Author: admin

No Means No!

So many times this week, more than usual it seems, I have had to tell multiple students that “no means no!”

It seems obvious to me. If you ask somebody for something and they tell you no, that’s the end of that conversation, move on, walk away. It’s over and done, they gave you their answer. But that isn’t the case most of the time.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Instead of “NO!” what they seem to hear is, “keep asking me the same question over and over.” It annoys me, so I can only imagine how it makes the person being asked feel. Ignored, unimportant, good for only one thing?

I step in whenever I hear the conversation continue and tell them that “no means no” and to move on with their life.

If we don’t teach our children that “no means no” in situations that seem unimportant, like sharing toys or food, how can we expect them to know that “No means no” as adults in situations that carry life long consequences as in forcing or coercing someone into having sex with them?

Rape culture starts at a young age. What we teach our toddlers and children about the right to say no and the responsibility to respect when people tell us no goes with them into their teen and adult years where rape and other sexual assault happens. We don’t want to teach our children the wrong thing. We want them to be able to tell someone no, with conviction, and stand up against them, when they continue to beg, but we also want to teach our children to respect the right of others to tell us no.

April is sexual assault awareness month. I was in Junior High the first time that somebody touched me without my permission and I never told anyone until a few years ago. I was 15 years old when my boyfriend raped me, I was too ashamed to tell anybody what happened for over a year and when I did tell, most people blamed me since I didn’t break up with him right away.

According the the National Sexual Violence Resource Center Website ( https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics ) one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old. One in five women and one in 71 men will experience rape in their lifetime while one in three women and one in six men will experience some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime. If you want even more heart breaking statistics, feel free to check out that link.

The only way we are going to change rape culture is to change what we teach our kids. Instead of teaching our daughters not to get raped, (well both genders, but girls do tend to get raped at much higher rates than boys) we need to teach our kids not to rape. They need to know that “no means no,” but so does silence, and “go away,” and “leave me alone”…

If you or a loved one has been affected by sexual abuse or assault and needs help call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4473 to be connected to a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.

Mental Health and Kids Movies

My kids are almost done with Kids Movies, but last week we went to see Wonder Park. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting too much from this Nickelodeon movie. I thought it’d be along the lines of Sponge Bob, maybe a little funny, but mostly a waste of time, money, and most importantly, brain cells.

I. Was. Wrong.

While this movie has some plot holes that left me with questions that will never be answered, it has an excellent message about depression, specifically for kids.

According to the Center for Disease Control, 3.2% of children in America 3-17 years old, have been diagnosed with depression. That’s about 1.9 million kids, diagnosed. That doesn’t even take into account all the ones who haven’t been diagnosed!

That’s a lot of kids with depression alone. Also according to the CDC, anxiety affects 7.1% of kids in the same age group, or 4.4 million who have been diagnosed. Again, that’s those who have been diagnosed, there’s bound to be many more undiagnosed kids suffering out there.

Movies like Wonder Park and Inside Out from Disney a few years ago, are a great way to increase awareness of childhood mental health disorders, but so is just talking about it.

Parents, grandparents, aunts , uncles, parent’s best friends, etc. can educate themselves, know the signs (also be aware that there’s not always signs), talk to kids. Know what’s going on, listen to them. Let them know they can tell you anything without judgement from you. Let them know that you are a safe place for them.

In Wonder Park, they don’t call it depression, they refer to it as “the darkness.” There’s one part I disagree with. The main character says she has to fight it alone. She doesn’t have to fight it alone. She has her friends there to help her.

Nobody needs to fight depression, or any other mental illness alone. We have family and friends who will be by our side. Maybe not all of them, but when “the darkness” comes, we find who will come along side us and help us through it.

If you or a loved one is struggling with depression, anxiety or thoughts of harming yourself please ask for help.

This is the National Suicide Hotline

1-800-273-8255 suicidepreventionlifeline.org

A Glimpse Inside My Mind

That’s not the greatest picture ever made, but I wanted to depict how my mind feels sometimes. John Green wrote a book titled Turtles All the Way Down. In it, he talks about thought spirals and I wrote a previous post about that.

Sometimes I have thought spirals, where I follow a thought with question or thought about it until I’m caught in the spiral of it spinning out of control until the next one takes hold. Then the next and the next. Forever. Until I’m exhausted and I try to sleep, but the thoughts keep me awake.

That’s why the picture has all the different spirals coming out of the head. It depicts all the spirals that bombard my mind at any given time. Of course some days are better than others. Some days there may only be one or two spirals, other times there are too many spirals to count. Other days there are so many spirals fighting for attention that I end up curled in a ball in bed doing breathing exercises or having a panic attack in public, or crawling under my desk in my classroom or, snapping at my family because I can’t take one more thing being added to the spirals in my mind.

So for fun, I though that instead of this organized, thought out writing you’re used to reading in this blog, I’d finish it off by just writing what comes into my mind.

Today’s a slow day, my mind is pretty calm, you might be bored. Bored readers won’t come back to the blog. People won’t read if I don’t write regularly. I haven’t been writing regularly. So many reasons why. Been busy with both kids, one has so much theater the other has so much concussion stuff.

I hope that she heals completely from the concussion. I have a student that had a concussion three years ago and still has some lingering effects. She’s back to her sport, but she still struggles with school. That’d be hard for my kid. She’s always done well in school and enjoys the challenge.

The first time a teacher told me she was in the challenge group I was horrified. To me that meant she was a challenge to have in class. She was in Kindergarten. Her teacher quickly told me that it was a reading group to challenge her.

I wish more kids enjoyed being challenged, most seem to want the best grade for then least amount of work. I graded a project today for my class. I’m going to have to deal with a lot of upset kids and parents I’m sure. At the beginning of the instructions I put that if any of the assignment was copied they would get a zero on the 140 point assignment. Probably a quarter of the students got a zero and that’s just the ones I caught. There were others that I could tell it wasn’t their work but I couldn’t find where they copied from. Some grade dropped dramatically. I hope if I get really irate parents that I have admin support.

I wonder what it’s like to be married to me? Is it hard? Do I irritate him by always worrying about everything and over planning? Does he get upset when I don’t feel like cooking dinner? What if he hates what I’m making tonight? I’ve never made Mac and cheese bites before. They might be disgusting, then what?

What color was the sky the day we got married. It rained that day so it was probably gray-blue. We’ve almost been married for 18 years. That’s a long time! Wow! Maybe it’s not too hard to be married to me. We should be able to make for 18 more. We need to start saving money so we can celebrate our 20th anniversary…

I think you get the idea. I need take my thoughts with me and go make dinner.

Helpless

I have felt so many emotions since becoming a mom 14 years ago this month. Joy, hope, sadness, pain, love, anger, adoration, pride, shock, awe. The list can go on and on. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

My family, especially my kids, are what kept me holding on when I felt alone. There was no way I could ever leave them.

These past few months however, I have felt a new emotion and it’s one I don’t like so much. I’m pretty sure that as my kids get older, I’m going to have to get more used to it though.

Helpless.

When they’re little, it’s pretty easy to fix their problems, or find the right person who can; the right doctor, the right counselor, the right medicine, the right coach, but as they get older it gets increasingly difficult to fix their problems or even guide them to finding the solutions on their own.

I find myself in a health situation with my oldest child that I feel completely helpless in. She suffered a concussion on November 9th. That’s three months ago.

She hasn’t played soccer since then.

Most people who get concussions take a week or two to rest, get over it and get back to their regular lives. Not my kid though.

She’s been put on home instruction for school because she keeps getting headaches, has a hard time focusing and concentrating and basically was in pain while at school.

Most kids would probably prefer to be home and not go to school, not my kid. She likes going to school and learning. She doesn’t want to get behind. She wants to do well.

She also misses soccer. Sometimes I take her to practice so she can be with her friends and do a little conditioning, but she can’t really do much of anything else out there. No real soccer training, no ball touches, no contact.

The hardest part is the neurologist is unhelpful. She has no idea why my daughter is still suffering, she basically accused her of exaggerating the pain to get out of school at the last appointment we had with her (we are getting a new neurologist).

We have no answers. We have no timeline of healing. No expectation of when she can get back to school or soccer. No idea when she can go somewhere without worrying about the place giving her a headache from too much stimulation.

We did, finally, get an MRI done, which showed her brain is normal. Good news, but still leaves me helpless because we have no answers for why she still feels the way she does.

This feeling of helplessness is by far the absolute worst emotion I have experienced in parenthood and I want it to go away!

Valentine’s Fallacy

This morning a girl walked into my class lugging a teddy bear almost as big as her, three balloons with various messages of love, a giant box of chocolates and what looked like two dozen roses. All expressions of love from her boyfriend for Valentine’s day.

Honestly though, if my husband had gotten me all that crap to lug around all day, I’d be livid. Showing love isn’t about going overboard buying stuff once a year, it’s about all the little things every day.

I love this cartoon. It reminds us that love is a choice, not a feeling. I choose to love my husband, everyday. Even when he gets on the only nerve I have left after teaching hormonal teens all day and helping our own kids navigate the wonderful world of Junior high school.

He chooses to love me every day. Even when I lose it on him and unleash all my pent up anxiety in his general direction.

Love isn’t always pretty heart-shaped balloons with catchy phrases or beautifully, fragrant roses.

Sometimes it’s ugly, roll up your sleeves, hard work.

Sometimes it’s holding each other when one of you, in my case usually me, winds up crying until your eyes are puffy and you have snot and tears running down your face and you might not even know why.

Sometimes it’s staying home on a Friday night, making tater tots and watching your favorite show, sport or movie.

Sometimes it’s helping the other through a tough time

Sometimes it’s watching the other person, being their cheerleader as they work towards reaching a goal.

Love isn’t being shot with an arrow by Cupid or falling head over heels.

Love grows with each day and each choice to be there for the other person until all you know is love for them.

My Body Turned Against Me

My last post was about being nicer to myself, encouraging myself and basically, not being mean to myself. Then, just a few days later, my body decided to turn against me.

It started out simply enough, a couple of sniffles, a tickle in my throat. I told my mother in law, “I’m a teacher, I’ll be fine. I have an incredible immune system, from being attacked all day everyday by sick kids.”

I was trying to stay positive.

I went back to school on that Monday after Christmas break, and by 4th period I knew I wasn’t going to last the whole week. I thought I’d have a sinus infection by Thursday.

By 6th period, I couldn’t get through an entire sentence without coughing, my throat was sore from the coughing, my nose was stuffy, my head hurt and my sinuses above my eyes were excruciating.

As soon as I got home, I called a sun for the next day. I woke up that next morning with a fever of 101.8°. I hurt all over. I made it to the doctor. They told me I had a sinus infection after I told them that I had a sinus infection (it wasn’t my regular doctor and I wasn’t impressed at all.) She prescribed be an antibiotic that wreaked havoc on my intestines.

I ended up missing 4 days of work and still felt pretty bad when I went back. Then two weeks after the fever started, my chest began hurting when I took deep breaths, with stabbing pains when I coughed, which was still a lot. I went back to the doctor and found out that my asthma had been triggered by the sinus infection and most likely the mold in my bedroom from a flood in there we woke up to on Christmas morning.

That doctor gave me a few prescriptions to get my asthma under control and within hours I felt better. The pain in my chest was gone and I could breath comfortably again.

I thought it was ironic that just a few days after I wrote about being nice to myself, and not tearing myself down, but encouraging myself, my body would turn against me.

This illness has sapped my energy for most of the past 3 weeks, I haven’t exercised, graded very many papers at work, eaten very well, spent good time with my family etc. Usually I would berate myself for that. I would tell myself that I was a horrible wife, mom, teacher, person, but I haven’t. I’ve been sick.

I’ve needed to focus on taking care of me and getting better. If I’m not healthy, I can’t really be there for anybody else.

So as I’ve felt better, I’ve cooked dinners for my family, graded and returned assignments to my students, helped my son with homework, and yesterday, for the first time in three weeks, did the stretching part of my exercise routine.

This illness took a lot out of me and it took a lot of time from me. It will take a while to get back to where I was before, but that’s okay.

It doesn’t make me less, it makes me human.

Happy New Year!🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

I know I’m about 5 days late on that, but hey, better late than never, right?

So…

Happy New Year!

Did you come up with your New Year’s Resolutions yet? Did you give up on them already? Not judging, but most resolutions don’t last very long. I didn’t even come up with any this year, it’s easier to not come up with any than to deal with the feelings of failure when I don’t follow through with them.

It’s a new year, it’s time to start over. It’s time for a new you. It’s time to make all the changes you’ve ever wanted to make in your life. All at once. All now.

It seems like the beginning of the year puts a lot of stress on people to change everything about themselves and become perfect. Lose the weight, become organized, get the better job, the bigger house, the better car, give up junk food, exercise more. Become better than you currently are.

That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on someone just because we change from one year to the next.

I’m not a mental health professional, but from personal experience, that kind of pressure to change has caused me to suffer from mental health issues in the past. I’m going to share how I’m heading into 2019.

To begin, I need to go back to 2018. I learned a lot about myself and my anxiety last year. I learned some things I can do to lessen my anxiety on a regular basis, like get enough sleep ( which is a struggle itself since I also have insomnia), eat healthy, and exercise. Just doing those things have taken my daily anxiety levels from a 5 on a scale of 1-10 to about a 2. That’s a huge difference. I feel like I can breath, everyday. I feel like I can relax on the shore instead of constantly treading water, just waiting to be pulled beneath the surface to drown in the demands of life.

I will take those new found skills into 2019 with me. An area I will work on this year is being nice to myself and to stop listening to the liar that takes up residence in my brain occasionally.

I’m cruel, belittling and horrible to myself. If I make a mistake, if I forget something, if I let anxiety win a battle, if I eat extra junk food, if I drink caffeine too late in the day, if I misspell a word, if I get a student’s name wrong, if I make a wrong turn, if I…., If I…

I let myself know how stupid I am. How idiotic. Unlovable, undignified, unprofessional, unloving, uncaring, fat, lazy, never good enough, always making bad choices, can’t make good choices, incapable, worthless.

Now, if one of my kids or a student did any one of those things, I’d encourage them to do better next time and remind them that their one mistake doesn’t define who they are. They can make better decisions in the future. I would offer them grace and hope. I need to do that for myself as well.

Sometimes I’m able to do that, but sometimes, that liar, Anxiety, takes up residence, and I start believing it. I start talking like it.

For 2019, I will be nicer to myself, not as a New Year’s resolution, but as a part of my continuing, growing, expanding self-care regimen. So that when a day happens like earlier this week when I went out to breakfast with my kids, went out to lunch with my friends and then went out to dinner with my husband, I will not call myself a fat, loser who can’t stick to eating healthy for anything. I won’t tell myself that I might as well give up now and just eat everything, all the time.

I will tell myself that I had a good time with three different groups of people and that sometimes spending time with people means eating food with them.

I will tell myself that nurturing my relationships with family and friends is just as important to helping ease my anxiety as eating healthy is and remind myself that I made healthy(ish) choices while eating at restaurants.

Here’s to not being better in 2019, but to being the best you that you can be in 2019!

Happy New Year!

Lin Manuel Miranda Sent My Son A Letter!

One of my son’s current obsessions is the musical Hamilton by Lin Manuel Miranda. A few months ago, he sat down and rewrote some of the songs to be PG, since some of them aren’t appropriate for kids. When he was done, he looked up Lin Manuel Miranda’s P.O box, printed out the PG version of the songs, wrote a note about how amazing a junior version of the musical would be and mailed it all to him.

Today my son received a reply. It was specific to the note my son sent to him and was signed with Lin Manuel Miranda’s autograph. I’m pretty sure that nothing he receives for Christmas this year is going to be as good as getting a letter from Lin Manuel Miranda.

In all reality though, the best Christmas gift any of us received was given about 2000 years ago, on that very first Christmas. I’m not usually preachy on this blog, but Jesus is important to me, and I’m going to take time to share about him today.

There have been many religions throughout history. Each has their own version of creation, God and how to get to heaven.

In Christianity, God created the Heavens and the earth and everything on the earth. Then he sent his son Jesus to be born of a virgin. Jesus lived for 33 years before being crucified as a sacrifice for our sins, so that we could be justified before God, in order to be able to enter Heaven. All we have to do is believe that.

That’s it.

Believe that Jesus was born to die as a sacrifice for our sins.

The best Christmas gift ever.

Something we could never earn.

Something we don’t deserve.

Something we are freely given because of God’s love for each one of us.

So while my son is basking in the excitement of having a letter from Lin Manuel Miranda this Christmas, I will remind him of the best Christmas gift ever…

Jesus.

Holiday Hope

I have overheard people talking baout how they don’t like Christmas because of a bad childhood. I grew up in a dysfunctional family. My mom and dad separated when I was almost 7 years old and my siblings and I spent the next several years living mostly with my mom, but sometimes with my dad, but we always spent Christmas with my mom and her family.

Even though they were separated and we spent Christmas day with my mom, our Christmas tradition included both of them.

Even though my parents fought, a lot. Even though they cut me down and made me feel insignificant, a lot. Even though most of the year was filled with anger and tension, Christmas time seemed magical.

One afternoon in December, when we got home from school, my dad would decide it was Christmas tree day. We’d load into what we referred to as the “banana truck”, a yellow, Volkswagen, flatbed truck, and drive to a Christmas tree farm. We’d see a tree and if it looked good, one of us kids stood there to guard it until we decided that was the one and we cut it down, or cut down a better one. He always let the three of us take a turn with the saw too, so we each had a part in bringing home the Christmas tree. Once we had the perfect tree for that year, he’d throw it onto the back of the truck, drive us to our mom’s and set it up for us. Sometimes he’d stay while we decorated and they’d get along for the evening. The magical part, they’d get along.

Then one year, when I was in middle school, we lived with my dad, and my mom rented a room from a friend. Even though it wasn’t my mom’s own house, we were going there for Christmas and there was already a tree. The problem, for me anyway, was that we weren’t going to be in a house with Christmas spirit, leading up to Christmas. My dad wasn’t going to get a tree if we weren’t going to be there for Christmas.

That year, my siblings and I took matters into our own hands.

My sister and I went hunting for the box of Christmas decorations, while my brother raided the wood pile. He found the perfect pieces of wood to fashion together in a Christmas tree shape, it wasn’t huge, maybe 2 feet tall, but it’d work.

Then, the three of is found my dad’s supply of green butcher paper. We cut off enough to wrap around our wooden Christmas tree frame, laid it out on the floor and decorated it. We drew on ornaments and Christmas lights in bright colors. Once the paper was Christmas-y enough, we wrapped it around our frame.

We took the Christmas lights and strung them up around the room, we didn’t want to put them in our paper tree, because it was the eighties and those big, old Christmas lights got hot and we didn’t want to burn our paper tree. We even hung lights in our bedrooms.

It was perfect.

Looking back, it’s still my favorite childhood Christmas memory. My siblings and I took a bad situation and filled it with hope and love. I spent many evenings that December sitting in front of our homemade, artificial tree, with nothing but the Christmas lights to illuminate the room, dreaming of a magical life and feeling peace in the hope that I could make Christmas magical on my own.

Right now, this world we live in is dysfunctional. People are fighting, a lot. People are cutting others down and making them feel insignificant, a lot. People are filled with anger and tension, alot. We can have a magical Christmas season.

We can choose to dwell on the negative and talk about how horrible things are. We can choose to keep the divisions between us and them.

Or…

We can choose to do something else.

We can choose to work together to make the world a better place, just like my siblings and I made our house a better place.

We can choose to see hope in the holidays.

We can choose to stop fighting and start talking.

We can choose to stop cutting others down and making them feel insignificant and start building others up and letting them know how important they are.

We can choose to let the anger go and find constructive ways to release the tension, like giving to others and loving them.

Each person in this world can choose to make it a better place.

My holiday hope is that everyone chooses love and peace.

I Cried in Class!

Yes, I really did cry in class. I was up in front, teaching a lesson, when tears filled my eyes. My students got a glimpse of my vulnerable side. It was a good thing, I think. I know it was a lesson they won’t soon forget.

In my psychology classes, we are just starting our unit on mental illness. Every year, I start this unit with a lesson about ending the stigma of mental illness and the importance of getting help if you are struggling with a mental illness.

The lesson started out simply enough; we defined stigma. Here’s the definition from the Cambridge Dictionary: “a strong lack of respect for a person or a group of people or a bad opinion of them because they have done something society does not approve of:”

Then we looked specifically at the stigma associated with mental illness with this:

“Stigma refers to a cluster of negative attitudes and beliefs that motivate the general public to fear, reject, avoid and discriminate against people with mental illnesses. Stigma is not just a matter of using the wrong word or action. Stigma is about disrespect. It is the use of negative labels to identify a person living with mental illness. Stigma is a barrier. Fear of stigma and the resulting discrimination discourages individuals and their families from getting the help they need.” SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), School Materials for a Mental Health Friendly Classroom, 2004

We had a little discussion about their attitudes towards mental illness and some facts about it, like the fact that 1 in 5 teens will experience a mental illness, which means their life will most likely be impacted in one way or another by mental illness.

Then we watched a couple of videos of teens and young adults discussing the way in which a mental illness has impacted their lives.

I ended the lesson by discussing several ways that each individual can help end the stigma surrounding mental health issues. These include: get educated about mental illnesses, listen to people talk about their personal experience with mental illness, respond to stigmatizing material in the media, speak up about stigma and watch your language.

The “watch your language” explanation was when I cried. Let me explain what happened.

I have Anxiety, Depression, PTSD and OCD. Thankfully, at the moment I am not having an episode of any of them, they have all gotten the memo that they are not invited to my party and are, so far, staying away from me. However, many of my readers know that I experience some dark times, where I feel like I’m drowning. It was the memory of one of those times that made me cry.

One of the “bonuses” of working in a high school is overhearing teenage conversations. Statements like this are common place:

“Maybe I’ll just kill myself so I won’t have to do that project/assignment…”

“I had such an OCD moment last night, I cleaned and organized my entire room.”

“I can’t sit still today, I’m so ADHD right now.”

“Oh my God! I can’t believe I just did that. I’m so retarded!”

Now, I don’t know the mental health status of all my students, but when only 1 in 5 deals with a mental illness, I can be pretty sure that many of the students who make such statements are just using the terms as adjectives.

These are mental illnesses, not adjectives!

In order to explain how this kind of talk can be stigmatizing, I chose to describe how OCD effects me at it’s worst.

In case you don’t know what OCD is, it stands for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

A person with this illness has obsessive behavior, things they have to do. It could be organizing their closet a certain way, it could be not driving over bridges, it could be having to check and recheck that the doors are locked every night before they go to bed. Whatever the behavior is, it’s obsessive.

Then there’s the compulsive part. That’s the thoughts and feelings that cause the obsessive behavior. Usually, this part involves a feeling of terror or panic. It is not just because the person has a moment and cleans their room.

So back to my story. I wanted to describe how OCD affects me.

Every evening I check all the doors to the house and make sure they’re all locked and the windows closed. In the summer a few windows are allowed to stay open if I’m not experiencing an OCD episode. However, whether I’m having an episode or not, the routine stays the same. That way if I’m having an episode of OCD, I won’t forget to do it.

When OCD is on vacation, I can check the doors once and go to bed, no problem. When OCD first comes for a visit, I will have to get out of bed a few times to check before I can fall asleep.

When OCD is at it’s most terrifying to me, I see the terrible thing that will happen to my family if I don’t get up and check the doors and windows.

OCD doesn’t let my brain just think about the terrible thing, no, OCD takes control of my imagination and shows me vivid images of it.

That’s when I cried. One of the vivid images took center stage in my brain, in the middle of the lesson. I’m not going to describe what I saw inside my head, but imagine the  worst,  gory, horror movie scene you’ve ever watched happening to your family. That’ll give you an idea of the images that flood my mind during an episode of OCD and that’s what filled my mind in that moment of my lesson.

So I cried.

They saw a mental illness’s effect on a real person that they see almost every day. Hopefully, it will help them to watch their language and realize those are mental illnesses, not adjectives.

P.S. I know that many people with OCD don’t have the same horrific images that I see. Some obsessions have much milder compulsions, but OCD is still intrusive and disruptive to the person’s life.