Better than months.
As I've previously wrote a few times, the supposed missing notebook was in the bag I keep in my car with other work papers. Of course, it's still there left untouched, perhaps it's supposed to be this way. I'll bring it in the house in another few weeks and maybe write about it then, it'll allow me to relive the experience of my trip and my reaction to David Bowie's death.
I like to rehash most recent events in my life, as a sort of warm up writing before I write what I've really been thinking.
In the last month, work has been plain bananas. Just fucking crazy. That's all I ever really say anymore. I never really want to get into it, however, the revelation is that my mood continues to stay relatively good. I'm not angry all the time. I'm actually just fine. I have adapted to the stresses of my job quite well, emotionally at least. There are things, obviously, I wish I did more of in my free time, but I'm eternally working on that. Isn't everyone? The biggest explanation behind the craziness of work is that we are down two permanent employees. It's really just been me, my beloved coworker, and my boss. Both of whom I work really well with, but when it falls on just us, it can be really overwhelming. We've just had substitutes in and out of our room, which while we need the bodies, training a new person each day or each week is very tiring and takes away from the students. And it is not only our classroom we have to worry about. We are a strong group that also supports other classrooms on campus. The good news, thankfully, is that one of the workers we employed a few months back, has decided to come back to our room. She was a great addition but had to leave for practical reasons. It's all a matter of getting through the process of administration getting her back. Until then, it's not finalized just yet. After thinking on it, I realize the change in my moods. The happiness is due to my students. I love each of them, and they are relatively easy compared to students we've had in the past [most of them are new and two of them have been with us for a couple of years]. If anything, most of my stress and irritation lies in the adults around me, particularly a teacher on campus and the subs we have. But knowing it isn't forever helps.
My other job, working with my cousins, takes more out of me in the short hours I put in daily. It's less stress on the body, but more on the mind. They are nearly teenagers and yet so young developmentally due to having autism. A thing I know well and am aware of. But my expectations of them, always and forever will exceed them. It's an interesting factor to work with kids in their own home. You can only control so much. I can't control how they are parented, how they act when I'm not there, but I can sure as hell try to extend my education and work beyond that in any way I can improvise.
Earlier this week, my mom turned 60. A strange thought. We both agree that she doesn't seem 60. She is young at heart, old soul, but still cherishes as much of life as she can with an open and positive mind. All traits I'm grateful to carry from her. I have been spending more time with her and it's always so pleasant. I am thankful for our rejuvenated relationship, something I didn't think was possible if you asked me 5 years ago.
My guinea pig is doing great. He's reminding me how happy I am to have someone around, how I love to spoil my pets. Maynard is a wonderful creature I look forward to spending time with. I can tell we are bonding, he's getting more used to me. I bought and built a giant cage for him last weekend. He is so happy in that thing he purrs all the time now. So freaking adorable.
Last month at work, my back pulled out, or whatever you want to call it. It stiffened on me after doing a simple thing with a student. It caused me to renew my membership with a massage place I had a few years back. While the massage helped, it didn't live up to my expectations of how it usually is. I plan to go back soon again with a different therapist. I'm playing it smart this time and keeping notes on each therapist of what I like and don't like. My posture naturally has never been good, and work only further worsens it. Imagine sitting in a little kid's chair, leaning over a table too small for your knees to fit under, leaning over so far with your stomach or even your chest resting on the top of the table. I'm 5'7" and already too big for this job. It's not always this way, but fairly often. Even as I write this, I'm struggling to sit upright. It's amazing at 28, all the bones I have to pop and crack every morning and throughout the day. The body is a beautiful thing, but you have to adapt to it. Like anyone else, there are things I love and hate about my body. My skin, never great. My weight fluctuates, but still reminds too high. My strength and pain tolerance, however, suits me great, especially at work.
Something I don't think I've mentioned here is that I am due to be a first time bridesmaid in April to a good friend of mine. I've finally found my dress, my shoes, and have yet to accessorize and create a painting as my gift and bridesmaid duty. She wants me to make a painting that will represent them with some loose inspirational pictures, that will be displayed at the wedding. Ideas are spurning in my mind but I have yet to execute anything. I will admit, there's additional pressure of the fact that it will be displayed to many people, but once I start, that shall be the thrill as well. I spent so much time and effort making a scrapbook for my cousin's wedding last year but I didn't finish it until the weekend of the wedding. I really hope to get off my ass and not do that to myself again, especially with my slow painting pace.
In the last couple of weeks I've had two dreams involving me having kids. I will point out that each dream represents an experience of two people I know. The first was a dream that I was pregnant. The second was that I adopted a child. The pregnancy dream directly reflects my newly married cousin's wife who is expecting. She revealed the news last month and I spoke to her the night before I had the dream. We were going out to dinner with friends, she was pregnant and so was I. There was this odd sense of pride of being pregnant, but also this underlying idea that I wasn't keeping the child, most likely either pregnant for someone or to give for adoption. It wasn't exactly that I didn't want it, but that it was a choice from the start. I'm not entirely sure, but a few familiar faces appeared in the dream and it ended on a sad note that maybe something was wrong. I was on my period when I had this dream, so the dream referenced that I was still bleeding, that perhaps I actually lost the baby. But it was uncertain.
Dreammoods.com is my go-to dream interpretation site, here's what it says that I feel applies to me.
To dream that you are pregnant symbolizes an aspect of yourself or some aspect of your personal life that is growing and developing. You may not be ready to talk about it or act on it. Being pregnant in your dream may also represent the birth of a new idea, direction, project or goal. Dreaming that you did not realize you were pregnant implies that you are in denial about something. You also have a tendency to ignore things until it is right in front of you. Alternatively, if you are trying to get pregnant, then the dream may be a wish fulfillment. If you are not trying to get pregnant, but dream that you are, then it symbolizes fear of new responsibilities.
The second dream references the fact that my boss, the teacher I work with, is in the process of adopting. She is struggling with the process. It is not my place to reveal the details here, but either way she has been on my mind. After thinking about her the night before, having my second ever migraine and struggling to sleep, a seemingly long dream occurred. I lived in a nice cozy home with plenty of natural light, appearing somewhat Bohemian [the only word that comes to mind]. The home was shared with my boss and her family although I only ever saw her and not her family in this dream. I had four guinea pigs that roamed free in the house and I had adopted a boy I named Zoe, occasionally nicknamed Zo. Rarely a name comes up in a dream, so I thought that was important. The most confusing part of this dream is that I could never really tell the age of Zoe, there would be moments where he was an infant, and moments he was similar to the age of most of my students [around 7 years]. However, there was a sense that he was about 7 currently, but perhaps my dream had memories of him as an infant. It was bizarre either way. He had light brown skin, ambiguous ethnicity. He was beautiful, intelligent, and an extremely pleasant child. I loved him so much, I could feel the love. He would play and hide, I feel every time I looked at him, he was hidden in something, either a cradle or something he could fit in as a toddler. Between him and the guinea pigs, everyone was so excited and playful. Now, I don't recall how the dream ended but it did leave me with a sense of overwhelming love.
To dream that you or others are adopting a child indicates that you are taking on something new and different. Ask yourself what is missing in your life that would make you happy.
I have had dreams of children, only one or so that seem to be mine, but mostly just my students, clients, or kids that don't resemble those I know. Surprisingly this doesn't happen as much as one would expect with my job. But the biggest difference with these two dreams is that the kids were mine. No, I don't interpret this in anyway to me growing a desire to have kids. I still don't want kids, but it's not to dismiss that I don't think about what it would be like. I think about that often, mostly to help me decide what it is I feel. I will say that I'm excited by pregnancy. I have a deep love or rather a strong sense of nurturing for pregnant women [the ones I know, of course]. I'm always going out of my way to help, or ask questions. I find it incredibly fascinating, and more so since I never imagine myself pregnant. That thought is absent to me, just as the desire to have kids is.
Due to these recent dreams, I've had some conversations with various people about it. My aunt, in particular, states that she still finds it strange that I don't want kids [but she does accept it]. She imagines me with kids, that I would love them so much. I get why she thinks that, and she is not the first to do so. Furthermore, I understand the aspect that keeps being mentioned, that I am very loving. But the reality is, at work I don't seem that way and sometimes I really don't feel that way. I appear and sometimes feel myself distanced, in a way, and unsympathetic for kids. It sounds bad, but I have to get that out for starters and then I can clarify it better. I have always taken every job I have very seriously. With kids, I have high standards and expectations. I realize that I treat them as I would anyone else, their age means nothing to me, even their condition may have no effect on how I treat them. I realize this stems from the fact that despite being hard of hearing, my mom always treated me like anyone else for the most part [in respects to my hearing]. Honestly, I've come so far, I'm quite successful with this life of being hard of hearing, so I'm grateful. Anyways, sometimes I have to step back and stop with the tough love. But in any case, love is still there, but I'm not what you would see as a typical example of loving. I show it in a very different way. I care about my students and clients so much that I'm tough and strict. This is something that I feel I get from my father. However, that's at work. When I'm around kids in my free time, I'm more loving and affectionate like my mother, because my expectations are not there. In my classroom, we approach autism in a way that enables the child to be as independent as possible. Which in an outsider's eyes would appear as unloving or even uncaring. But once you take the time to watch and ask questions about what we do and stick around for the results, you realize that love is still there and we do everything in the kid's best interests so that he can have a life like anyone else. We may be distanced, may watch a kid struggle, may sabotage environments, but all for the better. My job is so involved that I can never have enough time to truly paint a picture of what, why, and how we do everything. But I can give my most brief example of a scenario we do many times a day.
A student is having a hard time putting all his belongings into his backpack. He may grunt, may make noises, may cry, yell, become aggressive, or just simply show that he is struggling. We watch and wait. That is all. We wait for him to communicate. Communication is everything, and you cannot be independent if you cannot communicate [communication does not have to be verbal]. Once a student communicates to us appropriately, we can then step in and help. By appropriately, I mean that the student cannot yell at us, grab at us, hit us, throw things, etc. He is appropriate if he uses a regular voice to ask for help, or whichever way is acceptable depending on the student and his ability to express [some are nonverbal and have other means to communicate whether it be communication devices, visuals, etc.]. We wait until that happens and then we can do what is needed. If a child just yells or cries and someone helps him, then that child now understands that every time he yells or cries, someone will come running and do something for him. This is unacceptable and exactly a behavior we work every goddamn day to break. Our brains are trained on patterns, it seeks patterns even if there is none. Children with just about any ability recognizes patterns easily, even if they don't know it explicitly. They are always smarter than we give them credit for. We also have to have situations or even sabotage situations that have cause and effect on the student to allow him or her the need to express themselves. If we did everything for them, they would never understand that they can ask for something. In the real world, problems arise. If you experience life for so long without a problem and one day a problem appears, then you are completely unprepared and unequipped for what to do in that situation. Sabotage is my middle name at this point.
I hope that helps paint something, and that's a very basic explanation [of only one of the thousands of things we work on!!!]. This job has shaped me so much that I start to treat adults and even animals this way. My job requires me to be extremely flexible and adaptive, that it's truly incredible when I think about it. I've never learned so much in a place of work, and it's changed me and how I approach the world. Some is good, some not so good, and some is a little conflicting because I have to remind myself that my friends are not my students. The cool thing is though, that our techniques are not just applicable to special needs or autism, they are applicable to any child and after doing it for so long, I cannot imagine raising a child any different.
On a lighter note, I am loving. Sometimes even I feel like I'm mean, yet I have to remind myself I'm not. Everyone has their own style of teaching. Tough love is mine, but it always has my signature. I will die for any one of my students, honestly, any kid, and person. My signature is actually very fun, when appropriate. Boundaries are particularly important with autism. I cannot be affectionate anytime I want, but when I can I am. I call all my students, dude or bud. I'm very casual with them. I play with them, tickle them, poke them, bop them on the nose. When I'm at my most confident with a project or academics I have to do with a child, I add in as much playfulness as I can. That's probably the second best part of my job, the look in their eyes when they are truly learning and having fun with me.
See, these last few paragraphs are to educate others what I do, but also to remind myself that I do this. Everyday. And I do get something from it and I'm not as mean as I feel sometimes. Heh. In fact, it's been a bit therapeutic to be a little more specific about my job. Perhaps I'll write more about it in future posts. What do you think?
After rereading and editing this post before publishing, I realize more, just how much love there is within me. It's almost hard...
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