Strays

I take in strays. If I could, my house and grounds would be covered with plants and animals, found or gathered from the wild or from rescues. Someday, maybe. Not yet. But I take in stray kids every day. Not because I'm young and hip, I'm not. I'm short and sassy, or "salty" as they would say.

Not all kids enjoy high school, or their teen years, or even their lives. Many suffer both physical and psychological struggles including abuse of all imaginable types and extreme neglect. But they don't usually stay very long, because when the system winds up realizing that nobody at home is paying attention, the family has to move along. Can't bear close scrutiny for whatever reason. I can list hundreds, but ignorance and poverty seem to come hand in hand. Ignorance that leads them to make at least foolish and sometimes dangerous choices that lead them down dark hallways into despair. 

How these people treat their children may be based upon their own young experience. Usually one is just like the other, only now the child is the parent, and there's a child they don't know what they are expected to do for, because nobody did for them. I have compassion for these poor struggling souls, but I'm more interested in the well-being of their children. I probably see their children more frequently than the parents do. When the child begins to unravel because of their life's traumas, I'm the one who witnesses it. 

Several of these strays come to mind, vividly, but I'll only tell the story of a few. Let me warn you. The hardest lesson to learn needs to be in your mind as you read. This is the lesson: You cannot save them all. Statistically. 

My first stray was a young woman with a pale aspect who didn't meet most people's eyes. Not that many of her peers sought her out. She was a loner. She had long, greasy black hair, and she always wore the same turquoise and black checked hoodie with fleece lining. Every single day. Summer, fall, winter, spring, summer. 

But in summer she changed. That's because a couple of teachers kept hammering at the counselors to please try to spare a moment for this child and pull her records. Turns out she had been in our District before, but the file had been misplaced (?!) that indicated that she was on an Individualized Educational Plan, or IEP, when she had been with us as a younger child. 

They retested her, discovered that she was extremely near-sighted, clinically depressed, and suffered from Tourette syndrome, hence the sometimes startlingly loud hiccoughs she suffered when stressed. Within two weeks of getting glasses, medication, and being set up with a therapist she had already changed dramatically. She actually spoke in class and before the year ended she made jokes. She had recovered her second semester, and wound up graduating high school last spring. She is still dear to me, and she comes by to visit on occasion. 

Another stray I had was a young woman who had been prostituted out by her parents. She had her first miscarriage at 12.  She had been in and out of foster care for years, but was living with her maternal grandmother when she came into my class. She didn't look as though she cared for herself, not maintaining good hygiene, but she was very open about speaking up for herself. Guess when Big Brother is your parent, you have to learn to self-advocate. And she was bright, a gifted writer. Her parents were in jail not because of what they did to her, but because of what they did to another girl whom they had kidnapped with the intent to sell her into the sex trade. She was in my creative writing class, and wrote candidly of her experiences. She knew she was in transition, was healing, and she utilized the medium of writing cathartically. She started washing her hair, and taking pride in her appearance, although her clothing was ill-fitting and of poor quality. She didn't have much, but she was trying to strengthen herself by caring about her appearance. 

Then she disappeared. Literally. Gone from my classroom, gone from the gradebook roster, gone from our school. I begged to be told what had happened to her, but nobody in administration would tell me. The friends she had made told me that she had been taken away from her grandmother and placed in foster care again. I was devastated. She would be moved to another school, another house, another attempt to be the kind of kid that maybe foster parents wouldn't dislike or mistreat. 

Can you for one wild moment try to imagine what it would be like to try to get an education, to function meaningfully in a massive, over-worked, bulging at the seams public school, while going through the types of personal experiences this young woman had? 

She was to be adopted, I heard through rumor. Then I saw her at a movie theater and she introduced me to her soon-to-be adoptive family. I was thrilled for her. What a marvelous opportunity. What a terrifying prospect. Months later, she was back in our town, in our independent student living program, as they had "returned" her. Yes, that is a thing. DHS had apparently neglected to mention to this couple that their newly adopted teenager had been forced into the sex trade as a child, been forced to take drugs, and had had miscarriages and abortions. You can't expect that transition to be easy, and without knowledge, they didn't know what was wrong with her when she started testing their safeness. How far they could be trusted. Because foster care kids have major trust issues.

Soon after making a brilliant start back at our school, she started missing classes, and missing therapy sessions. She had had a falling out with a boy, and went into a major depressive episode, incapable of getting out of bed. She missed enough classes that she became a No Credit student, meaning that unless she had an F, she would receive no credit for the class. When she stopped attending and doing work, her grades plummeted. Soon she was told she could no longer be a part of the program providing her with  housing and other supports. We found a program in the City that was for girls who had aged out of foster care, but they had to have graduated high school. Ultimately she found a program in a rural area that was supposed to help alternative students finish their education, providing housing and other support. That was the last I heard of her. 

So I have a stray boy, now. Stray boy are completely different from stray girls, and sometimes have problems with women, so for me they are fewer. But I have one now who I am trying to keep in school by providing a safe place.  He's wild a a march hare, and his last name means wolf. He has thick, straight black hair, and dark brown eyes. He shaves the sides of his head, but allows the top to grow long, and wears it in a ponytail or a bun. He wears the same hoodie every day. Every. Single. Day. 

But he approved of my movie selection (He was in my film as lit class), and appreciated the time I've spent in the martial arts and my fairly in depth understanding of how humans express violence. He knows I consider myself to be an internally violent person. And I possess extensive, in depth information about how to disable an opponent. He knows I know how he feels when he wants to hit a wall or a tree, or, God forbid, a human. He has come to my classroom several times when he has felt he might be about to hit something or someone. And he's mellowing somewhat. He still is in turmoil almost continually. He respects his father, but there is little doubt that he has been physically abusive towards his sons. I also believe that the father is probably the better of the two biological parents. I want to get him on at least a 504 for his anxiety, so he can be given permission to act logically in the above described manner. But his father won't go for having him tested. So I just tell his teachers where he is when he leaves their room and comes to mine. And he doesn't disturb anyone when he's in my classroom, he sits and reads or watches the class. He just needs that safety valve to curb certain behaviors. 

At the beginning of the school year, he threatened to have dropped out of class within a few weeks. I've convinced him to try to stay, and we're in  the middle of the second semester. He won't lose credits this semester (god willing) and  he will get that much closer to graduating. If he could be identified, he could be helped, which would make everyone else's lives much easier and support him in finishing school. Failing that, he knows I am present for him when he needs a safe space. I am trying to teach him the honor of the warrior's code. He cannot cease being a warrior, but he can learn self=discipline. He and another young woman whom I love dearly come into my classroom at many breaks throughout the day. They leave me messages on sticky notes when I'm not in my room. The boy has started calling us "Fam." And today as he was leaving, he quickly, and slightly awkwardly, hugged me before launching himself out of the room for the day. 

Oh, I could be his grandmother. I could be his mother, he certainly needs one, but I can't take them home with me. I want to talk to his father; I know how to talk to his father to get him to get the kid some help. But Mom is a nut case, and Dad doesn't want the kid to be a nut case, too, not realizing that their issues are quite different, and he would benefit tremendously from just a little more attention. So since we cannot help him without parental approval, I am going to keep doing what I've been doing by giving him a place to come where he is safe and respected. Well-regarded. I don't think he gets much of that, and he's such a bright kid, so clever and funny. I would love to give him a big bear hug, but one has to be careful to not appear inappropriate. He just needs his Mom, and she's not available.

I love all my kids, but some become friends when they graduate. I have been truly gifted to get to work in education. I pray my contribution is worthy.

why do i mourn something painful?

i love the show "The Unit". LOVE it...not kidding. i hear the music and i want to go out and kick some ass. no joke. it brings back the bad old days when i could have kicked some ass, back when i took jobs that worked around my workout schedule. back in the days when i was attracted to men who could kill me, and only men who could kill me. my sweet husband says i was attracted to men who i knew could protect me, and that may have been the driving psychological issue that made them attractive, but the fact remains that i sought out men who were killers, quite literally.

i try to not think about them very often, i don't want to feel i'm being unfaithful to my husband, because when he made his intentions clear to me, i vowed to change my life...again. you see, i had changed it dramatically when my daughter was born, and more a few years later. i keep finding things i need to work on. but i wanted my husband so much that i vowed, to God, that i would be a different person, both for him and for myself. and i have been. at first it was hard, but with time, love, and patience on his part, i was able to become his partner, for which i will be eternally grateful.

but there's this thing, still, that craves the bad old days. not nearly as badly as it did in the first years of our marriage, but not gone. and when i watch that show, and hear the music, it all floods over me. it's a guilty pleasure, this viewing. but it's also a bit unsettling, how i can still crave something that represented nothing but pain for me. those men were not good to me, or for me. i think they thought they were good to me, and, considering the kind of men they were, they probably were as good as they could be to me. but good for me? absolutely not. the coming together was intensely pleasurable, but the times in between were excruciatingly painful. because the thing that made them attractive to me also made them emotionally unavailable to me.

why do i crave this? sometimes the feeling makes me weep. i am not who i once was, but i am also not whom i thought i'd become. Lord have mercy.

Limbo

Okay, I officially feel like I'm in limbo, some sort of static state of being in which I have no power to affect change in my life. I have been, in nigglingly tiny increments, laying the groundwork for becoming a certified teacher. I've gone through the 97 requisite steps, and believe I will be approved on February 26th at the meeting of the State Board of Education. This is fantastic, but it really does not change my lot in life until this fall, at least six months away. And, yes, six months isn't a long time, it's just that there are so many deceptively short increments of time that must be gotten through that ultimately add up to much of one's life.

Working as a substitute teacher has left me almost penniless. Yes, it was a good choice, as far as determining my ability to work in the public school environment, as well as for making contacts, letting people in the schools get to know me. It will ultimately probably help me get a teaching job. But the income loss has been daunting. Each week I ration our cash, making sure Keith and Sarah have what they need for the week, and buying those groceries carefully selected to represent the bare minimum to sustain us during the week. Then I pray nothing unexpected comes up, as it will throw my budget, and my mental well-being, into a state of disarray.

But unexpected things have come up almost daily: Sarah wrecked her car twice in a thirty-day period, ultimately ruining the car and putting her back as passenger, and, therefore, me as chauffeur, in my car. The insurance company mis-posted my payment, paying the entirety of her six-month policy and putting nothing toward the policy that covers our house and other vehicles, so I then had to scramble to come up with $600. more in the same month as the $400. payment already made. The gas royalty that I inherited has dwindled to almost nothing as natural gas prices have plummeted, doubly depleting my income. I need bras, I need a massage (in the most dire manner), Sarah needs shoes and face wash (continually), and Keith asks for nothing.

I want to stop paying for my YMCA membership, as neither Keith nor Sarah used it for most of the last year; I was using it, until things got bad at DHS, and then my chaotic schedule as well as my ailing mental health has prohibited me from using it regularly. I want to cancel the membership, but it feels as though it is my last chance at improving my health; I want to cancel it, but now Sarah has begun to use it with her father; I want to go back to yoga, even though it will not afford me the cardiovascular workout I need, because it will stretch my tight muscles and afford me stress relief I desperately need. It is cheaper, and if I could force myself to bike to the class, it would give me one really good workout a week. One. Insufficient. Which means I need to bike at least twice more during the week, but biking out of doors is much different than riding a recumbent bike at the Y...will I be able to do it, and when the weather becomes unpleasant, will I be able to force myself to do it?

So, I need to go the Y right now and work out, because I have no job today, but I don't see any point in trying to develop a workout schedule when the likelihood of my being able to go at this time of day on a regular basis is nil. I feel stuck. There are so many financial issues I need to address, but cannot, simply because there is no money to address them. Aaiiiee!!!

school days

well, i managed to make my way back into the public school system, the place that convinced me that i had chosen well in leaving investigation work and moving towards something different. after the frightening short stint in the autism classroom, i was, to say the least, somewhat trepidatious. was the experience i had as an indian ed tutor a fluke? had that year been an anomaly, something to not be repeated?

it is somewhat early to really make a judgment call, but early reports indicate that i can function effectively in the school system, and that it is, indeed, both fulfilling and rewarding. i've spent the last two days in different schools, different classrooms, with different subjects and age groups. both were tremendously full, but quite satisfying. both held challenges that made me feel vital, and both brought sweet surprises.

while i prepare to take the tests that could lead to my full certification as a teacher, a "real" teacher, i am working as a substitute teacher. it's challenging, because there is a type of student in every classroom who feels they are not fulfilling their potential if they do not make the life of a substitute teacher absolute hell. and i have felt them test me, but with no success. the secret, i believe, is to not allow them to make you angry. a good sense of humor, a respectful demeanor, and an understanding of when it is time to pull out the control voice seems to be my most successful modus operandi.

i pray i pass the tests the first time, both because i am anxious to get into a full-time position making an almost decent wage with benefits and because it costs a bundle to test. i don't want to put the burden on my family of continuing to make a substandard wage as well as spending more funds on testing. i am studying. the math sucks, but the rest is going okay. i think i'll engage a tutor to help me understand some of the review that is beyond my ken. i have a hair less than one month til the tests. pray for me.

leaving church

i have watched people leave our church over what i thought to be the most superficial of reasons. they have left over trees being removed; they have left over disagreement over the approval of a design for a chapel; they have left over the consecration as bishop of a gay man living in a committed relationship. i have watched them leave over legitimate reasons, but reasons i did not have to cleave to: they left over the lack of leadership provided by the priest; the left over the dearth of spiritual nourishment available in the church; they left over the ineffectual nature of the priest in his job. i watched one person leave because her child was not being served effectively, and with that one person, i could agree. i thought, "i'd do the same thing, if my child wanted to go elsewhere."

i find myself contemplating the same thing at this very moment. i brought my family to this church in december of 2001, and insisted that we make it our home, the people our family. my daughter was nine years old at the time, and i thought, "oh, how wonderful, she'll get to grow into adulthood in a healthy church, as a christian." the church was struggling with their youth program, but they were working on it; i had found out about a program that i thought was phenomenal called journey to adulthood, or j2a; i asked the vestry if they would consider trying it out, and they pooh-pooh'd my suggestion, saying they had already tried it and it didn't work. later i was told privately by some parishioners that the program had not been learned or run properly, thereby ensuring it's failure.

when the priest left and we called a new priest, things went downhill fast. he didn't do his job. he couldn't, perhaps did not know how to do his job, but the effect was the same: the church nearly died. the attendance dropped by two-thirds. the survival of the youth group was now secondary, as the survival of the church was foremost in everyone's minds, at least the minds of those who remained. we remained. the vestry tried to deal with the priest. the senior warden destroyed all their work by not following through with their decisions. it was two and a half years before things finally got to the point where the vestry called in the bishop. the priest was gone in a month.

it took two months, at least before i even began to see my surroundings again. i had become so hopeless, my actions merely rote repetition, that i had not even realized i had stopped looking at my surroundings, was just forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other, figurally speaking, for the show to go on. in another month i began to feel hope. it seemed like more light could get into the nave, and that worship had taken on a multi-dimensional quality again, something i'd missed sorely. and our numbers began, minutely and slowly, but surely, to increase.

now this all sounds well and good, except for one aspect. my only child, a daughter, is now almost sixteen. she has served as an acolyte since she was six, and been a good and faithful child. the former priest had a daughter the same age, and i had so hoped they would be friends, but it was not to be. my daughter knew she had best be nice to the priest's daughter, at school and at church, or she would hear about it from me. they did not get along. initially, the priest's daughter would act sort-of nice to my child at church, but then act as though my child were invisible at school, she "dissed" her. repeatedly. they very definitely were not friends. i told my daughter to be polite and stay away from her.

all this time i was picking up this child at the same time i picked up my child and taking her home two days a week, as a favor to her parents. the child would be all simpering and sweet to me, but then treat my child with disdain again at school. the dislike my daughter felt for this child only grew.

the priest's daughter is pigeon-toed, and quite clumsy. she falls a lot, and hurts herself frequently. my daughter made a remark to a friend that she thought that this child was faking her injuries in order to draw attention to herself. the friend repeated it to the priest's child, and i was called by the priest. i explained to him that my daughter would be made to apologize, and that that behavior was not condoned in our family, but that he might also want to take a look at the behavior of his own child, which has not been reported to him, in an attempt to get the girls to work it out on their own. my daughter did apologize, but it made no difference. from that point on it was not merely dissing, but outright antagonism.

when the priest left, we were told that he and his family were invited to attend another church in our town. we all rejoiced that they would be welcomed elsewhere where they could do no further damage to us. unfortunately this was not wholly correct; the ungainly daughter chose to continue to attend the youth group at our church. my daughter had tried repeatedly to make amends, both in and out of church, but the priest's daughter refused to even exchange the peace with my child, in church.

my daughter began to refuse to attend youth group, citing the presence of this child as the reason: "why does she get to stay when the rest of them have to leave?" i had no answer. the christian politically correct thing to do is to be pastoral. which means do nothing about the aberrant behavior. i pressed both the youth group leader and the interim priest to consider the matter, and the best answer i got was that if the girls could not get along, BOTH would be expelled from the youth group. i cannot begin to describe the depth and breadth of my indignation and anger.

the priest who was fired, no, allowed to resign, had offered an incredibly lame, shallow class based on the book Those Episkopals. the book is a rudimentary introduction to the episcopal church at best, and not suitable for any indepth study. he later stated that this was in fact a confirmation class, and that because his daughter had attended, she was confirmed in the spring of 2007. this was not offered to any of the other youth, nor was it explained that it was a class that was to lead to confirmation. nobody on the formation team would have considered it adequate for anything more than an enquirer's class.

the furor over this action caused the priest's wife to offer a confirmation class for the youth that fall. half the time she did not show for the classes, and they were rescheduled time and again. the formation director wound up having to finish the class after the priest was, er, allowed to resign. to this date none of the youth have been confirmed, it should have been done in the spring of this year; it is now september, almost october.

so i brought my family to this church to make it our home, the people our family; the church has not met the needs of my child, in any way, shape, or form, aside from communion each week. it has been a site of continued abuse from the priest's daughter, and remains such even though the priest was "allowed to resign". now my daughter may be expelled from the youth group, if she does not agree to continue to accept disdain and dismissal from the former priest's daughter. this does not seem fair to me.

okay, life is not fair. but it seems ludicrous that this should even be considered. but we have to be pastoral to the child. while we are doing that, who is being pastoral to my child? who is caring for my family, every member of which has served above and beyond any reasonable expectation in this church. yet the slacker former priest's mean daughter will determine the future of my daughter's attendance. ever wonder why people leave the church?

substitute teacher

tomorrow is the orientation for substitute teacher's for the public schools here in my town. i'm told that, because i have a degree, i will be called every day, from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. that will thrill my husband, who sleeps during the day...i can't believe how demoralized i feel, how stupid and what a failure. i went back to school and got the degree, now i'm going to work for $60. a day. i got the "real" job after college, and failed miserably (enough said on that topic in previous posts, no point flogging the dead horse further).

last year at this time i firmly believed that i would be in seminary right now, into the three year program that would turn me into a priest. then we decided that it would be better to let our daughter finish high school in her hometown before leaving for seminary. good decision, don't regret it. it's just that while you can't hardly get a job without a degree, you can't get a job worth having without a master's.

i have plans, am going to take a couple of tests to see if i can become a k-12 teacher, maybe get a job in january, assuming i pass the tests...but the tests cost hundreds of dollars, i need to do hundreds of hours of study, and there are no guarantees about any of it.

god's will is what i keep asking to know. i want to want what god wants me to want. urrgggghh... i thought god wanted me to be a social worker, it all sounded so good, so right, somehow. i had no idea what the work entailed, and that it would whip me like a cruel man whips a beast. i did learn much, about the poor, about the welfare provided by the government, and about myself. but i failed, i could not keep doing the work.

what if teaching is as wrong for me as social work was? maybe it's not social work, per se, but governmentalized social work. maybe dealing with uncertainty is what i'm to live with for the moment. aside from suffering and death, little is certain for humankind.

christ said the poor would always be with us. i realize this is slightly out of context, he was stressing the importance of the apostles really trying to understand what he was saying, as he wouldn't be around in that particular incarnation much longer. but it was a statement, "the poor will always be with you."

this means that, while we are admonished to do what we can for the least among us, there will always be those people with us who need our care. what does this mean for the folks trying to end world poverty? what does it mean for me, preparing meals to serve at one of the local soup kitchens? (and what are they called now, surely not "soup kitchens"...)

the changes in the church are causing financial difficulty for the church. everyone is searching for a way to be faithful and to also be relevant to 21st century people. seminaries are struggling, allowing faculties to drop in number, mostly through retirement without replacement. how can what i want to be more than anything in the world become something irrelevant? what am i supposed to do? tell me, precious lord, i'm listening...

getting better

i wasn't sure how long the surreal not-sure-who-i-was episode was going to last. the long walk at the lake was quite therapeutic, but i'm still scratching the bug bites. i went to the gym today, during the day, when all the mommies and retirees were there. i felt somewhat like an interloper, but i pretended that i was supposed to be there, i do pay, after all, to use the facility, and i enjoyed myself. the mommies weren't very friendly but the retirees were quite kind.

am going over to my mother's tomorrow to decipher some correspondence she has received from the Social Security Administration. i find it wryly humorous that i am better equipped to help her now with government-ese. guess it's a good thing.

but that brings up something totally unrelated to dhs; or, maybe not...my mother used to be so sharp. she was really smart. she could figure out how to find out anything, and get people to give her information they weren't supposed to share. she doesn't even know what her social security gross income is; she has difficulty differentiating from gross and net, and i know she used to know the difference.

so, how much of a role has stress played in the deterioration of her mind? granted, she has abused alcohol and prescription drugs for almost as many years as i've been alive, the role of which should not be underestimated, but she has also lived an extraordinarily emotionally stressful life. she has never understood boundaries; she frequently went beyond where hers should have been to the extreme discomfort of my father, and they fought about her behavior often. actually, he would just get angry and quit talking, and she would scream, drink, and throw things. then he died in a plane crash. then she went over the edge for an extended period.

she wound up working as a private investigator for my grandfather, we all did. she became an excellent investigator; nobody ever said she was stupid, just dysfunctional. and she worked on some major cases, one of them one of the most important cases in the history of this country. but the stress was too great, and she wound up a basket case by 1997, when i started doing a lot of work for her. by 2000 i was doing almost all the field work and writing the reports, and she billed the attorneys and took half the income.

so, long story still impossibly long, she never dealt, psychologically, with the reason my father nearly left her several times, before he died, and she never dealt with his death; she has repeated the same impossibly stupid mistakes over and over, and now has almost no quality of life; she is trapped, as a mere 70-year-old, in the body of an 85-year-old, and not a well one, at that.

i don't want to wind up like that. i don't want to be all alone, because i've always insisted that people come to me and never gone to them; i don't want to be isolated because i've never been involved in any sort of community; i don't want to be trapped in a space all by myself because i've made people around me so miserable for so many years that nobody wants to be around me. i want my daughter to not mind talking to me occasionally. i don't want her to dread talking to me on the phone, and even more the sporadic guilt-driven visits.

my mother gave herself up to her work. she renounced family and friends and community to be available for her work at any hour of any day. she would take a phone call at 9:00 p.m., with guests sitting at the dining table, from an attorney, even if he or she just wanted to shoot the breeze; she would talk for hours, completely ignoring the people there to visit her. i have lived in the same town as my mother for many, many years; i have lived in this house for 12 years; i can count the number of times my mother has been inside my house on the fingers of one hand.

dhs wanted everything i had. it wanted my muscle, bone, flesh and sinew; my brain and my heart and my soul. i tried to give it what it needed, what it demanded, but there wasn't enough left for me, for my own life. i felt i was being consumed by a voracious beast that had no knowledge of or interest in the damage it inflicted with its demands. as long as i was in the belly of the beast, i could *mostly* function; i say mostly because, towards the end, that even became an almost impossible chore for me; but when i left the beast, when it was finally sated for the day, or the week, and i was disgorged and allowed to crawl home, i found it increasingly more difficult to willingly return. it was painful, mentally and, eventually, physically. the last day i tried i found i could not push myself further; i had lost my flail; i could not drive myself another step. i knew i had to see a doctor, not so much to heal the physical as to verify the existence of the problem. i am so thankful for my doctor. he helped me acknowledge what i knew in my subconscious but did not want to face. he helped me admit i could not do the job any longer. and he helped me find a way out.

thank God.