Let’s Get It Started!

So, I’ve been a little consumed by this whole trying to get pregnant thing and have been writing about it lots. I still frequent my social work blogs, my favorites being Mixed Feelings and Trench Warfare. And I always feel a tad sad to see myself featured on their Social Work blog rolls, only to be moaning and groaning about sperm.

I’ve been mum on the social work front, too, because I’m feeling real down and out about my career and my clients right now. We have a low caseload at work, which means I’m working, like, 20 hours a week and surfing the net for another 20. Also, I’m kind of burned out on my clients, who are all dumb and mean (read: learning disabled and multiple trauma survivors) and I am lacking all supervision from my supervisor and my team.

Until today. We got a new referral. A self-reported out, proud and partnered dyke. I am an open book, she says! I have to be 100% honest with you, you’re the therapist, when you come into my house, we open our home to you, she says, you have access to everything! Also, talks a mile a minute and is not happy with her current service provider, who told her that she should not be wearing a sports bra around her son.

My clinical sense is that she is in an interracial relationship. Or maybe she is biracial. That she has bipolar disorder and is in recovery, from . . . I dunno. Heroin. And she has some some Axis II traits and touches. How ’bout . . . narcissistic. And we are gonna have boundary problems galore, at least I hope so. I love boundary problems. (Seriously.) Also, I’m just gonna call it. Sight unseen, I think mom is the butch. Light-skinned butch. And is that a New York accent I detect? Oh, yesssss!

(I luxuriate in making assumptions about people. Especially when they are based on the complex web of cues a keen observer with an eye for mental illness and regional-racial gender politics can detect during a 5 minute phone call.)

And when she meets our team she is just gonna be so sure that she made the right decision. That’s my quote. How do like that Reas? A predictive quote from the field. My team currently consists of me — a Northern white femme, my coworker — a black Southern guy, who is gay from 50 paces, and my other coworker, a straight Southern white lady. We are all early thirties and pretty awesome.

Are you ready for some social work fun?!?!

I am!

Seriously. I am really ready to like a client and have some fucking fun.

(In fact the absence of a satisfying working alliance in my professional life paired with the total lack of a social life in my social life is sure to ensure that I am 50% of whatever problems arise over the next year with this family.)