Amazing Parents

Aaaaahhh…….Summer is here. The sky is blue, the flowers are blooming, and the grass is green. And I’m glad the grass is green and it’s growing and all of that. Because it’s allowed me to see an interesting thing on my street. I call it the “hypnotical hyper-grass hysteria”. And yes, I’m sure that’s the clinical term.

Here’s how this “disease” onsets. First, you are living your life. You think everything is great. You remark to yourself at how beautiful your home is, how much you love your children. You’ve worked hard, its shows, and by golly, life is great! Until…..one day….early on a Saturday morning you hear the not-so-distant cry of a two stroke engine. Is it a four-wheeler? An airplane? No! It is the sound of the neighbor’s lawn mower and it’s choke is set on “rabbit”.

The second stage of this disease comes on very, very aggressively. For instance, you might look out your living room window and notice the freshly manicured lawn next door. It is so sharp and clean. The aroma lingers in your nose like the song of the pied piper’s flute in children’s ears. As if hypnotized, you begin to walk outside to the garden shed. You grab your mower, check the fuel, add some more, and begin to mow your grass in an exhausting subconscious trance.

Stage three comes on in the next few days. You love the look of your front yard when you pull into the driveway after work each day. It’s clean, gorgeous, and best of all, it looks just as good as everybody else’s. And then it hits you. Stage three is the realization that you have the disease. It is then that you realize that you somehow got caught up in the hysteria of what everybody else was doing. You wanted to look like them, to fit in, to feel like you belonged. It is now that you realize that this disease is chronic. From now on, every time your neighbor mows his lawn, you will subconsciously feel compelled to mow yours. No matter what. They’ve got you. The disease is now running your life and defining who you are.

And there are other similar viruses just like this one. There’s the Mammalian Has-no-hair disease, which has an early onset of around age 13 in most human females. It is at this point that the female begins to determine she should no longer have any body hair whatsoever. From the first onset of the terrible affliction, each time she sees another female body’s bare skin with hair, she feels subconsciously compelled to remove hers — whether by shaving, plucking, or the use of chemicals. Despite all pain, common sense, and survival of the fittest, she will begin removing her hair. This disease is usually chronic. The victim will continue to do this until death.

And yes, there are more! The Baby in A Box Bizarro, where human babies are put into boxes for up to 8 hours at a time each night, and sometimes even in the day. There’s the Feelings are For Foo-foos disorder, which generally afflicts human males, but is certainly not isolated to that gender. Also the Super Supper Syndrome, which is a really big problem in some areas. I know this syndrome has really taken over my local area. People everywhere seem to be eating larger and larger portions at night and then complaining of symptoms such as poor sleep, weight gain, intestinal upset and more. Avoid this at all costs, since it is becoming the largest factor of the breakdown of several current societies. Is yours one of them?

Like every disorder, disease, and syndrome there are things we can do to prevent these types of things from happening to your family. Just like hand washing prevents the common cold, the lack of brain washing has been proven scientifically effective in preventing these. Educate yourselves and your families. Refuse to blindly accept your neighbor’s standards as your own. As we can clearly see, society’s demands may not be the healthiest choices to choose. Choose instead to determine your own values and your own paths. That is the healthiest lifestyle of all.

Which silent killers are lingering in your neighborhood? Have you fallen victim to any of them and why? What can you personally do to prevent them and others like them? Do you believe you have the power to make that change?

I hope so. The world needs educated people who aren’t afraid of a little upstream swimming if we plan on giving our children a healthier world.

(This post is dedicated to my friend Nelly, with whom I learn more and more about myself every morning at 8. I love you, Nelly.)

Several years ago I started this blog, not really knowing where it would lead me. My first post was a declaration stating the need for a local support group for parents of children with attachment-challenges. And I meant it. We did need one.

At the time I wrote that post, I was vaguely aware of the need in my local area for more education on the effects of trauma and how prevalent trauma is within adopted and fostered children. I knew we needed more information and options regarding treatment plans for our children with RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder). And I knew we also needed to help educate the higher-ups: other parents, our children’s teachers, and all those therapists they kept referreing us to with no success. Today I am very clearly, hugely aware of just how much this is all still needed. And I have been working very hard to bring that to Oregon.

Well, here comes the reality of that hope: the official Amazing Parents website, which is officially being launched TODAY! Whoo hoo! I hope you all are standing on your computer chairs clapping and cheering in celebration of this huge accomplishment! Because it’s AMAZING!!

On our website, we will be offering educational classes and workshops here in our area based on the book Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control by Heather T. Forbes and Dr. Bryan Post. This is the book that has changed my life and helped heal my son — the same child they told me would never learn to love or be loved. We will also be bringing free support groups to parents who are really ready to try something new and see permanent positive changes in their families. With this support, we know you can make those changes. Follow that up with personal phone coaching by a Beyond Consequences Certified Instructor, and you have all the tools in your hands to move forward.

In addition, Amazing Parents is in partnership with Life Strategies, which is a counseling company owned by Sandra Lucas, MAMFT. Sandra will be bringing the principles of BCLC into each and every one of her therapy sessions. So between the classes, the support groups, the coaching, and the therapy, Amazing Parents is Oregon’s total package for helping families heal!

If you haven’t already, please check out Amazing Parents today and sign up for one of our free local events. I just know your entire family will thank you, because you will finally be able to find your way out of the maze and into love and healing.

A good woman will pick you apart
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended and you may be afraid
But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

If you walk away, I’ll walk away
First tell me which road you will take
I don’t want to risk our paths crossing some day
So you walk that way, I’ll walk this way

So I’m up at dawn
Putting on my shoes
I just want to make a clean escape
I’m leaving but I don’t know where to
I know I’m leaving but I don’t know where to

And there’s kids playing guns in the street
And ones pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up, I say ,“enough is enough,
If you walk away, I’ll walk away.”
And he shot me dead

Yep, he shot me dead.

When my son was younger, I would practically beat my head up against the bricks around the fire place in frustration. I would give and give and give of myself — my time, my energy, my soul. And yet, no matter how much I gave, it never felt like he gave any of it back. And that can be exhausting and at some point, it begins to hurt. The resentment grows. The war begins.

Now, I realize the theory of infinite love, which I was reminded of from a parenting email this morning. About how 1 + 1 = 2, but that love does not follow any rules. Love is infinite. You can add to love and it still equals infinity. Likewise, you can take away from love and you still, yes, you still have an infinite source of love.

I get that. I do.

But when you are in the moment, it still hurts when your love in unrequited. Because when you feel that way about another human being, whether it’s your mother or your child or your spouse, you so badly want them to feel that way back. You want them to smile back at you and laugh at your stupid jokes. You want them to cry with you when you cut your finger, when someone criticizes you. You want them to bring you coffee in bed when you just can’t bring yourself to get up one day. You want them to think of you when you are not in sight and also when you are. You just want to be important to them, like a treasure that they secretly found one day. That’s how it should be. Yeah, love should feel like that.

But that’s just not how it always is. Because love doesn’t follow all the rules. That’s why we say “all’s fair in love and war”. Because they are the same sometimes. Love and war. Two sides desperately seeking what they think they need, what they think they deserve or are entitled to, what they think will make a better world for themselves. You would kill for love, die for love. You would give up other deep-seated values at times to get that need met. You would cower back from who you know you really are sometimes. Because you just so badly want it all to make sense, to feel good. The thing is, you can never confuse feeling good with being in love. Because often they run on parallel courses, going on and on in either direction, forever.

All I can say is that sometimes when we begin to feel empty, running out of that special thing inside of us, we have to remember that love is infinite. That it never can be taken away from us. That somewhere inside of me, there is a bottomless well of energy and spirit and resolve upon which to draw. And I am able to give that to my child no matter what it appears he has taken from me. And I can be kind and affectionate to my spouse at the end of a long day whether or not he himself is able to do that for me. And my mom, yes her too. I can love her whether or not she stayed home with me during the long summers of my childhood.

Because it’s about today. And what I can do to feel loved and let others feel loved by me. I have that power, that wealth deep down inside of me somewhere. And my ability to do this is not dependent on what others do to me. They can neither take from me nor add to it. It is about me. Just me. And my infinite well that I know is in there somewhere. Sometimes we just have to dig a little deeper until we hit water.

When my oldest son was younger a friend of ours gave us a huge set of Brios that his three sons had sadly outgrown. We played with it for a while and then it got shoved into the corner of the room where it sat anonymously for a long, long time. As I type that, I am reminded of a man I once married, but that isn’t important now. What I wanted to say was how we brought it back out a while ago and rekindled the joy of that set.

We dumped out the big blue bucket and sorted through all the ramps, curves, straight aways, and forks. We stacked up the signs until we needed them. We stared at the pieces silently. And then we began. We took one piece and then another and then another and then one more. We just started laying out the pieces on the floor with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. It turned and twisted and went along as if it had a life, a will, of it’s own. There was a freedom in playing with it like that. Because no matter how many times you dumped out that bucket, those pieces made a brand new world each and every time. A random pretzel of where my train would go.

But somewhere I lost that joy. Somehow, some time, I don’t know what happened. Maybe I just flipped out. I don’t know. But somewhere I began to plan it out. I kept trying to make a better track. The random piece went back in the bucket in exchange for one that made me feel better about where my train would go.

Eventually it became the family joke. Mama up on Saturday morning at 5 am on her hands and knees on the living room rug, constructing the “perfect track” that I just knew I could build. It had to have every loop with a beginning and an end. There could be no dead ends, no loops without reason. My train could not be bothered with anything less. It had places to go, and I just knew I could figure it out. I remember I kept silently saying to myself that no train track factory would put a set out there without having each piece in that set for a reason. The perfect track had to be a possibility. Otherwise, there was no point in playing.

My kids, who used to play with me, suddenly sat around the room, far out of it’s reach, watching me with brows furrowed, wondering why I scolded them for touching it. I just needed it right. I needed it. And nobody understood that. I just wanted that stupid track to make sense. In fact, I dreamed about it, that beautiful, elusively perfect track.

Well, you know how it goes. The train track and all it’s pieces are back in the corner, in a bucket, waiting for it’s resurrection. For someone to notice it again. It’s a sad track right now. Lonely and without meaning.

Sometimes as I pass by that bucket in the corner of the living room, I secretly wonder to myself, “What did you do? ” Have I taken a perfectly good toy and, because of my unrealistic expectations, turned it into something that can never be loved or appreciated for what it simply is? Whatever that may be? When did I first begin to “need” it to make sense? And why? Did I really feel like my life was that out of control? Was I really that unhappy? Unrealistic? Did I really think I could build it like that? I guess I did.

Sigh.

Why do things have to be so dang frustrating? Why can’t the train track factories just manufacture perfect sets? For the love of all things holy, why? Don’t they know that some of us need it to be different? That we are tired and confused and we just still believe we can make it better?

I suppose this is the moment I realize that this is all figurative and that what I’m writing is in fact relative to my own life and not about a toy at all. That it doesn’t always make sense. And that the path that I find myself on cannot always be planned out and manipulated into something that looks and feels comfortable. There are loops that spin me around and change my direction for reasons that I cannot see at the time. And yes, there will even be dead ends when I least expect them. I suppose you want me to “get it” about now: There is no perfect track.

Ok, fine. You win. I get it.

(But to this very day, I still think I can build a better track.)

One good thing is that my son needs me to be able to feel the depth of his pain. That deep, scary, make-you-throw-up-just-thinking-about-it-kind-of- sadness, terror, and shame. When someone you love is ripped away from you. And you’re left standing there with your jaw hanging open, forgetting to breathe. You wonder what you did wrong. What did I say or do or was it just a look on my face? Was it just a solitary moment or was it a chronic series of years of failures? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me as a person? Something that I’ve been idiotically oblivious to or, even worse, frozen in denial by something so scary I can hardly stand to think of it? Am I the grim reaper or the elementary teacher that made me eat all my lunch?

I don’t know. Maybe all of the above. Maybe none. Maybe everyone is right and this too shall pass. But I doubt it. This feels too deep to ever really go away. This ripping away I feel will haunt me for the rest of my life. A little voice that I will always hear deep inside my head that whispers, “there’s something wrong with you and you’ll never be good enough and anyone who says otherwise is lying. Trust no one. Not even yourself. Especially yourself. Because yourself sucks.”

This is the same message I believe my son hears from somewhere inside himself. It is this same voice that goes up against me in battle formation for my son’s life. Because I am the person who says otherwise. I cannot be trusted. My job is to prove over time through my actions that what I say is real. That there are parts of my son that really are good enough. Good enough to be loved unconditionally. I want him to learn that. To feel that. And I want him to feel that from me, his mama.

The problem is that there is a fine balance here to be found when dealing with inner demons and fears and voices. Shutting them out means disconnecting from the pain, ignoring it, shoving it even further down inside of yourself for later. On the flip side is helping him to feel the pain, but it’s so easy to get stuck there. Letting the sadness and sense of defeat overwhelm you and paralyze you until you are left alive, but dying.

Somehow I have to help him feel his feelings safely. And help him come back to a state of regulation and feel a sense of healing and progression. One way I can do this is by modeling this balance. To demonstrate my own pain and be honest with my feelings of sadness and loss. But then to get up and dust myself off and go on. To be loving and open to be loved again. This will take me a long time. But I think I can do it. There is a part of me that is sitting idle. A strong part. And until now I haven’t needed her. But maybe now I do. And maybe now my son does too.

And like every other human relationship, maybe together we can learn the balance of beginning to love ourselves despite our fears and self-doubts until we can finally overcome them, erase them, and rewrite some happy thoughts for who we believe we are. And they won’t just be suggestive or lies. They will be real. We will really believe them. And it will be then that someone will finally be able to truly love us, because we will finally truly be loving ourselves.

I think everybody’s heard the old phrase “Ain’t nobody happy if Mama ain’t happy.” And we laugh about it, sure. But stop and think about it. Mama has a lot to do. She is the person who plans the whole household with meal charts, grocery lists, and calendars full of appointments to keep. She washes and folds your underwear and makes sure your socks don’t have holes. She wraps up wounds, but even before that she makes sure they never happen to begin with. She sweats over the stove in the summer and bakes sweet breads in the winter. Mama knows all your secrets. She believes in all your dreams. And she loves you even still. Yep, that’s Mama.

So what happens to the family unit when Mama is overwhelmed and exhausted and frustrated and alone? Is she able to really be present with her kids and meet them where they are, fill their needs as they are having them, smother them with her sweet affection? Probably not. Because her window of stress tolerance will be too full to take on anything else. So what can mama do to open up her window? Well, here are some things I like to do when I’m stressed out.

First of all, let me just say that it has taken me a long time to realize that my emotional health is vital to my kids’ emotional health. I mean, it seems simple enough. I realize that part. But it’s the actual follow through that I was stuck with. It was hard for me to take time to meet my own needs, or to spend the money on me, or whatever it was. I was just so caught up and overwhelmed with taking care of everybody else that it was hard to even see what my needs were. But one day I found that imaginary line of where the kids end I begin, and it was then that I decided to change things. I had to decide that day that I was important, that my window of stress tolerance was important. And not just to me, but to my family. In fact, it was not just my privilege to care for myself, it was my responsibility to show myself the same amount of love and respect and attention that I expend everyday on everybody else. That is my responsibility. And doing that will make my kids feel more loved. Because, like we always say, “Ain’t nobody happy if Mama ain’t happy”. And here is how I make me happy.

- I call my friend Nelly and ramble about nothing anybody else would listen to.
- I jump on the big trampoline outside that I had originally purchased for my kids, but now have claimed as my own.
- I write.
- I drive to the beach and put my bare feet in the sand while sipping a latte I bought on the way.
- I count my blessings.
- I listen to music on my new Ipod touch.
- I ride my bike around this little town, pulling the kids in the trailer behind me.
- I take a really hot “showther” (which is a shower where I sit down and put in the plug).
- I buy a fashion magazine and sit in bed to read it cover to cover.
- I eat a tiny bit of something that is not that good for me, but I relish every bite.
- I meditate on my spiritual beliefs.
- I do my hair in a way I’d never usually wear out in public, and wear it like that all day long around the house.
- I rent a gushy romance movie that my son would make fun of.
- I visit the Consciously Parenting Project forums and connect to other parents who “get it”.
- I make what I want for dinner, even if nobody else really likes it.
- I sit silently and feel my body just being alive.

What types of things do you do to regulate yourself and open up your window of stress tolerance? And how long ago did you realize you were worth it?

It’s funny to me to see my son today. He is going to turn 10 any minute and that alone just cracks me up. I feel like that baby boy just came into my home. That it can’t really be such a long time since that moment. I guess I feel like I just met him, and in a way, I guess that’s true.

I remember the years of drama and crying and fighting and….just all of that. The never ending guilt of knowing I wasn’t doing something right. And also the confusion and frustration of just not knowing what that was. I couldn’t have changed it then if I had wanted to. It was all just so complicated. So overwhelming and sad.

There have been many large transitions in our life lately. Lots of things that even I am struggling to understand. Years ago this whole situation would have resulted in tantruming. Screaming, kicking, sweating, broken furniture, tantruming by Tyler. And I would have hated him for that. For sucking even more life out of me than was already being sucked by the situation. At a time when I needed all the energy and positive thoughts that I could muster up from deep within. And he would have felt that negativity and it would have caused yet more tantruming. It was a vicious cycle of resentment and broken hearts.

Sigh.

But none of that is happening now. Tyler is able to express himself and tell me where he is emotionally. He hugs me and tells me everything is going to be ok in the end. Yes, this same child is now comforting me! Yes, he is able to connect to me and to what I’m feeling right now. He can use his words and his body in very positive ways to build an even stronger relationship with me. And I love him for that. For that kind of connection. For what he can give to me. But also for showing me that kind of power in love. For being a living example to me of endurance and patience and faith.

I’ve been thinking of that a lot lately and I often have to remind myself that all those inches did indeed add up to miles over time. That those stones did pile up into a mountain.

And he’s so right. In the end, it IS all going to be ok.

Sometimes I look out at this big, scary world and I am almost frozen solid with sadness. Before my son came to me, I had no idea how much pain was in the universe. As naive as I was, I just didn’t know. But now I can see it. All of it. The overwhelming sea of humanity existing together in synchronized pain.

I see the starving babies whose bellies are swollen, in countries with rich, fat kings. I have seen how war rips arms and legs from parents who are then unable to provide for their children. And other children left with no parents at all. I can hear the incessant cries of babies born drug exposed to young mothers in the ghetto who just don’t know how to feel anything real inside of their bodies, least of all a baby.

It’s not me being dramatic. This stuff is real and is happening every minute around the globe right now. And it hurts me. It hurts me deeply. I can feel it pulling on me from somewhere, like a string that tugs on me from everywhere, the other end connected to that ocean — the overwhelming, turbulent, angry sea of suffering.

There are things I do to ease my discomfort, to quiet the never-ending thoughts. Somethings are proactive and others are just soothing. I do them because I have to. I just have to. One thing I have to do is reach out for support. It took me a long, long time to find a place to turn to. At first I tried my spouse, but his pain was so deep that he wasn’t able to help me. I tried my relatives, but they seemed too far removed. I talked to friends that I already had, but what I had to say was too much for them and they all slowly wandered away. So I searched harder. I looked further. And I found you.

This past weekend I went to the desert and I sat in the hot, dry sun. All around me I felt the incessant chatter of mothers whose babies are hurting and struggling to find out who they are in this world. I could close my eyes and almost feel the synchronized pain of these mothers trying to parent their children with attachment challenges. An almost unidentifiable pain. Something maybe without any words. Just a feeling inside my stomach, buried deep, deep down inside me of a memory that still makes me sick. Was it my mother or my husband or my boy? Maybe inside me they are all the same. Sometimes I honestly do not know.

What I do know is that what we all need here is some hope. Even just a little. I turned to my soft friend, with her voice from somewhere I think I’ve been before, and I told her that we just needed some hope. And almost in a panic, she whispered, “Yes, but that is like throwing a stone into the ocean”. And she is right. The level of pain that these mothers live with is extreme. But you know, even stones add up to mountains over time.

For me, in that desert, I found what I was looking for. I found what I needed. I needed some hope. I needed to be heard and to feel like my experience mattered to someone. And that’s how I was made to feel. Like I mattered. That my needs were real and absolutely accepted on every level.

So to all those woman, screaming and laughing in synchrony in that big, loud room, on a mat, on the floor: thank you. That is where a little nugget of hope came to me through unconditional love and support. So to all of you, thank you, for not only throwing a stone into my great big ocean, but for being the stone itself.

Press on! I am doing that now.

Shell Silverstein wrote this book called The Missing Piece. It is about this little pacman-shaped guy who rolls along about his life. He likes to sing and have adventures. He even likes to stop so butterflies can land on him. He’s a good little guy and as you read you not only begin to love him, but you also begin to see yourself in his story too.

As he rolls along, he begins to feel like something in him is missing. It’s that little wedge that makes his mouth. And he begins searching for one to fill it, to complete him. It reads,

“It was missing a piece.

And it was not happy.

So it set off in search of it’s missing piece.”

This weekend I am heading off to Arizona for a mom’s retreat with my friends in the BCI network. These woman all share one experience. They have all begun a search to discover whether or not they have a missing piece and whether or not they want to fill it. I’m going to be pampered, yes. But also, it will be work. Because there are many things inside of me that I have left to integrate fully. It’s going to be liberating, yes. But it’s also going to feel at times like I can’t breathe.

“And on it went, over oceans….

through swamps and jungles,

up mountains,

and down mountains.”

A while ago my sister-in-law began to make handmade jewelry by fusing glass. She is an artist. Truly. Each one of her designs is unique and special and symbolic of something. She let me choose one and I picked one like this. I looked out across the pile of all these different shapes and designs and the second I saw this one, I knew it was the one for me. I just didn’t know what it meant to me yet. Or did I? Did I already know then that something was missing? I don’t know.

All I do know is that I’m going to take this necklace with me on my trip and I will touch it often to remind myself what I am doing there. I’m there to find out if there is something missing afterall.

“One day it came upon another piece that seemed to be just right…

Oh my, now that it was complete

it could not sing at all.

“Aha,” it thought.

“So that’s how it is!” “