Connecting but not the dots

Wow! I’m starting a blog!? Why?! I have no idea!!!

My thought process…

Do I have anything important to say?! I don’t know.

Do people want to know what I have to say?! I don’t know!

Am I worried how others are going to react to whatever I write?! Yes!

And that makes me freeze about writing or starting anything?! YES!

Then why?!

Well.. After a lot of Shakespeare dilemmas “To write or not to write a blog?! There is the question”, it got me to reflect on what this experience would mean, and most importantly what is the intent, the purpose. Big questions, right?!

Let’s already put it on the table, I’m a child therapist. I work with children and families who experienced adversities. You might think that might be uncommon situations or it might be present just in specific demographics, or families. That’s a misconception. Just to give you an idea.. 60% of adults report having had at least one adverse childhood experience and at least 50% of the children in the United States have had at least one significant traumatic experience (CDC, 2019).

We might talk about this with more depth at another time.. Let’s go back to the purpose.. Yes, working with people is part of my job, helping children develop coping skills is amazingly rewarding. It’s absolutely priceless seeing kids use their strategies instead of their hands and screams to express their feelings and manage themselves in stressful situations. I could write countless pages about the gratification of being a child counselor but that’s not the intent here right now.

As I reminisced about the kiddos and families I had the honor to cross paths with, I started getting intrigued by the questions (“what is it that I see and feel that makes me so passionate about being with people? What makes me so eager to learn more from them?).

At the same time that I started to potentially get to those questions, I had my 9 yr-old coming to me to help her with school work.. After giving her some guidance, she briefly went on her way.. Yes, I said briefly! Then she came back to tell me about events in school, ask about what I was doing, what she should get for a snack, show me what she was doing with the cat and I could go on and on. Familiar to you?!

Inside my body I could feel my heartbeat getting accelerated, I could feel my facial features change, my eyebrows getting close together, my breath getting slightly shorter. My thoughts on going to places like “Urgh! Stop disrupting me, let me continue to do what I was doing. Don’t you see that I’m busy?!” Aside from the fact that I have never written anything to post publicly except for a couple of lines in very few Facebook posts, I was getting frustrated with the situation.

But what is happening here?! Why was my body reacting that way?! My precious daughter came from school and voluntarily wanted to share her world with me. I should feel like the luckiest parent in the world. But what 's happening to me is the complete opposite.

After putting my laptop aside because I wasn’t able to write another word, attending to her questions, listening to the situations with her teacher and her friends, being with her struggles in finding her voice, I noticed my daughter's demeanor getting lighter as she got physically closer to me. She finished eating her snack and headed upstairs to take care of her other things.

What is it that it’s bringing tears to my eyes as I write about this?

That might be a trivial situation as I was so caught up in my world. But without giving me a lecture my daughter once again taught me a lesson. She didn’t lose her patience with me, she didn’t become frustrated with me, she used other strategies, other resources to get me to realize what, or maybe who, she needed. I can also hear people saying.. But Roberta, you are a therapist, you should know this, you should notice this right away, you should have gotten the clues from the beginning! You said it right, I should.. But I’m also human, a learning mom in which those situations slip through my fingers too. I’m tired of the “shoulds”, “have tos”, “musts” that we face all the time.

Parenting is rewarding but can sure be isolating and sometimes might feel more pressuring than fulfilling. “It takes a village.. It takes a neighborhood.. It takes a community (to raise a child)” whatever you want to make it. What it means is, it takes connection, non-judging relationships, sharing mishaps, truly listening and again connection when we need the support, when we need to feel felt. Connection is an absolute true need of all human beings that it’s frequently and negatively expressed as attention-seeking behavior, especially with children.

During sessions it’s beyond words to describe how I feel when parents start learning about themselves and their experiences in which they consequently start describing their kiddos’ improvements as they see them from who they truly are. As parents we usually feel we need to have it together or we don’t want to feel like a burden to others when talking about our struggles. With over a decade of experience with families of diverse backgrounds, I still get emotional when I think about all the parents who told me they just needed someone who would really listen to them speak their truth.

We need to feel connected regularly, preferably everyday. Yes, everyday! Everyday we and our children have emotional needs and as relational beings we need to attend to them.

The big questions about the purpose of this blog, I’m still figuring it out. I just hope that with the sharing we start connecting. We start to find our peeps, those who we can go to that will have the patience my daughter had with me when I didn’t get her? Who can we go to that will see our struggles without wanting to fix it? Who will sit with our hard feelings without dismissing it or telling us how we should feel instead? Who can we go to when we need to feel truly accepted from who we are?