Letter to a child's therapist, teacher, counselor: Remember my kids.

Dear Therapist,

Dear Teacher. Dear Mediator. Dear School Counselor. Dear anybody whose job it is to labor largely unthanked on behalf of children day in and day out, trying to find some way to help the ones who no one can help, to patch up garish wounds that gape large and ugly and bleeding with small Band-Aids, to take a child with no background knowledge and no winter jacket and teach that child to read, to teach that child to think and imagine; I have to talk to you.

I have three sons. And I don't know about your children, if you have them, but mine come with some of their stitching showing on the outside. Some of that stitching is faulty impulse control, faulty attention-paying wiring, faulty mood-control, faulty auditory processing. These three boys are the most beautifully wrought works of art I have ever cast eyes on, and part of that beauty is this faulty thread-work. Like the lazy line across a Navajo rug, it makes each of them more authentic. It can also make them first class pains in the ass.

Let me tell you a story. I have to tell it so that you will understand me. It is my story. This story is the reason I am writing.

I was a gifted child. I brought smiles of indulgence to the lips of every teacher that had me, teased by the delight of having met a child who could take what they taught further than they they imagined. Teachers; you know the tickled amusement I mean. I can appreciate it now that I have felt it myself teaching, now that a kindergartener has asked me politely how to spell "ocean" correctly. It is the unparalleled delight of knowing that, for once, you are not needed, that this child has bettered you, and you can bask in the delight of their blazing unfolding.

But when I hit middle school, I moved to a cruel and image-driven community, my family suffered a divorce and alcoholism, and a flaw that lay hidden in the weft of my own stitch-work (clinical depression) was pulled. 

The thread unraveled. My grades plummeted. The child that had once been a source of delight for teachers became, when considered at all, someone to sigh over. I skipped school, spending days hiding six or seven hours under a blanket in my own bed, concealed, rather than face the confirmation of my personal worthlessness that was middle school. My English teacher would read my creative writing with pride to the class in my absence, but he didn't call my parents to ask why I wasn't there. No one pursued me into the darkness to try to get me to come out. I fell hard from great heights.

The world that had only cast its approving light upon me up til then, in expectation on my greatness, turned away from the embarrassment of my broken body on the ground. I made a lame suicide attempt, resulting in a traumatic trip to the ER, one psychiatrist visit and nothing. I made countless visits to a school counselor to tell him that I felt I was slipping off the cliff of sanity while he quietly nodded his head. Attempts to talk to talk to friends resulted ultimately in having no friends. I was twelve and I was alone in the dark, in a world suddenly changed from what it had been.

I spent six years of my life in active clinical depression, daily losing the battle fought with a darkness that consumed the edges of Truth and cast Life in shades of bloody, lonely pain. I developed drug addiction and later, bulimia. There were angels along my way who reached out to try and  do what they could, but, for the most part, the world in general was more than willing to lose me. Most of my angels were losing their own battles with Life. The people who were winning were too busy looking away to grant the gift of seeing me.

At the age of eighteen, I fought my way crawling on my stomach with my bloody fingertips to Alcoholics Anonymous and taught myself, with help, to live. I am still learning. But I have learned a lot, if only through having made such absolutely prodigious mistakes. I have recovered from problems and events that many people cannot say out loud without a shudder, and I have stitched them into the fabric of my life, so that they have made me stronger and more flexible.

I have this to say to you out of all this experience: We cannot afford to lose children. Not without fighting. We need to stop acting like it is OK or it is inevitable that children suffer unbearable pain in this world. If, in truth, we can do nothing to stop or ease this pain, we need not let them suffer it alone. If we lose them to drug addiction, to illiteracy, to mental illness, let it be only after we have unleashed the Spanish Armada on their behalf, after we have shot every bit of ammunition in our stores, after we lie out of breath, exhausted from the effort. Let it not be for lack of imagination, lack of focus, lack of compassion.

Think about the times you have suffered the greatest pain. Maybe you were injured. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you lost a loved one. I hope that you did not do this alone. I hope that someone held your hand and kept holding it, and that this person looked you in the eye and did not look away. I hope that they did not get up and leave while you were most afraid. 

Please do not tell me my child is just going through a phase. Please do not tell me that all we can do is wait. Please do not imply that their failing to reach their potential as human beings is just OK, somehow inevitable. They may be one of many to you, and you may be tired. You may have seen so many, so many that you could not help and for whom the future was lost. Their faces may pass by you in a collage of hazy images. I understand. But let my child never become an item on your calendar, a name on a  list.

I don't need you to have the answers. I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you are willing to fight with me, for the life of my child. It is all I have ever wanted from you, for all these years, when I stood here talking about my child's ADHD, my child's language processing problem, my child's depression. Fight with me. You may have weapons I do not know how to use. Together, we can give my child what he needs.

Remember: These boys are the most beautiful things ever wrought. They are born to inspire. They are born to be inspired. I brought them forth out of pure possibility, knowing nothing of how to parent and without a cent to my name, with nothing but the power of my unspoken promise that they would never go without a single needed thing that I could fight for them to have. They never have. And I will crawl again on my stomach, my fingers bloodied anew, for as long as it takes, to see any of them safe and empowered while there is yet breath in my body. 

I woke this morning and heard this song (below) on my playlist. Judy Collins' son killed himself in 1992 after years of alcoholism and depression. I don't know his story. She wrote this song long before his death. You can hear her trying to hope for his future in the lyrics. I can't stop listening to it. I need to do more than hope. 

Compassion and persistence are my promise to my children. Can you help me?

Sincerely,

a mother

Now I remember.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt:   Post a picture of you that you like, write about yourself, post a video - what do you want your self-portrait to say about you? via Kristen at http://kristendomblogs.com/

I was a creative kid, and I always thought I was going to be special. 

My family taught me to believe that I was brilliant and I could change the world.

I had my first son when I was twenty-two. I was a very young twenty-two, but I was a good mother. 

I just didn't know yet that the most important thing in the world was not going to end up being whether or not my kids played with wooden Waldorf toys but whether or not they could learn to make lives worthy of their putting their socks and shoes on everyday; lives that make them catch their breath and forge onward, even when it hurts, because the pain is not as big as the feeling of inspiration that they have learned how to summon.

Photo by Samara Graham, 2010

I had Mikalh when I was twenty-nine, after my divorce and before Mike and I got married. I wasn't expecting to have any more kids, and I had just traveled right into the fiery heart of Mordor and, in a convulsion of mingled despair and blind faith, tossed in everything that had gone before. 

Mikalh made room in my heart for the faith to believe that I could do it all over again because, despite anything else, he was going to be the most loved baby in the world. 

His love of literature and creative pursuits has touched the part of my soul that remembers knowing I could do whatever I wanted and be whomever I chose. He has made me believe again.

Photo by Samara Graham, 2010

My family is the cornerstone of my life. I am not a career woman. I don't think that there is anything that argues with genuine feminism in saying that I choose to focus on the raising of my family, both for economic reasons and for personal ones. 

But for many years, I felt so defined by their needs that I could not really answer the question, "What do you enjoy?'

Now I remember.

I love ridiculous humor.

I love the naked truth where others want to obfuscate.

I love the human capacity to transform.

I love music that shatters the peace and music that holds my aching soul in its arms and tells me it understands.

I love garden soil.

I love to write.

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours: Words that Cut to the Bone of Truth

I invite you to re-visit this post from last December as part of A Writer Weaves a Tale's Old-Post Resurrection Hop. Check Sandra out. She's a brilliant writer and her blog a way-station for talent.

Words that cut to the bone of truth, sawing away muscle and fat, leaving bare the skeleton of what it means to be human, in all its starkly bloody glory.

Words that take me to the heart of who I am and what I feel.

Photo by Mark

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours

5 AM. The pain of my fibromyalgia has woken me up to send ripples of flame that spread down my forearms and lick the web between each finger, bringing me moment by moment further from the sleep my body desperately needs. A deeper, hotter fire pours down the column of my spine and fills my sacrum, making it a vessel of aching cramp. A persistent nausea pulls at my insides. 

In the war between discomfort and exhaustion, discomfort has won. I will get up. I will write.

Photo by Jilly

2 PM. The baby that my arms still remember, who smelled of a fresh sweetness as bafflingly ambrosial as a morning bakery, the boy whose soft possibility touches the core of my longing to want good in the world, that boy is sobbing on my couch, having been physically and mentally wounded in his daily battle with Life. 

His cries feel like jagged glass, like punches to my stomach.

At this moment in time, his soul is a crushed tin can beneath the foot of the world. His body curls inward, protecting himself. He is a fetal image again, a sprouting bean, or something bent-maybe not yet broken. I catch my breath, and beg myself for the capacity to remember that this is just a moment in time that can pass. 

If I let myself live inside that strangled sob, inside that inward-bent body, I may soon be crushed again myself, as I was when I had to pass through Scylla and Charybdis to become a grown woman myself. But I will not let him pass through alone, if he could know someone is with him and that he is loved. 

Something is always torn and bloody when a child is birthed. New tears rend me as they grow and I let myself feel the disquiet of Life as it shapes the men they will become. Sometimes all I have to offer these children is an outstretched hand.

Photo by Jenny Downing

6 PM. My church community has gathered in the darkness of December around an elaborate double spiral of pine boughs in our icy church parking lot, to usher in the winter solstice. 

The planning for this has been halting, filled with confusion, miscommunication, and emotional exhaustion. Leading up to this moment, I have felt more than once like stepping away from the project. 

Community is never what you think it is. It is always unkempt, filled with unintended power struggles and accidental slights; with the tireless wars we launch daily in the practice of attempting to live together.

Chanting begins, led by teenagers with a chant they have learned at a youth con, "Spiraling into the center, the center of the web, we are the weavers, we are the woven ones, we are the dreamers, we are the dream..." The background is punctuated by the sounds of the reverse signal of a backhoe that is moving snow nearby into great useless dunes by the roadside. 

Our community-elders, young children, teenagers, adults are moving into the center of a spiral, holding tiny pine cones to drop into a fire as an act of letting go. Upon reaching the center, they receive a candle and place it where they wish among the boughs on the arm of the spiral leading out. I am directing a child on crutches in an icy parking lot, listening to a persistent beeping, but, more-so, I am enveloped by the intention of the ritual. 

I desperately need to let go. I need to leave the self I thought I was in the light of summer in that fire and walk out with a new self, strong enough to meet the challenges Life has chosen, in its dazzling randomness, for me to face. I will do this, even if I must do it while prodding a crippled child whom, unbeknownst to me, I will later learn has already fallen with his crutches on the ice and suffered a concussion.

Photo by Kristine Coblentz

"Return again. Return again. Return again. Return to the home of your soul. Return to who you are. Return to what you are. Return to where you are. Born and reborn again. Return again..."

The comfort of the truth of these words washes over me. Where sweet encouragement to cheer me would sour in my ears, the beauty of darkness juxtaposed with light, the Truth of Nature and of being human holds me like a child in a mother's arms, comforting me with reality.

Litany. In the greatest darkness. Response: The light is reborn. Out of winter's cold. The light is reborn. From our deepest fears. The light is reborn. When we most despair. The light is reborn.  The light is reborn. The light is reborn. 

To end the ritual is my part. I lead the crowd inside, where seven children, fourth grade to ninth, guide us all competently, confidently, and gorgeously in the act of welcoming in the four directions and putting the ritual to rest. 

They say, finally, these words that I have written for them:

"The wheel of the year spins inward toward dark and quiet, outward toward light and creation. Again and again, it spins, and our lives spin with it, through happy times and sad, new inspirations and times of letting go.

Our lives mirror the beauty of the turning of the wheel.

We hope you will stay with us for cider and social time and that you will take with you the collective light of this community into the dark places you must go this coming year, and use it to germinate your dreams." 

I am bursting with pride in my community. We are raising bold children who know beauty, who can lead, who can think. We have wisdom among our elders in Los Alamos that would be the envy of any convocation of sages. Our families are vibrant, seeking, and strong.

In this moment, it is worth it to be human in a community, to suffer through emails that I don't understand, to bake a dozen cookies while getting ready for work, to attend meetings at the end of exhausting days, to struggle with how to live in beloved community.

I think that it is worth it to love the poetry of dark and light, to love the shadows that play around the edges of our lives, for the depth that they add to living.

If I live with more pain because I take the time to see them, I say I live, too, with more beauty.

Photo by Patrick Kelly

 This song makes me catch my breath and remember.

Notes on photos: The first three photos are creative-commons licensed searchable images that I found on Flickr. The fourth is a photo taken by my incredible, inspiring friend Kristine Coblentz at the Solstice ritual last night. She should also be credited with taking a huge leadership role in creating that ritual and having it be what it is. Her vision inspires me. The fifth photo was taken by me of my son Devin at our church's UU Nativity Pageant last Sunday, when he was a sheepishly smiling Caesar Augustus. The last photo is used with permission by my talented friend Patrick Kelly, whose gorgeous photographs can be found at http://photos.pmkelly.com/. Go look at them.