Archive for January, 2012
Rise Again
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Therapy on January 30, 2012
You know you’re really depressed when you turn on the oven and immediately see the words from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. And yet, her book pisses me off, and her suicide pisses me off, and the loss of her beautiful writing pisses me off. My own thoughts piss me off.
And make me sad. And then I start to cry and it’s as if I would stop, if only I could. Maybe these tears were a long time coming, but they hurt all the same. It hurts so much I can barely think straight, or write or speak. There are things I should do, but I do a lot of nothing. I sit here and stare out the window and wait for the phone to ring and dread and hope mix like the swirls on a candy cane.
The sky is light blue and the trees are barren. I should go outside. I sit here and I hurt and cannot even walk downstairs to eat something. Yes I can. I must stop focusing on what I cannot do. Relationships sometimes cannot be fixed. Why is that so difficult to bear? Why must I feel as if I failed at everything?
Rejection hurts me more than it should. It makes me want to hurt myself. I do not know why this is the case. I need help but I don’t believe that anything or anyone will make me feel better. I am scared. I don’t like to feel like this. Why won’t the damn phone ring? I cannot get my shit together. I want it to ring; I’m scared what will happen if it does ring.
Why must I feel so afraid? Wait. I can answer that. I cannot escape from my own mind. It falls upon itself, all of it, and as it falls I fear falling like an object heading toward earth from high above, faster and faster falling until the ground hits me. Splat? No, I wouldn’t hear the splat.
Hear. I can hardly hear what people are saying today. They try to comfort me but I’m so fucked up, that if they say the wrong thing, I hear rejection. I hear, “You’re not good enough. No one loves you.” That’s right. “You’re not good enough” immediately translates to “No one loves you.” And I cannot bear that. The pain is unbearable, this loneliness in a crowded world. Where is my place in our universe? Where do I belong? Is this feeling of hopelessness and loneliness a brand of sorts, that will mark me, weigh me down with a lead weight, so that no matter how hard I run, the weight of it knocks me down, backwards . . . I’m falling again. Always falling. Or failing. The words are so damn similar, like word cousins.
Don’t write the word cousins. That brings family into it, and the lack of one, the lack of a reliable mother, is what started this particular tailspin, this rush to make ground contact. A mother’s hands, my mother’s hands, a mother’s voice, my mother’s voice . . . no. I cannot call. The first rejection, the ultimate one, hurt the worst. I was too young to understand. But I am a mother now, and I must sort out the pieces. That is what I must do, can do, will do. Soon. I will rise soon.
Like this:
50/50, Flowers on Lizzie’s Grave and Calling Mom
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Childhood, Spirituality on January 29, 2012
The movie 50/50 explores, with great pathos and endearing humor, what happens when a 27-year old man named Adam finds out he has cancer. His survival odds stand at 50%. This movie pulls no punches. It’s real. Adam’s best friend Kyle uses Adam’s cancer as a pickup line, and yet Kyle is a true friend to Adam. Adam’s artistic girlfriend cheats on Adam with this ridiculous “Jesus figure,” and Adam avoids returning his mother’s phone calls throughout the movie, right up until when he needs her. And Adam develops a deep but not really inappropriate relationship with his therapist, who is even younger than he is.
But this is not a movie review. This is about putting flowers on Lizzie’s grave every October. And it’s about my third child, and why I so badly wanted to have him even against medical advice, and it’s about my first seizure, which I had at the age of 27. And if I strip it down to its raw essentials, this is about my mother, and mourning for the phone calls I cannot make.
We moved to our current home when my eldest child was 10 months old. Our second child was born a few months later, and we quickly became very close to the Recasners, who lived across the street from us. Ann and Jim Recasner met when Ann was studying to become a nun, and they fell in love and raised two children. The youngest child lived a couple of miles away, and her son, Conor, was Madeline’s age, and he spent time every day with his grandparents. As the months wore on, and my baby Jim shivered against the cold winter air, I heard Ann talking about Lizzie’s Tree, and I asked her, “What is Lizzie’s tree?” Ann didn’t respond right away, and then she gazed at me with her grey eyes and replied, “Our eldest daughter, Elizabeth, died from brain cancer when she was 8 years old. The summer before she died, we realized that this was going to be her last summer, and that she would not last until Christmas. So we planted her a Christmas tree, and we decorated it in July. And she passed away in October.”
I shuffled my feet and searched for something meaningful to say. I held baby Jim in my arms and kissed his head and then I looked Ann in the eye. “I’m so sorry Ann. I can only imagine,” and I stopped speaking because I was imaging losing one of my two children, and pinning all of my hopes on the remaining child. Ann held her hands out to hold Baby Jim, and she smiled at him and replied, “It’s not the kind of thing you ever get over, but the pain recedes with time.” I decided then that two children would not be enough, in case one ever left us.
Over the next couple of years, Ann and I grew closer. She felt like a second mother to me. And then Ann and Jim moved away, and this made me very sad. When it was time to say goodbye, we both struggled not to cry, and I asked her if there was anything I could do for Lizzie. She took a deep breath and replied, “The one request that Lizzie made of us was that each year, on the day she died, that we place a white rose on her grave.” I nodded, and promised to do that, and we hugged and we both tried not to cry when we said goodbye, but even now I am crying and it’s been years since they left. In fact, Madeline is Lizzie’s age now.
But the first time I visit Lizzie’s grave, Madeline was only three years old. And I took her with me, and on the way there, we stopped and bought white roses at Giant, and then we drove the Honda Pilot to the little Catholic cemetery and I wore sunglasses and held Maddie’s hand while we visited Lizzie. Maddie didn’t understand where Lizzie was, but she held my hand and helped me clear the weeds off Lizzie’s headstone, which read “Young and Promising Scholar,” and I hid my tears behind my dark sunglasses and thanked God for my own young and promising scholar.
In so many respects, I am lucky I even made it to see Lizzie’s grave. I had my own life-threatening condition hit me at the age of 27. My husband and I were staying at my parents’ vacation home in Maryland, and my parents were there too. This was before we grew estranged. It was like any other night. My husband and I watched a movie and cuddled and he said, “Goodnight, Cutie,” before he fell asleep. And then, a few hours later, some man was saying my name over and over again and I didn’t know who he was or where I was or what year it was; honestly, I didn’t even know who I was. But the voice, well, I trusted it, and then I heard another voice, and I knew this voice. It was my mother’s voice. They told me that I’d had a seizure and we had to go to the hospital and I was shaking all over and I felt like I had died. But I did not die.
And I thank God every night for giving me another day with my three children, and I ask him to please watch over me while I sleep. But some things God cannot fix, and while I am at peace with this, it saddens me still that if I need her, I cannot call the woman who raised me. It’s not that she is dead, and truly this is too complicated to go into here. Suffice to say that I cannot call her, but if I could, like Adam in 50/50, I would.
Like this:
Magic Pills, Lies and Children
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Childhood, Identity, Self-Help on January 26, 2012
If you could take a magic pill that would make it all better, would you? Or if you could give your troubled, or autistic, or ADHD child a magic pill that would fix all her troubles, would you? Would you wave a magic wand, pharmaceutical-based or otherwise, to smooth out the bumps in your child’s rocky ride? Or do you wait, arms 
wide open, to catch him when he fails again?
Magic pills and fairy wands frighten me. My mother built a matchbox house of lies out of my childhood, and it confused me so deeply, I became unable to perceive the difference between waking and dreaming. I don’t know what I hated and feared more: the way she helped abuse me, or the lies she told me to pretend that I lived a in a perfect home worthy of a fairytale. Mom’s mendacity confused the hell out of me. She fucked with the metaphysical fabric of my perception and rendered my reason ineffectual.
It was her version of feeding me a magic pill. It got so bad, so fractured, so intellectually paralyzing, that from the age 8 to the time I got out of there, I would sit outside and stare at the clouds and wonder if the world existed, and I was pretty fucking sure it did not. Everything I saw with my own eyes was a mirage; it existed only in the dream of an already dead child. And it saddened me to no end to think that I had died before I got to be alive. I was a ghost; a dead girl; caught or stuck in the clutches of a hell I was not even allowed to name. It pained me, this cold-hearted certainty that if I closed my eyes and fell asleep, that I would awaken to a darkness devoid of light, love and humanity. Ironically, that was my reality: a home without light. I wish I knew then what I know now, because I could have trusted my own observations and thought processes.
Which brings us to the here and the now. I know the difference between right and wrong; I can discern real from imaginary. Indubitably, I exist. I am alive. Of these things I am certain, and I say this soberly and seriously: as a parent, I do not want to offer my child a magic potion that will transform his existence into a kaleidoscopic fantasy. I don’t want to feed him lies. I do not want to alter his perceptions or protect her from seeing the real pain he is in when he bleeds.
And yet it hurts to watch her cry! My daughter staggered off the bus today, as if carrying a 50-pound stone on her back. She hugged me too long and too tight. “What hurts you so?” I replied, as I hugged her too long and too tight in response. Then she told me, “A boy, a patrol, sang this song to me on the bus, and he wouldn’t stop. It went:
Girls go to Jupiter to get stupider
Boys go to college to get smarter.
I gritted my teeth. “This is bullshit!” I growled. She nodded. “It is bullshit.” And I talked with her, and I gave her some advice, but I cannot fix it. She must find her way through this one and I will watch and wait.
A P.E. Teacher sent my youngest son into a dark hallway for a long timeout because he got over excited and stood, rather than sat, on his scooter. How scared was he? How lonely? Why must this happen, these troubles and difficulties, day after day? This sweet youngest child of mine suffers from ADHD. His teachers complain about his behavior almost every day, and yet he tries, we try, so hard to help him behave better. He’s a tiny, cute guy, not yet 6, and we’ve been advised to put him on Ritalin. This is a magic drug, a potion, an automatic fix, and yet, and yet . . . I hesitate. Magic pills and potions fix nothing, really, do they?
Or do they? The antidepressants I ingest let me live again; they fix all the busted circuitry in my brain and help me process feelings that for years were numbed out and buried. The anti-seizure medication keeps me alive; without it, I suffer debilitating grand mal seizures that destroy my ability to write. It would be self-destructive for me to stop taking either of these medications.
But what about my youngest son? Or my daughter, who also suffers from ADHD? Am I hurting them by not medicating them? Or would I take away that very thing my mother took from me if I offered them Ritalin: an unvarnished, truthful glimpse of reality? In altering their behavior, will I alter their reality as well? Will the drugs change them? Will Ritalin change their perception and experience of their world? Is a medicated child with ADHD the same child? And as parents, do we protect our offspring best by drugging them or is it better to let them navigate through rock-strewn fields and fall and bleed, only to rise again?
I do not know dear reader. I do not know. But I know I exist. I know my children live. And I know, oh yes I know, that my love for them is real. Oh, how I know. And tonight, this is enough.
Like this:
Super-Hero Contest Entries
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Uncategorized on January 24, 2012
Snark Woman I AM SNARK WOMAN. My superpowers include being able to bring a grown man to his knees with a witty one liner and the ability to leap tall piles of laundry in a single bound, but then tripping and falling down on top of it. My faithful minions.... my cats.... back me up by being aloof and uncaring. :)
Special thanks to https://www.facebook.com/pages/RASJacobsons-Lessons-From-Teachers-Twits/131268633653318
for Judging the Design Your Own Super-Hero Contest!
Peg Sculte’s Entry: schultef2@yahoo.com
Carl D’Agostino’s Rainbow Woman
Carl D'Agostino's Rainbow Woman
50 Sense's Amazona vs. Global Warming
https://www.facebook.com/pages/50-sense/229348510470680?ref=ts
https://www.facebook.com/RandomThoughtsandLotsaCoffee
My super hero: Bat Ma'am Superpowers: The ability to conquer all of life's challenges and heartaches with humor and strength, the ability to heal and care for all that needed it. Healing Powers. The Wise Counselor. The fighter for injustice. The giver of the hugs that makes everything seem better, make you feel stronger. The Power of Love. The ability to always pick herself up and move on. To get on with life, regardless of how dark or how hard the struggle. The abiltiy to put everything aside, her sadness, her needs in order to do for others. This is my superhero.
Like this:
First Conversation with Little El
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Abuse, Childhood, Identity on January 23, 2012
“Hey.” Little El said, casually. She glanced at me and sat down.
“Hey,” I replied. “I will listen to you, I promise.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
I nodded and waited. I didn’t have the energy to take care of Little El, to search for the right words to fix her. How can I fix her? I don’t have much to give.
“Are you going to ask me if I’m sure it happened?”
“No.”
“If you ask me that–don’t ask me that. Don’t put that on me.”
“I won’t.”
“Why do you care?”
“I need to know.”
“That’s all?”
“Talk to me.”
“I see it in a flash and then it fades but I feel it like yesterday, like when your guy hurts you accidentally when he makes love to you.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you see in that flash?”
“A man walks past me on a dark path in the woods and nods at me. I nod back. I taste fear as if it were salt left by summer sweat, with a tinge of bug spray overlaying it. For the rest of the walk I replay the assault that did not happen. Yes it happened. Not tonight. Not that man, not tonight.”
“Okay.” I reply. “Go ahead.”
“I saw it and it felt real in my body. I have trouble describing it but I don’t want to feel it again. For a flash of an instant I saw something and felt it.”
She stood up and walked over to the window. You could see the lights from where we stood.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I used to like to look at the city lights from Nana’s house. It was the only time I felt safe there. Otherwise I waited for someone to hurt me. Lights meant that someone was still awake and maybe somewhere things were okay. The lights looked happy. Now I look outside and I think how long it would take to hit the ground and how much it would hurt and I remember the time I almost jumped and this is all so much to handle.”
“Why did you feel scared at Nana’s?”
“Are you serious?” She crossed her arms and sat on the ledge, legs dangling above the ground.
“How does your body feel when you see the word rape?”
“My genitals ache and burn. It feels like someone is pushing into them. I don’t like seeing the word or speaking it out loud. It’s a bad word.” She shook helplessly and tried to talk through it. “I don’t know how to face this.”
“You’re thinking about hurting yourself aren’t you?” I asked.
She looked over at the window and when she turned back to me I saw tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Please stay here with me.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Do you remember when you were 17 and your parents thought you were gay and you got so upset that you just drove, hoping to meet a median at 70 miles an hour, and you drove for hours, until you ended up somewhere in Pennsylvania?”
She smiled. “Yeah. A big storm blew in and I was in white-out conditions. The rain came down so fast that the only lights I could follow were the big trucks’ lights. I couldn’t even smoke a Camel Light. I slowed down and almost stopped and I was afraid. That was my chance to die. I didn’t really want to die. I wanted to bleed from the pain and find someone that cared enough to fix me. I ended up alone with a choice to make and I fought to hold on. When I made it home I told my parents how much they’d hurt me, how wrong they were to think that my friendship with my best friend was anything more than that.”
“How many long drives like that did you take?”
“A lot. Those were my death-wish drives in the middle of the night. By the halfway point all I could think about was a warm bed and a few hours of sleep.”
“Remember the time you OD’d on marijuana laced with PCP?”
“Yeah. Fun. Crazy drug.”
“Doesn’t matter. Your heart stopped beating, you saw the light, the tunnel that atheists attribute to something that it’s not. I think it is. And then what?”
“I turned around and fought like hell to breathe. To get away from that bright light.” She shivered. So did I.
“What else happened—remember?”
“I held on to the sides of my chair and the demons told me to leap out of the window.” We smirked cynically.
“Doesn’t matter if the demons were real. Did you jump?”
She shook her head.
“So you’ve been here before. You know this pain, this hunger for human comfort. And if no one reaches out to you, you’ve been here before.”
“What if no one believes me? Wait, what if someone doesn’t believe me?”
I smiled sadly. “People have done worse things to you than not believe you were sexually assaulted and repressed the memory.”
“When I try to remember it the pain—I want to fall; stop standing. It’s all I can do to stand up and talk.” She bent over and put her hands on her knees.
“Breathe.”
“Can’t,” she choked.
“What do you see?”
“Dark. No!”
“What do you feel?”
“Pinned down can’t breathe gotta go get out of there where is everyone what is happening to me bad don’t make noise not here not here no no no don’t look.”
“Who?”
“My eyes are closed.”
“Open them.”
“I feel it I feel it so hard that I squeeze my legs together and it still cuts through me, storms through me like a late night train from nowhere.”
“Is it was it someone you know?”
“Yeah, I think. I don’t want to kill them. I want them dead, away, gone from here.”
“Where do you want to be?”
“So often I don’t want to stay. I feel it here inside me and I want to disappear, to not be.”
“Don’t. Stay. Stay with me. I will hold you here.”
She tried to stand but she glanced at me helplessly and started to fall. Her head hit the sofa cushions and she looked like she was still falling, unaware of time or place. I knelt next to her and held her hand.
“Little El—I’m here.”
She rolled on her side and curled her feet under her knees. Her stomach rose and fell, with breaths, or sobs I did not know. I waited. “What do you feel?”
It took so long for her to open her eyes and turn them on me. Her eyes were haunted and it made her look older. “Hold me. Please. Hold me.”
A jolt of pain hit me in my stomach. I started to shake and my hands trembled. Hold her? How? It did not matter.
In one motion, I leaned over, grabbed her cigarettes, and gently shifted her head so that I could fit on one side of her. She sighed slightly and I could feel her body tense and start to shake. I lit two cigarettes, handed her one, and with the same hand, I supported her head and hugged her. We sat and smoked, her head on my shoulder, and we said nothing.
“I’m ready little El. I will hold you tight and watch over you while you cry and keep you safe. I promise I won’t leave your side. You’ve held it in all this time but we need to let it out now, examine it together, figure out how it hurt you and you know what?”
She looked at me quietly. “What?”
“I need you so much. I need you like you need me because I can’t fix us without your help.”
She shrugged and started to get that wild-eyed look she gets. “I don’t understand.”
“I need you to trust in me and have faith that I will watch over you. Do you know why I need you to feel your pain? I need to feel my pain too. It’s the only way I can fix us, if we can sit together and I can go back through this with all the shit I’ve learned as an adult—there’s something to getting older.”
She leaned on one arm. “I don’t know how to cry. Can you teach me that?”
I put an arm around her and laughed. “I don’t know either. Maybe we can figure it out. Let’s go eat some ice cream and talk about it.”
She nodded. “I can have ice cream?”
“Yes. Mint chocolate chip—your favorite. Mixed with coffee. C’mon, let’s run to the store and grab some.”
She took my hand and we drove together and neither one of us imagined what would happen if we slammed into the median. We were okay, as long as we were together, me and little El.
Like this:
Choking Toilets and Swallowed Marbles
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Childhood, Humor on January 18, 2012
Madeline ran downstairs to the dinner table.
“Mom, Dad: the toilet is making a weird sound, like it is choking!”
Travis and I looked at one another.
“What?” I asked Maddie.
“You know,” she replied, moving her dirty blond hair out of her eyes. “It made a choking sound, like when you eat too much food . . .”
In the background, Ben cleared his throat and simulated choking very accurately.
Travis swallowed a bite of chicken and cleared his throat. “Children, has anyone put anything that has not passed through their body into the toilet?” This may sound like a weird question, but three years ago, Ben destroyed the old toilet by shoving matchbox cars down the hole and replacing it cost several hundred dollars.
I inspected the children. Madeline stood by Travis, arms akimbo, with her trademark 8-going on-28 know-it-all-smirk. Then I gazed at sweet Jim, who thoughtfully studied his dark green piece of romaine. I could tell they were innocent of toilet desecration. Madeline pointed at Ben. “Ask him,” she demanded.
Ben’s my youngest. And to be honest, Ben had already had a bad day today. He refused to get dressed for school; he would not complete his math during class (it was Jacqueline’s fault); and he kissed another kid on the school bus in the afternoon. As the bus driver replied to me in a grumbling tone when I asked if he’d been a jerk on the bus: “Yes, he’s been a jerk.”
He sat in his chair and we all stared at him and he blurted out, “The other day, I swallowed a marble.”
I covered my mouth with my wrist to stifle the sobbing laughter. Travis chewed on a light green piece of romaine and with iron strength, held his face in an impassive mask. He knew I was silently laughing at Ben and at him, since he had once swallowed a straight pin. Travis managed to say sternly, “You know that’s really dangerous don’t you? You could choke on that and die.”
Maddie chimed in. “Yeah, Ben.” The muscles in Jim’s temples moved as he chewed and I watched him eat. Jim fascinates me. He is so easy and never causes any trouble and even when the dinner table is in an uproar, he eats quietly and carefully and thinks about something else as he eats.
I held my laughter in, and with eyes closed from the effort, asked, “Why did you eat a marble?” Ben waved his arm dramatically. “I was playing with a marble in my mouth the other night, and then I fell asleep.” Ben shrugged. “And I swallowed it.”
“Ben,” Maddie cried, “You could have choked and died!”
“Yes, Ben,” agreed, Jim, “That was not a good idea.”
Ben was confused. “Choking doesn’t have anything to do with dying.”
Travis and I spluttered and tried to explain it to him. Maddie repeated whatever Travis said. I closed my eyes and covered my mouth and repressed my sob-giggles. Ben went on and explained, “I don’t know why I put it in my mouth. It was something to do.”
Madeline repeated my response to that. “Well, next time play with it in your hands.”
I sighed. “I guess we need to take away all the marbles.”
Jim put his fingers on a crouton and I gently shook my head. He grinned guiltily and picked it up with his fork.
“Oh,” cried Ben, “Will you take away the marble machine too?”
I shrugged helplessly. Travis shoved another bite of chicken into his mouth and Ben glared at Travis. “Dad, why do you eat so fast?”
Dinner ended. Hopefully there are no more missing marbles.
Like this:
Sandusky’s Effect on Coaches and Teachers
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Abuse on January 17, 2012
Last night, I read an article written by Phil Taylor from Sports Illustrated called The Sandusky Effect, and like so many things written by ex-athletes and sportswriters regarding the Penn State scandal, it ignored the 
perspective of abused children. See SI, January 9, 2012, at 80. Taylor does not exactly defend Sandusky as much as he complains that because of Sandusky’s alleged rape of a boy, Taylor is afraid to give the boys he coaches a ride home from practice. Taylor complains that when his players “come out of a game, [he] wonder[s] if it’s o.k. to squeeze a shoulder as a sign of appreciation. Why is it so important to squeeze a boy’s shoulder anyway? How serious of a loss is this?
To Taylor, not being able to squeeze shoulders or give hugs represents a huge loss. He writes, “One-on-one interaction between player and coach, innocent and valuable, is lost.” Really? I call bullshit. Just because physical contact must be limited “to gestures like a high-five or a fist bump” does not mean that boys will not receive the mentoring and instruction they need or want from male authority figures. What it does mean is that unsuspecting boys will not be fondled, abused and raped by men who wear the misleading outer garments of a trustworthy adult. It means that physical boundaries of boys and girls will be viewed as mattering. Mattering greatly.
It strikes me as odd that Taylor bends over backwards to state that the “recent allegations against Sandusky . . . are still unproved,” as if there is any doubt (in a non-legal sense) that Sandusky sexually abused boys. Taylor could have simply stated, for the purposes of journalistic integrity, that abuse was alleged. Adding the words “Still unproven” indicates a snarky disbelief that anything “really happened” in the Penn State locker room. He does add, almost reluctantly, that the “increased attention” resulting from the case has made parents more vigilant and abuse victims “more willing to come forward,” and categorizes these as “welcome developments.”
And then, after this barest hint of a genuflection to the cause of abuse victims, Taylor undermines it by whining, “what about the overwhelming majority of coaches, those of us who have no dark motives?” In other words, what about me? What about my needs as a coach and a father and an adult? And this is exactly the mindset that leads pedophiles to attack boys and girls. They need; they want; they take; they touch; they rape and through it all, they never stop to consider the victim’s welfare.
For years, sexual abuse victims had no voice. And when victims did begin to speak out and share their stories, folks shunned the victims or attacked their credibility. So often, my own parents sat around the dining room table, glasses tinkling in the background, and gasped over the latest broken reputation. “How can they believe these allegations?” They asked, and I’d sit there in my chair and squirm as my folks batted down the science of unlocking repressed memories. “How can we believe adults who are just now coming forward to report what supposedly happened to them as children? Some therapist or shrink planted the story,” Dad would opine, and Mom would nod and murmur, “Just horrible, those shrinks are all in it to make a dollar. They make more dollars if their patients were molested.” And I’d tune them out as they bemoaned the fact that coaches and teaches could not longer so much as touch a student or an athlete.
I’m an adult now, with children of my own, and to my parents and their ilk, and to Taylor and his ilk, I call bullshit. If you coach or teach children, go right ahead and give them a hug if they need one. This isn’t so much about your needs: it’s about what the children need. But by all means, if hugging the children makes you frightened or uncomfortable, then don’t lay hands on them. Problem solved. Or if you need to talk with a child privately
, leave the door open or chat in the corner of a gym in full view of everyone else. Never talk to a child who is not related to you alone in a vehicle. And if guidelines meant to protect the children you teach or coach annoy, frustrate or stymie you in your efforts as a teacher or a coach, then go find another avocation, because I’m thinking you don’t belong in this one.
Like this:
Create Your Own Super Hero Contest
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Uncategorized on January 16, 2012
Rules:
1. Pick your cause — funny or serious — and send in a visual representation of your Super Hero to elfarrisburke@gmail.com. You can use any medium: a drawing, a cartoon, a photograph, a collage.
2. Please include with your submission an explanation of what your Super Hero is fighting for (or against, as the case may be).
3. You may submit until January 24, 2012 at 9 PM EST.
4. On January 25, 2012 at 7 am, Renee at http://rasjacobson.com/ will announce the winner of El’s Strong Enough to Escape From Hell Create Your Own Super Hero Contest.
One lucky winner will receive a $20 gift card to Barnes and Noble.
{Knowledge is power, people. We find that knowledge in books.}
Like this:
Letters of Gratitude Unsent
Posted by Running from Hell with El in Therapy on January 13, 2012
I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank you, but I don’t really know how I can. At least I can share my gratitude here and hope that in some way, some day, I can thank you. How do we thank people when their job is to take care of us? How can we repay someone when the bill has already been paid but the amount written on the check feels so fucking inadequate? My heart is full of this beautiful but bittersweet thing called gratitude, and it hurts not to be able to share it.
Perhaps we all feel close to our therapists, but you’re not the only therapist I’ve seen professionally, or known. But this isn’t about how close I feel to my therapist. I consciously have tried not to make you into a mother figure, and although you have comforted me many times when I was sad, we’ve also laughed together a lot. And we have thought together, which works for me.
I don’t know how different you are from most other therapists, but I do know that you answer all of my damn calls and e-mails. When I felt bad about calling you so much, you told me that it was your job to worry about your boundaries. I know a lot of therapists wouldn’t have taken all of those calls on their emergency line that I’ve made over the last couple of years. I know that you have made a difference in my life. You have helped piece me back together even as you have sat beside me and helped me sort through the puzzle that is my past.
You helped me when I thought my marriage was over. Hell, you took my call when I was hiding in the bathroom in some hotel somewhere, and you said just the right thing to calm me down. That night, you heard me and let me know you cared about me. Maybe this is what all therapists do . . . I don’t know. All I know is that it is what you did to help me. When I told you I was raped, and that I had just broken through to the memory, you sat on the phone with me for an hour on a weekend day. I have no idea what you didn’t get to do with your family that day because you spent the time to listen to me. I was desperate that day; many times I have been desperate, and some of those times I called you, and more times I did not, but felt safe knowing that I could reach out to you. You made a difference that day and on many other days.
You’ve taught me a lot of tools that I use every day. For example, when I want to hurt myself, and just the other day I felt sad and crazy like that, I thought of what you would say, and I laid down on my bedroom floor and waited for the moment to pass. And it did. And by the way: you trusted me to sort things like that out on my own when you just as easily could have insisted that I get my ass to a hospital or urged me to get myself committed. You were never irresponsible with me, but you trusted me, and in turn, I grew stronger and learned to trust myself too.
You said that after 30 years of practice, your work was more like an art than a science. I see that in how you’ve worked with me. Yes, you follow a process, but you also follow my cues. And make no mistake: you’ve done excellent work with me. Like an artist using just the right brush strokes, you have brought the right mix of laughter, advice, listening, and whatever the hell else you use to help fix me.
I think you know how grateful I am. I hope you do. Even if you’re “just doing your job,” or following the therapeutic process, you’ve done great work with me. Is the job you’ve done with me objectively measurable? Maybe not. Maybe, however, it is. I do know that I am 160 pages into a novel that I could not have written 2 years ago. Depressed people don’t write novels. They lie on the floor and wait for the pain to pass. Or they pull it together for their family’s sake and ache and hurt and pray that one day, they will feel like living again. I am living and thriving and writing and while I have a ways to go yet before I am fully recovered, I am on the road to being healthy. And honestly, I could not have done it without you.
If I could, I would, somehow, someday, thank you.
Like this:
-
You are currently browsing the archives for January, 2012
