At a holiday breakfast this week for Employee Assistance Professionals and friends, I happened to sit next to a nurse who serves as the Quality Assurance Director of a nearby recovery center. As we chatted about day-to-day work activities, she mentioned a drawback of her current position—the lack of direct contact with patients. But, she said, I like to think that I’m making changes from the top down now.
I asked this nurse-turned administrator (whom I’ll call Elisabeth) more about her past experience in patient care. The energy in the room shifted. She lit up as she shared stories of her earlier career, helping young mothers with babies and small children to turn their lives around.
We were told to report cases to CPS [Child Protective Services], she said, but I thought, how is that going to help the child? So we went into the homes, cleaned the houses, decorated kids’ rooms, and taught young mothers how to run a household. We taught them how to take care of themselves and their children. They were so dirty. We cleaned them up. Cleaned the house. Showed them how to be organized. I wasn’t specially trained in this; it was just from having been a mother myself.
Elisabeth offered an example: A seventeen-year-old mother from the Mt. Vernon ghetto would repeatedly walk into our facility, drop her son in the nursery, and come to the kitchen to get breakfast. One day I told her, “keep your son with you—this is what we’re going to do. Go check his diaper, wash his hands and wash your hands. Then come get food.” When she had a plateful, I said, “Alright. You can have this food, but he eats first. Feed your baby first, then you can eat. That’s how it works.” It was amazing to see the change in her. She went from cursing at me to happily following the routine.
I had fifteen women in all—and years later, they are all still sober. I hear from them all the time. One sends me flowers every Christmas. She says, ‘as long as you get flowers from me, you’ll know I’m sober.’ Twelve of them even went into nursing as a way to feed their families.
The joy and fulfillment of caring for these women and children poured through Elisabeth with a glow that warmed us both in the true holiday spirit. I saw in her a rare caregiver who chose to be present and available to the needs of the moment beyond what she’d been told to do. Without her courage to listen and follow her instincts, children would have been separated from their mothers, and young women may have struggled for a lifetime with the basics of survival.
Maybe Elisabeth wasn’t “specially trained,” but she clearly had a gift for meeting others where they lived and holding the opportunity for them to take the next step.