A Mothers Letter to President Trump on the Affordable Care Act

January 20, 2017 Angela Harrison 1 Comment

I just sent this letter to our new president as well as both Texas senators and my state representative:

I am deeply, gravely concerned about my son’s healthcare. On October 3, 2015 he was in a horrific car accident leaving him a paraplegic. He is STILL recovering! The recovery process takes years! He desperately needs healthcare and lots of physical therapy. Even WITH insurance, therapy is $75/hour out of pocket.

He is 25 years old. He was employed and had his own health insurance at the time of the accident. He cannot work right now. In the future, we hope he will, but for now he is still recovering. Due to the fact that he has held down a full time job from the time he was a teenager, even at his young age, he had already paid enough into the social security system to pull out a disability check. This disability check is just over $600 a month, but it is considered “too much” money for him to qualify for medicaid. He has to be on SSDI for two years before he is eligible for medicare and that’s not two years from his injury, it’s two years from when they approved it. He is still a year and a half from that.

The ONLY access he had to health insurance right now is because the ACA allows him to be carried as a dependent on someone else’s policy. Congress has already acted to remove this protection. This will leave him vulnerable, with no way to access desperately needed health care or therapy services. I BEG, I PLEAD with you to please not ignore the most vulnerable Americans, do not let this be your legacy! Show me, show America that our government still cares about it’s people!

My son deserves access to healthcare. Millions of Americans who depend on the protections in the ACA deserve access to healthcare. I beseech you, do not forget about them! Do not sacrifice them for a political agenda! I am a mother, begging for her son’s future, please do not ignore me and others like me.

Personal, Uncategorized

Maternal Exhaustion

January 15, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

I’m tired. I mean what they call bone tired. I can feel the depletion in every cell in my body. I’m just tired.

I’ve been so tired for so long that I started to think it was permanent. I thought well this is it, old age is here! My mother told me this would happen, that I wouldn’t always have the boundless energy of youth. I didn’t believe her. I don’t know why I didn’t believe her, she has never lied to me and I know I’m not immortal but ah, the hubris of youth! I believed I was invincible. Turns out, I’m not.

My oldest son was in a horrible car wreck on October 3, 2015. As I sit here writing this, it is January 10, 2017. That’s 15 months, well over a year. Doesn’t seem like I should still be recovering from that. I don’t know why, he is. But I wasn’t physically hurt. Just emotionally.

Then I finally realized that his accident wasn’t just a thing that happened then it was over. The repercussions go on and on like ripples in the water when you send a stone skipping out. His wreck happened and life as we both knew it just stopped. Everything that came before is part of a different life. We live this one now.

First there were the months in the hospital and rehab. I would leave the hospital around nine or ten at night, make the hour drive home to spend a few minutes with my other children, dropped exhausted into bed only to jerk away long before I had gotten eight hours in. Unable to return to sleep, I would just get up and head back to the hospital, long before my other children were out of bed.

At one point, my youngest child, four at the time, handed me a drawing she made, pointed to the scribbles under the picture and said, “That means I miss you.” I know to her it seemed I had disappeared from her life.

I wasn’t eating. I lost ten pounds in two months. No matter how hungry I was on the drive there, once inside the hospital, I had no appetite at all. None of that touches the emotional toil it takes to watch your child suffer and be helpless to do anything about it. Dealing with his emotions on top of everything else wasn’t easy either. He was devastated, of course. What 24 year old wants to hear that they will never walk again? In those first few weeks, we didn’t even know if he’d ever be able to even sit up, much less stand or walk.

Then he was discharged and went home with his father and grandmother and I thought I would catch up on some sleep. Wrong. Back to work after two months, I was way underwater, completely swamped. Then there was the driving. He was four hours away from me, almost six during the time he spent at a second phase of rehab in Houston. I would often make that round trip in a day so I could attend doctors appointments and therapy sessions, to see his progress and evaluate needs for myself and help make decisions.

Then he came to spend the summer here. I continued to work 40 hours a week while getting him to physical therapy three times a week as well as mental health counseling. I had help; I’m not saying no one else ever pitched in. But I did most of it. He also had to make the trip all the way back to Bryan to finish his assessments with the neuropsychologist. Who even knew that was a thing before all this?

The physical toil it took wasn’t even the worst part. The emotional one was. We have had a contentious relationship since about the time he hit puberty. I kept thinking it was a phase and waiting for it to pass. The brain injury did nothing to improve the hostility and anger. Situational depression on top of a brain injury that is known to cause anger outburst on top of the issues that were already there. It was hard.

He went back to stay with his grandmother in September and on October 5, 2016, two days after the anniversary of his wreck, his father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. I went down for the funeral. I grieved. It doesn’t matter that he was my ex. The point is, he was also my husband once and we shared much of my young adult life together, and a child. But my grief is nothing compared to his mothers or his brothers or his son. Our son.

All of these hits just kept coming and in October I got the worse case of bronchitis I have ever had in my life. It started before Halloween. I had to get treatment for it, the second time, just before Christmas. It’s now after New Years and I still have the lingering cough. I never stopped working a full time job, I never stopped doing activities with the younger kids. The doctor assured me that I wasn’t contagious so there was no reason to take time off or stop going to activities. Even though the worst symptom was a deep, awful fatigue that I could not overcome, I went on. During the middle of this, I planned, shopped for and cooked Thanksgiving dinner for our entire extended family.

I’m not saying any of this for sympathy or to complain but because, shockingly, I had to sit and type all this out before I realized why I’ve been so tired. During my protracted illness, my brain was so fuzzy, I really couldn’t figure out why I was tired all the time. I have just now realized that the last 15 months have just been one thing cascading into another in a never ending flood.

After my son had to move back in with his grandmother, I spent months drowning in guilt and self doubt. Beating myself up emotionally for not being able to help him, for not being able to fix everything for him. Is it really any wonder I succumbed to a physical illness? I was beat down, physically and emotionally.

Then I plunged headlong into the holidays. I’m not kidding, I asked for time off in December back in October. Yes, I had to plan and schedule my down time to try and recover from the worst physical ailment I’ve had in years and I had to schedule it two months out. Not because my supervisor wouldn’t have been understanding and given the time off, she would have. But because I have obligations and responsibilities that I didn’t feel like I could just set down.

From Christmas day through New Year’s Day I did literally nothing. I didn’t leave the house; we cancelled play dates and field trips. I didn’t read to the kids, I didn’t go to the grocery store or run a single errand and I didn’t do work during my off time (much).

Yeah, ok, I worked a little. But I have a care giving type of job. My clients depend on me; their lives don’t stop just because I’m off work. Caregiver burn out? You’d think so. But I feel like what I’ve been through with my son has given me a deeper understanding of what the families I work with are going through. What it really feels like to be a special needs parent. What it feels like to grieve the loss of the life you thought your child would have.

His dreams of becoming a firefighter are over.

And I am by no means comparing my struggles to his. I’m not the one in a wheelchair. I’m not the one having to come to terms with living with a spinal cord injury.

But still, I’m tired.

parenting

What’s Your Resistance?

January 10, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

This is from a few years back but I just looked around and realized that it wasn’t on my blog! I’m not sure how that’s possible because it’s one of more favorite pieces of writing! Thankfully I kept a copy and here it is:

So tonight I attended another “train the trainer” session in my journey to be certified to teach child care workers about infant mental health issues. During the session, the issue of resistance came up. We humans don’t like change. Everyone has some part of them that resists change. We went around the table and everyone said what it was about this process that they might be resisting. I didn’t have the same issues as everyone else, but I definitely have issues, don’t we all?

Anyway, I’m not really that worried about doing a good job because for one, having five children and a stubborn father in law to take care of, I let go of perfectionism long ago! Besides that, I just have a high opinion of myself and know that I can do anything I set my mind to. I’m also not too worried about translating a more reflective style of teaching into the lingo of hard scientific facts. I’m an unschooler after all. I can turn spending a day of jumping on the trampoline into educationalize. Trust me. I’ll post a sample later. My resistance is more of a paradigm issue. See, in my oh so humble opinion fixing the daycare system is like fixing war. You can’t fix it, the whole thing is just wrong. In my perfect world we would just toss daycare out the window entirely and everyone would be paid a living wage so that two incomes were not required for mere survival. Seriously, a one wage family in the fifties had the same earning power as a two wage family in the nineties. How’s that work? Prices go up at a much faster rate than wages. I would go so far as to say public school is nothing more than free child care so that both parents can work. I think our culture, despite all noises to the contrary, is very anti child, anti woman and anti family. It is not normal or natural to leave your infant in the care of strangers. What other animal on this planet would do that? It goes against all survival instincts that the child has to be separated from it’s parent.

To top it all off these kids are being left in the care of workers paid minimum wage for the most part. Now, some long term workers have a true love for the children. Why else stay in it? But a lot of workers are there because they need little training and no education to do the job and it’s just a job to them. Being paid little and respected less, the stress of the job causes high turnover rates and low quality of care. Infants and toddlers, to whom proper attachment is paramount to survival and development, are constantly deprived of any consistency in their care. Recent studies show that children raised in daycare are more aggressive and have a harder time forming bonds than children who were not. The lack of proper training in daycare settings is staggering. Daycare policies often are contrary to best practices for healthy development of infants and children. Many workers WANT to do things differently but aren’t allowed. Many of the daycares that send their workers to trainings don’t attend themselves (owners, directors) so no real, sweeping change can be affected since those who hold the power aren’t learning the things that they really ought to know.

I know what I’m saying is politically incorrect and I don’t care because it is biologically correct, if we want to acknowledge that or not. I’m all for improving daycare because cognitively I know that what I want isn’t likely to happen. If only I were a billionaire who could endow grants to enable moms to stay at home. I know the economic realities of most families dictate many of their choices. But this is a failing of our community. This is a result of weakened family bonds and scattered families. When I was a child, if my mother had to work late, grandparents or an aunt or even a friend or neighbor stepped in.

We need to be supportive of stay at home parents and we need to emphasize real family values over material gain. Now, please don’t mistake me. I am by no means saying that women should not be allowed to work outside of the home. But I am saying that they should not be forced to by economic and societal pressures. That’s not a choice at all. Our senators children attend daycares with a ratio of about two kids per one adult. Wow! So why are our working families, the backbone of this country, having to settle for about one adult per 20 kids? Does anyone really think this is working? I have been criticized for having four children and asked how I can give them each individual attention and how I can possible home school three kids at one time? It makes me laugh. Really? In public schools there are about 25 kids per teacher and they want to know how I can possible handle three? Hmmmm.

I know all the arguments about “but MY daycare is a good one” and maybe it is. But I spend my work days going in and out of all of them and I see the differences in how things are done during drop off and pick up time as opposed to the big stretch of time when there are no parents watching. I’ve seen it.

Ive posted it before but it bears repeating: http://www.daycaresdontcare.org

I have so many things to say on this subject that I could fill up a hundred blogs but I guess what I need most now is to organize my thoughts so that I can articulate it in a way that will make sense to people and get them at least thinking. That would be a start.

Poetry

Peace, Peace

January 9, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet.

For our children and for you.

For the future, for the world, we must have peace.

Politics and rhetoric are stupid, it’s true.

Peace please beg the hungry

Peace, peace, cry the dying

We’ll have peace lie the politicians

Peace, peace, whisper the crying

Personal

Who Am I?

January 8, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

Let me just start tonight’s post by saying AAARRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHHh! Life is hard ya’ll!

I have been struggling to re-brand my blog and once I got everything switched over, immediately start wondering if I did the right thing! Should I switch it back? Should I run two separate blogs? What should I do???

Sigh. I’m a mess. Let me explain.

So, I started this blog a few years ago as kidsrpeople.org. The focus was children, obviously. As an eighteen year veteran child development professional and a mother of six children, I have a bit of experience there. I’m passionate about things like attachment parenting, children’s rights, homeschooling etc. So this seemed like a natural focus.

Then I decided that I really wanted to highlight my writing. So I changed it all! My blog name, my Facebook page title, all of it! And started posting some of my stories. Which I think about two people read. I really love to write but now I’m questioning if that should be the full focus. I still post about parenting and child development and social issues. These may be two totally different audiences. Am I crazy for combing these things? Should I keep two separate blogs? I mean three, since I recently restructured my original one over at blogger, raisingwildthings. That one is focused on my kids unschooling journey specifically.

Am I really just trying to do too much? But here’s the thing, I always have six million different thoughts and ideas running through my head and I want to share them all! I am STILL passionate about children’s right and I’m still a child development professional. Still a mom. But I am ALSO a writer and a poet and many things besides that!

I may just step back, stop trying to DO anything for a moment and just write! Write whatever pops into my head, whatever is demanding attention at that moment.

Because right now, I can’t even pick a name! Ha! I thought I’d do the writing under my maiden name, for a variety of reasons. But now I’m questioning that as well!

Seriously ya’ll, the struggle is real!

Writing

Dragon Flame

January 4, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

Alanya stood on the hillside watching the destruction in the valley below. She drew her red cloak close around her body and shivered in the damp twilight. She drew a deep breath and turned to face the dragon.

Imposing, large and red she sat on the hillside next to Alanya huffing warm tendrils of smoke into the cooling evening air.

“What can we do?” She asked her old friend.

Melancor huffed again, this time with the distinct tone of disdain.

“What can we do?” She responded, her deep voice rumbling over the hillside.

“We must find a way to put an end to this war!” Alanya responded, speaking in the ancient dragon tongue. “My people have lost their way. Dragons and humans no longer speak the same language, no longer share the same stories and legends, they no longer understand each other.”

Melancor nodded her head in agreement. “But how Dragon Flame?” she addressed her by the name the elders had called her many years ago when she had been a child. When she had been valued for her ability to speak to dragons.

War had broken out months ago, human warriors hunting dragons to their lairs and killing them in their sleep, breaking unhatched eggs, murdering the young! Dragons making raids on villages full of innocent people, those having nothing to do with the warriors. Both humans and dragons were dying at alarming rates. The dragon population was in danger of becoming extinct. Truth be told, so was the human population.

Alanya had grown up a privileged child, a princess as it were. Yet privilege was not what she was taught. She learned at her mother’s knee that a leader is not there to indulge their own whims and desires but to toil tirelessly to protect and improve the lives of the people they serve. The people were her responsibility. All of these deaths were on her head now. It was her job to put an end to this.

It didn’t help that she was the last human to speak to the ancient dragon tongue, just as Melancor was the last dragon to speak any human tongue. They both had tried to speak sense, tried to avert the war but to no avail. The young among both species had no memory of the shared past, no belief in the ancient tales of the past. The dragon population was already in decline, leading many humans to disbelieve in their very existence. Until they didn’t.

Once fear had taken root, the course was set. Now that there had been atrocities committed on both sides, each side felt justified in their rampages. Alanya feared that this was the end.

“Take the younglings,” she advised the old dragon, “take them and hide. Fly far away across the mountains and find a place where they can grow in secret.”

“They should not have to hide!” Malancor roared.

Alanya shuddered but stood firm. She knew that her old friend was right, but what other choice was there? The dragons, that had once been their friends, their allies, their companions, were now their enemies and she saw no way to repair that. All she could do now was find a way to minimize the damage.

“You know I’m right. Go and I’ll made it my life’s mission to convince humans that dragons never existed. In a generation they will be nothing more than myth.”

If she could get the dragons to retreat, she could save what was left of her people. If the dragons left, Melancor could save what was left of hers. If people stopped believing in the dragons again, then none would go looking for them. Both species could live in peace.

In the end, Melancor saw the sense of it, just as Alanya knew she would.

Alanya walked through the smoking desolates ruins of the last village of her people. There were a handful of people left. Wounded warriors, women, children, a few elders. She blinked back her tears as as her mind raced with plans for rebuilding. Rebuilding and rewriting human history.

In the distance she heard a great dragon roar. The last of the great ones. She lifted her head and watched as the last of the dragons flew out of sight.

Personal

Oh The Weather Outside is Frightful!

January 4, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

I’ve been doing a series of writing prompts and I’d thought I’d share this one. The prompt was Outise the Window: What’s the weather outside your window doing right now? If that’s not inspiring, what’s the weather like somewhere you wish you could be? If you’d like to try them yourself, you can find them here: http://thinkwritten.com/365-creative-writing-prompts/

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but that’s plagiarism. And it’s not really that frightful….yet. It’ll get there. Maybe. This is Texas, so who knows? Words do that to me though. I hear things all the time, every day that remind me of quotes. From a song or a book, a poem or a movie. I’m a walking fount of trivia that way. When my father in law lived with us, I had to walk past where he watched tv to get to the laundry room. I prided myself on calling out the title of the movie between the time I walked in one side of the room and out the other. Several times I correctly identified a movie I hadn’t even watched. Either from previews and extrapolation or because plot lines or actual lines or even characters that had become part of the pop culture lexicon. I hear things and I absorb them. I read and I know things. People ask me random questions all the time because they think I’ll know the answer. I often do.

I do this too. Deviate, wander. The prompt said write about the weather and I immediately go to quoting movie lines. My best friend and I use to go back and trace our conversations and I do this now with my kids. “momma, how did we go from a question about a song to nazi germany?” and we’ll go back to the beginning and trace it. This topic led to this one which led to that one and so on. It’s amazing sometimes to draw the lines between the dots. A friend in high school once asked me if the song Rambling Man meant anything to me. He was hilarious.

But the answer to the question is yes, there is a place I wish I could be, weather wise. Ireland. Mild and temperate. When it’s too hot or too cold, I hear those words in my head and see the Emerald Isle. Even the term Emerald Isle feels like a cool breeze, doesn’t it? Mild and temperate. Green and lush. The heart of the world some believe. My ancient home, my roots. At least some of my ancestors hail from there and I’ve always felt a strong pull to all things Celtic. To the Pagan traditions, to the art, to Stonehenge and Easter Island, to the Arthurian legends. I feel like there are answers there. I’m not sure what the questions are. I feel like it’s home, though I’ve never been there. I feel its pull. Mild and temperate, that’s where I belong.

Personal, Uncategorized

In My Dreams I Walk

January 2, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

“In my dreams, I walk.” He tells me.

The simple, raw grief in that statement shatters my heart.

~~~~~~~~~~

It is several weeks after the accident; I am in my bed drifting off to sleep. In that twilight world halfway between sleep and wakefulness I can hear the sound of the tires of the road, I can feel the rhythmic, swaying movement of a car. My eyes close against my will, sleep heavy and demanding. I’m so tired, so very, very tired. The part of my brain that is telling me I have to stay awake is no match for the part that knows how badly I need rest. No match for that comforting, rhythmic rocking of a moving vehicle. Just for a moment, it’s ok, I tell myself. Sleep pulls me under deeper and deeper.

Suddenly there is a loud crash, my entire world spins as I’m rudely jerked from sleep by the terrifying sensation of the car rolling over and over.

I sit upright in my bed, heart pounding in my chest and tears rolling down my face as I realize I have come as close as possible to experiencing what my son endured, without actually falling asleep at the wheel and wrecking.

parenting

Helicopter VS. Free Range Parenting

January 2, 2017 Angela Harrison Leave a comment

Today I realized that I trust my almost 14 and 12 year old with their siblings. Let me be more specific, as I was getting ready to take a quick shower, they wanted to go outside to play. I was ok with the older kids keeping an eye on their siblings, 9 and 5 for the ten minutes it would take me to shower. A year ago I wouldn’t have been and that got me thinking.

It got me thinking about how everyone has an opinion, how if I were to post it on face book, I would most likely get criticism from both sides. There would be those who say well come on! You should have given them a longer leash years ago, this helicopter parenting will cripple their emotional development. How will they grow into competent adults if you can’t leave them alone for 10 minutes in your own yard?

Then the other side, OMG, do you know what can happen in ten minutes? What if they ran into the road? What if a kidnapper came by? Anything can happen at any moment!

The thing is, they have a point. Both sides have valid arguments. Yes, children need to learn independence and self reliance as well as responsibility. And yes, any random thing can happen at any given time. So how do parents balance this? They seem to be two competing issues.

There is no simple, one size fits all answer. The best any parent can do is know their kids, know their environment and make the best choice possible for their family. We live in the county, down a private road. The odds of a stranger hanging around waiting to nab a child are just about nil. Traffic is also very, very light. And we have a fence around the yard. If we lived near a busy intersection, my decision may have been different.

Parents also have to know their child. Every child is different; one might be uber responsible at 10 while another is unreliable at 16. Don’t give me the “it’s the way they are raised” because anyone who has raised more than one can tell you that you can do the exact same thing with your kids and have them turn out wildly different. Because they have individual personalities. In fact, I would go as far as to say that you should NOT raise all your children exactly the same because what works for one does not work for the next. But that’s a subject for another post entirely.

The point is, you can’t judge another parent by your standard because you don’t know their kids and their situation. Not intimately. You may think your neighbor is a neglectful parent because their kids walk unattended to the park or you may think your sister is damaging her kids beyond repair with her helicopter parenting style. The truth is, you don’t know those kids the way the parents do. So you can’t judge. The best you can do is to know your own kids and make the best decisions possible for them.