Mind Body Mama: Is that a poem in your pocket?

It’s one of those days. One of those days when everything makes me crabby or bone weary, a day to eat chocolate chips straight out of the package and spend the afternoon kvetching with BirthPie about things that trouble us which will never be solved while our children run themselves into hysterical melt downs in the backyard. A day to fantasize about drinking a pint of Farmer Brown at the People’s Pint because I don’t actually have a chance in hell of getting to the People’s Pint today or any day soon. It is the kind of day on which everything I write is dark and sniping and bordering on self-loathing, or as Spec-K gently chides, a little lacking in metta.

It’s the kind of day when the you shut up box on my desk gets a lot of use. The you shut up box is there to remind me to disregard what the cognitive behaviorists call wrong thoughts. Fifteen years ago I would never have bought the argument that one can school one’s mind to turn away from compelling negative messages. I don’t know what yours sound like, but mine run along the lines of: “I suck,” and “I’m a terrible writer/trainer/mother/human being,” and “What makes me think I can ever [fill in ambitious life goal here]?”

Back then if I had encountered the notion of wrong thoughts I would have used the concept itself to fuel the assault. As in, “I must really suck, only a sucky person would have such a wrong thought about how they suck.”

As they say, I’ve come a long way, baby. These days when the wrong thoughts rise up singing, I gently nudge them towards the you shut up box. On days like today, when they’re in really fine voice, I sigh gently and give myself the night off from anything more challenging than watching television.

So I’m abandoning a number of really terrific column ideas for another day, a day of greater patience and compassion and introspection, and instead bringing you a few links that lift me up when I’m heading for the slough of despond.

When I was suffering from burnout last fall Birth Pie came over to stage a remarkable intervention. She deftly lifted a heavy burden of domestic and professional responsibilities from my shoulders, then quizzed me on things I could do each day in the realm of self care. When I suggested “read a poem,” she raised one eyebrow quizzically but dutifully wrote it on the list.

A really good blogger would have told you all that today was Poem in Your Pocket Day early enough that you could have gotten in on the festivities (you shut up!), but I’m telling you now.

Here are some excerpts of poems I first encountered on the NPR program Writer’s Almanac, a terrific source of daily poetry. Click on the titles to link to the poems in their entireties:

Bike Ride with Older Boys
By Laura Kasischke

…My afternoons
were made of time and vinyl.My mother worked,
but I had a bike. They wanted

to go for a ride. Just me and them. I said
okay fine, I'd
meet them at the Stop-n-Go
at four o'clock.
And then I didn't show….

This Shining Moment in the Now
by David Budbill

"when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I amphysically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees... "

Another place I visit regularly for poetry is The Poetry Foundation. I especially enjoy using their Poetry Tool to discover new poets and new works by familiar poets, and I subscribe to the Poem of the Day podcast.

Another source of daily poetry has been the blog 100dayspoems/. The creators describe it thus:

“The day before the inauguration we sent out a call to poets we admire to write poems that respond, however loosely, to the presidency, the nation, the government or the current political climate. More than one hundred American poets responded immediately. The first 100 poets were each assigned one of President Obama’s first hundred days in office, and each will write a poem reflecting on the state of the nation and the world on that day. A new poem is posted every day.”

If you missed it for the last 100 days, nothing in there says you can’t read them over the next 100 days. I haven’t read them all myself but the ones I have were exquisite.

An unintended theme of this post seems to be being behind the 8-ball in some respect. (You shut up!) In that vein, you missed your chance to enter Kate Hopper’s toddler haiku contest, but you can still read the entries on her blog, Mothers Who Write.

And as the great E.B. White said, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” Spec-K is both. Discovering her poetry blog is like finding a fabulous book on your bookshelf that you didn’t know was there.

I hope poetry soothes your soul when you’re having one of those days. Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day.

Mind Body Mama: The Three Rs, Revisited

Just last week I was walking Small down our quiet street to the 19th century brick school building when she said suddenly,

“Mama! Did you know there are actually four Rs?”

She paused infinitesimally before announcing them proudly: “Reduce, reuse, recycle and REJECT. Reject products that have too much packaging or things that you don’t need.”

Smiling, I replied with my mama mantra: “Where do you get this stuff?”

“Reading!” she trilled. Conspiratorially she added, “Ranger Rick.”

Back in the day there were only three Rs: reading, ‘riting, ’rithmatic. And although the idea of an education-themed pneumatic predicated upon misspelling seems fundamentally wrong to this English major, I was OK with these Rs. Those were glory days when I thought reading was a wonderful thing, a practice that brought me great joy, my way of connecting with the world beyond my own experience.

I never imagined what it would be like to have a child who loved to read as much as I do, but if I had contemplated that future I would have been delighted at the thought. Long, rainy afternoons lounging on opposite ends of the sofa, our feet entwined, each entranced with our own novel. Dinner conversations about theme and language and gender dynamics and characterization. Piles of books on every nightstand and chair and table.

Never in a million years did I imagine I’d be doing all of this with my six year old.

The pitfalls of early reading are not new to me, but they are multiplying. Small’s Ranger Rick subscription was a gift from one of my clients, but her Family Fun subscription is something I thought we would share. Think again. Each issue vanishes before I can get my hands on it, only to reappear as weird, random demands or commentary:

“Mama! My leprechaun catcher won’t stand up!” Investigation leads to a St. Patrick’s Day craft project that features half of my recycling bin.

“I like that story about little Suzie who can’t poop.” I trace this to a children’s laxative ad, and initiate a discussion comparing and contrasting advertising copy with editorial material.

“Mama! There are two things that I need. Actually I only need one of them. They are very easy and I need one of them to happen.” Preliminary reading of the article in question suggests that Small either needs to dig a big hole in our backyard or…dig a bigger hole in our backyard. Something about this is supposed to be fun. I think the magazine is grasping for low-cost entertainment options for families in the down economy: “Kids! Stop asking your parents to buy you stuff and go dig a hole in the backyard.”

In truth, Ranger Rick is but one source of Small’s rabid environmentalism. Her little school has decided to Go Green! for the final quarter, and Family Fun just sent us the Earth Day issue. (Hence the suggestion to dig in the dirt? I’m not sure; I haven’t been allowed to read the whole article yet.) Environmental protection is in the air out here in our crunchy little corner of the country and it’s not a great surprise that she’s sucking it all in.

I just don’t love all the ways it’s coming back out.

On the morning in question, Small looked up at me sternly and offered this example of the newly-defined fourth R:

“Mama! You shouldn’t use paper towels. They’re bad for the planet.”

Thus was introduced the fifth R: remonstrate. Or, in alternate usage: reprimand.

It was useless to point out that I don’t actually use paper towels, I use rags. Maybe Small thinks it’s normal to have scuzzy little squares of old towels and tee-shirts drying in the kitchen and in every bathroom, but it’s not that normal. Most people use paper towels. We use rags. (I’ll say more about my ongoing struggle with linens in another post. Let’s just say I have some issues.) For now it’s enough to say that we do not use paper towels except for exceptionally gross things, like draining bacon or cleaning up cat vomit. And we stand by this usage.

And we do not wish to defend it to a six year old.

While I’m on the subject I’ll also point out that we use cloth napkins. And cloth handkerchiefs. And we wash out plastic zip lock bags. And I spent two years washing cloth diapers and hanging them out on the clothesline. And I don’t drive on Mondays. (On that subject, did she not notice that we were walking to school?) We are meatless two or more days per week. We belong to a CSA and a food coop. We have a compost bucket for goodness sake—a smelly compost bucket that she vociferously complains about having to take out.

Not that I have a chip on my shoulder about any of this. Or that I think that there’s not more that I could be doing to reduce my carbon footprint because there is, there certainly is. It’s just that I’m less than charmed at living with a miniature representative of the Green Police.

Small’s environmental audit of my lifestyle did not stop with the paper towels. This weekend I travelled with my family to explore the city of Providence, R.I. (Birth Pie taught me long ago that travelling with one’s family is rarely the same as being on vacation.) We stopped into Whole Foods one morning to pick up a relatively cheap, reasonably wholesome breakfast. As I contemplated the coffee selection I felt stormy displeasure arising to my right. I looked down to see Small contemplating one of the carafes with a look of deep concern and profound moral disappointment.

“What is it, Small?” I asked.

Small was too stricken with despair and judgment to speak. I followed her eyes to a label that read, “Rainforest Blend.”

I am very proud to report that I did not roll my eyes—no, not even a little bit. I may have let out the teensiest sigh, a tiny exhalation not even equivalent to the breeze caused by a happy butterfly in the rainforest fluttering past the fair-trade coffee plants grown by fairly remunerated farmers.

“Are you worried that this coffee is bad for the rainforest?” I asked with exaggerated patience.

“Yes. You can’t drink that coffee,” Small determined.

This was the point at which I became a living advertisement for fair-trade, organic coffee. I explained about the farmers, and the forest, and the labeling, and the fact that this was why we came to Whole Foods to buy coffee anyway (thinking, but not saying, “Damnit!”) Because there was (free!) crappy, chemically-treated, deforestation-causing, worker-exploiting coffee back at the hotel without any rainforest labels. Small walked right past that coffee without comment, and yet here I was in the middle of Whole Foods delivering an extemporaneous infomercial on behalf of their coffee buying policies. All the while pretending not to notice the other customers keeping a wide berth around the crazy coffee lady and her weird little kid.

“OK, Mama.” My personal envoy from the Environmental Enforcement Agency was convinced. She issued a new policy decree.

“You have to get the rainforest coffee. You have to get that kind.”

I lost my patience. “I don’t want the rainforest coffee. I want the decaf. It’s ALL rainforest coffee here! Where is your other mother?”

Apparently, I’m not the only one living this way. Some Facebook friends report being double teamed by their twins Wednesday morning: the girl child remonstrated (reprimanded?) one mama for cleaning up spilled milk with a forbidden paper towel, while the boy child turned off the bathroom light during his other mama’s shower.

I told Small how her friends celebrated Earth Day.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“Not a very good way to celebrate,” she giggled. But after a moment’s reflection she said seriously,

“But it is good for the planet.”

Happy Earth Day.

Mind Body Mama: Launching the War Ship

Last Friday I hosted my Gratitude and Abundance coffee klatch. Karen and I got together just before the party to discuss a homily she’s writing. When Birth Pie arrived it was clear we had been discussing church business.

“What is this committee you two are on?” asked Birth Pie suspiciously.

“It’s the Worship Committee” Karen told her.

“What do you do?”

“Well, it used to be called the Religious Services Committee, but that seemed too non-profity and administrative, so we changed the name,” my honey-haired Buddhist friend earnestly explained. “We are responsible for creating the experience of worship.”

“Oh, ‘worship’!” exclaimed Birth Pie. (Her father is a UCC minister, after all.) “I thought you said ‘War Ship.’”

Considering the gruesome torture aspects of the Easter myth perhaps War Ship isn’t too far off. And sometimes I do think our progressive, intellectual faith could benefit from a little more military discipline and a little less kumbaya. I feel certain the pot lucks at West Point are better organized than ours.

Our family’s Easter tradition is to host Dusty and Hyacinth for a mid-day egg hunt and festive repast. As it is also our tradition to attend Easter Sunday worship, the morning is fairly full. Recent Easters have been enhanced by Small projectile-vomiting and Sweetiebabyhoneylicious being confined to bed by her Rheumatoid Arthritis. So I had high hopes this year when it looked like no one would be ill or incapacitated.

The three of us bounded out of bed at 6am in full-on attack mode. Our mission, and we were going to accept it: to prepare a complete Easter brunch and beat the downstairs of the house into some semblance of clean in time to get Small to choir practice by 9:15 am.

I took on the roles of Commander, Chef and Cheerleader. “We’re going to cook! We’re going to clean! Let’s go Team Easter!”

“What’s the name of the other team?” asked Small, eyeing her Spider magazine longingly.

“There is no other team!” I intoned in the voice of authority.

A bleary-eyed Sweetiebabyhoneylicious settled herself in front of the computer.

“She’s not on Team Easter,” noted Small. “She’s on Team Facebook.”

Somehow we pulled it together. We made hash. We made sticky buns. We made Bloody Marys, and I didn’t even drink any. We tidied, we decorated, we washed dishes, we ate breakfast. And then suddenly it was fifteen-minutes-to-go time and we were all still dirty and in our pajamas.

Which is how we ended up in the bathroom enjoying one another’s company through our morning ablutions.

Having Small join me for my bathroom rituals is not my favorite thing. The previous morning she had this to say about my makeup routine:

“What is that stuff? It’s smeary.”

I told her it was to cover the circles under my eyes.

“It makes it less purple under your eyes,” she agreed. “Not a lot less purple, but a little less purple.”

Despite the 40 degree weather and horrifically cold wind, I was determined to wear a spring dress to church. Unfortunately that necessitated shaving my legs in the company of my family. As I pushed the shower curtain aside to lather up my right leg, Small lost all focus on oral hygiene.

“What are you doing?”

Sweetiebabyhoneylicious attempted to maintain protocol: “Don’t worry about what Mama’s doing, worry about what you’re doing.”

A dismal thought occurred to me. It is entirely possible that I have not shaved my legs in over six years. Time gets away from you when you have a small child.

“Mama’s shaving her legs” explained Sweetiebabyhoneylicious, trying to get back to the task at hand.

“What is shaving?” asked Small.

“Removing the hair on her legs.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Good question,” said Sweetiebabyhoneylicious, waving the neglected toothbrush.

“Fashion,” said Mama with grim determination.

With seven minutes to go the whole family stumbled out of the bathroom and into the master bedroom. Small has taken lessons from the cat to employ when we’re running late. Like the VISA card, she’s every where I want to be. She weaves in front of me as I walk. She intuits telepathically where I’m about to head next and gets there first. With brilliant athletic instincts she’s able to step into my path wherever I turn.

As closely guarded as any WNBA champion, I dug in the bottom of the closet for the pantyhose collection last accessed in 2001. With her breath hot upon me I tunneled through the laundry to locate clean panties. As I charged for the mirror like Lisa Leslie, my three-foot nemesis drew the foul. When she made her move I straight-armed her back across the room.

“You pushed me!” came the indignant cry.

My denial was shameless, if undermined by giggles. “No I didn’t. Pushing is rude. Mamas don’t push their kids.”

“You’ve pushed me before!” Small countered, although she was already falling into my laughter. “You’ve even pushed me today!”

The ref, aka Sweetiebabyhoneylicious, broke up the scuffle. Sweaters, earrings and mary janes were found. Dress coats were donned and dress up purses were filled. We fell into the car with time to spare. War Ship indeed.

Mind Body Mama: Updates and Shout Outs

On the injury front

This morning I had Mimi, the masochist's massage therapist, work on my shoulder. I recommend Mimi most highly; she is a crucial member of Team Lynne Marie, the various body-workers and healers who keep my dilapidated body viable. Her treatments are incredibly effective, if not entirely enjoyable.

To get a taste of what I went through, dig your index finger in above your collarbone and pinch with your thumb from underneath. Continue to pinch yourself as hard as you can for the next hour. Take a few breaks from the pinching to poke yourself in the throat.

As a result of this therapy, once again, I am a hurtin’ pup. I’ve worked with Mimi enough to know that this is a good sign, but in the short term I’m all tingly hands and aching chest again. So I’m going to keep this post brief and give a few updates and shout-outs.

With the exception of Mimi and Dr. Pat—the core members of Team Lynne Marie—and Dr. Henre—the emergency pinch hitter who kept me from going mad with pain before I could reach Dr. Pat— no one really understands or believes the cause of this injury. This is the incredible, true story:

Once upon a time, when I was pregnant, I ate a bowl of soup at the Greenfield Coop. While lifting a spoonful of cream-of-carrot to my lips, something in my right shoulder shifted. Suddenly, I could not turn my head. Subsequently, I have reinjured something on the right side every year or so: a pulled latissimus, an inability to turn my head, a rearrangement of my ribs.

I received brilliant physical therapy for this syndrome from the crazy geniuses at Advance Therapeutics (the final third of Team Lynne Marie.) And when the pain finally went away, I stopped doing my exercises. And even when the pain started threatening to return, I did not do my exercises. And when I noticed activities that exacerbated the pain, such as typing, I neither curtailed the activity nor did my exercises. And when my arm and chest began aching from a marathon weekend of typing, not only did I not do my exercises, I taught karate and did several hundred punches. And somewhere in those hundred punches one of my ribs decided that enough was enough, and it started stabbing me from the inside to get my attention.

There you have the recipe for pain and suffering: underlying cause, coupled with stupidity, denial and lack of self care. Voila!

I recently ran into my old training buddy Seamus and updated her on my benched status.

“How did you get this injury again?” she asked.

“Typing.” I said.

For this I got a long look of silent pity and deep skepticism. Finally,

“Typing? Aren’t you tougher than that? I mean, I’ve kicked you and you seemed a lot tougher than that.”

The women in my Wednesday muscle conditioning class say I need to make up a better story. Something that involves slaying bad guys and rescuing old ladies where I come off really heroic. Not like someone who is bested by keyboards and soup spoons.

Wish I thought of it first

I wish there was an award for the best use of fitness jargon so I could nominate Kara at Mama Sweat for the term she coined this week: kegel fartlek. Even—or maybe especially—if you don’t know what either of those words mean, you have to admit they sound fantastic together. Read them out loud: kegel fartlek. Say it three times fast. Say it to your sweet darling, just to make him or her giggle. Then read Kara’s post on kegel exercises and send it to all the postpartum mamas you know.


Excellence in teaching

I set a pretty high bar for teachers. I demand a lot more than knowledge of their subject matter—though I do expect that too. I want a teacher who walks with her students, who is present to their inquiry and discovery, who nurtures the teacher within each student and fosters a community of learners. I am thrilled to say that I am receiving this and so much more from my new writing teacher, the incomparable Kate Hopper. I expect every one of you to run out and buy her book when it comes out. (If you’re wondering how you’ll know when her book comes out, don’t worry—I’ll let you know.) Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll come out to our coast for a book tour.

Since my keyboard time is rationed tonight I want to close by sharing a character sketch of Charlie Dada—my father, otherwise known as Grampy. I wrote it for Kate’s class and it filled me with fondness for the old guy:

"My father reads at the picnic table on the porch after dinner. He sits on the bench, leaning against the plastic-coated tablecloth, in a pool of light from a cheap white overhead fixture. His ashtray rests to his right, cigarette smoke curling towards the light and pooling around him. Across the dark yard, behind the stand of evergreens, the highway speeds through. The constant roar is like the ocean in a shell, dull and unchanging. The cars’ tiny headlights fly through the night and flicker through his trees.

The New York Times is piled on the bench beside him. His book is open in his hands. He is too big for the table, the bench, but his body is at ease in its bulk. His head nearly reaches the light. His legs are stretched out, ankles folded under the table legs. He never really has enough room for them so he’s not uncomfortable here. His hands are enormous and dark and scarred, his fingernails permanently stained from engine grease and diesel oil. He is completely still but for turning the pages, lifting the cigarette to his mouth and laying it down again."

Mind Body Mama: Get Your Self Defense On

I’ve been thinking about instincts this week. And how mine are fundamentally altered by my twenty-one year practice of self defense.

It wasn’t long ago that I congratulated a sister martial artist on practicing “kick-ass self defense” when she stood up for herself in a professional situation. I don’t know her well enough to interpret her surprise at that nomenclature, but she did sound surprised. I fear she shares the misaprehension that it doesn’t count as self defense unless there’s some kind of physical beat-down, or at least a physical threat. I hear that a lot.

Self defense is what we do to take care of ourselves and the people we love. In the very best cases it’s what we do before or instead of getting hurt. Lots of times it’s what we do in the midst of being attacked—emotionally, spiritually, sexually or physically. And too often it’s what we have to do after we’ve been hurt: the long road of healing and taking action so that the same hurt doesn’t happen again to ourselves or others.

Twenty-one years studying martial arts and self defense in a feminist, social-justice, anti-racist and anti-violence context has changed me. I don’t think like normal people any more. That’s a good thing.

It’s more than having had the scales taken from my eyes about racism in this country and my own white skin priviledge. It’s not just that I knew there was sexism in the media coverage of our most recent presidential race before Sarah Palin helpfully pointed it out. It isn’t even my habit of noticing and planning for breaches of security. Or my knowledge that secrets and silence do not increase safety, but diminish it.

It’s not just my belief that the responsibility for an act of violence lies with one party: the perpetrator. A woman ought to be able to walk down the street butt-naked and blind-assed drunk and not be at risk for rape, although I might concede she’d have some issues to address if she was making those kinds of life choices. Cold, lost and pukey might be appropriate consequences; sexual victimization, never.

It’s all of these plus my sense that all conflict comes down to two choices, each a face of compassion. The first choice is to yield, to follow the Budo wisdom of power in softness. Or in more Western terms, to pick your battles and let some pass. The second choice is to set your boundaries. Sometimes it takes the lightest touch to set a boundary; sometimes it takes a sledgehammer. Sometimes it’s a word. Sometimes it’s a fist.

And instinct. If there’s anything that twenty-one years of practice teaches me it’s to trust my instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it’s not right. No need to explain or justify, just act: leave, set a limit, ask for help. (To learn more about instinct in action, check out Gavin deBecker’s The Gift of Fear.)

And then there’s the pinko-commie belief that safety is everyone’s responsibility. That none of us is safe until all of us are safe. That means that sometimes we have to stick our necks out to help the next guy—or more likely, the next woman—be safer. We have to imagine a risk to someone else as if it actually affected us, as if we were actually part of an interdependent web of life. We have to be brave even when it’s hard or scary.

Today I read the update to the nursing home shooting in North Carolina that I’ve been waiting for since the story broke on Monday. When I first heard about the tragic death of elderly long-term care patients I thought of the facility in Connecticut where Grandma Dottie lived out her final days and Big Alice still resides. It’s always shocked me that anyone can breeze through the front door and wander the halls. Fragile, voiceless residents lay motionless in their beds, televisions blaring. How easy it would be to hurt any one of them, even without malice: to drop a cigarette next to an oxygen tank or to just bring in the ‘flu. And there’s no barrier at all to those with evil intent, no safety protocol. It’s a free-for all! I wouldn’t send my child to a school so lax in oversight; why do we allow our elders and disabled to be so vulnerable?

But the kind of malice that inspired the killing of eight people isn’t typically brought on by anger at an elderly relative. Which is why I felt a validation of my own instinct when I read today that the suspect’s estranged wife was an employee at the facility.

It broke my heart to hear who has apologized for the shooting. It wasn’t the man with the gun. It was the woman he was hunting.

She thinks what so many people think—that domestic violence is a private matter. That this rage, this malice and insanity of his should have been contained in the sphere of their domestic life. That she shouldn’t allow the shame and mess and danger of it to spill out and hurt other people. That it was her responsibility alone to face, even if it meant facing her own death.

But there’s another version of this story. This one says that there’s only one person responsible for this act of violence: the man with the gun. This version says that none of us are safe until all of us are safe. That it’s all of our responsibility to reduce the risk of violence in our world. This version is buoyed by statistics about the impact of domestic violence on business’ bottom line and the numbers of women affected by it .

Here’s the thing about an epidemic: it’s the very opposite of an individual problem. I know it’s the commie-pinko in me, but I gotta say: if thousands upon thousands of people are going through something—diabetes or domestic violence or foreclosure proceedings—maybe it’s not an individual moral failure. Or thousands and thousands of individual moral failures. Maybe there’s something deeply and profoundly and systemically wrong.

Like agribusiness and capitalism and patriarchy and the absence of gun control, for example. I’m just saying.

An episode of playground self-defense offered an opportunity to help Small listen to her instincts and step up to protect others this week. Yesterday Small and I were noodling around on the computer when she wrote this:

“I need help ceeping my friend Corey safe from Leo”

A lot of prodding led to this story: When Small and Corey run too close to Leo on the playground, he tells them, “Get away or I’ll kill you with a knife.”

Small said, “I think it’s a game because it’s fun.”

Then she said, “Corey is really scared.”

Then she said, “I’m not sure if it’s a game.”

Fortunately, we know Leo and his parents and we think he and they are pretty great. So we weren’t too worried about an impending playground massacre.

But the teaching moment was before us. My parenting instincts were clear:

· It was time to set a boundary: Threatening language is not OK.

· It was time to model what to do when we hear threatening language: We tell the grown ups.

· It was time to demand courage from my small, scared daughter. Silence will not protect us. We had to be brave and take fast action to help her friend.

Sweetiebabyhoneylicious called Leo’s parents who said they’d talk to him right away. Then they shared some laughs about his other recent antics, including public nudity. And we made plans for a play date. Nudity, threats and all, we like this family.

This morning Small and I talked to Miss Chris. Small was terrified; she hid her face against the fence while I finished telling the tale to her teacher. After school I got her back to the computer for another dialogue. I got permission to share our conversation here:

Small: I was scaird when Mama told Mrs Cris onLeo.

Mama: What were you scared of?

Small: I do not know. Can I plees get on my identady And play games?

Mama: Soon you can get on your identity and play games, yes. But first I would like you to think
about why you felt scared. It is my job to keep you safe. It is OK to feel scared, but I would like to know what you were scared of. Did you think something bad would happen?

Small: Yes.now can I?

Mama: Let’s keep talking on the computer for 15 minutes. (Sets timer.) What bad thing did you think would happen?

Small: I thot what Leo said was true.

Mama: Did you think he would kill you with a knife if you told the grown ups?

Small: Yes.

Mama: Oh, Small, that is sooooo scary! It must have felt very frightening for you.

Small: It did.

Mama: You were especially brave to tell when you felt so frightened.

What Leo said is called a “threat.” Sometimes when people make a “threat” it feels really scary and it seems like they will be more likely to do it if you tell someone. But actually, you will be safer if you tell the grown ups. Then the grown ups can do their job and take care of you.

These are the things your grown ups did to keep you safe:

· Leo’s parents made sure he did not have a knife. They checked to make sure he was just saying something that he didn’t mean. They told him not to say scary things any more.

· Miss Chris found out that she needs to keep an eye on Leo so he doesn’t say scary things and he doesn’t hurt his K-kid friends.

· All the grown ups figured out that it was just a game, not real.

· All the grown ups felt proud of you for being brave.

· Your parents gave you extra hugs for being scared.

Small: Can I have one now?

(BIG HUGS!)

Mama: How do you feel now?

Small: Better.

Mama: I’m glad.

Small: Are you done?

Mama: Do you mean, is this conversation done?

Small: Yes.

Mama: Two more questions:

1. Can I share this conversation with Miss Chris? It would help her be the best teacher she can be.
2. Can I share this conversation with other grown ups who might want to know how to help their kids be brave and safe?

Small: Yes. Yes.

Mama: Thanks, Small. Time for games now.