My "Social" Experiment

Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my little social experiment.

I'm a nurse. Well, I'm LICENSED to be a nurse. Currently, nursing is pretty far from what I want to be doing. Okay that's not true either.
I'm a certain kind of nurse. I function well in two very distinct jobs. Either I can be a home health nurse taking care of adorable dottering old folks and whiling away afternoons setting up their meds and doing their dressing changes while listening to them tell me stories of long ago times or I can be a psych nurse specializing in outpatient mental health or inpatient dual diagnosis drug and alcohol rehab. Quite a stretch right? Well, I've spent my nursing career sampling different jobs to see what I enjoy most. Of course I did all that when I thought I would be married forever and that my dear husband would always be there to have the other side of the income coin.
I was always the ancillary worker. His job, while usually paying less than mine, had better benefits for him and was a good, home town job. I was content to take lesser jobs so that I could take care of the kids and kinda be around when they needed me growing up because for a large part of the time they were growing up he worked non negotiable evenings. That meant if I wasn't going to open house and little programs and talent shows and taking them treat or treating, nobody was. And it was all ok at the time.
Flash forward and the kids are now grown. Youngest just graduated last May from high school. And now I'm divorced.
I didn't handle this little divorce as well as I thought I would. I mean after all I pretty much hated his guts for our entire 25 year marriage but I'm slowly coming to realize that there was more love sprinkled in there than I had previously thought. It was just overpowered by the vicious hate that we had for each other. Well mostly the vicious hate I had for him. He claimed he never hated me. And to my knowledge neither of us ever cheated on the other. That's not why our marriage failed. Everyone in small town Texas here thinks that is the reason but it is not. Small minded people just think whatever they want is fact.
Anyway, shortly after we separated a over a year ago was when my final nursing job came crashing down around me. They had hired a complete and total nut job as the Director of Nurses and she wanted all of the old staff except the one ass kisser she was grooming OUT of there. So she made it her mission to get rid of all of us in any way she could.
And after watching a place that I loved and respected so much go down the tubes so fast under her new regime, I gave in and said Fuck it and quit.
So now I'm poor... well that wouldn't do. So I was forced to sell some mineral rights so that I could have some money to hang on with until I got over all the terrible things that were happening to me. I was in a deep dark depression, saddened over the separation and the fact that we just couldn't seem to get it together enough to pull it back together no matter how many times we tried. It's very daunting to give up a 25 year marriage. Especially when you started it at 17 years old.
I stayed home for literally nine months. I seldom went outdoors. I avoided people at all costs. I wanted no part of any of it. I went out when I had to and that was very rarely to buy supplies for the house. I watched tons of daytime tv and squandered my money. When I would get online or buy a paper and look for nursing jobs I would get literally sick to my stomach. The town I live in has NO jobs for nurses save for the horrible nursing home which I have worked at four times and do not intend to work at again. That meant I would have to drive at least 30 min or an hour five days a week one way to get to a job. After having driven 120 miles round trip daily for four years I was sick to death of the prospect of driving anywhere on a regular basis to get to a job I couldn't probably stand.
Both my daughters worked at a little home town cafe owned, of all things, by a high school boyfriend of mine who barely even remembered me. They loved their little jobs and then one day an opening came up and they asked if perhaps I might want to work.
Well, how odd. I had not done anything outside of nursing for 19 years. I'd never worked in food service in my life, but it was just a cashier job. How difficult could it be? And after all, I didn't seek it out, it just came to me, so I figured God was telling me to get up off my ass and finally get back out and be in the public around ....omg...people.
So my little experiment began. I've worked as a nurse in this little town of 5k people several times. Alot of people knew that I am a nurse. Even more of them knew I was getting divorced. And in case you have never lived in a small town, boy oh boy do the small minds and big mouths love to gossip!
It was very ...interesting...to watch the looks on people's faces when they came in and saw me working as a cashier. You could see the wheels turning..."did she lose her nursing license? Is she under investigation? Is that why HE left HER?" and probably lots more uglier things that I don't want to know about.
Some of the more sarcastic ones would ask me if we were trying to turn it into a family business. And so, it's been a learning experience for me to work in a different and somewhat less "grand" position than I've been used to for so many years. It's been interesting to see how differently people treat "service workers". How callous and unkind they can be, or controversially, how kind they can be. It's been very enlightening to me to learn so many new things about human nature. No, I haven't explained them well today in this post, but they are here, inside me and some day I will.
The really interesting thing to me is how much I love this job. And how it saddens me to know that I soon have to leave it. While it is fun, and virtually stress free, it doesn't pay the bills for my one income existence. Nursing will.
So I have it in front of me... knowing that I have to go back to fifty hour weeks (including drive time) and severe stress...and wishing that I could just stay where I am and make enough money to get by. Just to get by. I don't require much else except the ability to pay my bills. Yes I would like to travel and do fun things and buy toys. But I would so much rather be a happy person daily at the little job I have and not do any of those things. Hell, I haven't done those things my whole fucking life. No need to start now. Lol.
Anyway, there's a job opening up at, of all things, a prison nearby. It won't be a hellacious drive and I've dealt with fuck heads in the rehab game and in the mental health game so hopefully it won't be too bad if I actually get it.
Ironically, my ex husbands new girlfriend that he just looooooooves to death is a guard in the prison system. Silly dyke bitch. Thankfully it's not the one I'm aiming for.

Stay tuned... who knows what fresh hell will happen tomorrow. :-)