I felt seen yesterday. My heart grew two inches.
My coordinator sent a text to our group chat. I’m not coming in, I’m taking a wellness day. I was not in the mood for the abandonment. Last Thursday, my last day before my 5-day weekend, he abandoned me right when our participants were to show up. I was left with the setup. One of our participants brought his sisters, his brother, and his friends, and they ransacked our office for candy and sodas. I was on the phone with the mother of the other kid who was supposed to show up, arranging a ride last second. Then he abandoned me again near the end of our program and left me with a 20-minute mess to clean.
People noticed his absence. Amber asked me where he was. I told her he said he was taking a wellness. Do you have program tonight? She asked. I said yes. That’s not appropriate. If you’re sick, you’re sick, but you can’t leave your team when you have program. Did he at least set you up? I explained that he did not, and how I was trying to pull that together. This ended up with me coordinating it for the whole week. It’s supposed to be his job to do that. He leaves everything for you because he knows you will do it. She was also upset because he sent me to do an intake alone at someone’s house. That is against our code of conduct. It isn’t safe. They weren’t home, so there’s that. Your program was nothing before you started. It just blew up, and it was all you. Then she was on my side about me taking on so many extra responsibilities without compensation.
I was festering over this on my weekend. I had an epiphany that I was fawning. I am overfunctioning at work because of an internal fear of job loss and an ex-abusive boss who had OCD. I am being taken advantage of and taken for granted, so I need to draw some boundaries.
I do like my coordinator, he is like a brother to me. I can tell that he has burnout. He is only human, I can let a man have a bad week, and it was a bad week for him. Leading up to it, I can tell that he is struggling with his executive dysfunction. He was glued to his phone. He let emails pile up. He forwards a lot of them to me. I wasn’t tracking them. He triple-booked us on that Thursday. Forgot to pay an invoice. Failed to close our freezer properly, thawing all the food.
We received our merch the week prior. It was 8 months in the making. He and the other mentor wasted no time setting up the banner. It was a nice moment. The way we just stood there and stared at it with our hands on our hips. It was like a trophy for us. We made it as a program. We’re here! It was the finish line. All we have left is to grow our participant numbers to where they are supposed to be, and we are almost there. I designed that banner myself. Our logo? I made the design contest for it. I designed the merch. I came up with almost the entire spending plan, I actually did it twice, and then executed it. I designed our webpage. I made all of our social media posts. I made our flyer, our brochure. I make our calendars, which are where we plan our programs. I then execute them. I’m doing his job. I’m fawning because I don’t want our program to fail. We have to renew our contract every three years. I am working on getting us more funding. Like… come on now. Just show up.
I will talk to him. Not ream him out. I need him to advocate for me to get a raise if he wants me to keep doing his job. Also, a coordinator of a different program has been dragging me into her planning. My coordinator brought me to two meetings for an event they are working on, but there were no other mentors there. I’m not comfortable with the optics, for starters, but they didn’t accept those extra responsibilities without compensation. I need to set some boundaries here. I clean the shared spaces in the office for world peace. I do it without complaining, but now they are weaponizing incompetence. One program is not doing that to me, and she just tried to potch me.
Other than that, yesterday was a nice evening. We took our kids to the park. Tossed some balls around. Other kids joined in. It was so quaint. I am proud of my work. My coordinator has been getting all the glory, so it was nice to feel seen. I keep us on task. I get the stats in, I make everyone stay on top of our case notes. I make him write the reports on time. I just restructured the budget for him. All he has to do is make the adjustments to the cash flow. The things he does execute, he does at my behest. 99% of the time. I create a lot of structure, and the things I absolutely cannot do, I make him do. I nag and I nag and I nag. We are about to have new problems and challenges with balancing 20 participants, so I am going to get him to try and add 10 hours for our part-time mentor. We are about to restructure our entire program, and I am arranging a meeting with his new boss for it. I keep our spaces decluttered and organized. It is important for kids to see that, as I just learned in the online workshop I was doing yesterday. They saw my shelf behind me and brought that up.
Blah blah blah. My 5-day weekend was… I had some psychotic episodes I ain’t ready to talk about publicly. I want today to be a good one. I’m starting off strong with waking up at my regular time so I can hit the gym.
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