Friday, July 23, 2021
Mama K's crew didn't come online at the appointed time. I texted Mom K, telling her to get hold of me when she got the message. I went out and gardened. She called shortly before 9 am when I had another appointment. We agreed to do it after 11. Then I got a text from her saying they had just heard from the Board of Health, and no one had Covid. They were free to go out. Did I mind if they canceled for the day so they could head for the beach? This family lives on the beach whenever they can.
I had an appointment with Shelly, my life coach/therapist. The subject at hand is loneliness, not just current but my forever loneliness. I think this was an emotion I denied most of my life. I remember a roommate my freshman year saying she saw me as living a lonely life. She didn't mean it as a loving observation. It was kind of scary. I thought she was saying she could see me being lonely for the rest of my life. Since I had a mom who always told me no one liked me, hearing it from a peer was distressing.
I do remember relating to loneliness in grad school. I read T.S. Elliott's play The Cocktail Party. One character says everyone is lonely. Some people know it, and some don't. I wonder if this is true. Could the difference be when we first experience loneliness? Even a loved child experiences abandonment when they don't get the attention they need immediately. Is that loneliness? Is it just part of all our lives? Is there a way to live so thoroughly embraced by a larger community that one never experiences loneliness? A relative attended my thirtieth birthday party in the commune. He said something about never having to feel lonely living there. It wasn't a stable group. If it had been, would the absence of loneliness have been possible? The loneliness of my childhood resulted from my endless conflict with my mom. I felt like I was living under constant threat. I suppose she did too.
In my work with Shelly, I'm just trying to sit with this feeling without running away. I know dealing with the feeling won't make my situation worse than it currently is. I'm not as vulnerable as I was as a child. I'm not even as vulnerable as I was before I met Mike. Whatever his failings, he made me feel loved and valued. Whatever my failings, I was able to feel loved.
I was reminded of a funny incident with Mom. While living with us in Princeton, she became distressed about my housekeeping. She told me that Mike was unhappy with it. I said he hadn't said anything to me. She said he wouldn't, but she could tell. I told her if he hid this information from me, our marriage was in so much trouble that my housekeeping was a nonissue. She walked away defeated and didn't try that crap on me again. Sometimes I think I developed as a verbally clever person as a survival strategy. If I came up with the right thought, expressed correctly, I could stop my mom in her tracks. At least I had some agency.
A, a student going into third grade, returned from his visit to the mainland with his grandparents and every amusement park within 100 miles. I had my first appointment with him on Wednesday. I have been fretting about this boy. The first time I saw him on Zoom, I thought he was odd. I spoke to the parents about it, and they denied any problem other than his problem with reading.
After several weeks off, A maintained the level of reading we had reached at the end of the school year. There may even be a slight improvement. However, he feels like someone who is constantly swimming in a swirling soup. I see him as having a sensory processing problem. I spoke to his parents once about him. I have been concerned that they have information on their son they are not sharing with me. I felt very frustrated. I decided I would call the parents and confront them on this issue. If they didn't share their information with me, I would recommend they find another tutor.
When I spoke to the mom, I didn't get stonewalling. However, the parents don't see the child as I see him. They say he appears normal as he plays with other children. He wasn't their first child; they have experience with children. Also, the mom and dad are two educated, articulate, thoughtful people. I told the mom about the BrainManagementSkills. I don't usually wind up telling parents about it before I use it. I have used this process for over thirty years and never had a bad outcome. However, I wanted to know what I was getting myself into in A's case. I had to consider that their perception is the accurate one. I had one incident where I was dead wrong already.
Given A's reading problems, I had reason to believe he had problems with bilateral movement. Several schools of thought associate bilateral movement, which coordinates the brain's two hemispheres, with reading problems. I told the mom to work with him on marching in place, ensuring that the opposing arm came forward with each leg. She assured me he had no problem. I couldn't believe it. I had him demonstrate. Not only did he not have a problem, but it was also clear that he was excellent at this task, a natural athlete. I had to consider that I'm off base on this other issue as well.
As I type, I'm considering another possibility. Dehaene says that the unconscious mind deals with all the details available. The unconscious mind then wrestles these details into some order. The conscious mind then cherry-picks the best choice for the external circumstances. What if A perceives at the deep level of the unconscious; that amounts to too much information. His head would be in a swirl.
I am going to describe the process to him directly. He is a bright child, very aware of himself and his surroundings, but it is not immediately apparent. Possibly, he's a genius who hasn't mastered his mind yet.
While on the phone with A's mom, I realized my alarm hadn't gone off for my 10:30 session with Sixth-grade D. I got on Zoom a few minutes late. I asked him if the release we had worked on had held; had the problem with sound compression stayed resolved. He said yes. With this success, he jumped from reading fourth-grade material to seventh-grade material in a flash. He read most of the words at this level correctly, including words he was unfamiliar with. He had trouble with sight words, high-frequency words, like was, and, because, for, etc. There was only one unfamiliar word he had difficulty decoding, the word fiscal. He kept reading it as physical. He couldn't let go of the familiar pronunciation for the unfamiliar sound of a word he had never heard before. It took time and effort for him to get it correctly. He could infer the meaning of fiscal with a bit of coaching. He was missing vocabulary but picked up on inferencing quickly.
The gardeners arrived. In preparation, I did some weeding and clipping. I just leave the waste lying around. It was Mike's job to clean up. The gardeners take care of it now.
Tommy came by around 4 to review the complete video on my reading method, Phase I, with me. I had him look at Mike's laptop. The man died without leaving me his passwords. I, fortunately, had the password for his tablet because he had me do something on it. The password is also my name; that makes it easy.
Sandor called to invite me to lunch on Sunday. Sandor was born in Cuba; his family came to the US as a child fleeing the dictatorship. He speaks to family members in Cuba and has on-ground information on what is going on. Much of what he had to say hadn't been in the news, at least not the news I'd heard. He said the riots were not inspired by a bad response to Covid and food shortages. They are a response to a change in some money exchange. I couldn't follow it all; it was something like dollars had to be exchanged for Cuban currency at a price. But now, somehow, they were demanding a second exchange, something to do with the Euro, and imposing a second surcharge. The government relies on citizens receiving money from relatives in the US. However, there are many Cubans who do not have that support. These people are made progressively poorer by the circumstances. These people were rioting; they were dying anyway and had nothing left to lose.
Sandor reported that the government was shanghaiing adolescent boys and forcing them to mix among the rioters and hit them with sticks. They were thrown into jail as traitors if they or their families resisted. I don't know if I got this next part right: I think he said the government was forcing these boys into those roles so they could claim that the rioters are just youth gangs in conflict with each other.
He also said that an ex-wife of one of Fidel's sons made public the corruption among the head of state. They are squirreling away money in foreign banks while the people starve.
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