May 2016

I love this essay about adult love and childhood abandonment. Maybe we are parenting and helping our children through grief and loss due to death, divorce, desertion or abandonment. Maybe we've been there ourselves. Children often can't or won't verbalize what they are thinking or feeling at the time. Maybe we read it in their body language. Maybe we need to ask. And sometimes it's just wonderful to read about the real lives of complex people doing such as being brave in love. This part...

My parenting was not ideal yesterday. I'd slept three hours and had a condo deal fall through days before closing. My house will still sell so I don't know where we'll be living in a few weeks. This is high stress. I was distracted, on the phone over 50 times with real estate people, the bank, attorneys, friends, town hall and rental places. Not fun. I cried a little but mostly felt an overwhelmed shutdown, the kind that comes with terrible thoughts. Like when the realtor says, "This has...

Have you heard or said how entitled kids today are? Maybe you think they expect too much and aren't as strong, resilient, capable or whatever as you or other adults? Maybe you can't imagine how they live - having so much, insisting on so much and texting so much. Maybe you think they are terrible and we were better. Maybe you admire them and wish you could trade places. Maybe generalizations make you uncomfortable or you just aren't sure what you to think about the generational changes or...

Please read this post and see the hand out. It's short and informative and I'm printing it out to talk about with my own teen. It's just another way to open the conversation on this. Staying Safe While Staying Connected via Emerald Montgomery

It's not trauma-informed if it's not informed by trauma survivors. I say this as a trauma survivor but even more as someone who has worked at a shelter for homeless families at a time when my own father was homeless. I saw class differences cause clashes that went beyond clumsy and awkward moments. People were hurt and dis-empowered at times by the very staffers working hard, and for low pay, to help. I was in college, and with only that as a qualification, told, during my first interview,...

"Here comes the diversity" I think when I drop my Asian daughter off at dance some nights. She is often the only person of color in her class, school and sometimes even at large competitions. It was true when she studied Irish Step or went to a Feis and it's true now that she does ballet, tap, jazz and lyrical. When I look for dance ornaments or dance-related trinkets, they are almost always Caucasian and I don't buy them. Maybe that will change now that there is a Misty Copeland Barbie doll...

Abandonment is the ACE described in this beautifully written letter. You might be my mom. Only you will know. I think about you often. I have visited the place where you left me, in that hedge in a beautiful straw basket with hand-knitted clothes, swathed in a blanket. This is where my identity was forged as a foundling. From that little bundle you left behind in 1965, a great big me was formed. A dog sniffed me out. That day not only changed your life for ever, it changed the dog’s owners’...

This month marks my tenths wedding anniversary. My ACE score is five. I have four children who are 8, 7, 5 and 1.5 years old. Raising them up with minimum impact of abuse is my greatest challenge . Part of this challenge comes from having serious financial problems as ACE study charts predicted but the toughest part is that my wive's behavior as a victim of child abuse is my weakest point to handle . whenever my wife shouts or curs or beat them,I feel like I was hit by a car. She lives in...

This is not an us/them conversation. This is an all of us conversation. And if we choose to keep our story of silence this epidemic is going to grow."

I used to sneak away for a hot bath as often as possible when my daughter was in the need-me-every-minute years. I'd soak long past when the water went cold and I felt guilty at times but sometimes I needed to be alone. To read poetry. To have some physical space. To exhale. I didn't always know where or how to pamper or self-care myself. There were few adults I trusted. I believed in attachment-style parenting and wanted to be there all of the time. And that even made me feel guilty when I...

This article is written by Darcia Narvaez, PhD and is posted on Kindred Media . It got my attention because the title, 'How To Stop Disrespecting Your Kids' is geared specifically to parents. Many articles are written about parents but not to parents. And sometimes, articles talk about parents in ways that are so condescending they are hard to read. This article gives parents direct access to the ACEs test and the Aces Too High website which is also great to see. It does a decent job of...

This is an excellent article about "holding space" published a few days ago in Uplift . The visuals are exceptional. It's making me think about 'holding space' as it pertains to parenting. For me, it can be harder for me to drop my "I'm in the mom teaching role" and just hold space, as a parent. To listen rather than advise. To be with rather than make better. To offer myself rather than impose myself. To accept where my kid is at in a moment and be with that moment - and her - at the same...