Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

             I had a fantastic night's sleep. I think I slept straight through to 3 am, got up and peed, and went back to bed. Then I agitated and dozed until 5:30. Because I'm retired, I get up even if I haven't had a great night's sleep knowing I can nap. It's one of the great joys of my life.

      Boy, do I miss Mike or my relationship with him. I was completely at rest in his company. There was only one moment in all our forty-five years when I felt fear or pain, the kind my mother generated in me. It was when he complained about how my mind worked, how it made connections to everything. It drove him nuts. 

            I've told this story before. We went to see my therapist together. He complained that my mind jumped from topic to topic randomly. He announced that I had to stop thinking that way. It was driving him nuts. The conversation went: I said, "I use primary sources and see connections" His response, "I use primary sources. I read the original Plato, etc., etc." Aside from the fact that he didn't read most philosophers in their original form but read them in translation, that was not what I meant by primary source. Fortunately, my therapist understood and knew exactly the right response. She said, "Betty's a phenomenalist." Mike said, "Oh!" Now, I made sense to him. He needed a framework. Where my mind makes infinite connections to seemingly unrelated things, his was organized and structured. Chaos versus order. Those words could have been our names in this marriage. It was the core difference. He helped me become more ordered; I'd like to think I helped him develop more tolerance for chaos.  

            Julia from Step-Up Tutoring emailed me saying a new tutor was having trouble teaching a third grader with delayed reading and was looking for help. I emailed Carol. She said she had already made contact with another support person. I was so sad. I want to pass on my methods. I want to see if I can get someone else to use this method successfully. After a while, I got myself together and emailed her, saying, "FYI. I have a lot of experience working with kids with delayed learning." She wrote me back that she would take up my offer. She was busy for the next two weeks, but after that. 

            I had an appointment with K at 1 pm. We changed the appointment time, so he had some time to recover from being in school, time to get a snack and run around for a minute. What chaos! His mom wasn't home. His older sister set him up. His two younger sisters ran around screaming. It was hard to hold his attention. He signed off at one point. I tried to call the older sister but couldn't get through. I texted her brother, asking him to tell her to call me. K got back on. It was a difficult session. Not fun for me. 

            I continued working on the farting story with K. I hoped to get an organized account that made some sense. No such luck. He continued talking about how his sister was mean because she hit him when he farted in her face. He has no sense of responsibility, which means no sense of cause and effect, meaning no sense sequence of events makes sense. Well, he just turned eight; there's still hope.

            I had a session with A. He remembered the words we worked on in our last session. It seems my strategy may have worked. I had him read sight word lists three and four. Wow! He just zoomed right through them. I was impressed- until he was reading words that weren't on the page yet. The good news is he has a good auditory recall of the order of the words. The bad news is he's not 'reading' them. I had him read them in random order by pointing to them one at a time out of order. He could still read them, but much more slowly.

            J met with me at the end of the day. He was excited to share a graphic story he read for school. He had already read it but loved it and wanted to read it again. There were some vocabulary words I needed to clarify. I thought it was sweet that he wanted to share the story with me.   

_______-________-_______

Musings:

            Mike picked me because he thought I would be a 'worthy opponent." When he was out looking for a mate, he asked a colleague what to look for in a partner. He gave that answer, "a worthy opponent." 

            I mentioned it to some people, and they're horrified by the idea of being married to an 'opponent." For them, that means conflict. 

            There are two things to take into consideration. First, opponents aren't necessarily enemies. You can't have a game of tennis or chess without an opponent. No opponent, no game. Second, each human being is a potential opponent to every other human being. We all perceive the world differently from each other. All our needs don't neatly line up with each other. As my mother said, mouthing my father's words, "If two people always agree, there is only one mind at work." 

            If we choose someone who doesn't stand up for themselves, put forth their ideas, and their own needs, that person is not present in the relationship. Eventually, they'll get angry or clinically depressed. Then you have a real opponent, someone who feels they have to override you to exist in the relationship.

            Mike and I believed in co-creation. We were both dialecticians; we believed that a synthesis was possible when a thesis met an antithesis. It is my favorite way of relating to another person.