Sunday, March 17, 2024

Sunday, March 17, 2024

 

    I woke before the alarm went off. I was plagued by grief. While I am touched when I get a massage, I am rarely touched with affection. I get occasional loving hugs from Paulette and Darby that are both satisfying and reminders of what I've lost with Mike's wonderful hugs. We were both affection junkies. Thank God we found each other. This morning, I had to sit and feel the vibrations of need peel off my body. I thought of atoms looking for their complements.

    I had a remarkable experience in church today. I was moved by a reference to God's mercy. I'm not sure why. Is it because I need mercy, or do I need to give it more freely? Then the priest, Fr. Lio, did something remarkable. 

He interrupted the mass. He said it was the first time he had ever done that. (That is not quite true. He did it when someone passed out in church. He told everyone to stay seated except for the medically trained to take care of the situation.) But today the emergency wasn't medical; it was canine distress.

   He announced that a dog in distress was in a car in the parking lot. The owner should go out, put the dog on a leash, and bring it into the church. I wasn't sure if he was saying the dog should come inside the church or onto the lanai, but it was to be part of the congregation either way.

    He continued: this is a pet-friendly church. It has been ever since some priest was here. He had a dog named Thumper who went with him wherever he went. Thumper processed with the priest. He came down the aisle to the altar at the beginning of mass. During the mass, he sat to the side with the altar servers. When mass was over, he joined his master and processed back down the aisle. The church has been animal-friendly ever since.

    I laughed with delight upon hearing this wonderful story. I felt a kind of joy I hadn't felt since Mike died. I felt my face form a smile I hadn't had since Mike died. God, I loved that man.

    A woman who feels compelled to include me in her life occasionally and who criticizes people with abandonment invited me to lunch. She will set you right whether it's your behavior or your opinion. She's incredible. Judy questioned my rejection of her. She said her mother criticized her endlessly but knew she was loved. My mother also criticized me endlessly. Aside from being my mother, I knew she loved me for most of my childhood. It made her behavior toward me confusing. How can someone who loves you and not only find constant fault with you but speak to you with contempt? She would tell me I was nobody. The two didn't go together.

   While I knew and believed that my mother loved me, I also believed this woman did not. Judy said I should love her. I can love her from afar. I do indeed wish her well. I rejoice in all that goes well in her life. But does that 'love' mean I have to suffer her abuse? I don't think so. I don't think it's even good for her.

   Relationships are mathematical. There's a ratio of good to bad moments in a relationship. Of course, these moments aren't strictly quantitative but also qualitative. Not only are they qualitative, but the quality is measured by the degree of emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction, making the ratio complex.

    Mike used to say he would fire me if he were my boss. Those words could have, should have, been devastating, but they weren't. I trusted his love for me completely. Mike wasn't in a position to fire me; no one fired me for my maverick ideas, practices, and, on occasion, behavior. Rather than be angry with him for his most irritating behavior, I thought it was funny. Mike was my funny Valentine. 

     My sister once said, "The face of a loved one is always interesting!" Ain't that the truth?! I wish I felt that way about my own 'face.' What does that say about my self-love?

  Adolescent D asked to be let off for the day. Third-grade M's session was postponed to later in the week; it was spring break. Mama K texted to say the girls were available. I got on with Twin E. She read try as turn. How do I get her to pay attention to the letters? Her mother yelled at her for playing with something while in session. I told her E was scared and distracting herself. I finally captured her attention. Can you blame her for being scared?

  She is 10 years old and still struggling at a first-grade level. She can't remember things even as well as her twin. I told her to give me the sound of a single letter, and she gave me another guess about the whole word. "Please, do what I ask you to do?" Does she ignore me because she doesn't understand the question, fears she doesn't know the answer, or can't bear repeating something that doesn't make sense to her? When decoding a word, figuring out a single sound is unsatisfying. It came out that she really does have problems with sounds. I asked her what sound the letter R makes. She said, "Are." I said rabbit using her pronunciation arabbit. She could hear that wasn't right. She correctly pronounced the initial sound in rabbit on her own. Okay. All my efforts to get her to listen to herself have slid down the drain. She's as stubborn as Adolescent D. Does she really have problems, or has she created them by not following the procedure I recommend? The Twins and Adolescent D do indeed have memory problems. Even that is a question: is the problem self-created or neurological? However, it is understandable they feel they can't trust themselves due to the years of failure to accomplish what their classmates did.

  I continued writing the words slowly and had E mimic the strokes with her index finger on a hard surface. She said her handwriting had improved slightly. Despite repeated requests, Mama K hadn't sent me a sample yet.

   I write the words on the Fry sight word list. I have three objectives with this exercise: 1) handwriting, 2) encouraging attention to the letters in the words, and 3) memorizing the words on the list. Today, she asked if she could 'draw.'. She meant to write a word. All my other students have learned how to write on the shared Zoom whiteboard. She couldn't. I sure don't know how. Since that didn't work, she had to dictate the words to me as I wrote them.

   I used this strategy with a student in the 80s. It took 182 sessions to get him to be a basic reader. (He got his MBA from Yale. He was bright as they come.) I met with him in person. I would select three letter words within the same word family. He closed his eyes. I told him how many letters were in the word and gave him one letter at a time. He had to figure out what the letter was by feeling the plastic letters and then the word by blending the sounds. We took turns. He gleefully picked 8 or 9-letter words from the dictionary when it was mine. He couldn't read the words, but he had to find all the letters and present them to me one at a time. That was the only strategy that worked.