Journaling 1

I haven't been on here in quite a while.  And when I have been on here, I have been writing a lot of poetry.  This is a thing of which I am very proud.  Right now, I have been struggling.  We are in the middle of the global pandemic, coronavirus covid 19 shit storm.  I left my classroom on March 11th and haven't been back.  Virginia schools closed for the year weeks ago and our county in Maryland just made the call a few days ago.  This means I have been distance teaching for over a month now.  I can safely say I hate it.  And I am insanely grateful that I still get paid in this unsettling time.  I am blessed and privileged and I am aware of it every day. Somedays, I feel that privilege as a joy, others I feel it as a weight because I know others have so many needs and it feels selfish to have a huge container of cashews and a bag of Dove dark chocolate. 

I thought of sitting down to write because I am struggling emotionally on a daily basis.  I am pretty sure others are feeling it too, in various ways and degrees.  So maybe if I write, I will remember to lift myself up.  And if I can do that, in even tiny ways, perhaps it will be able to do that for others too.  

If I have learned anything in my life, and the lessons just keep coming, it is that you cannot skip around painful things.  Trauma, abuse, fear, grief, loss...all those things, they will be felt, one way or another.  So I try my best to sit with them, these beautiful, strong, willful emotions.  There is no use fighting them. 

https://www.turningart.com/artist/zhan-ni-li

I am going to sit with them here, with words, to honor them and help them feel seen, to try and create a way to help them sink into my heart and become more of the stregnth I know I will need going forward.  

Taken from Trauma Informed Parent Credit: #sheenahill

May is always hard for me.  I was married May 1, 2005.  My husband died May 22, 2013. Between the 1st and the 22nd, there are so many painful memories.  I mourn the future that was taken from me.  On the 22nd, I never work.  I take the day and celebrate every second of his life with our kids.  I'm not sure how I would survive the day if I didn't do something like that.  We go on an outside adventure, to a zoo, or take a boat ride, or watch a movie he would've loved and spoil ourselves silly.  The day he died, we were in the Kline Hospice House...such a beautiful place full of hard working, lovely people.  I had stayed there with him the whole time, sleeping on the sofa beside his bed.  The night of the 21st, I scooted the sofa closer to him so that I could reach through the metal bars and hold his hand.  

I don't have anyone's hand to hold now. I hold my kids and try to give them strength and a foundation, hope, connection. I just wish I wasn't trying to build this for them all alone