Tuesday, June 22, 2021

 Tuesday, June 22, 2021

 

    I slept well for most of the night but woke up in the early morning hours in despair. I was doing very badly. I feel so abandoned, so alone, unsafe. I wrapped myself in the plush fleece blanket. It’s not as good as Mike, but it does something. I was turning into one of Harlow monkeys, choosing the soft cloth over food when isolated from their mothers. This mood is a bad down-turn. As it hit hard, my first thought was to pray for an early death. It was bad. 

      Things picked up a little during morning driveway yoga. Lying flat on my back on the hard cement surface and concentrating on my body helped. I’m not sure why it did, but I’ll take it. I felt much better. I’m impressed by how quickly I regain a positive mental state, not just calmer but peaceful and content. 

       Yvette often reads a passage from a spiritually oriented book at the end of class. I heard Yvette say, “OMG, you’re right. I read the one for July 22 rather than June 22. Interesting that you all waited until I was finished before telling me.” I hadn’t heard the reading. I must have fallen asleep. I asked Yvette to read it again after the class was over. It went something like this: when two people disagree, don’t think of one as right and the other as wrong. Work it out, so it’s the best for both people. Ironic: this is what has put me into this tailspin. Someone I rely on expressed “concern for my mental capacity” because I didn’t remember something the way they did—what a disaster. I don’t think that response would be good under any circumstances when there is a difference in perception, memory, or opinion. In my case, it feels scary for two reasons: One, I am an eighty-year-old woman. Suggesting that my mind is going is dirty pool. Second, this is what my mom did to me. Whenever I saw anything differently than she did, she told me it was because something was wrong with me. It was very hard for me.

       Unfortunately, the person involved doesn’t do discussion. I don’t know how you can find common ground without talking it out. How do you know what the other person wants or feels if you don’t talk? While my mom made a full-frontal attack, this person goes silent- with this exception. It was because I wrote something in an email, and they responded in kind. One can’t do silence as effectively in an email.

      At 8:30, I had Mana K’s twins. A. Did very well with three of the letters. The names just popped out of her mouth. On the fourth, there was a delay. I present the work to her by saying, “This letter is . . . . ..” as a statement while making a mark under the letter. If she doesn’t respond in a timely way, I say the name. The object is to reduce stress for her. I introduced the letter e yesterday. It’s not in her name but in the name of one of her family members. She identified it as i. She was slow on one letter, wrong on another, and good with four. 

       Then I worked with her sister, E. She did much better, identifying the letter name and sound of letters, which she had to blend with the word family -at. She did much better with all the letters we covered except the p. She changed the p to a b, blending the word as bat instead of pat. She converted the word mat to map. Her confusion is understandable. M, B, and P are all bilabial consonants formed by pressing the lips together. I didn’t help her distinguish between the three sounds today; I will do that tomorrow.

     Where yesterday, K, their older brother, was sound asleep when it was time to work, today he was available. He was working on handwriting and spelling. Initially, he didn’t write all the letters in his name; he would leave one out. That no longer happens. It is a complex writing skill. You must hold all the letters in your head, focus on just one letter as you write it, and then recall the next letter. We have the same challenge when we write a sentence. How do we do it? I think we have to reconstruct the sentence in our heads. It is harder if we have trouble with spelling or handwriting. Those activities take so much mental energy; we can lose track of where we are. 

      Today I covered how to write the lower case g. K did a good job starting it with a c last time, but then he put the tail on the wrong side of the letter. I had him write the lower case a, then showed him to keep pulling that final line down further to get the g. He wrote his name quickly and beautifully. He also remembered how to spell his last name and write that. His concentration was impressive for someone who has trouble focusing. Many years ago, a teacher at the Lewis School taught me that handwriting and focusing are somehow connected. 

     Dorothy called. She told me she reads my updates regularly. I am very grateful to those who read my updates and those who don’t and don’t ask to be dropped from the email list. Writing the daily updates is both a burden and a gift. Doing it gives structure to my life. Without it, I think I would be adrift. I suspect I would spend most of my time playing FreeCell. Boy, would that be a disaster! Writing them gives me something to do and helps me review my life and see I did more than nothing.

      I only had J, my Step Up Tutoring student from California. I started working with the BookNook program. I got myself signed in. While I did, the program provided a visual matching game, identifying points of difference between two pictures. Problem: I couldn’t get him out of the game into the reading part of the program. He must have played ten games while I waited for the program to move it. It didn’t. I didn’t know what I was doing.