First exciting thing: I no longer have a freezer stash of breast milk. Ian drank the last of the milk yesterday morning. We have been mixing breast milk with cow milk since Ian turned one and now, 3 weeks later, he's on 100% cow milk. My little boy is so grown up!
Second exciting thing: I officially have a new job. I received the written offer from the medical device company on Wednesday morning and accepted on Thursday morning. I also gave official notice on Thursday that I am leaving my current job. I think this will be a really good opportunity. I've been a lawyer for 6.5 years, but only at the large law firm. Now I'm moving into a company setting and it will be really great to learn all about the company. I'm going to continue drafting and negotiating contracts, which is where my skills lie, but I will also learn about labor/employment law and regulatory/labeling compliance and I will be expected to manage the company's patent portfolio with the assistance of outside counsel. The General Counsel at the company is super excited that I'm coming. I think it will be really great working with her. She knows that my parents are coming into town the first week that I'm starting work and she said that as long as she was going to be out of the office that Thursday/Friday, I should just take those days off. She didn't want me to have to struggle through the days without her there my first week. Awesome stuff.
Third exciting (but unwelcome) thing: My housekeeper had a psychotic episode while cleaning my house this past Thursday. So as I was returning from a partner's office, after telling him that I was leaving my job at the firm, I see on my blackberry that a police detective from my town was trying to reach me urgently. My first thought was that something happened to my son and so I started freaking out. But once I called him back, he told me that he was at my home with my housekeeper. Apparently, she had run out of my house, tried to break into 2 neighbors' houses in order to use their phone and get help for her kidnapped daughter. Ummmm....Crap. So the police were calling me for 2 reasons. They wanted to make sure that this woman was supposed to be in my house and they wanted to alert me to the fact that there was police activity at my house. I asked the detective how he had even found me at work and he said (amusingly), "Come on. Give me credit! I am a detective after all!" Apparently, my neighbor told him that I was an attorney and they were able to google me and find my profile on my firm's website. So I told them that my cousin had employed this woman for 10 years and she had been cleaning my house for 6 months and she has never shown any signs of mental instability or a mood disorder. I asked them to please not arrest her (they weren't planning to anyway) and that she needed medical attention. They also found her daughter in college and the police pulled her out of class (poor thing!) so that she could get her mom some help.
The whole thing was very upsetting. When I came home from work, her car was still parked in our driveway. And there were written notes on my kitchen table from her. Some of it is hard to read or illegible, but it went like this: "Maddy, the ____ manager from my property kidnap my Victoria and I will try _____ from your house. So please call police. FBI too is re: my ______." Then she listed her lawyer's name and phone number and said, "Please call police and FBI. Sounds scary but is really. Please SOS SOS. Maddy, call the FBI. SOS. My Victoria call me are kidnap. Please call [lawyer's name]. Our phone are trap so the calls are not coming true. It $5. Very important your phone secret may be ____ security trap too so go to your neighbor." Then she listed 2 more phone numbers.
About 3 hours after she was picked up by the police, she called my house and left a message on my voicemail. She told me that she had left notes on the table and to please discard them and that she was okay and that she was going to come back and finish cleaning the house. (As an aside, she actually cleaned the house quite well and just hadn't gotten around to mopping the kitchen floor.) She also called me later that night from the hospital. She told me that they were evaluating her and that she was staying at least overnight. When I talked to her about the incident, she told me that she "over-reacted" and "had some anxiety." I told her that it was more than that given that she had lost touch with reality and she denied that and called it an over-reaction. So that phone conversation didn't leave me feeling better about the whole thing. So now I have to figure out what to do. Part of me really wants to give her a second chance. But part of me wants to change the lock on our front door (she has the key) and call her next week to tell her that she shouldn't come back. But I think I'm going to have to let her go. Even if this is the only incident she will ever have in her entire life, I can't risk that there will be a second incident. The police called me at work. My neighbors are freaked out and want to know if their kids will be safe. I can't hire this woman and risk that she will do this again. My neighbors are my community and if something should happen in the future because I hired this woman again, I won't be able to live with myself. I'm also a little nervous that she might come over at 3 am, while my son is in the house, to finish the cleaning job that she didn't finish. She told the police as they were taking her away that she hadn't finished cleaning and she told her daughter that she was worried that I would be mad at her for not finishing the cleaning job. I really want her to get better and I wish her well in life, but I think we're going to have to part ways at this point.
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