I am a mentor in the Tom Osborne TeamMates program at Blair (my mom is, too). I have been seeing my student for almost two years now, and to be honest it seems like so much longer. The dramatic transformations she has gone through, the trials she has faced, and the sobering life experiences through which she has persevered has made her grow up sort of quickly, I think. She is ready to grow up. She’s ready to be done with adolesence. But there are too many lessons to learn still, and that is frustrating. I understand.
Sometimes the hardest thing is that no matter what advice I can give her, no matter how many times I can say “I have been through that too,” or “soon these problems will pass,” it is still her reality and she is the one who has to live it. I can’t find a lunch table every day for her. I can’t walk home from school every day for her.
Although others can relate to us, their advice is not what is helpful. Advice doesn’t help when we don’t consciously decide to act. So it is only our own ultimate choices and actions that matter. All we are as humans is our series of self-defining choices. I think that is scary sometimes, the immenseness of our self-responsibility.
Age 12 to 13 blows.
I always say that if I had a wish, it would be to be able to relive my childhood whenever I want. I was lucky to love my childhood. I was lucky to have fun birthdays, new school supplies, a big supportive family, and neighborhood friends. I also know that it wasn’t money that made us privileged (I think money was tight for a while but my parents didn’t make it the children’s problem), it was the devotion of our parents and family members. I owe so much to my creative mother. She made everything fun. She played with me. She gave me projects. She saved egg cartons and milk cartons and toilet paper rolls and shoeboxes (shoeboxes are most valuable). She supplied me with boxes of scratch paper and rolls of scotch tape. She made me halloween costumes. She put notes in my lunch box. This stuff is really not hard or expensive to do as a parent. But it takes creativity. And you have to actually care to do it.
So I spend a lot of times thinking of crafts for my mentee and me to do, or putting kits together. It’s easier for her to talk when her hands are busy. And learning a new technique or tackling a new project is so fun. Crafting can occupy your mind and bring an escape into a new place you’d like to explore. Or it can be something to do idly, just because you like to get something accomplished while you watch every reality show on tv (thats me). But crafting isn’t just a hobby. It’s therapy.
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I think that quote is from the Bible.
I am a piler. This is worrisome to me because I have seen what chronic pile-making can lead to–just look at my grandma. Her house (and she knows it), is really beautiful, completely unique, and full of stacks and stacks of magazines, (junk) mail, important papers, newspapers….pretty much any paper product that ever enters her possession is relegated to a pile. And this is okay–I think piles are a great organizational tool. But for me, it’s hard to get past that beginning phase.
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sooooo addicted to this game made for five-year-olds.
all I do is play cash cow
its even starting to send me subliminal messages:
get a job?
what’s that?
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