Serenity

The way positive affirmations work is to say them repeatedly.  It's about training the mind to accept the affirmations as the default belief, rather than allowing those mad little demon voices in our heads undermine our very human need for positive emotions, growth, evolution, change and development.

Prayer is similar.  Saying the rosary.  Using Worry beads. Or Komboloi beads.  Chanting.  Saying a mantra out loud, or silently, when meditating.

It is the repetition that helps.  These quiet, personal, and often short, meaningful stanzas that we can recite to ourselves to give comfort and hope and bring peace.

It is all connected to the breath.  Deep, quiet breathing, as we say our word or verse.  Letting the body and the mind slow down.  Like meditation, prayer and affirmations can slow the heart rate, release the negative energy, prepare the body for the intake of the new and fresh and restorative energy.

So I'll cut to the chase about now:  All the above went through my head in a blinding flash this morning as I turned off the car engine and prepared to step out into the car park at the High School.  (You know what's coming, right?).  This is what I'd said to myself repeatedly since I woke at 4.30am:

God.  Please grant me the courage to change the things I can change.  The serenity to accept the things I cannot change.  And the wisdom to know the difference.

By 7.35am, over scrambled eggs (I burned them to a ruin - never done that before) I'd shortened the prayer to:  "Courage.... serenity.... wisdom... ".  Over and over.

Meditation and mantra chanting is heavenly at the end of a hot yoga session, lying in shivasana pose on my purple yoga mat.  But the serenity prayer was coming out of me in short wee bursts of breathlessness as I crossed the car park to go into the school office: "serenity wisdom courage serenidom wisage courity doswim serecour wisnity..."

Maybe it worked, to pray a little, or a lot, or even in gobbledegook, today.  It isn't going to save my boy necessarily, but it allowed me to talk through the options reasonably calmly with the school, with my prayer going around in my head, and occasionally slipping out of my head and onto my knee where it looked at me compassionately and quizzically (really, it did) when I almost got a little emotional.

He's got one good grace left.  He's been asked to leave the school.  Only four weeks of school left, they would have kept him if they could, but he's made it unsafe for the school community to keep him there.  There's only so much abuse teachers will take (although it's a fraction of what I get from him, and I don't get paid for it) and only so much disruption classmates should have to tolerate.

So he's out.  Not expelled, but released.  Until February.  Oh, good Goddesses and Angels:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

 grant me the courage... the wisdom... 

and most of all, the serenity to get through this...

Wishing as always, courage, wisdom and serenity to all parents.  Just say the words.

Absence

I start with apologies for an absence of well over two months now... and I have a little and a lot of explanations I could make.

Lovely readers have checked in and asked how things are going: thank you one and all.

I got tired.  I was writing over the last year as much to capture the moment, as try to find answers to esoteric questions that  usually started with the word "why....?".

I got sick of myself.  Writing about the cruddy stuff of life seemed defeatist at times.  I countered it by writing every night in my Gratitude journal, by meditation, positivity, and achievements and fun stuff in other areas of my life.  But I tired writing about a child who it seemed I could not help.

I'm hopeless at the technology, I just can't seem to get it right. Or have my blog look the way I want it too (cool, funky, bright: hmmm, wrong blog subject for that!).  So my blog was blogging me up.

I got busy with other work, and with family life.  There's been five birthdays in my close family, numerous visits, school holidays, two weeks of illness and a few too many snow days.

I got writer's block.

My other two boys needed more attention, and I gave it, reaping rewards for them, and by extension for the whole family.

I needed time for me, time to concentrate effort on my business, on my colleagues, on my extended family, and on healing an injury that had been causing debilitating pain for some months.

It was a conundrum for me to write here about this very personal, difficult parenting and family life, while developing a business that centred on positive emotions, on future focussed solutions, on creating and developing positive mindsets, of working and assisting people to reach their potential.  I needed instead to focus on keeping myself and my business contacts ethically safe, and to do that, I needed to walk away for a time from complete concentration on one child so that I could get other parts of my house in order.

I was exhausted from wringing my hands in front of genuinely caring school educationalists, social workers, friends and people in extended networks.  Without coming up with any answers.

I'm still asking the same questions and making the same mistakes.  It is just that I am asking the big questions less frequently, demanding less of myself, accepting more the things I cannot change, and forgiving myself and my dearest lovely lost boy for our mistakes and for missing each other as we travel along on this life journey we share.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: the more things change the more they remain the same.  This was the first French saying I learned years ago.  It is kind of defeatist, but in these circumstances, as my lovely 16 year old boy travels down his lonely road, it does sum up the last couple of months for him and for my parenting of him.

I look to the light in the east... as we all must when the new day dawns.

Until soon

go gently
Claire