Putting the ME in Camille!

For the last ten days, I've been in a desperate struggle with some kind of vampiric virus that sucked the life force out of me, gave me a tubercular cough, and made me utterly unable to do anything but sleep and look pitiful. I was starting to see reruns of "Camille" in my head and was preparing myself for the inevitable - the doctor looking at me sadly and saying "...chronic fatigue... lifelong condition... so tragic." (When I was eight, the doctor told me that if I hadn't had my tonsils out I would have been an "invalid." I thought it sounded desperately romantic and would remind my brothers that "I could have been an INVALID" whenever they were mean to me.)

Miraculously, on the eleventh day I have risen! And gone to the grocery store. And bought all the junk good food my husband never buys and that we were getting perilously low on. My kids don't know what a close call they had and how lucky they are that I'm back on the job. Must remember to remind them I could have been an INVALID!

The Fairy Child

Things are going better for the little one at school. She's getting some of the sparkle back in her eyes and the spring back in her step.

Bullying update

We are in an ongoing conversation with the school administration and the classroom teacher. They understand, at least partly, the seriousness of the situation. The bully's mother has been spoken with and the bully herself has been put on probation. It's a start.

We have also discovered that another girl (who had formerly been a friend of our daughter's) was participating in the bullying. Very sad. For everyone. She has apologized, as has her mother.

We are asking the school to adopt a true anti-bullying curriculum, which would require that all the teachers complete a free, online course about how to identify, deal with, and prevent bullying. We'll see how they respond to that. We're also trying to take some proactive steps with our kid - who is small, bespectacled, and a bit fearful - that might help her have more body confidence. To that end, we're looking at a number of options - maybe one-on-one lessons with a female tennis pro, the idea being that more physical strength and confidence might help prevent this in the future.

So day by day, step by step, we're facing the problem and trying to solve it as best we can.

One really touching thing that has come out of all this is how many people have reached out to us, some to offer help and guidance, others who have shared their own painful stories of having been bullied. One friend wrote "I can still remember the dislocation and lack of confidence it produced." That's the crux of it right there. To be bullied is to be made to feel that you are worthless and helpless. The current research shows that bullying, far from making a person stronger, makes them more likely to suffer long-term from anxiety and depression. (And the bullies themselves are far more likely than their non-bullying peers to end up in jail!) So it's a very serious problem and we are doing everything we can to make our daughter's world is safer and give her the tools she needs to prevent this from ever happening again.

Here, for anyone who is interested, is an excellent website/course on bullying prevention (it's free!). It presents the most up-to-date research and techniques in a lucid and digestible way. I highly recommend it!
Pathways Bullying Prevention

My good girl

I offered to max out the credit card and take the youngest on a vacation until this whole bullying mess is (somewhat) resolved. She thought about it for a minute and said, "No Mommy. It's OK. I'll go to school." Such a brave diligent little thing. If it had been me, I would have definitely made a break for it.

Well, we'll see what the week holds. Wish us luck.

My fairy child in the hard cold world

Someone once described my youngest daughter as "like a fairy child." And there is something other-worldly and dreamy about her. Stories, pictures, voices fill her head. She writes them down on countless slips of paper that she leaves all over the house, forgets about. A day, a month, six months later, they resurface - these odd little fortunes from the quirky cookie-world of her imagination. I found one the other day that said:

"You will meet a tall, dark, handsome man and become
a hobo. Do not doubt us!"

I had no idea what it meant, but it made me laugh.

And since her head is so completely swimming with whimsies, she can be forgetful about things, things that - to other people - might seem more "real." Say, for example, anything in the physical world. She routinely puts her clothes on backwards (yes, sometimes even her pants!). And her hair would certainly go unbrushed till it became a nest for wild birds if I didn't wrangle her and it into submission occasionally.

But she doesn't have a mean bone in her body, and is so tender-hearted that she asked me, could she please give all her baby-sitting money to Haitian relief. Some might, in fact, say she's tender-hearted and sensitive to a fault; she was almost in tears when we got rid of our old living-room rug because it held "so many memories" for her. (Yeah, remember that time the dog peed on it here? and the time I spilled my coffee...) But whichever way you see it, she's a sweet, kind kid.

Somehow this strange mix that makes her so dreamy and dear, also makes her a magnet for bullies. In public school, she was verbally and eventually physically bullied. We pulled her out and put her in a tiny funky hippy school. There are less than 100 kids in the whole school, including a number of kids with ADD, Dyslexia, Aspergers, and other kinds of bully catnip. Those kids are doing fine. Nobody bugs them. But my daughter - bright, articulate, and yes, more than a little spacey - is getting bullied. Again.

Well crap.

I know that when she's older it will all be fine. She's going to go to college and blow people away (as she already does) with her perceptive, articulate, witty mind and her dreamy fey ways (that is as long as she doesn't wear her pants backwards). But that's all so far away and she has to go back to school Monday and deal. And it breaks my heart.

This conversation would not have happened when I was young and lovely

Yesterday, leaving yoga, I was explaining to a friend why full lunges are so hard for me to do. I said, "I have a really long torso, but very short arms."
"So," she said. "You're like a T-rex, doing yoga."
"Exactly," I said.

All work and no play make mom a bad girl

OK, this has officially veered off into horror. I really truly believed that worst was behind us. The husband was home, the furnace was new and waranteed, we were more or less dug out. What else could go possibly go wrong? And that just shows a complete lack of imagination on my part. Because this morning, with two kids still home from school the power went out. Which meant the the brand new furnace was off, as was the stove (electric starter!), and the phones (wireless). And my husband had taken the car and MY cell phone to a meeting which could not be interrupted.

So I'm officially done saying "It can't get any worse." What do you figure is next? Boils? Locusts? Or just flooding from the snow melting. Maybe I should start building me an ark.