As a realist, I am used to settling for "pretty good" while striving towards "awesome." You don't have any perfect days at a childcare facility. It's impossible. Somebody's always going to punch somebody else. You do the best you can. You deal with problems as they arise and do what you can to make sure everybody's basically ok.
My boss is a perfectionist and is only used to dealing with small groups of very young children in a very controlled environment, with, I suspect, sufficient staff to do most of the work for her. Her old job was all tea parties and fairy cakes. Here we've got six times the number of kids, from all age groups, in surroundings which are chaotic beyond belief, largely because we are working with a skeleton crew. We're scraping by. One person gets sick and it fucks the whole thing up. We don't have the luxury of perfectionism.
Today I realized (this was right after she told me how many menbers of her immediate family suffer from bipolar disorder) that my boss is the type of perfectionist who splinters and explodes when faced with insurmountable imperfection. An attitude of "if I can't have 100%, why bother at all?"
I think it was the rubber spider. That damn kid came up waving his rubber spider and wanting to talk about it for a half hour and I tried to hit him with a quick "that's wonderful GO PLAY" but my boss was enchanted and took the rubber spider and cradled it in her hand and petted it and cooed, "and UP! came a SPYder!!! and sat DOWN! beSIDE her!!!!!" in this repulsive saccharine singsong. The kid shut right up with his spider monlogue; he just stood there with his mouth hanging open, looking from her to me and then back to her as if to say, "holy oh my jesus you big fucking moron."
I should have been paying more attention to her face, because I really think that's when it happened, I think that's the moment she cracked. Maybe her eyes got all glittery and evil. All I know is that ten minutes later I heard her snarl "Get over it," to a four-year-old who was bleeding, and refused to give an ice pack to another one whose fingers had been badly smashed against concrete. For the rest of the day she mostly hid in her office. She was irritable, bitchy, and unreasonably jumpy - I scared her twice by speaking to her. I didn't sneak up, I approached her from the front - but she was blank as a ghost, grimacing, lost in her own head.
