Mining Nuggets

Making a difference

Quote of the day:

"That's often where courage begins: With the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what's important, and about our capacity to make a difference ..." Barack Obama receiving the Profile in Courage Award, JFK Library Foundation, May 7, 2017

Riffing off the quote above as I choose to use it for personal reflection:

Who I am and what's important, and about my capacity to make a difference ... I am five foot one inch tall, rather too plump at this older age in my life and wanting to trim it down a bit for my health. I have a doctorate in education with an emphasis in the early childhood years, and so have become an early childhood teacher educator in a small, private, struggling university. But am on my way out with a phased retirement plan and I have a Senior card so that I only need to pay $1 when I take the local train downtown Philadelphia. I have written books that focus on teachers' self-reflection about their emotional development, and helps them make connections between what they learned as young children, and how they interact and behave with children and families. I am in the process of writing another book about children's need for attention. I travel around the country and facilitate professional development workshops and make speeches for early childhood professionals about the topics of my books. I think I have some capacity to make a difference in the lives of very young children when I am able to reach their teachers - or parents - and help them understand the importance of relationship and attachment as the foundation for healthy emotional development and young children's emotional well-being. 

Making a difference takes time, and I am not always sure if I, in fact, do make a difference. After all, change is incremental and oftentimes regressive. We have been given our emotional scripts in our early childhood, and changing that script is difficult to do when it is so deeply embedded in the emotional memory of our brain. Sometimes I feel satisfaction if I manage to reach ten percent of the participants, who attend my workshops or presentations. And even then, I am not sure about the impact I might have. The older I become, the more I realize that change is a "drip-drip" process. It happens very slowly. That doesn't mean I should give up, and I seldom feel despondent. Because every now and then I see that someone has taken to heart and significantly understands what I am on about, and I notice a change in behavior that is authentic and substantial. 

So, I wonder to myself: What is my contribution? I think it is persistence in the face of obstacles - personal and professional - and a conviction that what I am offering for children is the right thing to do because it is about compassion and authenticity. In addition, I believe that in telling my story, and sharing the process of my own psychological development and understanding, I am giving others the opportunity to courageously confront their own. For when we face ourselves, we are able to make choices about how to go about making the changes necessary for our own emotional health and well-being. This must come first, or in accompaniment with our work with children and families, as we facilitate their growth, and offer them options for change in the way they perceive themselves and their lives. I want to contribute to how they will make choices for their own emotional health and well-being - and, especially, in how they will interact with others, and in the types of relationships they will develop going forward.

Two years ago at Mining Nuggets: Gratitude

Peering behind the door

In Old Friend From Far Away, Natalie Goldberg writes:

Let's look another time at this worry about what people close to you - or people not close to you - will criticize you for. What are you going to do? Walk around with masking tape glued over your mouth? You have to speak. That's why you put the pen in your hand to begin with: in order not to blank out or turn your back. You have to be willing to go into the hot, steamy center, to go to the mat for sorrow, grief, concern, in order to shed light on what has been in shadow ... (Page 33)

In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott writes:

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must ... You can't do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can't find your own true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. You can tell if they're there because a small voice will say, "Oh, whoops, don't say that, that's a secret" ... So you have to breathe or pray or do therapy to send them away ... (Page 198 & 199)

Yes, I respond.

I have put the pen in my hand to begin with (since age sixteen, actually) in order not to blank out or turn my back.

And, yes.

I must go through the door in the castle even when I was told not to. For, I must discover my own true voice.

This is something that has been driving me for a very long time. Searching for my voice about my experience growing up; my voice about quality relationships for children's emotional health and well-being as a priority - even more important than reading and writing; and most importantly, my voice about teachers and parents reflecting on their own childhood, and making connections between that and how they understand, and thus, interact with young children and others. 

And yet ...

It is the very fear of what others think of me, or how they are metaphorically reading over my shoulder, that stops me in my tracks each time just as I am about to put pen in hand, or peer around the forbidden door. Some might call it writer's block. I call it my dilemma about loyalty. For, my loyalty has too often been called into question - sometimes just through silence or shunning of me by others, and at other times through their harsh, shaming, painful words to me. The very fact of my questioning, or trying to understand the dynamics of relationships that affected my emotional development has been termed disloyal. My own experience of my life has been called a lie. So much so that I have learned not to trust my own emotions. 

And so ...

Recently, I discover in therapy that I am standing at a cross roads. Just as I am now at a stage in my life of confidence and freedom to be myself, at the same time the past questioning about my validity and loyalty rises up to block me from writing down what I know to be my truth - about my Self, and especially as it pertains to the subject of children needing attention - relationship - from those significant adults in their lives. It seems that I cannot shrug off, let go, or rid myself of the role I was taught way back as a young child - to be good, quiet and unquestioning so as to receive any love or acceptance at all. And if I did question or speak out - rejection and shaming was inevitable. 

At my last therapy session I was given a choice - a challenge: Slip back and paralyze myself remaining stuck within my old childhood mythology, or flourish as an older woman, who knows both from experience and knowledge what is best emotionally for me and young children, and who feels free to share her own powerful story to benefit others.

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: In honor of ...