One summer I needed a job, and my mom offered to get me a position at the assisted living community where she worked at the time. For some reason, I was oddly excited at the idea of working at the same place as my mom. I assumed it would be us going to the mall on our lunch breaks and her buying me chicken teriyaki, among other fun and delicious adventures.
I was not expecting the assisted living community to smell so strongly of feces. “You’ll get used to it,” she assured me. She wasn’t wrong, although I don’t know that it’s a good thing that my nose has been desensitized to the smell of human excrement.
The interview was largely a formality. I’m pretty sure I probably wore jeans to it. The training–however–was no joke. Nearly two weeks were devoted to watching videos and taking tests on HIPPA, blood borne pathogens, how to drag a patient down the stairs in a blanket in case of a fire (our building didn’t even have stairs), and more.
Finally, I was required to take a CPR class. This seemed like a lot of hoop jumping for the job I was actually going to be performing–my job title was “Activities Assistant.” AKA I played bingo with the residents. For $10 an hour.
My mom decided that she needed to renew her CPR certification, so she signed up to take the class with me. She regrets this decision to this day, I believe.
My mom was flirting with our CPR instructor even though he was only a 4 and she’s easily an 8. Needless to say, I was annoyed that I wasn’t getting the most out of my CPR class because my mom was trying to get a date to the assisted living community prom. That definitely wasn’t an actual activity we held, but I’m kind of surprised because the activities grew increasingly more stupid the longer I worked there (I was once asked to do an assisted living community yoga class. I had never taken yoga and most of the residents were in wheel chairs.).
By the time my mom was done batting her eyelashes and twirling her hair, I had forgotten everything I learned. As I approached the CPR dummy–I couldn’t help but think how I was going to let him down. He was going to die, simply because my mom has to flirt with every man we encounter–no dentist, waiter, grocery store checkout bag boy is safe. I became overridden with emotion and rage, tilted his sweet, plastic head backwards slightly, and folded my hands onto the smooth, cold surface of his unmoving chest.
“BREATH GODDAMMIT,” I shouted. “Don’t you go dying on me! I won’t let it end like this!”
As the tears streamed down my face, the temperature in the room dropped and the lights began to dim. Suddenly we were transported to the middle of the Atlantic, and my own breath was visible in the cold air in front of me as I frantically inhaled and exhaled.
“You’re going to go on. And you’re going to make lots of babies. And you’re going to die an old woman, warm in her bed,” I squeaked to the naked, male torso of the mannequin in front of me. I didn’t even know his name, yet we had been through so much in the past twenty minutes. I was deeply invested at this point.
Obviously those last two paragraphs didn’t happen. But my mother was mortified at this point. I had made a fool of myself–in front of her potential fourth husband.
