Thursday, April 28, 2022

 Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

   When I got up, I saw that my friend Carol from Ohio had called. I never heard it ring. I had no idea why. I called her back. We chatted about our lives. She was on her daily route to pick up her three grandchildren from school. Her daughter and grandkids are so lucky to have her, not only because she does these chores but because she does them joyfully; she is grateful to have this involvement. I completely understand. There’s nothing worse than feeling like no one counts on you.

   I ran into Julie on my morning walk. Vince was out fishing. Julie is a fund of miscellaneous information. We talked about gold. She was wearing a necklace with a charm that looked like a hunk of melted gold. She said it was only 14-carat gold. Yeah, what else would it be? I know my grandmother’s wedding band was 24-carat gold. It was so soft that it warped on her finger. Then Julie told me she had some gold coins. Her grandfather had kept some when everyone was required to hand them in. Huh? I knew the US had gone off the gold standard, but I didn’t realize that we had used real gold coins before then. Everyone was supposed to hand them in and get our current coinage in exchange. Not everyone compiled. Her grandfather’s coins were passed on to his children and then split among his grandchildren. When I got home, I looked up when the US got off the gold standard on June 5, 1933. Holy cow!! That was only seven years before I was born. 

  I had an appointment with Shelly at 10 am. I worked on that shock response I had the other morning in reaction to remembering I hadn’t taken care of a package of prepared salad. My whole body responded. I felt spinning in my solar plexus and then counterclockwise spinning in my head from the perspective of the front of the head using the right-hand rule.   I watched the tight spin expand. Shelly asked if it wasn’t disturbing. No, not if I watched it calmly, as taught in my Buddhist meditation. I would be very disturbed if I fought against it. Then the spin switched direction and slowed down. I had the image of my mother carving a groove into the spin. I interpreted it as her effort to embed her feeling into me, so she was not so alone with them. The effort to embed yourself into your child’s makeup seems normal to me. Unfortunately, she had some bad experiences that resulted in PTSD and had some disturbing feelings to embed. I am not angry at my mom. I feel great sorrow that she suffered so. She was a woman with a great capacity for love and caring that got twisted by circumstances. It is a parents’ job to achieve neuronal synchronicity with their child. It’s what we all look for in others. People we can ‘groove with.’  Because of neuroscience, we know this is not just a metaphor; our brains synchronize when we respond to something in the same way. 

   When my mom was young, it was believed that children couldn’t be damaged by the experience. They would always bounce back. The idea of long-term negative impact may have been a twinkle in some psychologist’s eye, but it wasn’t part of the mainstream thinking. 

   I felt my mom was behaving this way with me to regain something she had lost. Her dog came to mind. My mom had a remarkable relationship with a Doberman Pinscher named Lordt (SP?) for 9 years, starting when she was two. It was from him that she learned love and mutual caring. She wanted to regain that lost sense of deep connection. Problem: I was not an obedient dog. I was a human being with my own take on life. It made our relationship problematic.

   I had adolescent D in the afternoon. No, he had not listened to the audio file the night before. He forgot even though his mom had reminded him. Yes, he had read in school today. It went badly; he hadn’t been able to read it. 

      Today, I started a new procedure to encourage him to decode every syllable in multi-syllable words. I told him if he decoded every syllable, I would blend the word for him. It worked like a charm, better than I expected. When he did that, he often could figure out the words. This was wonderful.

       We had to quit our first Zoom connection and start a new one. Our voices were garbled on the first one. I heard that once before on a brand-new computer. I thought something was wrong with the speaker. It may have been the same problem. It’s good to know the problem can be fixed by exiting the meeting and starting another one.