Friday, June 28, 2024

 Friday, June 28, 2024

    Today is the twenty-fourth birthday of the youngest of my friends, Isaac. I am blessed with a wide range of ages among my friends. I have a few who are older than me, too. By this age, most are younger.

   I still struggle with a problem that has plagued me since I was a child- my fear of -I'm not even sure what.  I spent most of my childhood crying, "I can't do it."   I believed it to be true when back then. Everything seemed too hard for me.  I haven't thought it to be true since my mid-twenties. Yeah! It took that long to overcome my mother's constant battering, reminding me always I could do nothing right.  I fear doing something I've already done successfully. If I do it for others, I usually get over my fear-driven speed bump.

   Today, I cut back one of the Bougainville bushes to access the forest of seeding haole koas flourishing in that corner of the yard.  I also trimmed a second shrub.  Good for me.

   Now, I only have to post ads online for my damaged 12 electric cord, my tutoring service, and the Purewick external catheter. I ordered two for that period when I was on 24-hour care while recovering from my catastrophic fall.  I heard bad reports about the mechanism while I was in the hospital; some fail. I was determined to use it, so I only had to be attended once a day rather than several times a day when I was in diapers. I discovered the problem wasn't with the mechanism but with the proper placement of the wick.

    I got caught up on my updates today for the first time ever. Yesterday's is already posted. Amazing! It made a huge difference when I started listening to the classical music station instead of the news station. I got much more work done.

  I worked with the Twins this morning. Today, Twin E struggled. She didn't remember the word road again. It seemed like every word was a struggle today. She was sniffling; she had a cold. Yesterday, she had a bad headache.

   With Twin A, I continued working on The Magic Tree House Book, Dolphins at Daybreak.  We're working our way through one word at a time. The emphasis is on word recognition, using memory, decoding, and inferring from context.

   Adolescent D was home again from his four-day vacation. I speculated a family camping vacation, a trip to Oahu, or an emergency trip to the mainland for a family event.  It wasn't any of those. D was at Boy Scout Camp. Did he have a good time? Yes.  Did he do any reading while there? Yes.  Did he read out loud? Thank God, no. Did he feel he could read enough of the words to be sure he understood what he read?  Yes. Did he think the work we were doing was improving his reading? Yes. The other day, he thanked me for sticking with him, appreciating he was a difficult case. Who was he? What spirit replaced the boy I worked with for the last three years? Where did the positive spirit come from?  This is a fantastic change for the better.

   Today, none of the students at Ulu Wini asked to work with me.  I sat quietly and did some work on the computer.  I find sitting amid the community very peaceful, even when the children are all screaming in excitement and the occasional fight in the playground.  Going into second grade KG was playing a game with his dad, who volunteers. I discovered that some people I thought were employees were volunteers. These people live in this low-income community and choose to be involved. Shauntelle is one of those people. She has been volunteering for years. She wasn't there when I first arrived because she was still recovering from the amputation of her right lower leg and getting used to the prosthetic. Just as she returned to volunteer, the current youth coordinator quit. Josephine asked her if she wanted the job. She's brilliant

   I called KG over. He came without smirking.  Last I worked on reading with him, he still struggled with memory problems. I did some exercises with him; he reported they helped. While I had a few sessions with him this summer when we worked on his handwriting, I hadn't worked with him on the sight word list since the end of school in May.

    I checked him on the first Sight Word List #1-50. He zoomed through the first 25 and read 26-50 at a good pace. I pulled out the following list, #51-100, which we had never worked on.  He didn't do %100, but he only missed a few. I tried him on the following list, #101-150. He recognized many of the words. Those he didn't recognize, I could lead him through the decoding procedure with ease. If his decoding efforts resulted in a close approximation of the word, I used the word -with his pronunciation- in a sentence. The first time I did it, he was insecure.  He became better at it quickly.  He figured out the word independently as we worked on list # 151-200. He accomplished this with only a few examples. I told him he had been working on the second-grade list. No, he didn't want to try the third-grade one. He will be just fine.

  I was surprised by how much improvement KG made. No, he hadn't studied. It was the work I did with him that improved his memory function. Once whatever blocked his memory was removed, everything he had learned up to that point was available. This is what I usually see as a result of my work. If there is a break in our sessions, I see no loss, and I often see improvement, as I saw with KG.  This is because I teach learning skills, as well as how to read and do math.

   I called KG's father over. The boy says he does nothing with him. His dad said yes, he's improved. "I gave him books and told him to read them."  I don't know if he really believes his son's improvement is due to his actions or if it was compensation for his guilt at having done nothing. It was striking that the dad commented on his behavior rather than praising his son or celebrating his accomplishments.  I know the father is very insecure. Which explains this behavior but doesn't make it great for the kid or me.

   I had an encounter with one of my walking companions.  He is an odd combination of traits. He reminds me somewhat of a younger, not necessarily better, version of Mike. When Damon met him, he had the same thought. They look somewhat alike, and they love to talk about their knowledge. They are both very knowledgeable in their own areas of interest. Mike's was politics and history in general and science. Mike was more into concepts; this friend is a master of details.  He has Mike's old arrogance. My friend still believes he is superior because of his knowledge. Or perhaps it could be said that he thinks people who don't know, or at least appreciate what he knows, are stupid.  He's very preoccupied with people's intelligence. I qualify as sufficiently intelligent because I find his topics interesting and ask insightful questions.  He has no interest in what I know or care about.

   This is fine with me, except when he goes off on tangents, which I find offensive, scary, or both.  He often tells of pranks he pulls on people for his amusement. He insists he's just being funny, and the other person laughs too. Perhaps he's right about his prank victims.  His problem is he has no respect for my boundaries when I ask him to stop.

   I always ask him to stop when he goes off on how the stock market is about to collapse. He believes there's protection in getting out of it and investing in commodities.  I have no such confidence. If the stock market goes, everything goes. There is no safe harbor.  I don't want to listen to someone going on enthusiastically about the fall of Western civilization, even if he does believe there's a way to avoid personal disaster.  I ask him to stop talking about it or walk away.

   He really hit hard the other day. He expressed support for Modi's treatment of Muslims. When I protested that nothing could be said about all Muslins, he said, "You obviously have never traveled." I find the 'all' mentality about any social group frightening," with or without the advocacy of genocide. He made it clear he had no respect for my need not to discuss it.

  I think he responded to the intensity of my response. It frightened him. He said I needed therapy if I responded that way to an 'innocuous' topic, genocide.

   Mike and I came from homes where our boundaries were not respected and our feelings were not considered. A strength of our union was that we could give that to each other. I introduced the " life-saving tap," a signal we could give each other when behavior was causing distress.

   I learned the life-saving tap when I learned water life-saving. You must practice with a partner in the water when learning life-saving. Since one person plays the role of the drowning person and the other is the lifesaver, struggle is involved. This struggle occurs in water and often under water. If one person is in real distress, they can't wrench free.  It's the lifesaver's job to control the drowning person; the drowning person fights against the lifesaver out of fear. The solution in the practice session is the life-saving tap; you tap twice anywhere on the partner's body. The practice session stops immediately, and both parties swim to the surface and get a breath of air.

   Mike and I  agreed that if one of us gave the life-saving tap, the other party would immediately stop what they were doing unless it was a life-or-death situation.   It worked for us. While neither of us did it perfectly, it was a fundamental underlying commitment. It became a foundational principle of our relationship. It made us both feel safe. While we used it a lot in the first years of our relationship, we didn't continue using the actual tap later. However, we continued our commitment to the principle behind the tap.

   Either late in the relationship or perhaps even after Mike died, it occurred to me that someone could use the life-saving tap maliciously to control the other person's behavior for the pleasure of it.  Neither of us ever misused it. I expect such respect from everyone I meet and try to give it to everyone I meet.  I have problems with people who can't or won't express their needs. I may mean something well or assume something trivial while the other person doesn't experience it that way.  I don't get along well with people who can't ask for what they want and can't set boundaries but depend on me to do the job for them.

  I anticipate the question, what if one partner delivers over twenty taps a day or makes you feel you can't be yourself. Get the hell out of that relationship. All relationships involve negotiating boundaries. No relationship is 100% perfect. However, if it falls below a certain level, there is no choice but to leave.