Here's Something Fun...

For so long, blogging has been a source of stress for me. My brain is constantly processing, never taking a break. I hate the pain of my kidney stones, but the morphine stops my brain for a bit and that I love. But it is the only thing that stops my brain. I'm the kind of person who thinks of all the things I want and need to do and I fully intend to do them, but then there are so many and I build them up so completely that I drop them all. And then I'm overwhelmed in a whole new way. So, I have a habit of starting a draft blog, thinking of something else, getting frazzled, and walking away. I have 54 draft blogs that I have started but not finished. I was looking through them and found the following. I'm going to update it and, I think, end up with something kind of neat. I started this blog in June of 2011: Tomorrow is Ava's last day of kindergarten. I am finding the last day far more emotional than the first. I love her school, I love her teacher, I have really loved watching Ava start the adventure of becoming her own person. I've been trying to think through what is making this so difficult for me. Is it as simple as something wonderful ending? Could be. I've always been that way. I get attached to people/things/situations easily. And then, when it's time to move on it just tears me up. Is it that I'm watching my 'baby' shed the very last tethers to baby-hood? Probably. After Ava was born, I quit working. All I wanted was to be her mom. She and I were together 24/7 and I sometimes found myself resenting people who tried to break into our time. We were a team. When I got pregnant with Sophia, I worried it would hurt Ava. And it certainly was a huge transition for all of us, but as I watched Ava lose some her dependence on me I got to watch her become a big sister. Is it because as of tomorrow at 11:00am Elvejhem will no longer be her school? Yup. In a pretty major way. At some point in the next 4 weeks, we will be on our way to our new world in ND. I've loved the idea of my girls attending the same schools I did. I'm just having trouble with the idea of Ava having conquered this huge school and all its people and hallways, and then being taken away from it. Am I worried that she may not remember her kindergarten school, or the house she was born in, or her favorite places to play in the neighborhood? Will she remember all her friends here? Will she be as happy in Bismarck as she is when she's playing with her friends here? I guess it's all of this. Ava is getting older and smarter and less willing to be my baby. She is also a gigantic source of pride for me. To have anything at all to do with her is more gratifying to me than all of my other lifetime "accomplishments" combined. Now here we are on Wednesday, September 26, 2012. Reading this was emotional. I remember the way I was feeling during that last bit of Ava's time at her school in Madison. It was not a perfect system by any measure, but it was part of our world in Madison and Ava was proud to go there. She understood we were moving and that she wouldn't go to Elvejhem the next year, but I didn't think she could comprehend the full weight of what our move would mean to her. I was wrong. She got it, I was the one who didn't. She had two bullies in the beginning of kindergarten. One was a boy whose home life was non-existent as far as anyone on the outside could tell. He bullied Ava physically. For two weeks. She never complained once. Never came home and even hinted that it was happening. I found out when I walked her to school one morning on school picture day. She had dressed herself and was VERY proud. Little brown corduroy jumper, white short sleeved blouse underneath, and white tights that she put on herself so the crotch of the tights was visible if you saw just above the hem of her jumper. But, she had done it herself and there was no way you were going to take away that pride. So, I stopped at the end of the sidewalk that led to her classroom door. It was kind of raining off and on, so the kids were going straight inside. She waved, hefted her little backpack up, and strode toward the school. Out of nowhere, as if he'd been waiting just for her, this "kid" ran at her. He covered the ground between them so quickly I hadn't even realized it was a problem until he was already throwing Ava down onto the pavement. There wasn't much physical damage you could see except that her tights were torn. But, she stood up with her back to me and then turned around really slowly like she was worried about what I was going to say when our eyes met. I immediately ran to her and got down on my knees. The look in her eyes wasn't fear, clearly this had happened before, it was defeat and embarassment. I had just seen this horrible thing I now knew she was trying not to tell us because she didn't want us to worry or be disappointed. She sat down in my lap and sobbed. I cried a little too. That was the first time I realized it is never too early to tell your children that there is no possible way under the sun for them to lose their parents' love. There is no 'thing' they can do that will tarnish this love. We covered that it was not her fault and that she deserves to be treated with respect and kindness by not only the adults, but the other children as well. The pictures we got back from that day with Ava's disheveled hair and scuffed up knee show her spirit and joy the clearest of any to this day. And, an aid was brought into the classroom to control the bully until it was decided he needed more help than they could give him. I hope he is a happy, proud, and joyful boy today. I honestly do. Children don't start that way, someone shows them how to be that person. Ava's second bully was a little girl who was stealing her lunch. This situation was also resolved that same momentous day. We've found that Ava internalizes so much and needs near constant encouragement to share what she's thinking. Once we get her talking she asks questions and marinades in the answers. She does not ask for the same information twice. And, once she "gets it", she gets it. Now all this time later she's like an addition to the youth justice league. She does not stand for bullying whether it be toward her, her friends, or someone she doesn't even know. She feels what the people around her feel and she's the first to set to work settling a problem. She's amazing. Best of all, she's mine!

Letting Go. A little.

It Has been just under a year since I Last blogged. I've been telling myself its because I can't pin down what I want to blog about. It just occurred to me that I know exactly what to blog about, that was never the problem. The problem has been that I was afraid to blog about what I was thinking and that is unfortunate because I started this blog under the disclaimer that you, the reader, may not love what I'm saying but I'm going to say it all the same. So, read it or leave it but I'm blogging for me. Anything beyond that is useless and a waste of all our time. If you've read my blog from its inception you know I'm not always 100%on top of my game. But I am honest. And I am not ashamed of who I am. Read back if you must because I'm not going to rehash old news. I have struggled with an eating disorder for all of the time I should have been building who I would like to be. Just today after Ava told me one of her classmates kissed another classmate, I told Ava, "do NOT be concerned with things like that yet. Your job right now is to decide who you want to be and then be that person. Ask questions if you need. But today, tomorrow, a year from now be the person you decided to be; not the person you ended up being." And the great thing about my 7 year old? She understands. She knows she needs to respect herself. She knows that while right now she is Catholic, someday she may not be. It may not fit her. There was a point in time when I was so consumed by the pain of hating my own self, I turned it outward and hated God, my friends, my family. I was that person you pass in Target and turn to your friend or spouse and say, "how does one person get that angry"? And then one day, after being on suicide watch, after almost losing my marriage, after giving up on my future, and choosing to disappear one way or another, I found hope. I found a picture in a book. It was a picture of a butterfly and underneath the caption read "in Buddhism, butterflies represent the rebirth of life after death" and I thought a religion that gives you one of God's greatest, most mysterious creations as a symbol of survival can't be bad. So, in a way, I started over. I read about Budhhism, I talked to other people who studied Buddhism. This isn't a movie about how the down and out girl discovers her life saving miracle and travels to other worlds to pursue it, because in real life that takes money and there was not so much of that in MY real life. But I worked to learn what I could second hand. And I started not to hate so much. I got a tattoo of a large, beautiful butterfly custom designed for me by an amazing artist. That physical pain was cathartic on a level I didn't know existed. And I was left with a permanent reminder that I survived. I continued to study Buddhism and as I did something strange happened. I found myself more and more everyday feeling a little bit closer to my God, my roots. I found that I could live through Buddhism with it as my guide of how to treat myself and how to treat the people around me. But at my core I finally once again believed in God and Heaven and that I was a good person with a framework built of peace, kindness, and gentleness that was secured together by way of my faith in God. So, if someday, one of my girls comes to me and says, I think I need to look somewhere else, I'll be okay with that. I think ultimately, she'll come back. And ultimately, you can't force someone to believe something. You want them to get there of their own free will. Ava has always been lightyears ahead of where she should be and so much of the time that scares the shit out of me! When she was 18 months old, we took her to her pediatrician who diagnosed her as "speech delayed". I felt like I'd been hit on the back of the head with a concrete block. The doctor told us it wasn't necessarily a problem yet, but I saw a future of tutors and linguist professionals. It was about 1 week later that she started talking and she hasn't stopped yet. She aces her spelling tests, she compliments people on how wonderful or divine or stylish their home/dogs/casseroles are. She hears way more than she should and she understands almost as much as any adult I know. So, naturally, she wants to be older. I want so badly for her to slow down and be 7. Maybe forever. But, there again, she'd be the person she ended up being, not the girl everyone already knows her to be. Thank God Sophia is still mostly just interested in bugs and being naked (a blog for another time).