Wednesday, January 22, 2025

 Wednesday, January 22, 2025

   On my morning walk, I called Jean, my Hanai sister. Her husband, John, answered and we spoke for a while. Jean came in as we talked. She reminded me it was her birthday. I had noted it and forgotten it.  in my defense, I forget my birthday.  Jean said, no, to my  offer to sing Happy Birthday to her. She hummed a few bars herself.  She had good news. Her physical therapy was helping with the pain in her legs.

   My alarm went off at 8:20.  Good thing I set it. Otherwise, I would have forgotten to leave in time for Elsa’s grooming appointment at Petco.  Needless to say, Elsa wasn’t thrilled to be there. The moment we pull into the parking lot, she starts panting.  I’ve learned to give her a chance to do her business before we go in.  I asked the groomer if they could have her ready by 11:30.  The Grief Recovery class would be over by  11.

   When I arrived at the church for the class, I told the instructor I was expecting a return call from Kaiser.  I thought I might have another UTI.  I just wanted to test it to make sure. I’ve learned that older women no longer have the distinctive symptoms we had when we were younger.  If we let the infection go on too long, it can affect our kidneys and then we’re in real trouble.  At the first sign of a possible infection, I request a test.

    I had worked hard on controlling my emotions in response to the class.  The first part spent a lot of time telling us how we felt in response to grief.  We were doing what we were told to do by our parents and our cultures.  Now, we would be doing it the right way with this program.  Basically, the program tells us that everything we did before was wrong. This program was going to set us right. 

  Today, the work took a different turn.  We were going to tell our story.  We were going to make a time line of our losses, grading them by the depth of their impact on us.  I said the greatest source of my grief were things that impacted my parents. When I meditated on a source of grief the things that came to mind were a surprise to me.  the specific story I remember  hadn’t profoundly affected at the time.  That it came to mind now was a surprise.

      My mother had seen a man being dragged behind a motorcycle through the streets of Berlin.  I remember when I first heard the story, I didn’t realize he was going to die. Today, as I told the story I broke out into deep wracking sobs that left me doubled over. Everyone took it in. I can’t imagine it was well received. It must have been pretty frightening.  I also announced my folks were refugees from Nazi Germany. There are possibly a few anti-Semites in the room, to boot. 

   The leader handled it surprisingly well.  I was afraid of her response. But she was good. She gave me a hug. She calmly said this was beyond the scope of the course. I suffered from Complex PTSD.  She had worked with vets on PTSD.  Just saying that to me and not being afraid of my fear was a great source of relief.  I can’t tell you how many therapists I worked with who dismissed my distress because it was my parents’ experience and not mine or judged my parents as being abnormal because they hadn’t fully recovered from the events of their life. Hello!  I have known forever that a learned trauma is still mine.  Therapists argued my parents taught me those fears and they weren’t mine.  I told them they also taught me English. I consider the language to be mine. What I learn becomes mine. The concept of generational trauma is common place now. Thank God.

   When I got home I needed a nap. I was drained from the crying.  The grief isn’t just because of what happened to my family. My family was lucky.  Most got out without any physical damage.  My father’s family had been wealthy and lost everything. They picked up the pieces a went on without complaint.  The horror is the knowledge of what man is capable of doing to his fellow man.  In Nazi Germany, my family became hunted animals, criminals not because of what any of them had done but because of who they were.  

    I had  a session with the Twins.  I worked with Twin E first.  She was lying in bed. Her mom and brother were arguing in the background. We couldn’t get started until they moved away or stopped the fight. I only dictated three words, rocks and stone. She consistently leaves off the -s suffix.  Many students have this problem. They either don’t hear the -s, or they’re so focused on the base word, they ignore it.

    She spelled stone as stown.  I was thrilled. Ow makes the long/o/ sound in snow, blow, flow, etc.  while I praised the thoughtful spelling, I told her it was wrong and to think of another was to spell the long /o/.  I referred to the VCe syllable pattern. She had no idea what I was talking about.  We spent the rest of the session reviewing VCe versus VC syllables patterns. We’ve done that before. We will probably have to do it again. We got through one sentence when we hit the word easily,  which she spelled easyly.  We spent the rest of the lesson on that spelling pattern. I love teaching to the problem instead of a prescribed objective. The students mind is more open if not completely open.

    At 3:30, I had fourth grade GV. In our last lesson, we worked on his problem with his younger brother, who has a family wide reputation for being loud and annoying.  I worked with GV to help him be less reactive. Today, he made a diagram to show me his improvement. He drew a pink circle covered three quarters by a black overlay. That was how much his brother bothered him before the exercise. He erased most of it, leaving less than a quarter still cover to illustrate how it was now.  I asked if his brother’s behavior was also better.  I suggested he look for ways to enjoy his brother, and to make sure he tells him if it went well.  If he just ignores him and doesn’t give him some positive feedback, the poor kid will escalate his efforts

   We did some work on the spelling. I bumped him up to working with fourth grade material because he needs more practice with multisyllable words. The first word in the paragraph was hippopotamus.  He groaned. ‘remember the procedure. Figure out how many syllables and then focus on spelling each syllable one-at-a-time.  My kids have more trouble figuring out the sound of the individual syllables than they do the phonemes.  Any idea why?  I don’t know.

  Lastly, I had fourth grade LG. According to his iReady work, he still reads at an upper second grade level. That’s a huge improvement. he has problems with comprehension.  I switch back to sentence analysis.  As he read the sentence, he came across the word several. He threw in the towel. “Oh, no. you don’t.”  I took him through the steps.  “What are the vowel letters? Which letters represent sounds? How many syllables?(Determine by the number of vowel sounds.)  Divide the word into syllable. Pronounce them as best you can.)  He divided it up as se/ve/ral.Good for him. That is a phonetically possible division.  Following phonics rules won’t always produce an accurate pronunciation of the word- but it gets close enough for the reader to figure out the word- if is in his vocabulary.  It was and LG did.   I teach this procedure over and over. It’s not that they don’t know how to do it. It’s that they freak out when they see a big word.  I suppose you could call it the freak-out disability.