Wednesday, September 11, 2024

 Wednesday, September 11, 2024

    I went to bed around 9:30, read another chapter of A Man Called Ove, turned off the lights, and fell asleep almost instantly.  I awoke at 2 a.m.  I dozed or lay in bed and thought for the rest of the night.  I had some obsessive thoughts, upset about the circumstances of my life.  Except for the occasional uncomfortable surges of miscellaneous shame, I was fine.  I didn't get caught up in stinking thinking. Congratulations to me.

   Mind you, my life is heaven by most people's standards.  I would feel guilty about having any complaints if it hadn't been for the excellent piece of wisdom my uncle gave me when I was seventeen.  

   He had just delivered me to Cortland State Teachers' College (now SUNY at Cortland) for my first year.  I told him how miserable I was. He said something to the effect: Given the suffering in the world, your problems are trivial. "However, every man's suffering is relative to his own experience."  What I've learned subsequently is our default brains search out the negative experiences of our lives as our tongue searches for the sore tooth or the missing filling.  We're told it's a survival strategy. Yay for the survival strategy. However, it isn't helpful in my sheltered life. Please give me the open road of the hunter-gatherers. Then, I'll have something tangible to worry about.  

   Figuring out how to deal with our zoo-like existence when we weren't designed for this plush life any more than any wild animal is intended for its zoo life.  Eliminate the problem this brain mechanism was designed to address, and it will search for something else to focus on. Every contemporary religion addresses this problem, providing us with tools to calm our racing minds, our troubled souls, and our fear-ridden bodies.

   I finally got up past 5 a.m.  I made it through my yoga exercises this morning at a good clip. I'm usually interrupted by an urgent need to obsess about something.  Not today. Hallelujah

   I had an appointment with Shelly, my therapist/life coach. Yesterday, I had been irrepressibly disturbed by my stinking thinking until I decided to focus on an underlying fear.  It's not fear of what- just fear.  I used the Vipassana technique, focusing on sensation. I instructed my mind and body to look for fear.  That calmed me down.  I fell asleep again.

   I asked Shelly if she thought my underlying negative emotion was fear masked by anger or anger masked by fear.  She said fear. When I focused, the sensations started in my calf muscles. The impulse was to run for my life. My mother's verbal attacks were explosive and felt like being hit with a cattle prod.  The electrical impulse surged through my body, contracting muscles and driving me to move. But I couldn't. My mom wasn't one of those people who said, 'I'll give you something to cry about' when I cried.  I didn't cry. But any sign of distress would have upset her. Then she would have known she had hurt me.  She couldn't bear that. She didn't want to hurt me. She just wanted to vent her frustration without regard for me. if I was hurt in the process, it would make her a bad person. She had some concern for me; it just couldn't supersede her fears for herself. She was a frightened, wounded animal. They're always dangerous.

   I walked two 5 gal buckets of green waste I collected yesterday from the area to the side of the driveway down to Darby's house. I yelled, "Delivery," but there was no response. 

   I continued listening to Flight Behavior by Barabara Kingsolver. She is an amazing writer. She seamlessly weaves her concern for the environment into a fictional story and incorporates details of human interaction that are a joy.   I also love her voice.  

  I gave Elsa her three-in-one pill for heartworm, flea, and tick protection.  I was supposed to give it to her yesterday.  I have to be careful to follow the schedule. If I put it off, I can forget about it altogether.

  I went to Ulu Wini today. I wonder each time if any kids will want to work with me. I have two children who come to me each time, both are excellent readers, progressing at remarkable rates. 

   One is 2nd grade KJ. When I asked her if she wanted to work on math or reading, I was almost surprised when she said math. She told me she loved doing math but demonstrated weak skills for second grade.  I gave her a pencil and paper and let her create the math problem.  She chose to create a page of problems before she solved one. She started with 10+2= and went down the page, writing an N+2= problem for each subsequent number up to 29+2=.  Then, she proceeded to solve them.  She used counting-on, showing me how she made a fist for the first number and counted-on using her fingers.  She was confident until she hit 29+2=.   She had done alright on 28+2=. I think she was surprised that it returned to a number ending in 1. What surprised me was how slow the process was. I was never sure why it was slow; I just observed that.  The exercise was a good drill. I didn't do much other than observe. Hopefully, she will want to do more of these exercises. 

   The second child was 2nd grade, JM.  The last time I worked with her, I discovered she didn't know the vowel letters. She still didn't know them.  I created a drill after reintroducing them.   I left out one letter from the sequence.  _e, I, o, u, a,_, e, I, o, u, a,e,_,o,u, etc., and she had to fill in the missing letters.  Watching her search her memory for the missing letters was interesting and reassuring. She's going to knock it out of the park. 

     While KJ could read fluently at a high second-grade level, I didn't think JM would be ready for it. She selected a book from Shauntel's collection, We Don't Eat Our Classmates. When I checked the reading level, it said it was 3-7 years.  I don't think so. This is a picture book. They are designed for a parent to read to a child, not for the child to read independently. I found one reading rating the book at  2.3, second-grade third month.  There were many two-syllable words in it and some complex sentences.  I would rate it at a higher level. JM sailed through this book. I was impressed. I checked my notes on her from last year. She had been hanging on but was not an impressive reader. Now, she was. Her decoding skills and sight word recall were impressive. I taught her how to use context when good decoding didn't nail the sound of the word. 

    Given that this was the first time I had introduced using context to infer meaning in coordination with good decoding skills, I gave her three choices of possible words. She had to select the one that made sense in the lesson. My guess is this will be the last time I have to do that with this child.  

   The third child was first-grade PY. She was new to Ulu Wini this year. I never worked with her last year. She wanted to work on math, counting by 10s.  I showed her the pattern; the numbers were in 1-10 sequence.  It took a while for me to discover while she could count, she could not recognize the written form of the number.  If I wrote 15, she could not tell me it was fifteen.   She needed to see the number in sequence, 1,2,3, etc, and then count to figure out what it was.  I discovered she had no recall for either numbers or words. 

   When I asked her what part of the brain she used to visualize her blanket, she pointed to the back of the right side of her head. Oh, boy. When I tried to switch her to using the front, it made her dizzy.  She had a spin pattern that moved from out to in and slowed down to a halt. Great. I did find out she lives in a contentious home. Her parents are divorced, and there's a stepdad. Everyone yells at everyone else, and her thirteen-year-old sister punched her in the nose. Great. My alarm went off, and I had to leave. Those stress-related 'disabilities' can be complex to work with. They are designed as defenses. If circumstances don't change, how can you convince a young child that they will survive it?  

    I realized I didn't have to leave as early as I did. I didn't have a tutoring session at home at 3:30. I stopped at Kaiser and took care of two things. My doctor had my blood results back from the other day. Everything looked okay, except there had been a drop in my kidney function. She ordered a urine test. I stopped at the lab desk to pick up the containers for a 24-hr collection. No, it just had to give a small sample.  I made a point of drinking more water today because the lack of it may be causing kidney dysfunction. I still was putting out as much as I was drinking.  I only made a small contribution to the collection. I was surprised.  There was no swelling around my ankles.  A drop in kidney function is scary.  I saw the impact on Mike. Dialysis is a nightmare.

   At 4:30, I sent a Zoom link for my session with fourth-grade LG. Again, there were unresolved connection problems.  There wasn't an immediate response when I sent the link. I called the mother's phone. LG answered. His mom had to go pick up his sister. She left her phone with him so he could connect. He was trying.  I found it interesting and flattering that he was trying to connect on his own and was not using it as an excuse to get out of the session. His mom returned home and also tried. She had given up on using the internet through the computer. They would stick to the phone. However, not even that worked today.  I was tired. I proposed giving up. Hopefully, his dad can solve this problem. Or- maybe the universe is saying I shouldn't continue working with him.  Now that I have gotten through to him and shown him the value of following directions, he may not need me anymore, even if he doesn't fully understand why he should.

  Yvette came over for dinner. We are committed to doing this once a week. Neither of us is a cook, so she brings a frozen meal. I had a can of lentil soup and a salad. I thoroughly enjoy these events.