I'm a Social Worker... Sort of.

In my blog archives, I noticed that I skipped all of 2010. I hope this is because I’ve been so diligently working on my book, but in reality, I’ve had a hard time blogging. Around the time I stopped blogging, I started a new job. I’m a social worker. Sort of. I tell everyone I’m a social worker because that’s the easiest way to describe what I do.. but I’m not sure that’s accurate. I think a social worker actually means you have a Masters and can do counseling….. I don’t really know. I do case management for kids who are Wards of the State. So whatever the general word for that is, that’s what I do. Until I know, I’m going to keep calling myself a ‘Social Worker… sort of.”

I had a roommate a bunch of years ago who was a preschool teacher and she came home almost every day with ‘roll on the ground laughing’ funny stories about her kids. They aren’t my stories to tell, but if you know her or ever run in to my old roommate, ask her to tell you the story of the Penis Brain. It’s not crude, actually totally endearing, and about hysterical questions 3-year-olds ask.

When I started this new job, I thought I’d have a ton of hysterical “penis brain” stories about my crazy kids. In reality, I mainly have difficult stories, which after a while of getting burned out start to make me “laugh to keep from crying” but aren’t exactly funny…aren’t funny at all. This week at work I had to sit out of an intake interview with a kid whose story was so horrendous I thought I’d cry if I looked into his eyes. I was having a bad day in general, and in general I need to be able to put up with those types of stories to do my job well. I can’t cry every time I hear a hard story or else I would sit out of every meeting and our residential budget for Kleenex would be through the roof. But, every once in a while, it is nice to be reminded how to be sensitive. It was nice to be reminded that crying is the appropriate response when I hear of a parent who treated their son in malicious and evil ways. Ways that left scars, physical and emotional, from head to toe.

Crying is an appropriate response when a boy who has lived with his foster mom for 6 years is given 2 weeks notice before he has to move out. The reason? He was interfering with her life.

I really wish I had more funny stories.

And I do have more funny stories, there are a lot of reasons they don’t make it to my blog. We do crisis driven work. In general I’m so exhausted, that unless a kid stabs his teacher at school, it’s easy to overlook. It’s easy to overlook a kid getting a part in a play at school or getting an A on their report card (which is pretty rare…. I might not overlook that). It’s also easy to overlook the things that make me fall off my chair laughing, which thanks to how amazing my kids and my co-workers are, is pretty often. My goal for the next couple of months is to pay attention to those things more, remember them, and write them.