party, we found Mom was simultaneously having a bite to eat and putting her groceries away.

I admit I tried to shame her by telling her about how much Dad enjoys the respite centre and how well he is treated there, how much fun the party was. I tried to tell her about some of the interesting people I met.

She interrupted me to say, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute. I don’t think my hearing aid is working. Just keep talking. Say anything. I think my hearing aid is not working. Just keep talking; I’ll take it out and then put it in to check if it is working…”

Now, I have noticed many times before that if my Mom is not interested in something you are saying, she has dozens of little tactics to stop you from talking about yourself, to start talking about her. Or failing with those, she just blanks out. She has absolutely no interest in most things others might be doing or find interesting, unless it somehow is of direct interest to her.

Even during a recent phone call I helped her make to express our sympathies to my cousin who had just lost her father, my uncle, my mother found a way to intrude with a puzzle about her own condition, her experiences of getting old.

It’s no surprise to me. After all, I’m the kid who cannot remember my Mom attending many of the important events in my life when I was young: recitals, Christmas concerts, graduations…(Maybe my wedding? which again turned into a tortuous event all about her! a story for another time!)

I can even understand logically how, with short term memory loss, my mother might be excused for not remembering the situation at hand, having a tendency to wander off wherever her thoughts and whims take her, unable to stay on task.

Still, I couldn’t help but be amazed and frustrated. It seems like some of the deteriorations in her experience of getting older are also exacerbating her penchant for being selfish. That sounds harsh I know, even as I love her very much!

Posted in Journal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Green things and spaces

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Kati Saarinen
Thuja plicata

This gallery contains 18 photos.

More Galleries | Leave a comment

Church

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

I often wander on up and down the ravine formed by Byrne Creek in Burnaby. It’s a quiet place of green with the only sound being the burble of the water tumbling over rocks, breezes sighing in the trees and the occasional bird song. Byrne Creek drains a large urban watershed along the south slope of Burnaby, BC, runs through a beautiful ravine park and spawning habitat, and into the Fraser River.

Whatever the weather or time of day, I almost immediately feel my soul is soothed there. For me, it’s like better than going to church. It is the only “church” that is meaningful to me.

Here, as I let my gaze travel upwards along the solid trunks of the beautiful trees, feel the play of sunlight through the lace of the foliage above, I feel I am breathing in holiness and wholeness. My body relaxes and my senses soften and open.

As I follow the path, delighting in each new vision around the bend, I also feel a sense of reluctance as I approach the end of the path. I don’t want my visit here to end.

An organization called the Streamkeepers help maintain the creek through community projects and public education, and monitor its rejuvenated populations of coho salmon, chum salmon and cutthroat trout.

 

Posted in Journal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

August blooms

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Kati Saarinen
August 2011, flowers and other things 104

This gallery contains 27 photos.

Random blooms.

More Galleries | Leave a comment

Strange conversations

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Kati Saarinen

So…I was walking home from Gateway Skytrain Station. It was sunny and hot today and I had two large bags of groceries weighing me down. There are always one or two individuals hanging around the station, begging or selling or giving things away.

“What are you selling?”

I had noticed the swarthy man on the stairs ahead of me. He had the swagger and dressed in the manner of a down-on his luck gambler. He was now talking to a slim young man who had been waiting outside on the sidewalk. Indian? I wondered.

“Cigarettes,” was the reply.

“How much?”

“Sixteen dollars for a box,” the young man said. “Aahhh, that’s like one dollar…”

I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation because I had walked on, pondering the prevalence of black market anything here (it falls off the back of trucks here more than anyplace else in Canada, I think!). Maybe it’s the desperation. I read somewhere recently that BC has a higher rate of poverty than the other Canadian provinces. Don’t know if it’s true or not. I have also wondered if the presence of more people sleeping rough has anything to do with the milder climate.

“Quite a heavy load you’re carrying there, darlin’” I heard a man’s voice behind me.

I smiled and nodded. It was the swarthy man.

He quickly overtook me on the left, walking on ahead of me, but assumed we were having a conversation anyway.

“Nice day,” he offered.

“Mm-hmn.”

“I’m done with women!” he declared over his shoulder.

I gathered he didn’t mean me in particular  — as I assure you we don’t have a history – but women in general. His white jeans weren’t quite clean and were hanging off his butt. No belt. Dusty, pointy, black, leather shoes. His greasy, black hair kept falling into his eyes. His skin had a sheen as if he had already been drinking this morning.

“Too much trouble,” he continued, assuming I was interested. I smiled grimly to myself. Busy street. Lots of people around in the middle of the morning. No real danger; just a loquacious, self-important pretender.

“I’m going to get a 2-4 of beer, go downtown. My buddy’s got a boat and we’re going to sail around on English Bay all day,” he boasted.

“She thinks she can just dance on my head!” he laughed. “Hah! I’m too smart for that. I’ve been married three times and I’m only 41. She took off…Nice! I woke up this morning with nobody screaming at me.”

He started to jay-walk towards the liquor store across the street.

Looking backwards at me again over his shoulder, he asked, “Need some help, darlin’?”

He glanced down at my bags of groceries.

“Um, no need!” I smiled at him.

“Have a nice day!”

Posted in Journal | Tagged , , | Leave a comment