Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

 

     The sixth session of the Grief Recovery system was today.  I didn't have a car, but I knew  Paulette planned to attend the Kupuna meeting at church. I hitched a ride.  She left a ten of eight; the grief workshop was at 10.  I packed my computer and was ready to rock and roll on time.

   I dropped my purse and briefcase off in the Grace Center, where the Kupuna were meeting.  I sat for a while and spoke to a woman I had never met.  She had also lost her husband and had participated in a previous grief workshop.  She had a small dog with her. I told her that Elsa had attached to Mike more than me. After he died, it took her three years before she started following me from room to room and five years before she started snuggling up to me at night. N told me she had the same experience with her dog. She read it as normal behavior.

   While the Kupuna group started assembling, I left for a walk along the shore or as close as possible without walking on the rocks. Water slick rocks and I aren't good friends anymore.  I also walked along Ali'i Drive.  I didn't take a long walk this morning because I got up late and had to leave early.  I just went out long enough for Elsa to do her business. I rushed home to put the garbage out, water the 42 shrubs, eat breakfast, and do the morning NY Times puzzles: Wordle, NYTimes Mini, and Connections before Paulette came to pick me up.  

   As I walked along Ali'i, I came across Mary Warren enjoying the view of the ocean along with her morning coffee. She asked me about the Grief Recovery Workshop. I told her I thought it was a remarkable process. I also told her about the didactic presentation style of some of the underlying principles.  A few word changes would communicate the necessary idea without condemning all the participants did before they attended.  The current facilitator can't hear what I have to say. I'm considering writing to the program administrators with my observations.

   As I entered the meeting room, I saw one of the participants crying- more fighting against her tears.  I told her to ask if I could do anything.  She managed to get herself under control before she came into the room. She had been so overcome that she couldn't face doing the homework for today's session.  

   When we met in the small group, she started to improvise. The facilitator then came up and said we could only read what we had written. The woman could make her presentation the following week after she completed her homework, but I am concerned she may not show up next week.

   During the break, I asked if anyone was heading to the Palisades, where I lived. I was prepared to take an Uber home. One of the women said she would drive me home. While she lived further to the south, in the other direction from my home, she had to stop at Costco anyway.  Since I wanted to pick up two items there myself, I proposed we stop at Costco first.  I was in and out. She said she only wanted to buy several boxes of strawberries for her daughter's commercial project for Valentine's Day. I texted her that I was at the front of the store, sitting on the base of one of the support columns.  She took forever. I wasn't in a hurry, but I wondered if she had left without me.  She finally responded to my text, saying she was in the checkout line.  While I waited, I observed customers come and grab carts. Holy cow! A bunch of carts were dropped off and gone within one minute.  There were three people out collecting carts from the parking lot. One of them ran a cart over my foot.  Fortunately, he just scuffed the toe. My reflexes were still good.

    When I got home shortly before 2 p.m., I immediately contacted Mama K. She said she would get the girls on. I only worked with fifth-grade Twin E, the lower-functioning of the two girls. Today, I did a co-writing activity with her, which I had done with her sister the other day. The difference is impressive. Her thoughts were more scattered and more difficult to evoke. On, boy. I would have to look at what she said to see if I could organize it into a coherent piece.

   I had fifth-grade (correction from fourth-grade) GV immediately afterward.   I asked him if he wanted to work on the writing or the shifting images in his brain. He said the latter.  I find his problem is mostly psychological.  Sometimes, the problem is that just one accident has become a habit.  That any of us find the neurological pathways for reading and memory, particularly associative recall, is amazing. It's not purely accidental.  We can learn from parental models or possibly from some incidental adult who wandered into our lives for an hour on a sunny day. That's all it takes to turn things around. 

  GV is an introvert.  I asked him who he felt safe with. He only feels safe when he is alone. He feels safe with me because he is the sole focus of my attention. Oh, boy!   I have to be part of a unit to feel safe, but not a crowd like a rock concert.  That feels dangerous to me.  I told GV that both introverts and extroverts can be driven by fear. As I say about myself, quoting Blanche DuBois, "I always relied on the kindness of strangers." Home was not a safe place when I was a child. I wasn't beaten or sexually abused; I was constantly told I did everything wrong and there was something wrong with me. I wasn't even born at a good time; I was born at 7:42 pm instead of arriving during working hours. I told GV both introversion and extroversion can be good or bad. If the impulse is driven by joy and love, it's good; if it is driven by fear, it's bad.   GV's mom agrees that her son is fragile.  He has to be lured out gently.  So far, most of what I've been doing is teaching GV concepts. Anything else feels too invasive. I have to handle him very carefully.

     GV's mother sent me copies of the writing he'd done in school.  One piece, a long story he says was a free writing activity, was unintelligible. The spelling was unrelated to the sounds of the words, and the syntax was weak. I don't know if it had a good story structure. I read and reread it four times and never figured out what it was about.  Another piece, dated January 27, had several spelling mistakes, but I had no problems reading it. Each word bore a resemblance to the correct spelling.  Grammarly could have corrected this without a hitch.

  One of the papers GV's mom emailed me was a report card on his reading.  I got a surprise.  He didn't do well on the comprehension questions. His reading tests out on a 4.1 grade level.  This is up from a second-grade reading level when he started 5th grade. He tested at a third-grade level at the end of the first marking period. 

  GV is thoughtful and articulate.  I didn't expect him to do poorly on answering comprehension questions. I  need to do WbyW with him. His mother agrees he is a fragile child who must be lured out. An extrovert may respond by diving, but the introvert doesn't.

   We did more with GV's psychological problems, which interfere with his learning.  He explained his problem with reading started in preschool or kindergarten when he was first introduced to letters. Before then, everything had been "easy"; letters were hard.  It explains why many children are traumatized by letters. The contrast between their expectations and the reality is the trauma. Did GV have more difficulty learning the letters than any other child in the room?  We'll never know. We can't judge his perceptual problems by what we see today with the shifting letters.  Shifting images is normal for a young child. The right hemisphere is as active as the left in perceiving abstract symbols.  If the cognitive development freezes at that point, the student will experience 'failure.' I'm reminded of the line that a performer's emotional development stops when they become famous.  The sudden onslaught of fame is traumatic. Emotional development freezes in the face of trauma.

     I had fourth-grade LG at the end of the day. He ran into trouble sounding out the words surrounding.  He got sor for the first syllable.  He couldn't get the sound of the /ou/ in rounding.   I pushed him, thinking he was having trouble anchoring himself in his physical perceptions, listening to and feeling what his mouth was doing. He spelled it soronding. LG put a pillow over his head, saying," I don't know," and throwing out possibilities. I finally realized his head was out of whack.  I hadn't seen him like that since we started working.  He said it started before our session. I apologized for pushing him. I should have realized the problem when he began producing nonsense and saying anything to get me off his back.

    I told him he should tell me from now on when his mind goes off course like that. We have to work so he can recover from an episode like that.  I spent a few minutes affirming his experience in the situation.

   I was alone on my evening walk and ran into Xia, my neighbor up the street. She usually walks with Mei, my next-door neighbor. They both speak Mandurian; they struggle to be conversationally fluent in English. Xia asked me if I was lonely.  Oh, yes. It's a struggle.  Her husband's still alive, but there are other causes for loneliness.  She's semi-retired and works from home instead of an office. She feels what so many retired people feel- useless. It's a killer.  It's supposed to be a killer.  If you can't serve the tribe, it's time to make a graceful exit.  Many may express regrets about how much time they spend at work at their death instead of with family and friends. But the opposite is also true.  No one likes feeling useless when you make no worthwhile contribution to anyone else's life.