SILLY RABBIT
The past three nights, I've been having these dreams about an exboyfriend. The emotional context has been wrapped around a place, a city, a house, something that was his and then was mine and then becoming his again. I was afraid, worried, wanted to call the place mine but knowing it was his, wondering what he would think of me when he found the little sippy cup stains on the carpet or dust behind the couch.

It seems pretty transparent, the meaning behind the dreams. I have these kind of dreams now and then about him, a dream like I am living in his town, and I am worried he might find my house, and then he is moving in, and the shutters are falling off or the lawn needs mowing.

It is fairly close to the way it was with us, the way I think about him now, so the meaning doesn't bear a mystery for me. The reasoning is more of the mystery - why now, why so often?

Yesterday a sudden strong desire came over me to write to my favorite professor, the one whose job I wanted to have one day, the one who wrote letters of recommendation for graduate schools that turned me down, one after another. I wanted to have the same degree he has, have the same kind of influence, the same kind of life. It was my plan for my life, until my plan got derailed, and I've been reluctant to contact him since then.

I really wanted his opinion, though, so I sent him an email, told him what I was doing and if he could meet with me or carry on a conversation over the email about some questions I had.

He sent me a delighted response, and in his email, he stated that he remembered me, having dinner with me and Temple Grandin. He had invited me to his house to eat and talk with him and Temple, who is the "Numero Uno big dog" in the field I wanted to pursue, and who happened to teach graduate studies in Colorado. She and I outlined a plan for a PhD dissertation project, talking about funding, and then....I never applied to her school.

My reasons were complicated. Later down the road, I tried to get back on that horse, but instead of trying to go through her, or through my professor, I tried four other schools where no one knew me. Turns out that was a bit of a problem. Apparently you have to know someone on the inside.

Today, I was thinking about what he said in his email, that he remembered feeling sad at the time that I wasn't choosing to pursue graduate studies there with him.

When I had read that line, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. He had believed in me, he had wanted me to be his student. I remember talking with him one day, towards the end of my final year, and he gave me kind of a sideways glance over his glasses as he mumbled something about an open position with his department, a job for someone who would be interested in going to horse auctions (I mean, yippee! That is my favorite kind of place!), and I knew it was his way of inviting me to stay on, and I knew he also knew I was leaving. I wanted to go to Colorado so bad, I couldn't see the forest for the mountains.

Later, I cursed myself for not taking his offer. Oh sure, I already had a horsemanship position secured in Colorado. Sure, it would have taken some rearranging to do it. I had already given up my apartment, made moving plans. My boyfriend, the one I have been dreaming about, was all for it. It was perfect, he said, I could move in with him, and then surely the job would turn into a graduate student position, and I could get my PhD, and we could get married, and....

Hold on right there. That's right. I know without a doubt that if I had stayed on, I would have made my dreams for my life come true. I know my boyfriend wouldn't have let it happen any other way. He would have been there urging me on and pushing me ahead and holding my hand through every bit of it. I also know that he would have become my husband and that thought really scares me....

I had a dream about him once, when I lived in Oregon, that seemed rather poignant. In it, he brought a rabbit into the veterinarian's office where I worked. We had worked on his rabbit, some kind of back surgery, and then his estranged brother brought the rabbit back in, because now it couldn't hop. The rabbit wasn't perfect before, but now it was nonfunctional. It couldn't even move. I went to tell my doctor about it and she just looked at me like I was stupid and said, "Of course. That's the side effect of the surgery." I didn't get it. This phrase kept repeating in my mind, and still I think of it:

Why was the cure worse than the disease?

Hearing my professor voice his emotions, though, made me realize something. I made him sad. I did that to him, and in any effort to apologize, I should explain it wasn't an affront to him. He probably wonders what the heck happened to me, and sometimes in the course of the years when I have contacted him, I've glossed over a brief explanation, "I was raising my family and put my academic aspirations on hold for the meantime", but I know that my flimsy excuses don't hold water. They are probably as transparent as the dreams, although the reasoning probably warrants a mystery.

I don't want to tell him the real truth, the real truth on why College Station makes me nervous, why I never asked him if he could just let me in his program after all this time and wanting the things that never happened for me. I don't want to tell him because it makes me look really crazy to say something like look I constantly felt my parents never loved me, I felt rejected by them, not good enough, which caused me not to believe in myself, although I covered it up with a thick line of bravado, you see, so that no one would ever guess how really pathetic and worthless I felt, and I couldn't apply to your school or her school or any school that might offer me a chance of success and satisfaction, because I never thought I deserved it, so I just kept running away from what I really wanted, but several counseling sessions later, I am a much better person and no longer intentionally sabotage personal relationships that offer a chance of happiness and no longer choose escape patterns but face these inadequacies directly, which is why I am here now.

I know it is, in part, this background I have that makes me good at what I do. I am empathic to animals because their true wishes and desires are hard for them to express to humans. I want to be their champion and stand up for them, be the voice for those who cannot speak for themselves. I want to wrap my arms around them and tell them it's okay, that somebody loves them, that someone is going to look out for them. I want to make them as comfortable as possible and treat them with kindness. I want to treat them the way I want to be treated.

My true talent with animals is in calming the anxious animal, because I see in them parts of myself. I know what it is like to live with anxiety and fear, to want to run away and be unable to. This is why I chose my horse, as he was an outcast and headed for a rough ending. I sensed that underneath his explosive interior, he was a bundle full of nerves. We spoke the same language.

We had a fear-aggressive Newfoundland dog where I used to work who was frequently boarded and needed his ears cleaned often. He had severe chronic ear problems that gave him great pain, and previously, he was dealt with by a combination of being drugged and held down with force by several technicians. I didn't want that for him, so it became my goal to be able to work on him unsedated, solo, without any stress. It took some work to get him to trust me and allow me to touch the painful places, but we did it, laying in our quiet corner of the clinic. These are the things I am good at that no one ever sees. Give me a growling Rottweiler and I'll make it golden, give me a frightened monkey and I'll get it eating out of my hand.

This is where I get confused on my own issues, because I know my worth, and I know I have value. I know I have skills in this way, and that these skills are a result of my education, my background, my perceptiveness, and my intelligence. I know the understanding of animal behavior that I possess is worth something, if not a PhD, than at least more money or acknowledgement. So what am I still afraid of?

At one point a few years back, I thought that maybe I needed closure with this old boyfriend. I thought talking to him again would stop the dreams from happening, and dissolve that heavy knot of tension I had every time I went through College Station. I was driving through the town often around this time and I wanted to not experience the anxiety that the possibility of running into him caused. We opened up a dialogue, but he shut it down a few long emails into it, saying that it brought back old feelings for him. He's married now and he didn't think he should maintain a friendship with me because he couldn't help revisiting the emotions that a remembrance of our relationship caused. I kind of understand, but it makes me angry sometimes, too. Why can't he compartmentalize like I do? I tried to shut him off at that pass by downplaying our connection and focus on the friendship we had, but I think that hurt his feelings. This dialogue did nothing for the dreams and the anxiety, though.

When I think about the possibility of meeting up with my old professor to further discuss some of these ideas I am asking him about, and consider applying for his program at this point in my life, I think about College Station, driving to College Station, and suddenly I am a rabbit looking for a hole. I'm scared.

It makes no sense to me. Is it that I know I am good enough, but I worry they will think I am not? Or is it that I worry I am not good enough, but they know I always was?

I can't get away from the fact, though, that sometimes my escape maneuvers hurt people, leave them disappointed in me, maybe because they saw so much more potential than I was allowing, or that they wanted me to be happy and successful. Although it is unintentional, collateral damage, I know it is not right to hurt people, and I shouldn't do that.

Starting with myself.

PATHOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTS

In the past few months at my job, I've watched the behavior of my boss degenerate. I suspected some kind of mental issues beforehand, but of a kind of benign nature. However, with the added stress of a percieved threat, her mild bipolarism of before has lapsed into some kind of paranoid desperateness. I would say it is odd to watch this happen before me, but some of you who read this recognize that situation as a kind of dejavu. Oh, I really don't think this time it will go as far as the last situation did - my boss doesn't own this company, so if she freaks out, she is not going to run it into the ground - but worst case scenario is it could cost someone their job and professional reputation. My goal is to stay out of the crossfire, but I find myself caught sometimes in the middle, sometimes simply due to the nature of my position and sometimes out of a desire to protect the innocent party.
Meanwhile, I continue my work, which is to look for pathological behavior in my patients. Every day, I am observing, identifying abnormal behaviors, trying to ascertain the stimulus, determine the stressor, so I can remove it and hopefully cause the patient to revert to a normal behavior pattern. I put my "behaviorist" hat on and watch carefully with a tuned mind, clipboard in hand, while my patients merge around me, and make notes. This is normal, this one is not normal, what is going on here, what's wrong here, making observations, thinking about plausible connections.

Sometimes I forget to take off my "hat" and I see things around me in a different way. Sometimes I see my boss as a person in charge, and sometimes I see her as a victim of her own pathology.

Like most of us, I am beginning to suspect. I remember one time a friend asked me if I have ever wondered why I seem to always end up with insane bosses. I am not convinced it is something about me that draws me to these people, although my own pathology could lead me to stay in situations other people might not put up with.

My own pathology is also abnormal, and sometimes I see that as a direct result of my upbringing. There is probably some genetic interplay in there as well. Both of my grandmothers had some kind of mental pathology as well, maybe an undiagnosed anxiety or depression problem. My father and sister have both been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, and maybe that is a part of my abnormality as well, but my psychiatrists never get past the bipolar or anxiety/depression labels with me.

I am not convinced I have a true problem, because I function fine without medications. Sure, there's been the occasional panic attack or overwhelming sadness, but it has always happened when I have been emotionally worked up about something, and I still think it all ties into to my mother, who constantly rejects me.

This is part of her pathology, and like I said, plays a large role in mine. I brought my friend over to her house the other day, and I finally had a witness to it. My mother will get this look on her face, and I know it is coming; then she lays it down, some kind of heavy-handed criticism. Constant rejection, constant doubt of my ability to do anything. The past years, it has been mostly related to my parenting skills. This is the latest thing for her, but this kind of behavior has been going on with her for years. She gathers my sisters around her like allies and encourages them to gang up on me. She finds something in me to knock around every time I see her.

I no longer believe the things my mother says about me. It only took me about thirty years and a lot of therapy to get her negative feedback loop to stop playing in my mind. I decided at some point that even if my mother didn't believe in my worthiness, I did, and that is all that matters. Lately, I put on my hat and look for the triggers. I gaze at it with observer-neutral eyes.The trigger for her lately seems to be protection of my children, which I see as unjustified. I take care of these children just fine.

However, her pathology does affect me in this area. My biggest fear is that I will end up with a child who feels about me the way I feel about my mother. I want my children to feel loved. However, there are times when showing that love is difficult for me. Sometimes I am angry with the children, or tense, or short on patience, particularly in the morning, and particularly with my oldest son. His (currently unmedicated) ADD issues make it really taxing when we have to get out the door by six thirty, and the toddler is frequently cranky. My youngest son is a lot of work at this age. He wakes up crying sometimes and the only way he stops is if I hold him. This goes on sometimes in the afternoon as well, so I end up holding him a lot, or having to watch him attentively as he wobbles along in the house, trying to stick everything in his mouth or a socket. Meanwhile, my older son flits around and only sometimes and painfully follows directions. Everything is a struggle, and sometimes I am not the nice mommy, but the freakout mommy. I feel angry.

My worry is that this struggle I describe will someday become part of my older son's pathology. Will I be judged, as he enters manhood, for the good I did as a mother, or my failures? Will he suffer self esteem issues as a result of pushing and prodding, the frustration when he can't sit down to finish his homework assignment, the irritation when instead of following directions, he gets distracted in his bedroom looking for a toy to sneak into school?

I worry about the pathological footprints I am leaving on his psyche. My mother passed the baton, and every day I make conscious decisions to not be the kind of parent she was. Every night my children are hugged, kissed, and told they are loved. I try to make sure I tell my son what I love about him, what the good is in him. Sometimes it is hard, though, sometimes it takes searching, and I loathe that about this part of life.

The other day, there was an odd situation with my dog Scout. The youngest and most exuberant of the dogs, he had gotten excited with I was playing and laughing with the toddler. Scout was running around throwing a mitten up in the air and attacking it as it came back down, but sometimes when he runs around like that, he doesn't pay attention to the baby and knocks him down. I commanded him to calm down, and he quit running, but he came up to us and began barking. I asked him to lay down, and he backed off a few feet, but then he began barking a series of sharp barks - woof! woof! woof! I gave him the command to quiet, and when he continued to bark I tried to get his attention and realized I could not reach him. His eyes were glassed over and his body was quivering, and his woof was a steady even stattaco.

I stepped out of my role as his owner-mistress and put my behavior hat on. This was aberrant behavior, and something about his body position struck me as symptomatic of "rage syndrome", usually seen only in Springer Spaniels. I actually became concerned that in this state he was in, he might behave aggressively. I was concerned about the potential impact that his pathology held, and considered the consequences. I understood the trigger for the incident, which was a frustrated play drive, but the way he handled it was abnormal. It could be something that gets worse, or continues, a symptom of something darker, some untapped aggression, only time will tell. I will have to wait and see if this manifests into a true pathological condition, as opposed to an incident. Wait and see.

Likewise,with my boss, with my patients, with my son. Sometimes it is not clear what the ramifications are until what is becomes what has past. It seems unfair sometimes that it is so easy with the patients. I can rearrange their situation to decrease the stress, the pathological behavior. It is like a puzzle I can fit together different ways. With my mother, with my son, with my boss, I don't have that luxury. I can't simply rearange their environment and increase positive interactions. There are no easy solutions, although from the outside, it might appear so. Or maybe solutions never came easy for me.

It makes me think of the Serenity prayer, which I remember seeing stitched in a framed piece of cloth at my grandmother's house during my childhood.

God,
Grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Can I help you?

This afternoon, I had this amusing interaction with my supervisor.

She was telling me about something she was going to do, and inviting me to join her. She says to me, "I don't know what you're doing right now, but..."

I really wanted to quip, "That's funny, neither do I!"

Which is amusing on so many levels to me.

I could leave it at that, but then you, my reader, would have no idea what that meant or why it was so hilarious to me. So I will elaborate...just a little.

First of all, I had absolutely no plans for the day. In fact, most of my day was filled with making plans for tomorrow. I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants this afternoon when she caught me and I really had not made any immediate plans except to continue planning for tomorrow. Part of this is because I am still out of sorts with this restructuring of my program I am doing, still trying to figure out the best way to get it all done.

Secondly, as most everyone reading this little blog already knows, I really am very new to this particular area of this field. I have been working with this species less than a year. What cracks me up is that it is not that difficult for me to extend my background to allow me to inherently understand what I am doing. Last week, I overheard the new doctor talking about me to the office girl. She was marveling that I had only been working with these guys for eight months, I guess because I came off knowledgable to her. "I guess she's just a natural," she said.

The thing about that is, though, is that if someone has a firm grounding in animal behavior, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for them to be able to understand most animals. All animals communicate mostly through body language and some kind of vocalizations, and it is just a matter of determining the dialect, I guess. Initially, I remember trying to figure out what these guys were saying to me, but at this point, I translate without even thinking about it.

Body language is subtle to humans, because we are not trained to look for it, but if you spend a lot of time with animals, it is something that becomes intrinsic and valuable, not only as a source of information, but also in terms of safety.

When I was a kid, I remember people telling me that a horse's ears will be pinned back when it is angry. That is true, but if you wait until the ears are pinned back, it is probably too late to avoid getting hurt. You have to always be watching for the more subtle signs (tension in the body, shift in weight, the flicker of the ear, turning of the head or eye) and respond to those to keep from even being near a horse when the ears are pinned. There is also appropriate response, which is completely different if the horse is a "bluffer" or is truly aggressive. These are skills that become instinctual the more time you are around horses, and in that respect, it is the same across species. I respond to these guys' body cues now without even thinking about it.

Thirdly, I am just making shit up anyway here. The funniest thing about that is that I invented all this work to do just to keep myself busy, and now people ask for it, depend on it, double check it around here. That cracks me up all the time. I have a whole binder of documentation that could be audited at any time, but it is all stuff I feel like I sort of pulled out of my ass. Oh sure, one of my critical documents was an amended form of something that was left behind by a (big name) doctor that used to work here. Since he left, though, no one was using it to document this stuff, but suddenly now that I am using it, it becomes valuable.

Fourthly, this job is so vastly different than anything I have done before, it doesn't even feel like the same thing. I remember trying to explain this to the HR lady who was here, but she had absolutely no idea what it is like in the real world, so I couldn't frame it for her in a way she understood (probably because she was weird). A large portion of my jobs with the same title in the past involved a lot of client relations. At times I felt like a hostess, a grief counselor, a liasion between the client and the doctor who was trying to mediate middle ground between their contradictory wishes, a translator ("let me explain what the doctor is saying in layman's terms"), a humane educator, a pet and people trainer, a receptionist and "quote maker". A veterinary technician wears many hats during the course of the day.

Here you just take the client out of the equation. The volume and intensity of real work is significantly less. Cleaning, feeding, surgery assistance, patient care; it's all out the window.

Fifth, my supervisor could really care less what I am doing, as long as I am not bugging her. When I first started here, I had no idea what to do with all this rope. Usually doctors keep their techs on a short leash. We are their "right hand men", literally standing right next to them. They don't work on animals without us. The new docs sometimes get anxious when we are not around, because we hold their hands and help them. When they are not working on animals, we are usually scurrying around right near them, within earshot so that if they suddenly decide they need to look at an animal, they can pull our leash and we'll come running.

When I first got here, I was running circles around my boss asking her if I could help her with anything, but she kept sending me away. I got the drift. I never really work with her, we work independently.

She really has no idea what I am doing most of the time. She never asks me to help her, and I stopped asking her a long time ago.

HINDU: REVERE THE COW

Farmer: Feed the Cows

Animal Rightist: Free the cows

Animal Welfarist: Love the Cows

Environmentalists: Reprogram the cows

Recently, scientists in Austrialia have been investigating ways to reduce methane emission of livestock. I find this very interesting. When it was originally presented to me, it sounded more radical than it really is, but in learning about it, I wonder why we never tried that earlier.

I wonder, though, if that is a little too close to "playing God".

And then I get angry, because it makes me think about the stem cell research controversy. I think about how Bush and I are on other sides of the fence on this one. He has vetoed every attempt to get stem stell research federally funded. I think that stem cell research has the potential to help find the cure for Parkinsons, which my father has, and whose symptoms are getting worse. I feel his time is growing short and that research could not come fast enough, and why doesn't the government throw us a bone on this one?

I think about the children who have cancer, and the desperation of their parents for research that will find a way to save their child, ease the pain, provide comfort and cure, as I throw a marshmellow at my "research model." I think about how we should do our best to serve the animals that serve us, and I think about how understanding their behavior will help us build a better research model.

And it takes me back to the cows, because I remembered a day where I believed that understanding their behavior would help us build a better farm animal: an animal that was comfortable and therefore produced more meat, more milk. Now I am trying to build a better research model, one that is comfortable and therefore enjoys better health and more hair.

But it's all the same.

I'm just here to love them.