She’s Simply ‘The Best Out There’

For Katrina Floyd, last Thursday was Mother’s Day.

Floyd, who has two pre-schoolage daughters, pampered herself with a manicure and a pedicure at a day spa near her Northeast Washington home. She claims she treated herself because she “hadn’t done that in I don’t know how long,” and not because of Sunday’s holiday.

I don’t buy it. Because if I had Floyd’s job - spending one morning convincing a beautiful, five-month-pregnant girl of 18 that she doesn’t deserve a man who beats her, and the next failing to persuade a 17-year-old to consider waiting until after high school before getting pregnant - I’d do something wonderful for myself for Mother’s Day.

Of course, no one as impatient as I am could do Floyd’s job. But let’s pretend I could. Could I also handle having my older daughter sometimes ask if I could do something to bring back her daddy, who was shot to death on Christmas Eve in 1994 by a robber? I don’t want to know.

Sometimes you meet people who hurl your life into perspective. People who by just climbing out of bed and getting some oatmeal into their kids perform amazing tasks. People who despite unimaginable pain strive to improve an ungrateful society and to help kids on whom others have given up.

Although I admire Floyd for surviving her husband’s unexpected death, and four years earlier, her older brother’s, I’m also impressed that she’s a social worker, “the best out there,” according to a colleague at Columbia Hospital for Women here. Floyd works at the hospital’s teen health center on Capitol Hill, where young women ages 13 to 20 get physicals, OB-GYN care and counseling.

One of my best pals is a social worker, but I wonder: How do folks do that? Any idealist might try social work, but who’d stick to a job helping troubled people whom everyone else would just as soon forget? Why cultivate a career that gets you noticed only if you screw up?

Like many in her profession, Floyd, 32, never thought of doing anything else.

“I always wanted to be a social worker,” she says, as convincing as Grant Hill stating his boyhood hoop dreams. “My brother Timothy, when he was growing up, had problems and had a social worker who really tried to help him. … It was in me.”

Floyd was three months pregnant at the death of her husband Paul, whose slaying is still being investigated. She considered abandoning her career to focus on daughters Nicole, now 4, and Erica, almost 2, and on “just … breathing.” Then she asked herself, “If you don’t do it, who will?

There are still days, she says, when “I can’t take it … when I hear (a co-worker) scream out really loud here - which always means that one of our patients is pregnant again. That’s our reaction: ‘I just can’t believe it.”’

Of course, any woman who wed her high school sweetheart and misses his support would have trouble with an unmarried girl of 19, whom she’s been counseling, announcing she’s pregnant with her fifth child.

Floyd says these girls have never seen “the other side.”

“Generations of families are not educated and never will be,” she explains. So she sees “kids of 16, whose mothers are 32 and on drugs, and the teen is pregnant. … This child doesn’t know it’s possible to have a life where you come home, have dinner, go to bed at 10 and there’s no arguing. … She has no idea about what I see as normal.

“But she’s having children.”

Even so, Floyd insists, “these girls want to be married, have a good supportive husband, a home. … But they don’t see them as things they can actually achieve. … (They) feel, ‘I may not be able to finish high school, go to college or get a job downtown as a secretary. But I can have a baby.’

“It’s something (they) can point at and say, ‘I did this.”’

Eight years ago, in her first, brief job at D.C. Child Protective Services, Floyd worked 12-hour days and took each failure personally. When Timothy died of a drug overdose, she quit. She took the teen center job and learned to accept that she couldn’t do it all.

Now she focuses more on her victories. Like last week, when two girls who’d never discussed being sexually abused opened up to her. “To be the person to … say, ‘It’s OK you’re upset,’ … that feels good.”

She thanks God for getting her to where “no matter what, I can continue to stay sane. To breathe.”

Losing so much “has made me stronger - oh yeah,” Floyd says. “I mean it when I tell patients, ‘You can survive.’ But if I could, I would have wished for something else. To lose a limb or something.

“Nothing could be as bad as not having your husband.”