officially freaked out... - updated

at 2:00 today i go to buck's school to talk to the teaching team to get them on board w/ his care. this is totally freaking me out. i'm not sure if it's the exhaustion or just feeling like things will get lost in translation or just that i don't know most of these people other than his homeroom teacher (who i love) - and feel insecure and inadequate or what... but i just want to crawl under the covers and hide.

i'm all fluttery inside and can't even identify what is next. i actually think i inherited liam's anxiety this morning over his open house tomorrow. he's not doing so well either... actually even worse than i am. i know that this is good and rescuing him is not helpful in the big picture, but in the small picture my latent co-dependent genes want to kick in. i committed to only doing what i was asked to by him, and only if i wanted to - and so far he hasn't really asked, so i'm not really helping. his lone-ranger act is going to wear thin soon though. he's sick and got all of the family stress on top of it all.

i just wish i could calm myself down. i figured maybe writing about it might help... and a shower... :)

i am up to this time with the staff - it's teaching and i love to teach. and i don't have to be a diabetic expert - i'm the "buck" expert, right? i want to bend their hearts to my son, and that i am prepared to do. i think more than anything is that i'm afraid i will cry. these are total strangers (mostly) and i go too deep too fast and don't want to leave myself out on a limb i can't climb back from gracefully...

please pray if you are the praying kind. much love!

UPDATE: i don't know what i was so freaked out by... well, maybe i do, but it wasn't the meeting, or at least it shouldn't have been. i think it was the fact that this was the next stage of letting my baby grow. educating the school meant he had to go back. the meeting went so well, it was only the teacher and the resource center teacher who handles this already for a 3rd grader. the plan of care is wonderful, he's monitored well and has ample help and support if/when he needs it. it made me feel like it was actually possible to let go.

buck went to school today and all of the details were a bit overwhelming, but i managed it well and he did fine. he posted the lowest numbers he's had yet at lunch, so there was a bit of concern - but it was handled well and he self-identified not feeling "normal" and went and asked for help.

he has walked to and from school this year and really enjoys it. he has a good friend and really wanted to join him again coming home tonight. those last 10 minutes before he got home were a bit anxious for me, but i saw him come up over the hill and slide around with his friends in the back driveway and it brought tears to my eyes to see him being so "normal" again.

we've got a three day weekend here so the doctor is going to get a bit more aggressive about bringing down his blood sugar to normal levels. we should be able to manage by the end of the weekend. we've still got 2 checks in the middle of the night, but i'm sure i'd be up worried like a new mom the first time her baby sleeps through the night if we didn't right now.

thanks so much for your prayers!

done

well, we finished our final class for this module today and it feels so good to be done. the trauma of the death of my girlfriend's daughter on top of everything else just threw quite a bit into an already full cup. i think i went deeper in the times of silence and contemplation than i might have gone without it, but that too adds some intensity that depleted my supplies even further. i am happy to be done. it was amazing and i loved the process. i had a hard time engaging into a lot of the social aspects as so many times it required another sitter and i think the fact that people were coming in and out again made me not want to really have to say goodbye. it's different to be living in the place everyone comes to, instead of being transplanted myself.

it feels good to be home and know that all that is required of me is to top some home made pizzas and enjoy a movie with my family.

hope you all had a great couple of weeks, i'll post more soon, really.

connection

i was finally able to connect with my friend yesterday. it was like no time had passed, but we both knew so much had, and terrible time too. but our souls were still very close. i had prayed much for the words of life and light. so many things said at these times hurt and wound more deeply. i didn't want any of my words to be hurtful. i pray they weren't. i rest in the assurance of the love with which they were spoken.

details are still so sketchy and confusion and questions are large, but there is peace in the storm and clarity when needed. generosity is being offered on many fronts and they have a safe bubble for the time being.

i have been trying to tap some friends to work out a flight and travel arrangements so i could attend the funeral, but my own exhaustion, my daughter's sadness and just too many details in too short a time seem like this may not happen. she understands and knows her support will be full. i think a trip later might be better timed, and we'd like to bring them here to rest and get away when things get hard.

i'm not sleeping well at all. my brain just won't seem to shut down in the early morning hours. i really need a jammy day. i'm spent. there went the alarm. i guess it's time to start the day. thanks again for your prayers and support.

i am so loving this

sarah louise asked if i took a picture in front of the house for my first day of school. i was actually thinking about it - but knew that i couldn't post it here anyway, so i didn't (and i was a bit distracted getting the kids to where they needed to be so that we could walk to class). we live 1/2 way between our church and the university so we can walk to everything. it's so cool. some of our classes are at the church because our group is bigger than it's been before so the rooms there are better for most of them.

one of the best things about this program is that they specifically build spiritual formation into the schedule. one of our four classes is ignatian prayer. we had our first time with that today and it was incredible. our spiritual director is such a gentle, lovely woman. i just adore her.

i am also just so tickled that 1/2 the class is women like me and that this community isn't at all threatened by our voices. there is no jockeying for a place at the table, no preference given to the males in the room and such an openness to hearing our story, even our difficult ones. i can tell some of the men in the group aren't this used to women fully participating. it's wonderful that the profs love this too and that god can use their uncomfortableness to crack their hearts open.

gotta go liam made dinner - god bless him. i have no energy to hardly even type. the mental exhaustion is overwhelming. i'm journalling tons, so i'll have lots to share later.

love and miss you all!

first day of school

i feel like i'm twelve. anxious and excited, dreading and ready to quit. oh well, here i go.

brain too full... can't fit any more in...

okay, it's official. i am overwhelmed. too much reading. too much to fit together. too much unknown. i'd love to have the posts i wrote in my head on the way to and from the dentist the other day. they were beautiful. now? zip. nothing... nadda.

maybe just typing will clear away some of the haze. maybe not...

classes begin on monday. monday. it's real. really, really real. of course i just found out on sunday that my two kids have PD days on monday and tuesday. so instead of having some gallivanting time with my kiddos i have classes and they have NOTHING. getting childcare lined up is one of the things i loathe about parenting. it's probably why i didn't re-enter the work world. i hate asking people for help. my kids are 9 & 11 and other than a week in the year i or liam look after them. sure there are baby sitters from time to time, or they spend a weekend with friends occasionally - but really this is pathetic. it's not that i don't trust other people with my kids, it's just because i hate asking for help. it feels like i'm shirking my duties as a mom. i know that's not true and this is important and finally i am doing something for me - but dang i hate asking.

i have called the after school club and found out it's just $6.00/day/per kid and $18.00 for the full day. they make all meals and give the kids snacks so it's a very reasonable alternative (and saves me from having to do the dreaded ask). but of course this is the least popular alternative with pink and buck. i've told them a couple of times to just suck it up, but that isn't seeming to help. (well, not in those exact words...)

speaking of buck. i just got a phone call from the principle. seems my non-violent son who rarely gives us a minute of trouble picked a book off of a girl's desk today at school and it was apparently a bad idea. she grabbed his ear and took him to the floor. in retaliation he grabbed hers back and eventually kicked her (he said probably to get her to let go). the principle said buck admitted it and apologized but he'll still be spending the whole day in the resource room... i explained that there is no greater way to punish buck than to deprive him of people. it will be a torturous day for him being alone. i can imagine he will never make this choice again. poor kid.

so i'm doing all i can to avoid all of the reading i have to do. there is no possible way i can have it all done in time for classes as we signed up very late in the game. this is fine with all of the faculty, they know us well and we have a whole year before our next actual module because the spring module is a travel one. we won't be traveling until spring 2010, so we'll have lots of time to catch up, but i definitely would get much more out of the classes if i put my nose back into a book. i just hate the deadline. there are so many things i am loving reading - but have to skim because i can't read and relish the thoughts because i have to actually move on to the next thing. and then there are those dinosaurs that i loathe reading and am trying to plow through just to get them done.

and then of course i can't even enjoy the lovely fiction i can't live without because i feel so guilty reading it instead of assigned reading that it's screwing with everything. and then i think... dang. i'm paying for this. shut up, stop whinging and suck it up.

speaking of paying for this... the financial aid director advised us to apply because she felt we were good candidates for grants. the provincial office said that we should have figures tomorrow. it would be amazing if there were funds available to us that weren't loans. if you are a praying sort any lifted for governmental generosity would be amazing. back to the books... oh and i don't mean facebook...

it's official

well, minus the financial transactions liam and i are officially enrolled to begin our masters degrees as of today. it hardly seems real. i have been up to my eyeballs in amazon searches, used books and tons of reading. we're doing the module program here, even though we're local it is the best alternative for our family and liam's work. lots of reading and writing on our own and the first of the two weeks intensives in october. i'll be blogging this from my 'named' blog instead of here, but i just wanted to explain in case things drop off severely due to the fact that i should (even now) have my face firmly planted in a book (non-fiction, ugh) :)

study help from zefrank

this makes me want to go back to school (oh yeah, i am...)

study then sleep

Famous Divinity School Dropouts.

i find this article fascinating. i could 'add' one to the list - richard simmons. i guess he once was studying to be a priest at the dubuque, iowa catholic thomas aquinas seminary. that was always the rumor that went around the school after the bible college bought it???

Neatorama » Blog Archive » Famous Divinity School Dropouts.

school's out for summer!

yes, we just finished - they go a couple weeks later in the season that the US schools.

when they got home i called everybody into the living room - we all joined hands and then liam and i did the crazy-leg, spastic dance yelling "SCHOOL'S OUT, SCHOOL'S OUT, YIPEE!!!" the kids were so shocked it took them a sec to start dancing too. buck said 'oh, i thought we were going to pray!' :) nice to know we can still surprise them!

so things change once again here... i know i didn't accomplish nearly enough personally in this past season, but i must cut myself some slack because we accomplished so very much on the relocation front. so WELCOME SUMMER!! i will try to embrace you, embrace my full-house, the humidity and heat and find quiet, pockets of cool and solitude along the way.

why didn't i ever have these guys for science class?

this is a great way to spend 3 minutes of your life watching this - so creative!

EepyBird.com - Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment

do you have to ride the short bus??

can you pass 3rd grade?

take this geography quiz:

click here

five golden rings

liam and i were talking the other day about our childhoods and i shared something with him he never knew before. i don't know that i had ever spoken it out loud to anyone.

one of my favorite memories of my early years took place in 3rd grade. i blogged about my 2nd grade experience here and re-reading it brought back so many memories for me.

my 3rd grade teacher was mrs. morris. she was also my kindergarten teacher. as i spoke about this time to liam i realized how much this woman meant to me. kindergarten was a wonderful experience for me, mrs. morris made it safe and fun and filled with wonder. i was very happy to have her again in 3rd grade. when i spoke of this to liam i realized that meant she was my teacher before the rape, and after.

i told him of the highlight of my acting career. every year the school would have a christmas program. this was a highly creative school and it was far more than 9 christmas carols sung by each grade - each class had a wonderful production of their own and mrs. morris decided that year we would base our production on the 12 days of christmas. now there were 21 kids in our class - so to fit them all into '12' she had to be very creative.

a low kind of puppet stage was placed in front of all of us and when it was time for our portion of the song we were to stand up sing our part and perform the small routine we had learned. you know the song, the five golden rings is the feature of the carol - it's held out and repeated so many times in the song. i told liam how amazed i am now that i was chosen to be the '5 golden rings girl'. there were so many in our class who were more popular, fit the pretty child mold and were far bigger hams for the part. somehow she gave it to me.

i think it was because she saw the change. between the girl she knew 3 years prior and the girl that i had become. i think she saw the spark that was gone from my eyes, that i needed greatly to be the '5 golden rings girl' and feel feminine and honored. my 'costume' was a glamorous long formal glove that went all the way up my little arm, and on each finger (thumb included) i had a large chunky ring of costume jewelry. when it was my turn i stood, held out my hand to display my rings and belted out 'five golden rings'. standing between the 4 calling birds and the 6 geese a laying i felt like a princess.

i'm sure she has passed on, but mrs. morris is one person i hope i meet in heaven. her nurture and care of that little red haired girl meant the world to me and i am so grateful for her involvement in my life.

my refrigerator box

it was 2nd grade, the school year after the abuse. my teacher was mrs. wilson. it was 1973, but she still had a huge beehive hairdoo and cats eye glasses with the cord that held them to her neck. her classroom was a wonder to behold for my 7 year old mind. there was a library and a story carpet and a science center - with a real, live octopus floating in formaldehyde, and a paper wasps nest hanging from the ceiling suspended on a branch. this was a place of learning, a place of inspiration, a place that i adored.

my favorite place in the whole room was the three cardboard refrigerator boxes at the back of the room that were for reading.

i loved them. they made me feel safe. no one could sneak up on me and i could always see them coming. why couldn't more of life be like that? places of safety that allow us to see what's coming. i hate feeling out of control or blindsided.

those boxes gave me an island of security that nothing else in my little life held for me. my own home had become a place of fear and loathing. i remember i started wetting the bed after the abuse, and having terrible, frightening nightmares.

they were always the same. the tin man, lion and scarecrow would be walking toward me, and i was excited, feeling like dorothy on my way to oz. then they just started to float at me at high speed, and i couldn't move. my feet were cemented to the ground, and it wouldn't stop, over and over until i woke up ashamed in cold, wet sheets.

i'd lay in bed and cry. failing at comforting myself and so confused as to why this was happening, i'd strip off my wet nightgown and crawl into my parents room. i'd sit inside the door listening to them breathe, so sound asleep, and i'd shiver. i was so cold, i remember being so very cold.

i'd crawl to the end of their bed and try to wrap myself in the bottom of their chenille bedspread to keep warm. it did't work. by the time i'd finally crawl under the covers at the base of their bed it would be almost morning. rarely was i well received to be found smelling of pee at the end of their bed. i was shamed and ashamed. i would slink to my room and roll up my bedsheets and take them to the basement.

so getting to school and finding a box that kept me safe, even for the 20 minutes a day was a godsend. thank you mrs. wilson.

Barnard Commencement 2004 Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich

it's long, but well worth the read:

It is a total thrill to share this day with you today. I really feel honored to participate.

How many of you are parents of graduates? What I'm really curious about is how you managed to get here today, after paying all that money for tuition - Greyhound bus? I put two kids thru Ivy League myself, which meant I had to hitchhike to their ommencement ceremonies.

I had another speech prepared for today- all about the cost of college and how the doors to higher education are closing to all but the wealthy. It was a good speech -lots of laugh lines - but 2 weeks ago something came along that wiped the smile right off my face. You know, you saw them too - the photographs of American soldiers sadistically humiliating and abusing detainees in Iraq.

These photos turned my stomach - yours too, I'm sure. But they did something else to me: they broke my heart. I had no illusions about the United States mission in Iraq, but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

There was the photo of Specialist Sabrina Harman smilng an impish little smile and giving the thumbs sign from behind a pile of naked Iraqi men - as if to say, "Hi mom, here I am in Abu Ghraib!"

We've gone from the banality of evil... to the cuteness of evil.

There was the photo of Private First Class Lynndie England dragging a naked Iraqi man on a leash. She's cute too, in those cool cammy pants and high boots. He's grimacing in pain. If you were doing PR for al Qaeda, you couldn't have staged a better picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the world. And never underestimate the misogyny of the real enemy, which was never the Iraqis; it was and should be the Al Qaeda-type fundamentalist extremists: Two weeks ago in eastern Afghanistan, suspected Taliban members (I thought we had defeated them, but never mind) ... poisoned three little girls for the crime of going to school. That seems to be the attitude in that camp: In the case of women: better dead than well-read. But here in these photos from Abu
Ghraib, you have every Islamic fundamentalist stereotype of Western culture -- all nicely arranged in one hideous image-- imperial arrogance, sexual depravity ... and gender equality.

Now we don't know whether women were encouraged to partcipate. All we know is they didn't say no. Of the 7 US soldiers now charged with the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 3 are women : Harman, England and Megan Ambuhl.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so shocked. Certainly not about the existence of abuse. Reports of this and similar abuse have been leaking out of Guantanamo and immigrant detention centers in NYC for over a year We know, if we've been paying attention, that similar kinds of abuse, including sexual humiliation, are not unusual in our own vast US prison system.

We know too, that good people can do terrible things under the right circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram found in his famous experiments in the 1960s. Sabrina and Lynndie are not congenitally evil people. They are working class women who wanted to go to college and knew the military as the quickest way in that direction. Once they got in, they wanted to fit in.

And I shouldn't be surprised either because I never believed that women are innately less aggressive than men. I have argued this repeatedly - once with the famously macho anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. When he kept insisting that women are just too nice and incapable of combat, I answered him the best way I could: I asked him if he wanted to step outside...

I have supported full opportunity for women within the military, in part because -- with rising tuition-- it's one of the few options around for low-income young people.

I opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, but at the same time I was proud of our servicewomen and delighted that their presence irked their Saudi hosts.

Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would eventually change the military, making it more respectful of other people and their cultures, more capable of genuine peace keeping.

That's what I thought, but I don't think that any more.

A lot of things died with those photos.

The last moral justification for the war with Iraq died with those photos. First the justification was the supposed weapons of mass destruction. Then it was the supposed links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden - those links were never found either. So the final justification was that we had removed an evil dictator who tortured his own people. As recently as April 30, George Bush exulted that the torture chambers of Iraq were no longer operating. Well, it turns out they were just operating under different management. We didn't displace Saddam Hussein; we replaced him. And when you throw in the similar abuses in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, in immigrant detention centers and US prisons, you see that we have created a spreading regime of torture - an empire of pain.

But there's another thing that died for me in the last couple of weeks - a certain kind of feminism or, perhaps I should say, a certain kind of feminist naiveté.

It was a kind of feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Maybe this sort of feminism made more sense in the 1970s. Certainly it seemed to make sense when we learned about the rape camps in Bosnia in the early 90s. There was a lot of talk about women then - I remember because I was in the discussions - about rape as an instrument of war and even war as an extension of rape.

I didn't agree, but I didn't disagree very loudly either. There seemed to be at least some reason to believe that male sexual sadism may somehow be deeply connected to our species' tragic propensity for violence.

That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.

But it's not just the theory of this naïve feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision for change rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women are morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that made women superior- or maybe the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority was beyond debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our culture, and
in polls are consistently less inclined toward war than men.

Now I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today. Here's Mary Jo Melone, a columnist in the St. Petersburg Times, writing on May 7:

"I can't et this picture of [Pfc. Lynndie] England out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, but that we were morally superior to them."

Now the implication of this assumption was that all we had to do to make the world a better place - kinder, less violent, more just - was to assimilate into what had been, for so many centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could become the CEOs, the senators, the generals, the judges and opinion-makers - because that was really the only fight we had to undertake.

Because once they gained power and authority, once they had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society, women would naturally work for change.

That's what we thought, even if we thought it unconsciously. And the most profound thing I have to say to you today, as a group of brilliant young women poised to enter the world - is that it's just not true.

You can't even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that the problem was that there just weren't ENOUGH women in the military hierarchy to stop the abuses.

The prison was directed by a woman, General Janis Karpinski. The top US intelligence official in Iraq, who was also responsible for reviewing the status of detainees prior to their release, was a woman, Major Gen. Barbara Fast.

And the US official ultimately responsible for the managing the occupation of Iraq since last October was Condoleezza Rice. What we have learned, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the foundation of morality. This does not mean gender equality isn't worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. And I will keep fighting for it as long as I live.

Gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world. What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly, is that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of moral superiority on the part of women is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism.

Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman - whether a diploma, a promotion, a right to serve alongside men in the military - is ipso facto - by its very nature -- a victory for humanity.

And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle - the struggle for gender equality - when in fact we have many more. The struggles for peace, for social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance ... cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.

Women do not change institutions simply just by assimilating into them. But - and this is the "but" on which all my hopes hinge - a CERTAIN KIND of woman can still do that-- and this is where you come in. We need a kind of woman who can say NO, not just to the date rapist or overly persistent boyfriend, but to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

We need a kind of woman who doesn't want to be one of the boys when the boys are acting like sadists or fools.

And we need a kind of woman who isn't trying to assimilate, but to infiltrate - and subvert the institutions she goes into. YOU can be those women. And as the brightest and best educated women of your generation, you better be. First, because our nation is in such terrible trouble - hated worldwide, and not just by the fundamentalist fanatics. My version of patriotism is simple: When the powerful no longer act responsibly, then it is our responsibility to take the power away from them. You have to become tough-minded activists for change because the entire feminist project is also in terrible trouble worldwide. That project, which is minimally about the achievement of equality with men, is threatened by fundamentalisms of all kinds - Christian as well as Islamic. But we cannot successfully confront that threat without a moral vision that goes beyond gender equality. To cite an old - and far from naïve -- feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low."

It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

I'm counting on you. I want YOU to be the face of American women that the world sees -- not those of Sabrina or Megan or Lynndie or Condoleezza.

Don't let me down. Take your hard-won diplomas, your knowledge and your talents and go out there and RAISE HELL!