Friday, April 27, 2007
Breathing day
Man, so much has been going on lately, it seems like I can't post about anything in a timely fashion anymore!
Today I don't have too much to do except get ready to go out of town to a Democratic training session. The carpool leaves at 3am. *sigh* Sometimes living out here surrounded by vast rural beauty sucks.
Okay, catching up. As the splendiforous readers of Crabby Mike already know, on Tuesday he and I went on a field trip to a local prison as part of a program called Choices. It's intended to show impressionable youth that prison life is not much fun.
I was expecting something where they tried to scare the kids, and there were some minor low-key elements like that. What I wasn't expecting was to see half a dozen hardened repeat offenders tell their life stories in harrowing detail, sometimes crying. The message they drove home repeatedly was to TALK TO SOMEONE when things are happening that are driving you to desperation. Stand up with others at your school against bullying. You have more choice than you think, and the choices you make matter.
The lesson I came away with was that if we took a small percentage of the money we are GOING to be spending on prisons and put it into child protection services that actually DO something...we wouldn't be needing most of those prisons down the road.
Another thing that made this week a bit more of a trial than fully necessary was that someone (who meant well, I'm sure) pointed my daughter at the posts I have written about my personal difficulties in dealing with our situation.
Despite there being no identifying information connected to her name, and my assurance that EVEN IF ANYONE HAD THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST IN TRYING she would not come up in a Google search, nothing would do but for me to go and adjust my personal writing to suit her paranoid needs.
So, trying to be nice, I did. What that act of conciliation got me was...demands for more conciliations. Still, a chance for communication had unexpectedly opened, so I decided to try to use it to sort things out. I mean, someone has to be the grown-up, right?
It worked out about as well as you are probably guessing it did. Not. Basically we are living in two alternate, incompatible realities. In the D-verse, anything not 100% focused on her wants, needs and feelings is unwelcome. In fact, it doesn't even exist.
As Mike used to say, "OHHH WELL. Get used to it!"
Some good news is that things went much better with my therapist visit this time. I had a lot of new stuff to talk about, obviously, but also, Cindy herself brought up her feeling that we had gotten off to a poor start because she had formed the idea what I had come in to find a way to reconcile with my wayward child. She apologized really nicely, and that was that. Instead we talked about things like setting appropriate boundaries and ways to deal with recurring depressive thoughts.
One way was to think of something really silly and completely unrelated to whatever might start to weigh on my mind. She also mentioned pre-planned non-verbal cues to others, so they could change the subject in social situations if need be.
So I told Caro later, "When you see me stick myself in the neck with a fork, that means I need to be distracted."
That pretty much catches me up, I think.
Today I don't have too much to do except get ready to go out of town to a Democratic training session. The carpool leaves at 3am. *sigh* Sometimes living out here surrounded by vast rural beauty sucks.
Okay, catching up. As the splendiforous readers of Crabby Mike already know, on Tuesday he and I went on a field trip to a local prison as part of a program called Choices. It's intended to show impressionable youth that prison life is not much fun.
I was expecting something where they tried to scare the kids, and there were some minor low-key elements like that. What I wasn't expecting was to see half a dozen hardened repeat offenders tell their life stories in harrowing detail, sometimes crying. The message they drove home repeatedly was to TALK TO SOMEONE when things are happening that are driving you to desperation. Stand up with others at your school against bullying. You have more choice than you think, and the choices you make matter.
The lesson I came away with was that if we took a small percentage of the money we are GOING to be spending on prisons and put it into child protection services that actually DO something...we wouldn't be needing most of those prisons down the road.
Another thing that made this week a bit more of a trial than fully necessary was that someone (who meant well, I'm sure) pointed my daughter at the posts I have written about my personal difficulties in dealing with our situation.
Despite there being no identifying information connected to her name, and my assurance that EVEN IF ANYONE HAD THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST IN TRYING she would not come up in a Google search, nothing would do but for me to go and adjust my personal writing to suit her paranoid needs.
So, trying to be nice, I did. What that act of conciliation got me was...demands for more conciliations. Still, a chance for communication had unexpectedly opened, so I decided to try to use it to sort things out. I mean, someone has to be the grown-up, right?
It worked out about as well as you are probably guessing it did. Not. Basically we are living in two alternate, incompatible realities. In the D-verse, anything not 100% focused on her wants, needs and feelings is unwelcome. In fact, it doesn't even exist.
As Mike used to say, "OHHH WELL. Get used to it!"
Some good news is that things went much better with my therapist visit this time. I had a lot of new stuff to talk about, obviously, but also, Cindy herself brought up her feeling that we had gotten off to a poor start because she had formed the idea what I had come in to find a way to reconcile with my wayward child. She apologized really nicely, and that was that. Instead we talked about things like setting appropriate boundaries and ways to deal with recurring depressive thoughts.
One way was to think of something really silly and completely unrelated to whatever might start to weigh on my mind. She also mentioned pre-planned non-verbal cues to others, so they could change the subject in social situations if need be.
So I told Caro later, "When you see me stick myself in the neck with a fork, that means I need to be distracted."
That pretty much catches me up, I think.
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