This morning my skin is on fire. I touch it and hives the size of lemons instantly appear. My body is telling me I must revisit my truth. Reset my thinking. Keep that frontal lobe high functioning. It doesn’t take much to peel back the veneer that covers my regret, no, in truth shame. A deep shame that I couldn’t protect my own children. Ultimately, I saved them, but I couldn’t protect those precious ones. Not from confusion, heartache, or changes to their brain that trauma unavoidably causes. Not only were my children’s brains altered, mine was long before theirs. This is how generation … [Read more...]
Moscow Murders and Me
The apprehension of the suspect in the November killing of four University of Idaho students was both a relief, and an unlocking of memory I held firmly in that place of ‘long ago.’ I attended the trial of the man who murdered my sister-in-law, her husband and the couple who lived next door. March 8, 1980. Six children instantly parentless. Wesley Huntley was held at gunpoint by the neighbor’s oldest son until authorities could arrive. I remember the shocking phone call. The unreality of that truth. The aftermath and taking two stunned young nephews into our home. The arraignment and … [Read more...]
How To Find Hope After Suffering a Trauma
Trauma packs a powerful punch... This article on trauma was published by The Ethel, from AARP. So grateful to have been asked to write it for them. … [Read more...]
In the Balance
I have been haunted all week. I take news in tiny doses, so deeply does the pain of war, or race related massacre, or dear god, nineteen little children and two of their teachers, drop me to my knees. I couldn’t stop the kaleidoscope of images slamming into one another. Their child would not be kissed goodnight tonight. The teachers’ children motherless. The living children traumatized by unspeakable cruelty. A collective trauma, the ripple effect still lapping up against another, and another, and another life. When I feel hopeless – or helpless in this case – and wow, do I ever, I start … [Read more...]
Music
Music. It opens me. Enlightens me. Deepens me. Lifts me. Sometimes it splits me in two. I don’t recall weeping from the beauty of music as a child. I do remember needing it. Making it, first on an organ, then an Italian accordion to take to the African bush, next a guitar, and finally a piano; and singing it…usually from the back of my horse, or high in a tree. For a number of years following the tortuous process of bringing my children to safety, to sing was impossible. I used to say my heart had no song. But that wasn’t entirely accurate. It was more that if I allowed myself to sing … [Read more...]
Weaving Grief and Loss into the Fabric of Life
I recently slogged my way out of a series of losses. Though I talked of grief overlays, or cumulative grief, I didn’t address how one might do the work of addressing the presence of it in one’s life. So, let’s talk about overlays, a cumulative grief. Ideally, one would experience loss, talk about it, think about it, sob with it, write about it, process it: Repeat. But what does one do when grief upon grief upon grief stacks one on the other? Was I weak to falter under the load? Shouldn’t I be sturdy enough having spent a lifetime perfecting resilience to find it now? I ran aground early … [Read more...]
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