From A Child’s Heart
To me, being on the outside looking in:
A child being in jail for skipping school is just lost in the world with no mentors and nobody to look up to. They are in a jail setting and punished in certain ways, I relate it to someone saying to them:
‘Fuck these shoes. I’ll just throw these shoes back in a box for the next 20 years and when they’re nicer I’ll pull them out.’
Instead of just working with the already worn parts of the shoe. Working with the ways that the child needs to be healed. You know very well how to heal that child. Much like a human knows how they treat another human can damage them or lift them up.
Are you mad at the child or threatened by them?
Are you mad at the other person or threatened by them?
And when you answer that question, you can begin to dive into why you do what you do.
Because you’re selfish. And that selfishness is worthless to me. Because I am so selfless it’s shocking to some people. They look at me as if to say
“The audacity of you to think and act in such a selfless manner! How dare you!”
When I merely think in the opposite retort “The audacity of you to think and act in such a selfish manner! How dare you!”
My mind would go towards working with what was already there to help heal the brokenness. How do we keep a child in a mind-state to where they can stay sane if they are hated by those around them? Is it homeschooling? Is it taking them from the very place that they tell you they hate? And the very place that they tell you hates them?
The expectation of some people in life is to just move on from death. Just leave it in the past. Some of us do. We don’t realize what this does to a child. How this makes them feel. Like they have nowhere to turn. They don’t understand it. They don’t know how to release the anger. The loneliness. The hurt. But yet we tell them (as adults) to “move on”.
It’s because you don’t want to be bothered. And I cannot be bothered with people like you that act or think like that. So please stay away from me. I want to hold these children near to my heart. Tell them how to grieve. I have every single type of grief there is. So I know it all too well.
And I will be the last to tell you to just move past the hurt.
You are entitled to live in it. Just don’t let it break you.
I am watching a documentary about a child that is in an institutionalized home for young kids. Not only have I worked in one about 6-8 years ago because I am passionate about lives people live and how they receive love; I just wanted to watch something that would increase my emotional intelligence while I sit in my current state in life and figure out what the fuck has happened to me. A huge part of my ten page resume was dealing with human services and healthcare. How someone would misconceive the notions in this girl’s heart is beyond me. She needed this. She deserved this. To see her mother’s grave on her mother’s birthday, anniversary, holiday or any other day that she needs. Because it can free her from her chains inside herself. But as a woman who has been through an exponential amount of grief at 37 years old, I sat here not expecting someone to understand where I was coming from automatically. No expectations, as I usually say.
In this life that we live how can we expect a child that is 12 years old, and their mother was just shot; to understand the moral and spiritual aspects of life and death? What is death? What does that mean? How do I heal this pain? Where do I get my strength to move on now? Because the one person who made me happy and smile is gone. So, what do I do now? Where do I go? Who can I trust? Who can I love? Who loves me? Why am I here? Am I lovable? Did I make a mistake? Is it my fault? Is there any way that I can bring them back?
These are all questions that I had asked myself when my grandmother died and I was 16. It was like I had two moms in life. My biological mom and my grandmother. And to lose my grandmother was double the pain in a sense because of how people in my hometown and this state had felt about her and her work in social work. And my mother was another voice of comfort when I needed. When my grandmother needed. It was that love for both of them that was unconditional. Can we discover how love can heal? What if the child knew that caring for someone else can cure the emptiness in their hearts of their loved one being gone? There were so many times I had a met a child that had no parents and would tell them to go into nursing. I really think you should just give it a try. I know you love fighting, but understanding that you’re just afraid to open up and be seen/heard sometimes is the reason that you act the way you do. What if you thought of it as a healing aspect for you to be so strong for someone else, and they can be safe for you? You can sit with an old lady and tell her how much your mother meant to you, and that in turn will soften your heart. Making sense of the cycle of abuse, what it means to love and care, what is karma? How do I change these things?
Anger management is not something that is common in schools. But it would have helped a child that lost their parent at 12 years old. They’re telling this one girl that getting a special visit to see her mother’s grave is an incentive. Not a right as a baby girl. And that breaks my heart. Because no matter what, I bet she would have a tent
Unconditional Love: Unconditional love is love that is given freely without expecting anything in return. It remains steady regardless of circumstances or imperfections of the other person
You might be willing to want to be more of a people pleasing person if people pleasing in the first place was based in a healthy rhetoric.
Are you mad at someone because they have not figured out their life yet? And they are a certain age? You feel like they should be able to figure it out or should have a pretty good idea of what they want to do in life. But what involvement in providing a healthy environment did you have for them? To what extent of life did you go for their happiness and yours?
Often getting into an argument over the livelihood of a child when it comes to morals and their mind. As a mother I will fight in a very aggressive manner regarding the logic of you telling me that what I have been through in life is the reason that I am going to have to explain my failures in life to my children. Do you not think I carry the guilt from that? And you carry the guilt for how you treat me when I show you how you could/should have treated me better and with more respect. So as a man how unjust is the circumstance or argument when you’re mad because I pee in your shower at your house? But your ex-wife is the type of female that makes fun of/extorts women who have been abused? And you like to carry on the same cycle of abuse. In a form fit for yourself, you look to others and put on a mask acting like you’re good and wonderful but you know good and well there is no unjustness in my peeing in a shower. It’s how you take respect.
What does respect mean to you? So if you have a disaster such as hurricane katrina, and it’s a time when all people not only begin to panic but as any other catastrophic event in their life that includes society simultaneously; to the point where we then have to act, survive, and exist together as a unit. How then would we obtain the logic sometimes in having more of a desire for the action of thought process and compassion for all facets of life in that moment. Before that moment. After that moment. In time. Example being that if it was a way that we were supposed to act when there is an emergent situation; but the help available to you at the time is not going to work for you the same way it has in the past. We have now decided to argue that it’s how we treat someone with a disability or disadvantaged in life but argue for the ability of greed to not only buy time but peace. Acting on that in an emergent situation; I was wondering if I was desperate and needed a solution for myself; would I ask myself these questions of “What am I mad at and what am I afraid of” if I had not had a desire to see more than just my point of view? To see more than what I am going through?
In the documentary the woman slams down the folder and says it’s getting pretty thick. That sense of sarcasm hurt that child. I saw it all over her face. And had they thought about more than themselves they would have realized there is an active way they can be part of a bigger picture that desires a more positive stance on change. Especially for the child. If you are in social work ask yourself “How well do I really understand the value of respecting someone else in the way I communicate with them and inspire them. No matter what age they are?”
This poor girl was saying “I don’t know how to deal with the anger of my mother being gone. I just don’t know what to do anymore.” And that’s all I needed to hear. But I didn’t need to hear it. Because I know. I am intuitive enough to know what she means by what she said. And it resonated.
The types of grief are below:
- Anticipatory Grief: Pre-death emotions
- Delayed Grief: Postponed emotional response
- Disenfranchised Grief: Unrecognized loss
- Abbreviated Grief: Short lived response
- Absent Grief: Denial of loss
- Collective Grief: Shared community experience
- Complicated Grief: Interferes with functioning
- Cumulative Grief: Multiple losses impact
- Inhibited Grief: Hidden emotions
- Masked Grief: Atypical symptoms
- Normal Grief: Gradual emotional decrease
Depending on the research you do, you can encounter Abrupt, Prolonged, Absent, Delayed, Disenfranchised, Collective, Climate, Secondary Loss, and Anticipatory. It was when I attended a grief group that I was shocked. And still to this day work through most of it on my own. Grief doesn’t always come from losing someone. Sometimes putting someone through unnecessary turmoil in life can do nothing more than cause more grief.
Click here for Psych Central’s article on grief.
I will tell you what and how I think then.
I do. I like to pride myself on wanting to perfect my way of thinking in that way sometimes. As it makes my job in life as a human better, more meaningful, deeper, and more enlightening. I am not better that the work I need to do on myself. So, I need to re-evaluate myself on a consistent, obsessive basis at times. It gets exhausting.
I do not like her reprised response in this documentary. Whether it be at that time, or not. What if at some point in life I need a ride to see my mother’s grave? What if someone wants to give me that same sordid response to a need for me to see the very person that raised me? And albeit I am in this position in life, I need this. And you refuse to give it to me.
All you’re going to do is sit back and watch me suffer right now. Then sit back later and say that you’re sorry for what the suffering has done to me. My mental. Fuck that and fuck you.
You know what you did.
I was watching this episode of a show that was discussing prison. The woman said, “Power is seductive” and I said to myself
“Power is not seductive to me. Honesty is. Power is sadistic.”
People often hate themselves, because they see something in you that threatens them. Let that be their issue. Not yours.
Understandably in the reform manner of the child, you need to adhere to the state regulations of the home. Absolutely, but I would do things differently. And that’s all that needs to be said. Is that I am not you. So, I go within my mind and talk to myself about how I would do things differently with more compassion. With better regard for the person as a whole.
As a human.
I cannot sit and watch that poor baby sit in that chair and cry on the anniversary of her mother’s birth or death and feel hopeless. PERIOD. My heart would have wanted to heal her.
XOXO,
El’Aundra
