People who need more help than me...

Ok, let's just say you are a 23-year-old reading teacher. You might just happen to have some students who are, say, 14 years old. You graduated from University of South Florida the same year I graduated from TCU. You have been married less than a year. You are attractive and seem to have your life pretty well put together. So why, why, why, why, why, of all the fantasies you could possibly have, is it a fucking turn-on for you to sleep with a student? Seriously, Debra Beasley LaFave, why is that even an option for you? According to the student, Mrs. LaFave said that she was attracted to him "because it's not allowed". Mrs. LaFave's husband accompanied her to court. I'm not sure if I feel sorry for him or just want to call him an idiot. Cheating 11 months into your marriage is one thing, but with a 14-year-old? Come on! She should've been alone in that courtroom. Seriously, Mr. LaFave, I'm single and I promise I'm not nearly as fucked up as your first choice for a wife! At her first appearance, her lawyer described her as "an outstanding member of the community". Yes, this is your first offense Mrs. LaFave. But, you've taken your outstanding-ness (yes, it's a word now) and used it to take advantage of a student in the worst way possible. Maybe he was never your student, but you are responsible for your actions with every child that enters the doors of your school. Outstanding...give me a fucking break. Now, it's people like me who are left to fix what you've done to him. I see this shit every week...kids who have been taken advantage of by people who are supposed to care about their well-being. They are used and thrown away, not knowing why it happened, what they could've done to stop it, or what the hell they are supposed to do now. Imagine his next girlfriend. Will he try to pressure her into sex just because he got laid by the hot teacher? Will she give in because surely he must be worth it if a teacher would sacrifice her job, her marriage, her life as it once was for him? Could this result in another teenage pregnancy? The big debate these days is supposed to be over whether teachers are supposed to be teaching abstinence or sex education. Excuse me if I don't remember a how-to personal tutorial being part of the debate. I'm shocked. You've just got to be kidding me with this shit. To top it off, there was an even more disturbing story in the news today. This one came out of Phoenix where an ice cream truck driver was arrested after he raped and impregnated a 9-year-old girl. NINE YEARS OLD!! Apparently this guy befriended the girl (red flag) and her mom trusted him enough to let the girl ride along in the truck. PEOPLE be more careful with your children!!! If some freak will drive an ice cream truck just to find his next victim, who the hell can we trust anymore? I can't imagine having a pregnant little girl in my support group on Tuesday night. Seriously, what is she going to do? She can't have a baby at 9 years old. Her poor little body couldn't possibly take that. So what now? An abortion? That could start an entirely new debate that could go on in my head for hours. I'm tired. This news exhausts me. Please, God, let there be better news tomorrow. Our children should never have to endure such pain. I pray for them and I pray for the souls of people who would cause them such pain...for, surely, they need more help than I do.
"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." -Neil Postman, 1982

Attention Deficit...and, oh yes...Disorder

As I begin this post, it's pushing 11:30 p.m....looks like it's going to be another late night for me. This is a frustrating time because I LOVE sleep. My doctor gave me a preliminary diagnosis of ADD on Thursday (6/24). I was prescribed Adderall XR 20mg. The shitty side effects I'm experiencing (so far) include: INSOMNIA, loss of appetite (I'm o.k. with this one), dry mouth along with an awful taste in my mouth, and random zombiness. This is ONLY the 5th day for me to take this medication! Isn't it amazing that the side effects are immediate, but the helpful aspects of the meds take about 3 weeks to surface?...as if this isn't frustrating enough. Starting in my late teens, I always said that if there was a mild form of ADD I have it. It wasn't until I started working that I realized just how easily distracted I am. Throughout the earlier portion of my life I always associated my distraction with negative personality characteristics--lazy, procrastinator, stubborn, messy, disorganized. I never thought to attribute it to an imbalance in my brain. I always have ideas of how to organize myself, but those ideas are too overwhelming to complete the task. I can start projects, but rarely finish them. At any given moment I have a thousand new ideas running through my head about completely separate and random things, yet I can't seem to focus on just one and follow through. Is this what ADD looks like? I've asked myself that question many times, but doubted that I could truly have it. Why? Well, for starters I look back at elementary school. The "CM kids" were the ones with ADD. They had to have help with their homework. They had to leave the classroom and go to a quiet place to work. They made average or below average grades. They were always in trouble because they lacked impulse control in the classroom. I didn't see myself as any of those things. I made all A's. I never needed help with my homework (once I finally sat down to do it). In fact, I was usually the first one done (so I could hurry up and do something else before I missed my chance). I got in trouble sometimes, but only because I was arrogant (and followed through with my devious thoughts before I could stop myself...that's not lacking impulse control, right?). Turns out, ADD has nothing to do with IQ. I should've figured that out somewhere along the way, but for some reason I fell into the crowd believing that ADD/ADHD=learning disability=bad grades=no future. That wasn't an option for me. It also turns out that kids who have certain "protective factors" in their lives, may never show the full extent of their ADD until those protective factors no longer hold such a strong presence. In my case: the parents. My parents were so good about making sure I did my homework (I say that now, but at the time I figured they were just trying to annoy me). They didn't cut me any slack when I was in elementary school. "You sit down and do your homework, or you can't go play outside." They didn't have to push too hard. I knew what the goal was and I knew that the homework would be easy. Once middle school rolled around, things changed a bit. The homework was still easy, but I was older and thought I could "make my own decisions." That combined with my parents letting up a bit allowed the "procrastination" to slide right into my daily routines. It wasn't just about school work. It was cleaning the kitchen or my room, feeding the dogs, getting the trash together, folding laundry. My family (myself included) just thought I was a messy kid who was stubborn and didn't care what my surroundings looked like. The fact is that I constantly looked at my room and tried to come up with a plan to organize it. I would start with a pile in one corner, play a video game, talk on the phone, play with the dogs, work on another pile (the first pile probably wasn't gone yet), stare at the wall, get a drink of water, talk with my sister (her room was spotless hours ago), chase the cat around, see what my parents were doing, decide to make the bed, decide to wash the sheets because it was too overwhelming a task to make the bed, sort my laundry to see what clothes could go in with the sheets, look through my tapes to find something new to listen to, decide to put the tapes in alphabetical order by genre...I think that starts to paint a clearer picture. I'm not saying that I definitely have ADD. Only a full psychological evaluation can tell me that. I'm just saying it's a definite possibility and too many kids--girls especially--go unnoticed with ADD because they are not like the stereotypical ADHD boys that come to mind. What about the girl who stares out the window constantly or doodles on her paper? She isn't noticed because the teacher is too busy looking at the little boy who keeps going around to different classmates and tapping them on the head with his pencil. But she is just as affected by it. She just may not realize the full extent of it until later on in life. I might just be a prime example of that.
"There is no success without hardship." -Sophocles, 418 B.C.

Why blog? It kills less trees and my hand doesn't cramp up.

Ok, here's the deal. I need a place to put my thoughts down. Paper is too complicated; I cannot write fast enough to keep up with the churning thoughts in my brain...and I can't go back and add stuff because the ink doesn't move like the words do when I type (I just added this...perfect example). But, I NEED to journal...in whatever way I can. So, here's this email one day from a friend of mine (thanks for thinking of me, Sarah). I'm thinking, what is this blog it speaks of? So, naturally I check it out. But at the time I was not brave enough to put my thoughts in a place where others can see them. (I have to conquer the childhood notion that nobody could possibly have gotten into that securely-fastened-yet-somehow-able-to-be-magically-opened-without-the-key-but-surely-only-by-me diary. Shut up, everyone read it. Everyone knows who you had a crush on. Everyone knows you wanted to be...a chef, then a weather lady, then an artist. It's true!) After much reflection I've decided it's not only o.k., but has the potential to be very beneficial. One of the only ways I can truly see that I'm o.k. with my thoughts and work through them is to put them out there for others to see...and possibly provide feedback. A fresh set of eyes looking at an issue provides a new perspective for me to consider. But, I'm going to need time to train myself not to censor my thoughts just because others might read them. I need to not care about being judged...but I do.
The fact is, there is too much going on in my life right now. To top it all off, there are horrible things going on in the world and I am powerless. Much of this feeling started on September 11, 2001. It reached a breaking point after I made the regrettable decision to view the Nick Berg beheading video. I thought I could handle it because I saw some of the Faces of Death videos when I was a kid and didn't remember being deeply scarred by them. I've also seen most of the HBO series, Autopsy. Death is one of those things I've always had a curiosity about. At the same time, I have irrational fears about what happens while I'm still alive and others around me are dying. It's a horror movie playing in my head...fucking with me constantly. So, when I found a website with the Nick Berg video, it was an adrenaline rush...a shameful, nobody-should-know-about-this-but-I-still-have-to-see-for-myself rush. When it started playing, the rush turned to nausea as he began to identify himself and talk about his family. I knew I couldn't do it. It was too fucked up. So, I made a compromise. I minimized the picture and just listened to the audio. Bad idea. If you have not seen or heard this, you cannot possibly imagine the horror that saturated my soul as I listened to this man's death. That night I didn't sleep at all. I couldn't even bring myself to turn off the light in my room. What does this mean for me? If I could explain to myself why I have this impulse to see (or hear) death and then an overwhelming sense of fear afterward, I would probably know...shit, what would I know? I know I'm not morbid. I know millions of people have seen this video, and probably some of the other stuff I've seen, but don't have the complications that I had afterward. Or are they just not talking about it?
(Enter therapy). I believe in therapy. I believe everyone needs therapy. I've seen therapy work wonders for my dad in dealing with his social anxiety. The combination of my experiences and education kept me from attaching a negative stigma to therapy. It's like getting help with your Algebra homework. You ask someone to explain it to you in a different way when you can't understand the problem. I should've started therapy last year when Aunt Kathy died, 7 years ago when Burgess Merrifield died, 10 years ago when my Grandpa died, 12 years ago when I watched Faces of Death, 18 years ago when Granny Jess died and someone mentioned her coming back to haunt the family and I was in the hotel room waiting for her to come through the walls. And whose idea was it to show that litte girl a picture of the dead baby she was named after? Still, it took Nick Berg to make me ready for therapy...
So, in the words of so many characters in movies and on television who are portrayed as co-dependent, hopeless, incapable, fragile therapy-seekers (which pisses me off to no end)..."My therapist said I should"...explore this as a spiritual issue. I've been to two sessions and that is where we are headed so far. She sees my fear as being associated with evil, rather than just death itself. I can see that...especially with the all-hours horror flick theater in my head. Alina suggested the same thing when I talked to her about it...not directly, but she told me that she prays whenever she is afraid. I know my faith needs to be strengthened. The problem is, I don't have any questions about what is happening to me when I die. But, someone please show me the passage in the Bible that says I'm safe from a horrifying death by some unimagineable force just because I'm a Christian. I don't have any answers yet, but I'll only worry if I ever run out of questions.

"Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other." -Francis Bacon, 1625