Reality

Reality is kind of a fickle thing, isn't it? I mean, it's subjective. You have what you perceive as reality & I have what I perceive as reality. But the only reality that actually matters is that which belongs to the person perceiving it.

When I vent my stress & anxiety about my struggles this semester to friends & family, I get 100% positive feedback. A lot of 'You can do this!' & 'I believe in you!'s. And that's the reality of the people how give me that feedback. Unfortunately, it's not my reality.

My reality is a multitude of variables crashing down on top of me like a tidal wave. I cannot simply believe in myself because others do. My reality is not that simple.

And although I appreciate all of those people you do believe in me & support me & want the best for me & mine, my reality is working against all those good intentions.

My reality is a class consisting entirely of weekly tests that must be passed w/ an 80%+. Weeks that are failed must later be made up w/ an 85%+. Only 5 weeks can be failed before you fail the class completely. Right now I sit at 3 weeks that I have failed consecutively & I am staring a 4th week in the face. I'm failing because I'm a horrible test-taker. Because it is just too much information for me to absorb & retain. Because I've never done very well scholastically regardless of how intelligent I am. Because there simply isn't enough time in my day to study all of this information & keep up w/ the obligations of family & my other classes.

My reality is not the reality others see in me.

So what do I really want by venting in this manner, on this medium? Not platitudes, certainly. Honesty? Advice? Suggestions? Help to overcome myself? I believe this is what I want but would I take this advice, were it to be offered? I'm not sure.

I am so worried about not making it out now that I've made it so far. So much is riding on my actually finishing this. On my actually accomplishing something of substance. What if I can't do it? What if I don't make it out? I have to return home w/ yet another failed degree attempt on my shoulders. I have to drag along the financial burden of my loan repayments w/out a degree to show for it. W/out a career to pay for it. My family will continue to suffer for my failure.

The easy thing to say is to work harder for it. But what isn't understood is that I am working hard for it. This is the best I can do & my best has never been good enough.

Anxiety & depression are my reality. And I'm not really sure what this post even accomplishes.

The End is Nigh

In the midst of my final semester of Mortuary College I have this vague sense of the end being close to my grasp. Granted, I underestimated my Comps class & the commitment it requires when taken along w/ other courses. But I think back to a few semesters ago & how daunting it all seems & I feel so silly for thinking it was impossible. It is possible. In fact, at this point it is inevitable.

I have my required embalming case reports. All 25. My sign-off solo embalming will take place next month. That seemed so far off 2-3 semesters ago. I felt like going from 5 to 25 embalming was just not going to happen in 2 semesters. Not so. Some weekends I was sure we'd embalmed everybody in the Mid-state area but the reality was I was working toward my goal. And now, I've met that goal. The feeling of elation at this victory probably won't be met until I complete my first solo embalming successfully. Ha.

In my Practicum, I've begun to feel welcome & part of a team. Although the last few weeks haven't been as busy as I'd like, I'm hopeful about my Practicum days coming up. What I've most felt in being the funeral home's office is how much I miss working in one everyday. It's been almost 3 years since I left Alaska & the funeral home that have me my start. I miss working in that setting. I miss the deep sense of fulfillment at serving our families. I very much hope that after I complete my courses this summer, I'll be able to work in that setting once again before serving my apprenticeship.

Going back to work means finding a daycare for my now 18 month old daughter. I have to admit, I'm nervous about this. I know I'm projecting my own feelings of social anxiety & she'll love daycare but I'm still nervous. I remind myself daily that she isn't a little baby anymore. She's so big & independent. Sometimes it breaks my heart.

The end of babyhood.
The end of college (for now).

The beginning of a truly wonderful life.

So much, so fast.

It seems crazy that the Spring Semester is almost over. I've been jammed at school & at home. I had my second of three semesters of Clinicals & gained a ton of confidence in the prep room. This was largely due to the thorough & patient disposition of one of my clinical mates. I feel very good going into my last semester this summer.

My LAST semester!

How insane is that?! If I can get through the end of this semester & the next, I'm officially done w/ school. I've got CANA (Cremation Association of North America) certification this summer & then all I need is Pre-need certification to be a very appealing Funeral Home employee applicant. I'll take my national board exams this fall & walk at graduation this winter.

We had originally planned to be moving back to Alaska whenever I completed my schooling but a perfect storm of opposing circumstances mean we'll be here for about 1 more year. I'm looking at this as a positive. I hope I have no trouble finding (any) job whenever I finish classes & I'll work up until we leave. Hopefully, we'll save some money & our road trip home will be enjoyable & not just utilitarian.



This semester, I have Restorative Art which means I've been sculpting a head out of mortuary wax. It's been slow going but I think I'm finally making a bit of progress. Tomorrow, I hope to get the ears on & maybe do some smoothing. After that, it's all cosmetics, lashes, brows & wig. Finishing touches. This go-around I've budgeted for all of that so I won't feel like such a failure for having a half finished head.

The day after tomorrow, I present a summary of a paper we did for Funeral Service Counseling. The teacher calls it a "Lossography" & it is exactly what it sounds like. A collection of the losses I've suffered in my lifetime. It was incredibly hard to write particularly in light of the recent loss of a close friend to drug overdose & the ongoing feelings of loss I deal w/ in regards to my father who suffered a brain injury which sped the progression of his dementia. Over the course of writing the outline & rough draft, it became clear to me that I might need some grief counseling myself. Hearing the presentations by my classmates last week cemented it for me. I'll probably be looking into finding a therapist soon.

Even morticians are affected by grief.

In Funeral Service Directing, our big project was a 2 part video recording of a funeral arrangement scenario role play. The first video went fine but in the second, we were under a bit of time constraint & as I was playing the funeral director, I really felt the pressure. I feel like I really didn't live up to my hype & my performance suffered. I think I'll actually do better in front of a real family. I have in the past. I just have to improve my impression.

A major personality defect I have is my tendency to take on the linguistic accent of the people I'm around. I never noticed it so much when I lived in Alaska because there isn't really one single accent I was exposed to for long periods of time. Down here, I affect a pronounced southern twang if I have to engage in conversation w/ a southerner for even a few minutes. It goes away once I'm back in my own home but the thicker the accent of the person I'm speaking to, the thicker my affected accent gets. I think it's likely a defense mechanism. Ironically, I hate sticking out too much so I try to adapt to my environs to better fit in. Part of that is affecting the regional dialect. Sometimes I worry that the real southerners find this quirk offensive so I'm actively working on on toning it down if not stopping it completely.

This summer is the time where I refine my image. I'm going to learn how to do everyday makeup & practical but professional hair styles. I'm going to work on my weight so that my wardrobe options get a bit more plentiful. Hopefully by August, I'll look like an honest to goodness career woman & not like a frazzled twentysomething pretending to be a grown up.

;)

Harder Than It Seems

Maybe to everyone else it's perfectly obvious what physically taxing work embalming is. Maybe I'm the odd one out (as usual) who just never put it together.


I just wrapped my twelfth (of eighteen) day of Clinicals at a local funeral home. My school splits our clinical requirements into three semesters of six weekend days (fri-sat-sun) each. During these clinical weekends, teams of 3-5 students report to an accredited funeral home to work in their prep rooms for three full days. We do everything (dressing, casketing, cosmetizing, etc) but we only get credit for being there & the number of embalming cases we do that count towards our required 25 cases needed for graduation.

For those of you who didn't ace math, I'm basically done w/ my second semester of Clinicals. Next semester I have about a half dozen cases left until I do my qualifying case (where I do an entire embalming start-to-finish on my own). Anything after that is cherry on top. In addition to my final semester of clinicals, I'll be doing my practicum which is a weekly externship with a local funeral home (usually one other than the funeral home we do our clinicals at).

But what people don't realize is that embalming is actually quite difficult. I see the little tiny women in my school & wonder how on earth they are able to get through Clinicals when it takes the stuffing out of me & I ain't small - not by a long shot.


Between moving corpses from gurneys to prep table to dressing tables to caskets, hunching over the table, maneuvering a trocar inside bodies, and dressing stiff, lifeless cadavers, at the end of my clinical days, I feel like I've run a couple of triathlons. It's sort of a stupid moment for me because I don't know why I would have thought this job was easy.

This job is hard. It is wasn't, more people would do it. I knew that before I ever decided to apply to mortuary college. I knew it before it ever occurred to me that I'd figured out what I want to do with my life. I knew it, so why am I so surprised when I come home after clinical weekends & can hardly walk?

Winter Wunderbar

D's first birthday was last Sunday. We had a blast. She loved opening presents & playing with her new toys. She seemed a bit baffled by her cake, though. I had to stick her hands in it & she immediately pulled them out & held them up for Grammy to wipe off. So dainty. She seemed to rather like demolishing the cake with her spoon. All in all, it was a fun time.

Fall semester has concluded with me passing all of my classes. I even got an A in one of them. Pretty freakin' great, if you ask me. Since I don't have to retake one of Fall semester's classes, I'm on track for completing my mortuary science degree in Summer 2013. That's just 2 more semesters folks. I'm so anxious to get home to Alaska, I may just skip the entire graduation ceremony in favor of packing up my family & boogieing back to the Last Frontier. I'm sure my family will talk me into flying back for it though.

We are going home for the holidays however. We leave in 11 days & we are woefully unprepared. I've been pouring over ever book & article I can get my hands on. Reading blog posts from other traveling mamas. Doing gobs of research on airline policies. Coming up with plans & then contingency plans by the bucketful. I still feel like it'll be a complete catastrophe.

Two layovers, one comfortably long & one very, very short. I'm really hoping D sleeps a good portion of the long flight & is her usual curious self at the airports. We've done two roadtrips this year & she's done remarkably well. My relatives often joke that she must not be a real baby because she hardly ever complains.

I'm blessed, really. But I spend an awful lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is supposed to be harder, isn't it? She's a year old now & we haven't had one midnight run to the ER, she sleeps soundly through the night 99% of the time, & tantrums are very few & far between. I feel bad for feeling bad that we don't suffer like so many other new parents. Yeah, I'm confused by that too.

A Little Background

By little, I mean LITTLE. Seriously abridged. Completely summarized. Without much detail at all, really. Because if I gave it all away at the get-go, I'd have nothing to write about here. Always got to leave em wanting more, right?Here goes.

My name is Kat (or Kittie if you know me well). I am mom to a little girl (we'll refer to her as D) & Significant Other to my beloved J. He & I have been together for eight years. We're not married (yet). I've been holding out for the wedding I want not the wedding I have to settle for. That's not the kind of girl I am.

 D snuck up on us, though. J & I hadn't planned on having kids until a bit further down the road. D had other ideas & formulated a sneak-attack. She's a damn ninja.

J & I started our life together in Alaska, our home state. It's also where I got a taste for the funeral business. I worked as an admin assistant & office manager for a funeral home for almost two years. It was during my time there that I realized funeral service was what I wanted to do with my life. Not a common career choice but it feels right for me. A couple variables came together & we moved to Nashville, TN so I could attend mortuary college, get a degree & become a licensed funeral director/ embalmer.

Of course, nothing we ever do is easy & the theme of our lives has always been entropic - where there is order created, chaos ensues. A few months after we arrived in TN & shortly after I began my first semester of Mortuary College, I became pregnant. Here's the kicker - I didn't find out I was pregnant for almost 6 months. Say what you will but fact remains, I had no pregnancy-specific symptoms (morning sickness, etc) & what symptoms I did have were easily attributed to the huge amounts of stress I'd been under.

 However even after the pregnancy was realized, I knew I couldn't give up on school. I continued my coursework in my last trimester & gave birth to my beautiful daughter November 25, 2011. The following Monday (2.5 days postpartum for those keeping score at home) I completed my first of 4 final exams for that semester & managed to get my best grades of my time at that school.

 Yeah, I rock.

Again, a few variables came together that determined it was more beneficial to take the following semester off & hit it hard the semester after. I got a good 4 months to do the full-time stay-at-home mom thing. Even though it drove me crazy at times, I wouldn't change it. I feel pretty lucky to have been able to stay at home w/ my baby those first few months.

 Life isn't without it's struggles (understatement of the century) but all in all, we do alright. D makes sure we smile every day & we work as hard as we can to keep the smiles coming.

 So, dear reader, thank you for joining me in documenting this journey. There are a whole lot of Mommy Blogs out there so thanks for taking the time for mine.