But the next morning, I got up early, put on my good slacks, and I drove to Dr. Ferris’s office to take my name off my grandchildren’s paperwork.
That is all I went in there for. If I was not watching those babies anymore, I had no business being the pickup authorization and the emergency contact. I was not being spiteful. I was raised to keep my paperwork honest, and honest was that I had been fired.
The girl at the front desk pulled both charts. Then she stopped reading, and got up, and went and got the nurse. Then the nurse went and got Dr. Ferris, who came out into the waiting room in her white coat at ten after eight with a chart open in her arm.
Between the two of those children there have been forty-three well visits and eleven sick ones. I brought them to forty-one.
Every allergy in that chart, I reported. Every milestone date is a date I gave them, because I was standing there when it happened. The croup at fourteen months is written up from what I told the resident at two in the morning, because I was the one in the ambulance.
Dr. Ferris turned the chart around and showed me a line from that admission that she had typed herself in 2019, and she said every physician who opens that file reads it first:
Grandmother, Ruth Hensley, is the reliable historian for this patient. Defer to her for timeline and medication history.
She asked me not to take my name off. She said she could not treat those children as safely without me on that file, and she would rather I stayed on it even if I never picked them up again.
So I signed a limited form. Medical history only. No pickup, no daycare, nothing that made me free labor. And I went home and I cried in my own kitchen where nobody could see me, which is where I do that.
Three weeks later Brooke sat in that office for Emmy’s four-year check with the nanny who has the degree, and she could not answer the intake questions. Not the allergy, not the age at first words, not what the croup had been treated with. Dr. Ferris was kind about it and she was also very clear, and what she told Brooke to do was call me.
She called me from the parking lot. It was the first honest conversation that woman and I have ever had, and she did most of it crying, and I let her.
I took the paid aide job at the Little Lambs preschool at First Baptist that fall. Three days a week, my own money, twelve children who are delighted to see me at eight in the morning.
The babies come on Saturdays now. Not because somebody needs a free option. Because their mother asks, and my son finally opened his mouth in February, which took him thirty-nine years.
Brooke brought my cobbler dish back and asked for the recipe. I gave it to her wrong on purpose the first time. I am not a saint.
Keeping score is not the same thing as keeping records. Somebody had been keeping records the whole time, and it was not me.