Looking Back In Order to Move Forward

This blog was originally created as a gr.12 English project and has a good chance that 0-2 people will ever read it. Unless of course I get up the courage to share my blog. However, as I was mulling over how to process some of my thoughts and feeling about becoming a Mom and trying to be the kind of Mom I want my children to know this seemed like a good place to start. As far back as I can remember I wanted to be a Mom. I always loved babies, but wasn't nearly as patient with toddlers as my sister.
When I think about what shapes the kind of Mom I want to be and the things I so desperately want to avoid, my own mother is the greatest influence in that equation. I have always felt compelled to tell my story of my experiences with my Mom's illness. However, I have struggled with how to honour her dignity while being honest. I still don't know exactly how things will take shape but as I wrestle with motherhood the desire to unpack my experiences has increased. I have also been encouraged by other parent's honest blog posts so I hope that maybe someone will stumble across my posts when they are having a hard day and know that they are not alone. I muster my courage and thrust my thoughts into the great void of the internet. Hoping and praying that good will come of them.
My life has a before Mom's illness/ after Mom's illness timeline. Prior to my Mom's illness my memories of her were amazing. Although for a long period of time her after illness behaviour clouded  any positive memories. In my first year of university I read through some of my Mom's old journals. She had shown them to me the summer she got sick and said someday when I was older I could read them. This allowed me to remember the person she had been before illness and grieve the loss of my Mom. I was then able to learn to love and accept who she is now as a new person instead of constantly expecting her to be who she used to be. The Mom I had for my first fourteen years no longer exists. No matter how hard I prayed for healing God choose to not restore her to us. One of the first questions I want to ask God when I meet him in Heaven is why he choose to miraculously heal her to the extent he did and why did he stop there? I think I know part of the answer, or at least it is the only thing that makes sense to me. God allowed me to walk through that trauma so that I could comfort others and show genuine empathy when I meet people who also had painful things going on. Unless, I share that comfort and empathy all of the pain has been meaningless. So I try to grow through it, to keep looking up and growing towards the sun. I do not want to be defined by childhood trauma but I want to learn from it and choose to create a different environment in my home than the one I experienced from fifteen on.
Prior to my Mom's illness she was kind, compassionate, and a good listener. She had a quick temper (which she was kind enough to pass on) but she desperately worked to control it and do better, not allowing it to define her parenting. I remember her coming and apologizing for yelling at me one day and explaining that it was something she needed to work on and that she was working on controlling her yell. Reading my journal from the time of her illness I railed at God for the injustice of taking my Mom. I reasoned that if he had taken anyone else's Mom they would still have their best friend but my Mom was truly my best friend before she got sick.
The one thing I know with all my heart is I never want my children to experience what my siblings and I experienced as my mom learned to live/lives with her traumatic brain injury. My mom has done things that the Mom I knew would never have wanted to do and a lot of those things shape what I know I don't want to do as a parent. However, it leaves me wondering how do I do differently when that is all I know? As I try and walk through my story in the hopes that I can process and grow through introspection I want to invite you my reader to walk a little in my shoes and hopefully be encouraged by my stories and learn from my mistakes.
You are not alone dear mother as you cradle your infant babe wondering who thought you qualified for motherhood, whiling away the hours on Facebook or Pinterest wishing someone would post something new so you would have a distraction from your inadequacies. (Word of advice, don't join Facebook bst groups when you are trying to distract yourself from a less than ideal reality) When I feel like I'm failing at motherhood it is so tempting to checkout, to occupy my mind with anything other than my current reality. This blog is a part of me committing to checking in and dealing with myself to hopefully create a more desirable reality.
I don't want to be a Mom that yells, throws things, threatens, manipulates or physically punishes my children. Knowing that is only the beginning. What I have come to realize in the past 6 or so months when the real parenting has started with my daughter. Is that it is hard to succeed when all you know is what you want to avoid. (Prior to a year I consider it mostly care taking but now she is starting to want to exercise her own will and opinions. She is able to climb and run beyond the safe areas and voice her sentiments rather loudly at times and the real parenting work starts.) I knew that I wanted to be a gentle parent but I didn't know what that looked like in real life.
A couple of months ago I got blindsided by the week of overwhelming emotions from my daughter. She cried over "insignificant", in my opinion, things. For example I set her blocks on the floor after she had left to go play with something else.  Sometimes with the crying spell lasting 20-30min. She was also constantly engaged in limit testing and didn't listen when I nicely asked her not to do things. Not even when I started senselessly saying No, no, no in a stern voice. I was so frustrated. It was probably my hardest week of parenting to date and I felt like a complete failure so I decided to do some pd and introspection. I  quickly realized that I was mostly to blame for her behaviour. I had muddled my way around as I tried to figure out what gentle parenting looked like. I was incredibly inconsistent and wasn't giving her clear boundaries. I read some articles by Janet Lansbury and came up with a game plan so that I could have a consistent response to limit-testing. I wrote myself cue cards and reviewed them daily till I started to form new positive habits of interacting with my daughter. A huge thing for me to realize is that her behaviour was developmentally appropriate and not directed against me. It is easy to feel like you are being attacked when everything you say is being ignored and someone is constantly screaming/crying in your ears. I am learning to comfort her and try to name her feelings. It is really cute, now when she starts to get upset she will often come to me and ask for cuddles or uppies before things get too overwhelming for her. She may be crying but she will seek me out and when I pick her up she starts to pat my back. I may say something like "you are really upset because you want a banana and I said you couldn't have one right now. That is so frustrating. As she starts to calm down I may explain I don't want you to have a banana because lunch will be ready in five minutes.  I want to help her learn how to identify her feelings and work through them rather than stifle them.
My daughter is a future world changer, she is strong-willed, intelligent, adventuresome and loves exploring new things. These characteristics will carry her far as an adult if only I can manage to guide her during her childhood and not snuff out her spark or scar her too deeply through my mistakes.
The deepest desire of my heart is to draw her and any future children towards a relationship with Christ and with their neighbours. I want them to have confidence in their identity and value and not-struggle with self-esteem and self-loathing like I did, as a result of some of the lies my Mom planted in me after her illness.
My plan on how to do that has to do with creating and sustaining a trust-based relationship where I am responsive to their needs in a calm and steadfast way. It is so countercultural to the last years of my childhood. I continually fight back the urge to yell, or lash out when I get frustrated. I am trying to equip myself with tools and support to guide my children in a gentle and loving manner. Hopefully, equipping them to become healthy, loving adults with relatively few scars from parenting trauma.

Anyways, that was quite the novel and a little all over the place so hopefully it will make sense. I really need to head to bed so I can be patient and loving tomorrow so that's how it will remain for tonight.

The Last Post

I'm not entirely sure what conclusions to draw from these pictures. I could say:

• Life is fickle record any memories worth saving cause if anything happens to you or your brain the people around you will lack your perspective on life
• Some parts of my life are lost somewhere they are locked up in unreachable parts of my Mom's brain so I'll never know for sure which birthday or Christmas concert is pictured
• Memory is a funny thing, sometimes it is vivid and you can taste, smell and feel the experience other times it leaves you drawing a blank no matter how hard you try.

I must conclude that this was an interesting and challenging experiment. It was intriguing to see what kind of memories some of those pictures stirred up. It was a success because it allowed me to explore and try and rewrite my history from random clues within each picture by probing my memory to see if somehow subconsciously I knew something more.

I will leave you with a picture symbolic of the journey. We all have our past and our past is a part of us but our past does not define us. We are defined by how we choose to act in light of our past. I choose to take what I can from my spotty history to treasure the good memories and learn from the harsh realities. I choose to keep traveling down the path God puts before me and to embrace the present as it comes. I will attempt to record my memories for those who come after me that they may learn from my mistakes and share in my adventures.

Thank you for journeying with me through this shoebox

Picture#12 October 9, 2004

Once again we find ourselves in the Arborg hospital. My Mom is again the one lying in the bed. The first time was we were celebrating my brother's new life. This time it was a prayer filled vigil. This picture was taken on my fifteenth birthday.

My Mom lay inert. Her eyes would open and I did passive physio on her every day after school, but she, herself, could not move. She had a tube in her trachea and a ventilator pushed air in and out of her lungs. Tubes carried liquids in and out of her body through many different portals. Monitors beeped and whistled. Sometimes they would shriek and nurses would come running. My Mom's condition was fairly stable but she was a vegetable.

Occasionally she would try and mouth something, but because of the tube in her trachea she had no voice so we really didn't know what she was saying. The doctors felt like it would be alright to try and take the trachea out. So first they had to do a day of 24hrs off the ventilator, but because our hospital is so small one of her family members needed to stay with her. I stayed with my Mom. I talked, I sang, I tried to do homework, I carefully monitored her breathing. After that 24hr period she passed the test, and so they took out the trachea. For the first time in 3months she had a voice.

The voice that spoke from my Mom's body was not her own. The things she said made no sense at all. That first day she was worried about packing up our cabin-we don't have a cabin, then she kept asking where her baby was-my brother was 10. She was confused and did not recognize anyone except for her Mom, and she only recognized her sometimes. My Mom was lost.

Picture#11 '03

It is summer, we are in Creighton, SK, visiting my cousins and Grandma. Someone probably Auntie Sandy said, "Hey, we should get a picture with Grandma and all the grandkids!" so we piled onto the couch and took a picture. What I really like about this picture is that it captures the special relationship that Grandma and I had.

When I was little I was very close to my Grandma. I followed her everywhere, and tried to do everything she did. However, she always loved my sweet and gentle little sister and would favour her whenever she'd bring new fabric over to sew us some new clothes. I just wanted be loved by her. We got a long quite well until my Mom got sick. Once my Mom got sick my Grandma was unable to see the hurt and the need of her daughter's family but only her sick daughter. She unwittingly hurt my Dad, and I very badly by judging us and saying we were not doing enough for Mom even though both of us had sacrificed pretty much everything in order to take care of Mom. Last year I wrote my Grandma a letter explaining the pain she had caused and ever since things have been on much better terms.

Picture#10 '02

I am cutting my Dad's hair. I think this was the first time that I cut my Dad and brother's hair. We had just bought clippers. I'm not even sure what prompted the decision but ever since I've been cutting their hair. I remember being so nervous. I carefully studied the instructions sheet and diagrams that came with the clippers and then I started cutting. I remember my Mom hovering over me being concerned that I not make Dad bald and helping me figure out how to cut around the ears.

Over the years as I have cut my Dad's hair I have noticed it thinning and greying. The year my Mom got sick my dad's hair went from pepper with a little bit of salt, to salt with a little pepper.

Picture#9

The wonderful outfits in this picture were definitely orchestrated by me. I would often come up with elaborate make believe games for my siblings and I to play. In this one my brother and sister are wearing the dresses my sister and I wore as flower girls in my aunt and uncles wedding and I'm wearing my mom's old dress. I'm the bride in a lovely forest green dress. When I was younger I always dreamed of getting married and being a bride. My sister and I took turns being the bride, but my brother made the cutest flower girl. We would often dress up and play wedding or photo shoot.

After we got dressed-up we would go to the store, where our parents were working and show them our lovely outfits. I think Mom decided this one was memorable enough to photograph.

Picture#8

In this picture I'm sitting with Brownie, my dog and constant companion. Each day after school I would grab a freezie from the freezer and go for a run with Brownie as we ran we'd stop for freezie breaks. I would suck some of the juice from a piece, and break it off, then push it out for Brownie to eat from my hand. Brownie was such an important part of my life. He bled to death shortly after my Mom got sick.

I remember his last night trying to get some broth down his throat with a syringe. Lying with him on the garage floor and crying. Laying with my arms around him. It was the middle of winter and it was bitterly cold. I had laid out a rug for him, but even with the rug the cold from the cement penetrated my warm flesh with icicles. I lay with my arms around him and wept. For in his death I lost not only my dog but the keeper of my secrets, my shoulder to cry on after my Mom got sick and the only constant thing at my house.

When I see our old van in the background of this picture the first thing that comes to mind is the wheelchair ramps that we had when my Mom was in her wheelchair. We had to set them up, wheel Mom up into the van. Next we used the metal lock bar our neighbor had created and lock her wheelchair in place then take down the ramps and slide them into the van. Then we would be able to go wherever we where going.