The Day I Blew Barbie
I do not typically make it a habit to blow my colleagues but, once in a while, I must admit I do get a little guilty pleasure when it happens.
Which is never. Because it never happens.
Until it happened last week. And then I realized I got joy from it. Not that I would do it again.
Or I absolutely would.
Blow Barbie.
Until her wet was fully dry.
Oh yeah.
So, it was a baaaad week at work.
If you look at our work wall calendar right now, you would see “WEEK FROM HELL” written in ALL CAPS across the colors of blue announcing staff requested days off, green denoting special events in different buildings, orange reminding us of weekly tasks, and black being special things I need to remember to do in my role of captain of this cleaning shit.
SHIP. Ship. I meant to write the word “ship”.
Sigh. A shit ship.
Anyway, it was a bad week though. Tough times in Janitor High.
“Oh, what the heck! This week all gone to hell and I can’t even drink my damn coffee without drama!”
“Momma” Irene and I were enjoying our Friday mid-morning powwow exchanging mutual opinions on certain members of staff who seemed to have misplaced their common sense that week when “Auntie” Barbie, carrying a brown McDonald’s multi-cup holder with only one coffee in it, stormed through the front glass door like a bowling ball ripping through a strike.
“That damn McDonald’s! Don’t know how to put a lid on a cup! And you know I check it! I check it every damn time”, she slams the single coffee on the corner of Irene’s desk, “but I don’t know what I was thinking today and picked it up and that damn lid popped off and it spilt everywhere! Hotter than hell! On my pants, all in the car on the seat and floor! It’s a wonder I didn’t drown right there in the Transit in all that damn coffee!”
We were frozen watching her. Not moving a muscle.
Barbie, my supervisor, is a gentle creature. Country, home-grown kind of woman with soft greying hair tucked behind her ears and pulled back in a tiny thinning pony, freckle-n-sun-kissed naturally tan skin the color of a soft melted syrup. Her silver-rimmed glasses hide the equally greying kindness of blue eyes that crinkle beautifully when she smiles.
Her laugh is my favorite. Throwing her head back like a kid waiting to getting a mouthful of Rediwhip, Auntie Barbie throws all in, gives 100% 100% of the time and full laughs as if every joke was the first and last joke she would ever hear. Once in awhile, I really try to get her going on the laugh-o-meter and I hear a “ding, ding, ring-a-ling!” in my head when one of her hands lands on her chest mid-roar.
But despite her poetically political politeness when chatting with her staff, her overt kindness in lending a hand to anyone in need, and her acute sense of excellence in every point of her job, I have also come to know the dark side of this female person and know four basic rules of thumb when dealing with her:
Don’t screw with her money – she is poor
Feed her regularly – she is hungry
Don’t suck up staples or peach pits in a vacuum and, for heaven’s sake - change the bag! - she is grumpy
And last but not least:
Don’t fuck with her coffee – she’s a proper addict
I have already promised to handwrite all these as her epitaph on the side of the McDonald’s cup we will be using as her urn when she passes out of this world into her, as she calls it, field of “tall cotton”.
Sulky and sullen, emanating a certain force field of “don’t even say it!”, Barbie stalked back out the door with cleaning spray in one hand and paper towels in another muttering all the way.
Now Momma Irene and I... we gloriously and unabashedly lost our shit full guffawing at poor Auntie Barbie’s tirade.
“My pants is wet to boot! Oh my God!” Barbie reappeared in the office and stood in front of the door twisting her body to see the damage on the back of her shorts. With the paper towels and spray looking like exercise weights in her hands, I laughed only because I thought she looked like some 1980s throwback to Jane Fonda only countrified.
“Damn coffee! I’m over it! This whole week! I’m done, I’m toast, I’m cooked!”
She stomped across the office and into the bathroom ho, ho, ho’ing all the way like some out-of-season mad Santa.
Irene and I calmed ourselves and looked at one another with knowing glances. It had been an awful week for Barbie. A janitorial company servicing commercial contracts, when our staff call out, it is up to us – my supervisors, flex positions and I – to cover their absences in the buildings doing exciting work such as pulling trash, hitting those bathrooms and swiffering through breakrooms.
This week, I suspect, was a kind of record for “Most Cleaning Skeleton Crews Can Do”. We were sick of mucky toilets, stinky trash and all of us had mild cases of “vacuum neck”.
“Durn cups! It's McDonald’s fault with them stupid cups! And that woman – she knows me! They ought to know better! I am there every damn day two times a day and they give me a cup with a lid that don’t rightly fit! Things are bad these days when you can’t get a cup of coffee with a lid that fits! I’m about to never go back to that place, coffee all down the back of my shorts! How am I supposed to work like this?”
Back out in the main office, poor Barbie was standing there with a five-inch wide line of wet coffee stain running down the right side of her butt cheek down to the bottom of her jean walking shorts trying desperately – and hilariously, I might add – to bend her body again in unnatural ways trying to shove brown paper roll up her backside to absorb it.
Momma Irene and I were back to rolling.
“Barbie, would you just settle down and hush! It’s fine. It’s not that bad!” Irene started scolding her.
Barbie was not to be swayed. “Yes, it is! Durn wet pants! I can’t go into a building like this! Everyone thinking I peed myself!”
I. Could. Not. Resist.
“What pee, Barbie? Coffee is brown – it kinda looks like you shit yourself!”
“Oh Gooooood! Oh NO!” Barbie went from dramatic to insane in five nanoseconds while - I’m pretty sure I am remembering this correctly - Irene actually fell out of her chair laughing her ass off.
I know I was supposed to be the austere, professional manager in that setting but how in the world can one sit there with a stick up one’s arse when I’ve got a 58-year old country in-tall-cotton woman with a coffee shit stain running down her pants acting like a lunatic and a 69-year old youthful stubborn donkey who beat cancer rolling on the floor in stitches?
Welcome to Friday at work.
They – these two spectacular, riotous women - are why I love this job.
Which is not a job I love, by the way.
Since my move back home to my sister’s attic (THIRD FLOOR!) in Delaware last year, I have managed to shift from the glorious privilege of running prominent food and beverage departments for Marriott, Int. as a Director of Restaurants. In my capacity there, I continuously felt valuable as emails rolled in, needed as staff banged down my door with questions in pursuit for knowledge and direction, and daily rushed to important meetings with bigwigs to discuss complicated P&Ls and upcoming marketing ventures, and invited by amazing chefs to weigh in on menus and new proposed culinary delights.
I was an important woman making decisions driving revenue, uplifting staff engagement scores and feeding the masses with disposable income to burn on meals that would pass through their systems and land in....
Toilets I am now responsible to audit.
Do you even know what a potty ring is? Or how to use a pumice stone?
Bruh, a year ago, I certainly didn’t.
But don’t worry!
I am not totally lost in just a world of potties. Oh no. I have also learned other janitorial gems such as floor types and am often in charge of figuring out which mop systems best match VCT, engineered vinyl, ceramic tiles, epoxy, rubber, terrazzo and, of course there’s that pesky quarry tile.
The last term cracking me up because of my experience in commercial kitchens. Standing on tile floors I never even knew had a professional name.
Nice to meet you, Quarry.
On a walkthrough once for a one-off carpet cleaning quotation, I had to ask Boss lady the difference between an “extraction” and a “bonnet cleaning”.
Dear God. What happened to me?
What seems like a whole other lifetime ago, Chef Tiby and I worked to arrange a training session with my servers and bartenders. Yeah. We ran a revolving steakhouse on the 26th floor of the Le Royal Meridien in Abu Dhabi. We thought, being a rather engaging kind of management team, to bring in a full beef tenderloin and butcher it right in front of the curious staff to better help them understand the cuts of meat they peddled nightly at outrageous prices.
And let me tell you - asking Chef Tiby the difference between a chateaubriand and a filet mignon was infinitely more sexy than asking for the differences between a bonneting and an extraction.
As you can imagine, I stepped into my role outwardly deciding to do my very best to make a positive difference in whatever role I would play while I also internally withered into a veritable pea-sized raisin of drippy-drop droopy failure.
So it’s not a complete shocker I ended up in Avon’s office two months later sitting in his entirely too low-to-the-ground leather chair in yet another cloud of depressive white noise asking him how I got here, how I was gonna survive and where the fuck was the exit door to all of this?
To which he responded, “How did you find me again?”
I chose a black male therapist. On purpose.
Male because I missed Marriott and sitting around conference tables with men who could get to the point and taught me to be direct. And black because I learned long ago the value of different perspectives and I didn’t want some white entitled yuppy woman scrunching her face at me again asking “You know that’s not normal, right?”.
After a few weeks of weird ranting, some crocodile tears, a bunch of disjointed sentences trying to explain myself and a whole host of awkward silences, Avon hit me with it.
“You have RAD.”
“Wait, what? What’s RAD? Is this a label? Do I look like a can of soup? Or someone looking for a label? Bro. No. I don’t do labels. I want my money back.”
I was not joking. Me and labels? No.
“Reactive Attachment Disorder. You. Have. Reactive. Attachment. Disorder. With avoidant attachment tendencies, I might add.”
Fucker.
Don’t you know I scrunched up my face with all my white entitled yuppy woman energy, looked him right in his eyeballs and said, “You know that’s not right, right?”
Add “hypocrite” to RAD. Tsk.
But he was right. Thirty Google searches, seventy-five articles, two self-help books and fifteen podcasts later, I knew he was right.
In adults, RAD and avoidance is a real pain in the ass. Like somehow I got handed the rules to baseball, was sent out on a football field and then got real good at slam-dunking the puck of “I-want-to-be-connected-with-you-but-get-away-from-me-because-I-don't-trust-anyone".
A one-woman sport where I am Best in Class on a lonely podium in an empty stadium and no applause for my noble prickly efforts.
A real life PushMe-PullYou diagnosed by Mr. Black Dr. DooLittle himself.
Who started to talk me through it as I began to lay down my defenses and surrender to the reality of what had become my trademark. Starting in childhood, of course, we began to work through old stories, started to pick through the garbage pails of my cranium finding rotten memories churning up bits of agony.
It hurt. Ten months later, it still hurts.
I feel like a stupid child sometimes. Googling stuff like “what is a boundary?” and “how do I learn how to trust people?”. Writing letters of apology for being avoidant to family in my life. Having to be coached on “How to Say Hi to Your Mom at Thanksgiving”.
Which is bravely did and she ignored me.
So, then my little girl self had to go back to Avon and get coaching on “How to Deal with Parental Rejection”. And this time I stopped the googling and bought the book “Boundaries” by Henry Cloud trying to answer the question “what is the line between trying and giving up?”
Walking back into the office after therapy one day (stupidest thing EVER, by the way... going to therapy in the MIDDLE OF A WORK DAY. Dumb I tell you.), I burst into tears. It was only Irene and I in the office and we hadn’t been all that close up to that point mainly because the office was made up of a sum total of six women – all of whom I was trying to avoid daily for obvious RAD reasons.
Irene is a tough cookie. Sixty-nine years old, opinionated and smart-mouthed, on top of being an active beauty, she is an incredibly determined woman who tells the story of crying for exactly five minutes when she found out she had breast cancer and then dried those tears, replaced her spine with steel, looked at the doc and said “Let’s get to it because I’m not going anywhere.”
And then beat cancer.
She and Barbie live together, have for twenty years. They’ve been best friends for forty.
Avon said, “Be vulnerable. Be open. Be accepting. Be trusting.”
I said, “I can’t, Avon. I don’t know how.”
But then, that day in tears in the office, Irene came to me, hugged me, smiled at me, listened to me, accepted me and said by her actions and affection, “I’ll show you how.”
And, over the course of a moving-towards-healing year, Irene became “Momma” Irene and Barbie became “Auntie” Barbie.
I didn’t even know I was adoptable.
Until the day I looked at them both and said, “I really love you” and they grabbed me and said, “Oh honey, we love you too.”
And suddenly I realized the beauty of healing is not just in the letting go. For the first time I saw – and felt – those spaces I had opened in letting go were now being filled with the bringing in. Without understanding it, voids of sadness and rejection were being organically permeated with love and acceptance from unexpected places.
The more bad I let go, the more good that came in.
And the love was the same. The love I thought I needed from that one person?
The replacements that came crawling out of the woodwork were just as wondrous, healing and maternal whether it was from Irene and Barbie or from the people I reached out to and invited back into my life – people like my Aunt Nancy, my sisters Cora and Cody, or my friends Trisha, Tammy as well as Mr. And Mrs. Cannon.
Compassion and love in the form of faith found me. That little bleating sheep hiding in the corner of the pasture? Yeah, that was me but I’m not standing out in the rain anymore.
Like flowers, the more I opened, the more my children opened. In the sunlight of acceptance, we have grown together over the last years and compounded missing time into precious present moments.
New people appeared like Mary and Ashley and said, “Hey! You wanna be friends and go do stuff?” and I was “yeah!” and we’ve done stuff.
In February, I beat RAD with a badass stick, walked alone into the conference room of the Dover Public Library scared out of my mind and took a seat at the table of a writer’s editing group. And they said, “Well, hello there!”. And when I read my first ever essay with shaking knees, and a full-on red face of embarrassment, they fricken cheered and said, “You CAN do THIS.”
The magic cherry on top of the cake?
Somehow, SOMEHOW... a boyfriend appeared. A guy who has embraced every color of my quirks and adoringly calls me his “colorful box of crayons”. Who also has a wonderful mother called Nana. A woman who bought me hundreds of Robin’s Egg maltballs for Easter just because I made a passing comment about liking them.
Who would have thought life could be so full?
Who thought MY life could be so full?
Not me. Not me before therapy, anyway. Not me before learning I had a label.
But me now?
The one who decided I would not let my life be defined by a label? The one who decided there are no stupid questions and asked google “What is the opposite of RAD?”, wrote down all the traits of a securely attached person and has worked everyday to be her?
The one who got up from that chair last Friday, walked over to the counter and picked up the small blower we use to clean cobwebs from the front doors of many of our buildings and stuck it right up Auntie Barbie’s shorts so I could blow her coffee stain dry?
Yeah. That woman not only thinks her life could be full of love and joy but knows it already is.
And while Momma Irene was busting her gut while I was blowing Barbie, who by now had both hands on her chest in full uproarious bellowing laughter, I felt pure joy as I looked back and forth between these two women I adore.
I have been adopted because I let myself be adopted.
I am loved because I am learning to let myself be loved.
And yeah – I might still have RAD but I’ve also got a blower and a pretty awesome tribe.
