Raptor With A Broken Wing

What working the nursing home night shift as a 17-year-old foster kid taught me about helplessness and the comfort and horror of bodies, plus the rich rewards of intersecting metaphor and literality

This week’s writing exercise explores the fine line dividing one possible life and another, and the moments in life that illuminate that hairline crack. It’s also about empathy, inaction, and different degrees of helplessness.

I’ll start with a story that begins now, with me living in a pretty house in a hilly neighborhood in Minneapolis shaded by the city’s last remaining elm trees and inhabited by mostly University professors and artists. It’s a neighborhood organized around gardens walks and block parties, book clubs and house concerts, street clean-up and political activism, all undergirded by a degree of affluence. On the outside, I blend in with these comfortable surroundings I’ve wiggled my way into. However, on the inside, I am vividly and constantly aware of how fine the line is between one kind of life and another, the line between lending a hand and needing one. My family struggled. I always had a roof over my head, for instance, but didn’t always have running water or lights depending on whether those bills got paid. We moved so much that I changed schools almost every year. We were socially isolated. Eventually the “system” got involved and I ended up in foster care at age seventeen.

While in foster care, I enrolled in a certified nursing assistant program. My foster sister, Joy, also enrolled. Classes were held at night, in a large building on the edge of downtown St. Paul, not far from the city’s grand cathedral. It may or may not have been a community college. I only know that Joy and I rode the bus together from our foster house near Lake Phalen.

Our foster care arrangement was a quirky and questionable set up for teens who were relatively responsible, but whose families couldn’t or wouldn’t care for them. It was called an Independent Living Situation. In this “situation,” the foster “parents” lived with their real children downstairs, while the “independent” foster teens (you had to be at least sixteen to live at the ILS) lived upstairs—boys on one side of the apartment, girls on the other. The girls’ bedroom overlooked the lake; the boys’ room overlooked the driveway. Each of us received a city bus pass and a weekly food credit to be used at a small, independently owned grocery store within walking distance.

The foster entrance was located at the end of a long driveway, in the back of the house, through a door that led up a steep staircase. A buzzer alerted the “parents” to our comings and goings. Curfew was strict. If you arrived late, the door to the stairway would be locked and police would be called. No exceptions.

It was deep winter when Joy and I embarked on our adventure to become certified nursing assistants. The kind of chronically subzero winter we used to have in Minnesota back in olden times, before climate change. This was, in fact, 1986, the year that the city of St. Paul’s annual Winter Carnival’s Ice Palace was constructed on Lake Phalen; I remember walking across that frozen lake at night, on the way home from learning how to safely transfer a frail old person from bed to chair or from chair to bed or—even trickier—how to remove and replace a full set of wet bedsheets on a bed with an immobile person still in it.

Of course, for our practice sessions, the sheets weren’t actually wet and there were no old people, but just us, the students, mostly young and generally spry, pretending to be what we could barely yet imagine. After our long evenings spent awkwardly mastering transfers and other unfamiliar skills, Joy and I would shiver our way across that interminable expanse of snow-covered ice, our ungloved fingers frozen stiff around our red-tipped cigarettes, our feet numb inside of our cheap and inappropriate footwear, our path illumined by that incredible glowing palace of ice, so magical and incongruent against the bitter darkness.

I cannot remember what compelled me to sign up with Joy for those night classes on top of everything else we were juggling at the time—things like trying to graduate from school while keeping my dysfunctional home life a secret. Or like trying not to get kicked out of the ILS for being late too many times. Or like trying to keep my boyfriend’s attention because he was, I thought, the one and only thing between me and total aloneness. In any case, Joy and I must have really, really wanted to be nursing assistants. Our end goal was to get hired in a nursing home. I did have some fond memories of my earlier experience of volunteering in the lovely Sholom Home in St. Paul, where I read to residents and led bingo games and helped decorate for St. Patrick’s Day parties and so forth.

I also recollected warmly the time I had spent reading to a blind neighbor, Charlotte, who had advertised for a helper. I would walk to Charlotte’s small white house on autumn afternoons during my junior year of high school, before I was put into the ILS. Charlotte’s house sat far back on a deep lot so thick with conifers it felt almost forested; the pine smell always filled me with equal parts hope and sadness. Once inside, I’d read to Charlotte—mostly from the Bible, her chosen text—as she rested in her sage green armchair. Charlotte was quick to correct me if my reading was too fast or too soft, but soon I knew how to use my voice just as she liked it.

Unfortunately, neither reading to Charlotte nor playing bingo at the Sholom Home prepared me for what I experienced when I finally got hired to work the night shift as a certified nursing assistant at a St. Paul nursing home that looked not unlike a white brick castle, but that felt not unlike a lonely and surreal prison while smelling like something fierce and indescribable.

Especially bizarre was the basement, a maze of long snaking concrete tunnels where we employees could find locker rooms and vending machines for soda and snacks, and where the laundry room pumped out clean linens and towels and, I suppose, residents’ clothes 24 hours a day. Upstairs were the resident rooms and the dining hall. Feeding was a task we learned in our program, but the practice didn’t at all equate with actually feeding an older person. I was consistently too impatient, too fast with the spoon.

More natural to me were tasks such as bathing—though make no mistake, that was not easy!—and combing and braiding the women’s hair. I was fairly skillful at changing their clothes, intrigued and mesmerized as I was by how their pillowy flesh hung so loosely from their protruding bones, which seemed simultaneously sturdy and frail. These women were not shy about their bodies, not the least bit modest about what one referred to as the “feminine juices.” I was seventeen and naïve. I had never really spent time—not ever—around older people. The women drew me to them as if I knew them in a way I cannot explain, as if I could see in them a familiar place from another life. In this way, they both comforted and unnerved me.

The men upstairs were another story. I remember changing their catheter bags and emptying the urine-filled containers, trying so hard but in utter vain to keep the urine from splashing on my white canvas tennis shoes. And the constant sexual banter grew tiresome. The men did not draw me in the way the women did, but nor did they similarly unnerve me.

What did unnerve me, enough to scare me away from my brief foray in nursing assistance altogether, was neither the women nor the men, but John.