The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

The Christmas My Mother Called Me Unsettled Until The Whole Table Stood Up For Me

My mother raised her glass of sweet tea, looked down the length of the table at me, and told everyone I had made nothing of my life.

She said it kindly. That is the part people never believe. There was no shouting, no slammed door, nothing you could point at later and call a scene. She smiled the way she smiled in the church directory photo, and she said, “And then there’s Nell. Still unsettled. Bless her heart, forty-one years old and still out there in that drafty old house, still going nowhere.”

The table laughed. Not a mean laugh. A soft, comfortable laugh, the kind that comes when the family has heard a thing so many times it has worn smooth, like a doorknob. Craig laughed. His wife, Brenda, laughed. My aunt Pauline laughed into her napkin. Even the little ones laughed because the big people were laughing.

I laughed too. That is the part I am least proud of. I sat there in my good green cardigan, the one I iron only for Christmas and funerals, and I laughed along so that nobody would have to feel the thing that was actually happening.

Let me back up and tell you how I got to that table.

My name is Nell Shaw. I live three miles outside of Delia, Kansas, down a county road that the township does not always grade before the first snow. The house my mother called drafty is drafty. It was built in 1911 and it has settled in a way that means one bedroom door will not close in August and the kitchen window whistles a low note when the wind comes out of the northwest, which here it mostly does. I have lived in it for sixteen years. I love it the way you love a tired old horse that has carried you a long way.

I am a nurse. Not the kind with a corner office and a lanyard full of badges. I am a licensed practical nurse, and for most of those sixteen years I have driven my old Ford from house to house across two counties, sitting with people in the rooms where they are dying.

That is what I do. I go to the places other people cannot stand to go. I go to the back bedroom where the hospital bed does not match the wallpaper, where the house smells like the particular sweetness that comes at the end, and I do the work. I turn people so they do not get sores. I clean them when they can no longer clean themselves. I crush the pills into the applesauce. I hold the hand of a man who was a county commissioner for thirty years while he cries about his mother, who has been dead since 1958, because at the end they go back to the beginning.

My mother has never once called that a career. To her a career is a thing with a title on a door and a photograph in the Wichita paper. What I do she calls “playing nurse out in the sticks,” and she has called it that for so long that I stopped flinching at it somewhere around my thirty-fifth birthday.