I'll Fly Away

Somewhere between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day is a time and place for nurses like me.

My family knew starvation due to my parent’s divorce. My father’s lips kissed the tin cans of cheap beer and our family ended up in a shack on a ghetto plantation. My brothers collected dead batteries from the junk yard for lunch money and learned to hoist me into windows to steal bread from the mean Portuguese lady on the corner. More than once she cursed us and chased us with her mop. I ended up in foster care as a teenager, holding up my pants due to severe weight loss.

With the help of a social worker I begged my mother to take me in. I became the caretaker for Elaina, my half sister. At the age of 16, I scrubbed toilets after school and promised my mother I would not burden her. One day I knew I would just fly away. I made good on that promise leaving home 3 years later with my first nursing job.

Taking care of my sister had never been a problem and one day at the age of 9, Elaina came to me with a hatful of tears. She had been to court and had lost the case; according to her, "The judge told me I was a liar." My sister had been sexually abused by my mother’s boyfriend and I believed her. My mother was a pill popper and lived with a heroin addict who was quite familiar with the inside of a prison. This led to many years of silence between my mother and me, until one day she was incapable of taking care of my sister. "Please take her," she said. And I did.

I was too proud to ask for state assistance and worked many double shifts in the ICU to provide for us. I was strict, even harsher than a real father. I worried for my sister. She never laughed, and a simple smile was a rehearsed act on her part.

"I try my best to be normal," she once told me. "And so do I," was my reply.

She studied hard, so hard that she earned a scholarship to SF State. Her high school gave her an award and gave me one too: "Parent of the Month," it reads (I still have it). They never realized I was her brother. She was to be an RN, and I was proud of her. She too would have the chance to fly away.

Then one day she came to me with the same hatful of tears I saw when she was just a child. "I’m pregnant," she cried. She had just turned 18. "It’s all right," I said. "I'll work more shifts and you can still go to college." But my hopes and dreams weren’t enough.

I can still see her face when I sat with her in the clinic. "You don’t have to do this," I pleaded, and then the Nurse called her name. She didn’t even blink. She walked into my life a child and walked out of the family planning clinic a woman.

That night we watched A Raisin in the Sun, a movie about a dream deferred. What about our hopes? "Do they fester like a sore and then run?" I looked at Elaina and saw all the hurt that had tried its best to escape a pained body. At some point in her life, my sister had become just like me, a bruised soul.

Elaina never had children and we never spoke about that day. I always think about this time in my life when I triage a young female’s pregnancy. I recognize the lost innocence in her eyes and I stay completely still when the young tears are unstoppable. I give her a Kleenex and wait for the cloud to pass.

I am present, like a bird on a windowsill. I want to share my story with these young girls who feel they don't have options (but of course I don’t).

Nurses have the special job of giving unconditional care without judgement. It is our gift. It is our journey.

We live and learn, and live again from our darkest hours. Though the faces may change, the stories reflect themselves through our patients. And our personal experience becomes the human experience.

For every nurse there is a hatful of tears.