Feeling Good

These past several months have been emotionally hard for me, and my family, and it’s taken it’s toll. We’ve lost members of our family – young and not so young – and have more folks who are seriously ill with not so good prognoses. These things, along with my own aging, has me thinking about things that I didn’t spend much time on before.

I know I’m having completely normal responses to death and aging but that doesn’t mean that I feel it less because, eventually, everyone goes through it.

I think about death a lot more but I also think about LIFE a lot more, too. Doing things, seeing things, and expressing things have become more important. I’m also learning to be more calm. It’s hard. I’m not a calm sort of person. I’m a reacter. I react. Strongly. I had to stop yelling and raising my voice at home because it was making things tough for my kid. He’s very sensitive and I was really messing with his self-image and his self-confidence. Simply by not yelling and being calm, he’s doing much better. He used to clam up when we tried to get him to talk about what was bothering him or why he got into trouble at school. But now he’s finally believing me when I tell him that we’re not going to get mad at him and we just want him to tell us the truth and know that, even though there will be consequences for his actions, we still love him and everything will be ok.

I know that not everyone agrees with taking this path for child rearing, but we’re not going to hit him. For any reason. We want to teach him respect but not fear. And, to be completely honest, getting my ass beat on a regular basis didn’t make me respect my parents. It only made me better at hiding what I was doing and not getting caught. I think I’d rather have my kid know that I love him and care about what he’s going through and let him deal with the consequences in a way that mirrors adult life. My boss isn’t going to take a switch to me, but she may make me put in extra hours or dock my pay.

I’m feeling scattered right now and, I’m sure, it’s coming out that way in this post. But that’s how I roll.