Baby Fever and the Oncoming Storm

Once I knew I was going forward with the baby plan, it became difficult to think about anything else. I didn't tell many people, because I didn't want to face the questions if I didn't end up pregnant. My immediate family and a handful of friends knew, and that was the extent of it.

But it was tough to contain my mounting excitement. I could no longer go to Target without a trip through the baby department, looking at clothes and cribs and car seats and baby bathtubs. Hell, I would even wander through the baby food aisle at the grocery store, debating the nutritional value of the different brands and wondering if I would actually be able to stay on top of making my own baby food from organic fruits and vegetables.

I kind of had a one-track mind.

You could even probably say I was obsessed.

I had full-blown baby fever.

In the past, when I'd thought about having kids someday, I'd always imagined that my first child would be a baby boy. However, knowing that this was probably a one-shot deal and I would probably only have one baby, I started to envision a different future, with a baby girl.

I pictured her at different ages and stages, what her personality would be like, the baby and toddler clothes that I would dress her up in, how I would fix her hair, what her little voice would sound like. My biggest mistake was that I named her.

When she wasn't even a reality yet.

I had a boy name picked out, too, but it was the girl name that I was really set on. I had my whole future - and hers - planned entirely.

My body had other plans.

Looking back now, I can see that there were warnings in the weeks after my first appointment. Little signs that trouble was brewing. Still, I doubt that anyone besides a complete hypochondriac would have paid much attention before the storm hit.

I blame a lot on the Norethindrone. I don't know if that's completely fair. I've never been able to find any research linking Norethindrone with what happened to my body over the next month, but I also think the timing was too suspect for it not to have been involved somehow. I think it's entirely possible that there was some kind of interaction between the drug, my immune system, and my stress response to other events that hit at the same time.

Of course, I suppose it's also possible that what happened was always going to happen, no matter what I did or what medications I allowed into my body.

I actually considered not taking the Norethindrone, though, and just starting on the birth control instead. I wish now that I had done that. It may not have changed anything, but at least now I wouldn't still be questioning whether I'd had a direct hand in what happened to me by taking that drug. But I decided to go ahead and take the Norethindrone because I was going back to the doctor in 3 weeks, and if I hadn't had a period by then, I knew he would have a lot to say to me on the subject. Basically, I took it to keep from being lectured.

The doctor prescribed the Norethindrone because I had specifically requested that he not put me on Provera, which I'd taken several years before, and it resulted in some sort of horrific hormone-induced psychosis. I'd spent ten days bursting into inconsolable tears at the slightest provocation. It was not an experience that I wanted to repeat. Of course, what I didn't know at the time was that Norethindrone was essentially the same as Provera, just with a different delivery system.

The first sign of trouble was that my face broke out. Horribly. Of course, with the influx of progestin in my system, I naturally assumed that this was acne. I was wrong.

A couple nights, I came home from work feeling out of sorts, and discovered that I was running a low-grade fever. Each time, I was fine by morning.

On the 4th of July, I noticed that my right knee was hurting for no apparent reason. The pain wasn't horrible, just enough to be a little annoying, and nothing that I did seemed to alleviate it.

Meanwhile, I went for my follow-up appointment the week of the 4th. I joked with the doctor that the Norethindrone hadn't really worked for me either, because it was like my entire adolescence had been condensed into two weeks. And I told him that I'd made my decision. I was even pretty sure that I'd settled on a donor by that time. All that I needed to work out was the money. I had some savings, and was applying for medical financing. I would just need to save up for a few more months, and I was hoping to get it together to do my first cycle in October.

The doctor approved of my plan and told me to schedule my next follow-up sometime in September. I got all my preliminary lab results that everything was good to go, scheduled the September appointment, and left.

The weekend came, and I was out all day Saturday. When I got home that afternoon, everything seemed okay, except that I noticed that the baby gate I used to confine my dog to the kitchen was no longer in the doorway, and instead was propped up against the wall. Mostly, this just confused me. I live right next to a historical cemetery, and I like to think that friendly ghosts frequent my house sometimes. It wasn't the first time something strange had happened in my house. Little things happened here and there - lights that I was certain I'd turned off were on when I got home, doors that I'd closed were open. The only part that was throwing me was how the gate ended up propped against the wall.

Still, nothing else seemed amiss, and all the doors had still been locked when I got home. Nothing was out of place downstairs. I called my mom and told her that my house ghost was acting up again.

"Are you sure no one broke in?" she asked.

"I don't see how they could have," I replied. "I haven't been upstairs yet, but nothing is missing downstairs."

But when I got upstairs, I immediately realized that I had been wrong. I was greeted in my bedroom by empty spots where my TV and video game system had been.

After I called the police, I realized that the bathroom window, which looks out over the kitchen roof, was open slightly. That was how the thieve(s) had gotten in. I could have sworn I'd had all the windows locked, but I can only assume that I missed that one. Or maybe I just hadn't thought that one was important, because it was so small that I hadn't imagined anyone could actually fit through it. But it was easy enough to access because you could climb onto the kitchen roof from the next door neighbor's backyard without being visible from the street.

In case you're wondering, the window has been locked ever since, with the little pull-out pieces in place so that the window can't be opened more than an inch and a half.

All in all, I figured out that about $2,000 worth of stuff had been stolen, including my great-grandmother's amethyst and diamond ring, which was by far the hardest loss to take. A TV could be replaced. The ring could not.

I'm pretty sure the stress of the break-in played a part in that brewing storm, too, because it hit the very next day.

But even the first wave seemed relatively innocuous at first.

On Sunday, my mom and I tried to go to local pawn shops to see if anyone had tried to pawn GG's ring. Pretty quickly, we realized the flaw in our plan, which was the fact that none of the pawn shops were open on Sunday. So we spent the day thrift shopping instead.

As the day wore on, my left hand, which had been hurting since I'd woken up, swelled to double its normal size. By the end of the day, I wasn't able to move it at all. Eventually, I figured out that the pain was radiating from one of my knuckles, but my entire hand was throbbing. Still, I wasn't thinking too much of it. I'd had unexplained episodes of tendonitis before, and I assumed that's what this was. It always cleared up with a short course of prednisone.

By the next morning, though, I was achy and feverish with a sore throat, and my hand was still throbbing. I called in sick at work, and made a doctor appointment. Nothing terribly eventful happened at the doctor's office. My rapid strep test was negative, but the doctor gave me antibiotics anyway in case the culture was positive, and started me on a five-day course of prednisone.

It was another day or two before I realized that something was still not right. With my previous experiences with tendonitis, it had always cleared up almost immediately with prednisone. This time, after a couple days, my hand was feeling a little better, but pain was jumping around from joint to joint. One day it would be my right elbow, the next, my left knee. By the end of the five-day course of prednisone, it was clear that nothing was getting better - it was only spreading around my entire body, and I never knew where the pain was going to hit next.

And I was starting to panic.

I went back to the doctor with another sore throat and continuing joint pain, and he ordered both another throat culture and a blood test for strep, as well as some other blood work. The throat culture was negative but the blood test for strep was positive. He suggested that I might be experiencing something called reactive arthritis, which is when the body has a malfunctioning immune response to certain infections. It was self-limiting and usually lasted a couple months. However, when my blood tests indicated abnormally high levels of inflammation, he referred me to a rheumatologist.

It would be months before I would have any definite answers.

The Final Answer

My appointment with my doctor was first thing in the morning on a day that I'd taken off work, so I had to wait the whole entire agonizing day before I could talk to my mom. However, luckily it was mid-June, and my best friend, a teacher, was on summer vacation, so she answered when I called from my car in the Walgreens parking lot while I was waiting for my prescriptions to be filled.

I was still a little breathless when I filled her in on what the doctor and I had talked about, and I admitted that my decision was pretty much already made. How could I not pursue this, knowing that I only had a few years left?

As I processed everything I was thinking and feeling aloud, she was supportive. It was not the first time we had talked about the possibility of one of us doing this - we were the girls making contingency plans when we were in high school: "If I'm not married by the time I'm....." So it was not entirely a surprise that I was bringing this up. We weren't on the same page by the end of the conversation, we were on the same page from the very beginning. I was going to do this.

I was worried that my mom would be a harder sell. Mom was adopted, and was thrilled with my foster-to-adopt plan. The day after I had contacted the local child welfare agency to request the paperwork to start the process, I called my parents, and Mom answered the phone with, "Do you have a grandchild for me yet?" She was joking, but I knew she loved the idea that I would adopt a child in need.

I had texted her right after the doctor appointment and told her that I needed to talk to her after she got off work, but then I had to wait until after 5, so I had a whole day to plan what I would say. I was already at my parents' house waiting for her by the time she got home.

She was concerned, but not terribly so; I'd told her in my text that it was nothing bad. I launched right into it, giving her a quick rundown of my conversation with the doctor.

"The thing is," I said, "adoption will still be on the table when I'm 40. This won't be. And I think if I don't at least try, it will be something I'll always regret." It surprised me that I started to tear up as I spoke, though it shouldn't have. I'd been running on adrenaline all day. The emotion was bound to catch up with me at some point.

Mom hugged me, and immediately said, "Then you should go for it." Just like that.

"But, what about the people who will say this is selfish?" I sputtered. "The ones who will say that I shouldn't do this when there are so many children who already need a home?"

"Let them say it," she said. "You would be an amazing mother to an adopted child, but that doesn't mean you're obligated to adopt. If you can make this work, and it's what you really want, you should go for it."

I will readily tell anyone that my mom is awesome, but this is definitely near the top of her highlight reel of awesome parenting moments. She had my back, no questions asked.

Well, no questions about my motives or intentions, anyway. She did ask all the right questions about how it would affect me, which were, "So what happens if you try, and you don't get pregnant? Is there a limit on how many times you'll try? How will you feel if you have to give up?"

All things I had already thought about, and had answers ready. Three attempts was usually the maximum. I definitely wanted to try once, and failing that, would hope to be able to stretch my finances to at least two attempts. Three was probably completely out of my budget. Unless the prices dropped significantly, IVF would not ever be a consideration. If two attempts did not result in pregnancy, that would be the end of it. It would be tough, but I would at least know that I gave it a shot. The thought of never trying and spending the rest of my life wondering "what if" was worse than the thought of trying and failing.

At the end of the day, I was hopeful and excited. Honestly, I had no doubts that I would try and be successful. Of course it would work. This was the sign I'd asked for, wasn't it?

Little did I know that the opportunity to try would be ripped away from me in a matter of weeks.

The Sign

WARNING: I'm going to talk about things that a lot of people find yucky. Like periods and spotting and pelvic exams. It's not gratuitous; it's completely relevant, but I'm not going to mince words, either. I will be as descriptive as I think I need to be. You've been warned.

One of the most common symptoms of PCOS is irregular and sometimes absent periods. In my case, when I'm not on birth control pills, I tend to have a period about once a year, but sometimes I've gone more than two years between periods. And I know, in my head, that this is not a good thing, because failing to shed the uterine lining at least once every three months can lead to all kinds of problems, like endometrial or uterine cancer. Still, at times, it has seemed ludicrous to me that I was spending $30 a month to make myself have a period when most women would pay good money to go a year or two between periods. So, sometimes I didn't take the birth control pills. Sometimes for a long time. Like two or three years.

Which was the case in May 2011, when I started spotting. It wasn't a period, it was too light for that, but it didn't stop. Day after day, a constant light flow of blood. By the time this had gone on for six weeks, I knew I couldn't keep putting it off - I needed to go to the doctor.

I thought this might be the sign I was asking for, and I also thought I knew what the sign meant. I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that the doctor was going to tell me that I would never be able to get pregnant.

I was prepared to hear that.

In an odd way, I was looking forward to hearing it. Because if that's what the doctor said, I could move on with my foster-to-adopt plan with no reservations.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't be a painful thing to face. But I'd been facing it already, and the uncertainty was the hardest part. Ending the uncertainty would be a relief. It would be closure.

But that wasn't what the doctor had to say to me.

And I have to say here that even now, this still kills me. This was hands down the cruelest turn of events in this whole process. Because if the conversation had gone the way I thought it would, that would have been the end of it. No more agonizing, it would just be over and done with. But to have the opportunity that was presented in the conversation that followed, only to have it snatched away again in an incredibly painful, life-altering way, was an experience that I don't know if I will ever completely heal from.

After my pelvic exam and vaginal ultrasound (which, for anyone who has not had this particular experience, is exactly as pleasant as it sounds like it would be), and after I got dressed again, the doctor came back in and said, "Have you thought about trying to get pregnant?"

I was completely taken aback. And not even by how stupid the question was. Of course I'd thought about it. There probably wasn't a single day of my life that I hadn't thought about it at least once. I pointed out that there was no one who could be the father, and the doctor countered with, "What about using a sperm donor?"

I pointed out that my single social worker income would be a barrier, and asked how much it would cost.

And the number he replied with was much lower than I anticipated. I was going by the cost of IVF, which typically runs anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand per cycle. The procedure the doctor was describing to me, intrauterine insemination, or IUI, was far less invasive, and ran about one to two thousand per attempt.

This was something I might actually be able to manage. At least for one or two attempts.

He answered the rest of my questions thoughtfully and patiently, while my mind reeled, trying to wrap itself around how different this conversation was from the one I'd anticipated. I asked about the odds of multiples, because I knew fertility drugs would have to be involved. He said the chance of twins was less than 8%, and the risk of larger multiple groups was even lower.

I asked about my odds for success.

"At your age, with Clomid," he told me, "your odds are excellent. But after 35, your odds for success will probably be less than 5%. So if you decide to go forward with this, you'll need to do it soon."

He gave me pamphlets and information on donors, and told me to think about it, and schedule another appointment in about 3 weeks.

He also gave me a few prescriptions, one for the birth control that I would need to go back on to keep my uterine lining healthy until I was preparing for my first cycle if I decided to pursue IUI, and one for a drug called Norethindrone that I was to take before starting the birth control to jump start my period and get rid of all the excess crud that had built up in my uterus at that point. I think the Norethindrone may have played a part in what happened to my body over the next several weeks.

I scheduled my follow up appointment and left, my mind still reeling, thinking about the conversations I would need to have with my mom, with my best friend, to help me make a decision. But I think I knew even then that I wouldn't be asking them for help in making a decision. I would be asking for their approval and validation.

Because the reality was, my decision was made before I even got back to my car.

The story I've wanted to tell from the beginning (but that I've been avoiding)

When I started this blog, about a year ago now, I'd had a hell of a year. And I don't mean that in a good way. And after starting the blog, my life fell apart even further, which was a big part of the reason that my posts stopped for many months (not that I think anyone was really waiting with bated breath for my next posts). But the thing is, when I first started this blog, there was a particular story that I wanted to tell. Just to get it out, really, to have the words that had been going through my head out in the open. I wanted to tell the story for my own sake, although I certainly think that others may be able to take something from it. My biggest hope, though, in wanting to tell my story, was that it would be a therapeutic process for me.

So, of course, I put it off. I wrote funny (I hope) little fluff posts, to avoid the elephant in the room. And maybe there was a reason for that, because I'm in a much different place with it now than I was a year ago. I'm not completely healed. I don't know if that can ever happen. But it is not nearly as raw as it was a year ago, and maybe I needed that extra time for the perspective to be able to tell the story.

And this is infertility awareness week, which seems like a good time to tell this particular story.

There is what seems to me a very logical place to start, but every time I try to think about how to structure my story, I realize that another important piece of it is even further back in my life, and the story keeps getting longer. I probably won't be able to fit it all into one post, so this may be a multi-part deal. And I'll start at that logical place I mentioned, but it's probably going to require a few flashbacks.

It all started when I decided I was going to try to have a baby.

But first, I need to backtrack a little.

A little over two years ago, I was in an extremely good place in my life. Things that a few years earlier I'd worried I would never accomplish were falling into place for me. I was a homeowner with a career I loved. I was in my early thirties. Just a year or two prior I'd been afraid that I'd spend the rest of my life living like someone who had never matured past college - that I'd be fifty and alone living in a crappy little apartment on a month-to-month income because I'd never managed to settle down and get my shit together. But now, with a stable income and a house, I felt like I was in an appropriate place for my age.

So, of course, the question on my mind became, what's next?

I have always, always wanted to be a mother. More than anything else. And at nearly 32, with said stable home and income, it seemed appropriate to start considering how to make that happen. The fact that I did not have a husband, or even a boyfriend, or, hell, even an occasional date was simply something to work around. It would be ideal to have a partner, of course, but the truth was, being a mother was more important to me than being a wife. More than once, I have expressed the sentiment to close family members and friends that if I were given the choice by some higher power between having a child or having a husband, that I could only choose one, I wouldn't even have to think about it. Having a child would win, hands down, in any scenario.

I had been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, one of the most common causes of female infertility, about a decade before any of this (and knew since early adolescence that something was not right with my reproductive system), and I already thought by then that I had come to terms with this. A friend of mine also had PCOS and had told me a great deal about the fertility drugs, followed by several IVF cycles and the heartbreak that came with them, that had finally resulted in her daughter. I decided after these conversations that I would never pursue IVF. Even though she got her happy ending eventually, I didn't want to risk spending tens of thousands of dollars that I couldn't afford and still come out the other end with a broken heart. If I met Mr. Right and got pregnant naturally at any point, great, but otherwise I would find a different path to motherhood - most likely adoption through foster care (because infant adoption is almost as costly - and in some cases even more costly - than fertility treatments).

And so, around Christmas of 2010, I decided that I wasn't getting any younger, and there was no reason I had to wait any longer to start the foster-to-adopt process. I could do that on my own, and I certainly wasn't ruling out having a baby someday by doing this. I could adopt a child now who needed a home, and if Mr. Right came along in the next few years, there was a possibility that I could still have a baby then.

I submitted my initial paperwork in January and was approved a few weeks later to take the classes. Because I had previously worked in the child welfare system, though, I knew one of the trainers who was teaching the next round of classes. I could not enroll in his class. This meant I would have to wait until July to start the classes - about six months away.

No problem, I thought. That would give me time to get all my ducks in a row, and refine what sort of adoption scenarios I was willing to consider. I was well aware that adopting from foster care usually involves children who have experienced significant trauma and who frequently have mental health diagnoses and behavioral issues. I was confident that I could handle the challenge - in fact, with my background in social services, I was sort of uniquely qualified.

However, having all those months of waiting also gave me time to come to some realizations that I may not have thought about if I'd jumped into the classes right away.

Like the fact that bringing an adopted child with special needs into my life would be a huge barrier to finding Mr. Right, far more so than having a biological child with ordinary needs would be. Dating as a single parent is bringing a hell of a lot of baggage into any potential relationship. Dating as a single parent with an adopted special needs child? I began to think it was probably unfair to ask anyone to take that baggage on. I didn't date that much while still childless to begin with, so I had to consider the very strong possibility that, by following this path, I was, in fact, ruling out the possibility of ever having a baby.

With that thought in mind, I suddenly found myself logging onto dating websites with an alarming, possibly desperate frequency. Okay, definitely desperate. And I began hoping for a sign that I was on the right path.

Around mid-May in 2011, I actually got a sign. And I've been resenting the trajectory it sent me on ever since.

Hopefully, someday I will look back at all this and realize that the reason for the events that followed was because there was something better waiting for me. If that is the case, I haven't discovered the something better yet.

Identify the Problem, Apply the Solution

We sat in class, discussing the 10-minute practice counseling sessions we'd completed the previous week in small groups. We'd videotaped the sessions, transcribed and evaluated them, and were turning them in that day. My small group, all coming from a social work background, was discussing the difficulties of trying to unlearn our social worker habits. "I just want to fix it for them," one of my group members said. The remaining two of us indicated our agreement with this sentiment.

"Okay," the professor said. "Let's examine this. What's the difference between social work and counseling?"

We stared at her, stumped.

"I'll rephrase the question," she decided. "What does a social worker - a case manager - do?"

This, I could answer with confidence. "We identify the problem," I said, "and apply the solution."

"Ooh." The professor was impressed. She reached for a pen and paper, writing down my words. "I need to remember that one."

The other two members of my small group nodded their agreement.

"How is that different from what a counselor does?" the professor asked now.

We began throwing out vague answers, trying to identify what, exactly, the difference was. There was one, we were sure of it.

"Okay, let me ask you this," our intrepid professor continued. "Why counseling, and not an MSW?"

Again, our answers were vague. That difference was absolutely there. There was a reason, when I had looked at the course listing for the MSW, compared with the course listing for a masters in counseling, that I had thought, oh, no, that is not what I want to do. I just couldn't define that reason in words.

Finally, the professor grabbed a marker and went to the dry erase board. "No laughing at my drawings," she warned us with a smile, before drawing a stick figure that she labeled "client." She then drew a box that she labeled "problem." I felt something sliding into place in my brain. "Now," she continued. "As a case manager, where is your focus?"

One of the members of another group, who had not been a social worker, murmured, "The client."

Her murmur was drowned out by the voices of all three members of my group, myself included, saying, with conviction, "The problem."

"Oh," our classmate murmured, perplexed.

The professor smiled. "With counseling, the focus is on the client. I've heard all of this before. Case managers can't focus on the client. They don't have time. MSW students struggle with this, too, especially if they're still working at their social worker jobs, because they're learning some of these skills in addition to the case management skills. But when case managers try to focus on the client, they end up getting in trouble with their supervisors because they start falling behind in every other area."

Suddenly, my mind was filled with visions of former supervisors lecturing me about paperwork and numbers that I hadn't managed to stay on top of, and myself responding with all the problems my clients had faced over the past week(s) that I'd had to help them through. This was always hand-in-hand with a vague job dissatisfaction that I'd always assumed was the result of not getting paid enough to put up with this shit, combined with an inability to think of anything I'd rather be doing, career-wise.

It all made sense to me now.

I was always trying to focus on the client, not the problem. In a role where I needed to focus on the problem, not the client.

That was the problem.

And that was why I was so adamantly opposed the MSW program. And why the masters in counseling was absolutely the right choice for me.

Solution applied.

And Then I Ended Up on a Gang's Hit List

To say that I was destined for a career in social services is kind of an understatement. Looking back now, I don't think there was any way I could have avoided it. Not that I didn't try. I've tried twice to go in a different career direction, and both times it has ended disastrously. My vision of my career when I was in college involved providing counseling for children in some climate-controlled office with mellow lighting, soothing decor, and calm New Age background music. However, by the time I finished college, I was ready to be done with research papers and exams for a while, so instead of applying for a master's or Ph.D. program in clinical counseling, I got a job in a residential treatment facility for abused and neglected children, and things kind of went from there. I always had it in the back of my mind that I would go back to school someday, but events just never came together for that to happen, and the more practical experience I had in the field, the less enthused I became about the idea of taking out more student loans for a degree that probably wouldn't ever pay for itself.

But about that practical experience. Let me explain a little bit about my childhood. I grew up as the sheltered oldest child in a middle class family, living in a relatively affluent suburb (although my family was definitely at the lower end of the income spectrum for our community). Still, my parents placed a high value on education, and they were frugal, so somehow they managed to send me and my two younger siblings to Catholic schools. (I look at tuition costs now, and I'm honestly not sure exactly how they managed to send us to those schools and still feed us, but I digress.) There are two implications of my Catholic education. One is that I was sheltered from the socioeconomic diversity that is present in public schools even in higher income neighborhoods. The other is that the caretaking instincts I possessed naturally were nurtured not only by my parents, but also by my teachers. Combining those two things, it may be clear to anyone reading this that I was headed in the direction of social work without the slightest clue of what I was getting into. I remember once for a religion class in 8th grade, I went on a field trip to tour a local homeless shelter, and then we ate lunch at the adjacent soup kitchen. While we were waiting in line for the doors to open, I was mildly shocked to realize that the other people in line were dressed just like me. I think I was imagining characters in Dickens novels, dressed in rags and asking "Please, sir, may I have some more?" with British accents, which, in retrospect, would have been a little strange for midwestern Americans.

So, yeah. I had a lot of learning to do. Luckily, I learned pretty fast. (This is especially lucky since a single social worker's salary dictates that I can only afford to live in the same neighborhoods where potential clients also reside. When I was house hunting, I literally had to veto several suggestions from my realtor based on the fact that I had clients who lived too close for comfort - in one case, right next door. And then I found my dream house, and signed the contract, and an hour later went to a meeting in which a client informed me that she had just moved to a new rental - which happened to be directly behind my new house. Having the nicest house in the neighborhood is small consolation when there could very well be a meth lab next door. But, again, I digress.)

Still, though I learned quickly, and my time in child protective services provided a multitude of learning experiences, nothing quite prepared me for the phone call I got from my supervisor one Saturday.

I can't go into any details, but the backstory is that I had been working with a teenage mother in one of the rougher neighborhoods we served, and I had made some recommendations to the court regarding custody of her baby that she did not appreciate, which is not exactly a rare occurrence in CPS, so honestly, I didn't really think much about the fact that she was mad at me. I was secure in the knowledge that I'd done what I needed to do to ensure the baby's safety.

So on a Saturday soon after the court date in question, I wasn't feeling well and I'd had my phone on vibrate most of the day while I slept. When I woke up, I was somewhat concerned to find several missed calls and a couple of frantic messages from my supervisor. I called her back immediately.

"Oh, Natalie, I'm so glad you called! I've been so worried that something happened to you!" she exclaimed, breathless with relief. (Though she and I did not always see eye to eye, I will give her that the safety of her employees was always a high priority for her.)

She went on to explain to me that she had received a call from the supervisor of a therapist who was working with my teenage client. The therapist had told him that our mutual client had told her that she was in a gang, and because I had "messed with her family," I was now on the gang's hit list.

I responded to my supervisor in the only logical way I could think of: "What?"

Finding out that I was suddenly among the local chapter of the Folk Nation's most wanted did not have the same effect on me that it had on my supervisor. I was actually rather calm about the whole thing, because, frankly, it was too surreal for me to wrap my head around. So, instead, I thought through it logically. I figured that I probably wasn't that high of a priority for the gang, because, seriously, there was no way this girl could possibly be a high-ranking member, and the gang probably had more important tasks than avenging an underling's child custody issues. And I was savvy enough by that time to know that the gangs mostly stuck to their own territory, and as this was before I bought my house and I was still living in an apartment about a 30 minute drive away from this gang's territory, I was probably safe enough at home, and in general, outside their neighborhood, because they probably wouldn't go looking for me, and my client had no idea where I lived.

Still, it did occur to me that she knew my car. Whether she knew the license plate number or knew the look of the car well enough to describe it, I couldn't say, but I did have a couple bumper stickers that could be used to identify it. And then I had to wonder, on the off chance that they did come looking for me, would I be putting my family and friends at risk when I visited them?

And then I realized that I couldn't tell my mother anything about this, because she would probably make me quit my job.

Oh, my god, I thought. I have become Stephanie Plum. I could just imagine my mother pursing her lips and asking why I couldn't get a nice safe job at the button factory before she went to sneak a nip out of the pantry. My life had become a Janet Evanovich novel. It was probably only a matter of time before I inadvertantly blew up a car. And I didn't even get the benefit of Morelli and Ranger. Just my luck.

I didn't say anything to anyone for a full 24 hours, but inside I was dying to tell someone about this, because I was this white-bread private-school girl from the suburbs and WHAT THE FUCK?! Finally, I broke down and told my best friend the whole impossible story, because I think I would have exploded otherwise.

But then I went back to work and got the full story. Turns out, everything had been blown out of proportion. It wasn't actually so much that my client told her therapist that I was on the gang's hit list as it was that the therapist had asked a bunch of hypothetical, leading questions about what would have happened if she were in a gang, because, oh yeah, it also turns out my client wasn't in a gang. I'm not sure exactly where in this game of telephone the information got distorted to "Natalie's on a hit list," but I suspect it mostly came from the therapist. If I recall correctly, she didn't last too long with that agency.

So it turns out that one of the best stories from my job was something that never actually happened.

Not that that will stop me from telling it.

I have lots of other good stories about my work. Like the time I was attacked by dogs, or the time that I was bitten on the arm so badly by an out-of-control teenager that I had to get a tetanus shot, and the only thing that kept her from ripping the skin clean off my arm was the fact that I had watched enough Crocodile Hunter to know that I should push back against her teeth instead of pulling away. But nothing really tops my hit list story. A police detective who I worked with on a couple of cases told me once, "You social workers are kind of crazy. You aren't concerned enough about your own safety. You're walking into the exact same situations that I do, but you don't have a gun." Looking back, I'm pretty sure she was right.

My current job, providing parenting education to at-risk families, is pretty tame by comparison, for which I am thankful - although I still go into plenty of sketchy neighborhoods, and I still end up with some pretty entertaining stories. Although I recently heard a colleague's story about a SWAT Team raid on one of her home visits, which I wish were mine, because it. Was. Awesome. (Although probably not for her at the time.)

But when I first started this job, I had several weeks of training, and during those weeks, I was getting to know a guy I'd met on a dating website (for the record, it fizzled out within a couple weeks), and he asked me one evening what my training had been about that day.

I hesitated, because I knew parenting topics can kind of freak guys out early in a dating experience. "Breastfeeding," I told him tentatively.

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "I'm never going to win the 'who had a more interesting day' contest with you, am I?"

Oh, if he only knew.

Watching Movies With Nudity With Your Parents

Let me just start by saying, don't do it. It's not worth the emotional trauma or the years of therapy you will need as a result.

Unfortunately, however, sometimes nudity will just pop up in a movie when you're not prepared for it.

Take, for example, the time when I was 14, and my mom rented Pump Up the Volume for a mother-daughter bonding night. I actually thought it was a pretty hip choice on her part, considering that when I was 12 and asked to see a PG-13 movie that all my friends had seen, the response I got was, "You can see it when you're 13." Obviously, I'd come a long way in getting my parents out of the dark ages in just two short years. As for the fact that I would be watching the movie with my mother, well, we were watching it at home, not going to the movies. You know, in public. Nobody had to know. It was all good.

But that was before the scene where Samantha Mathis was making out with Christian Slater, and she took her shirt off. And she wasn't wearing a bra.

(Having watched this movie now as an adult, I realize that there was plenty in the movie that should have embarrassed me besides Samantha Mathis's boobs. Such as the fact that Christian Slater's character referred to himself as Happy Harry Hard-On and did an extensively over the top impression of a man jerking off that put Meg Ryan's fake orgasm to shame. But remember how I wasn't allowed to watch PG-13 movies until I was 13? Yeah, there was a lot that I didn't get until I was much older. Which is embarrassing in itself, but for completely different reasons.)

Anyway, that happened. And I sat there, staring at the TV screen in horror, thinking, oh my god, I am watching this with my mother. And to be fair, I'm sure it was just as horrifying for her. Neither one of us moved our eyes from the screen for the remainder of the movie, in a deliberate effort to avoid eye contact. When the movie ended, we still sat motionless, staring at the blank TV screen. I was terrified that Mom would want to talk about what we had watched in some kind of twisted Very Special Episode moment. I had to figure out a way to escape before that happened.

"Good movie," I said in a strained voice.

"Yes, wasn't it," she replied, her voice equally strained.

"Well, look at the time, it's almost 10, I guess I should get to bed. Good night!" And I made a run for it. And we never spoke of it again.

Or, at least, not for many years.

Fast forward a decade and a half, give or take a couple years, and one day Mom (who, I discovered as an adult, was not really the prude I thought she was when I was a young teen, but was trying to shelter me - something I understand better now when I hear my 7-year-old niece singing about skinny dipping in the dark and it makes me want to smash any radio that might play Katy Perry in her earshot), anyway, Mom was telling me how funny Get Him to the Greek was and recommended that I watch it. So I asked her if she'd seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, because Russell Brand played the same character, and it was also very funny.

(Huh. Katy Perry. Russell Brand. All in one paragraph. I totally didn't even do that on purpose.)

ANYWAY. A couple weeks later, Mom borrowed Forgetting Sarah Marshall from a coworker, and asked me if I wanted to watch it with her.

I hesitated. "Did I mention that there's full-frontal male nudity in it?" I asked.

"You know, we're both adults now. I think we can handle it," she replied.

I considered this, and then shrugged. "I guess you're right. It couldn't possibly be as bad as when we watched Pump Up the Volume."

"Oh, god, that was awful!" Mom exclaimed with a shudder.

It was strangely comforting to know I wasn't alone in the horror of that memory.

Mom asked my father if he wanted to watch with us, but he declined. I was secretly relieved, because even though I was now enough of an adult to watch nudity in movies with my mother (supposedly, anyway), I wasn't sure I was quite ready to look at a stranger's penis with my father.

Unfortunately, fate had other plans. After putting in the DVD, we discovered that the remote was missing, so we couldn't choose the movie version we wanted to watch, because those controls were ONLY on the remote. After searching in vain for the remote, Mom went to find Dad to see if he knew where the remote was, or if he could figure out how to get the movie to play properly. It was my further misfortune that this particular DVD was one of the ones that start to play the movie automatically when it has sat in the DVD player for a few minutes. So I suppose it was inevitable that Dad walked in at the EXACT moment when Jason Segel opened his towel and showed the world his goods, and I had to relive my adolescent horror.

Clearly the lesson here is that I shouldn't tempt fate. I failed to learn this as a teenager, and I paid the price. From this point forward, I will play it safe and only watch movies with my parents that feature animated singing animals.