The Worst People Ever

Everyone bears a cross, some weight of the world that they have to deal with, issues that they would rather pass to others or get rid of completely.  Often times, in our interactions with others, we don't see these crosses, these burdens that they suffer and struggle with.   People have a tendency to put their best face forward so others don't see their struggles.  They mask their pain in public and deal with the torment in the comfort of their homes.   In our everyday lives, how many times have we judged others because we think they are scatterbrained, flighty, "not with it", or maybe we think they are depressed, self-centered, or shy.  There are often times hidden struggles that influence the way people portray themselves in public.  Not everything is always as it seems.  In my work as a contractor, I sometimes spend a good amount of time around people in their homes, seeing that other side, being a silent witness to the struggles that they deal with.  I sometimes make silent assumptions about peoples motives, thinking one thing even though I know it may not be true.  I don't know the specific assumption that I made, but there is a lot more behind my current customer's actions and life than I could have ever imagined.  And this is how I discovered the worst people ever.  It wasn't her specifically telling me her struggles.  Instead, I overheard phone conversations that she has had while I am working there.  I don't eavesdrop.  I just happen to be working near her room when she is on the phone.  There is no where left for me to work in her house and while my intention is not to listen to her conversation, sometimes it can't be helped. 

So what is this cross that my customer is bearing?  From what I gather, my customer, divorced and living alone, has a daughter who lives in a group home and attends a school that teaches life skills.  I am guessing that her daughter is dealing with some type of mental health issue, perhaps autism or something similar.  I have never seen her daughter, but have heard her talk about her on the phone and have seen pictures of her when she was younger.   Sometime over the past year, her daughter has suffered abuse at the hands of her caregivers, the one's who care for her at the home, not the school.  She suffered both physical and mental abuse, including strangling and beating.  I don't know what type of psychological abuse she suffered, but I can imagine its not good.  There could be more, but I have not heard it.  Arrests have been made, lawsuits have been filed, and the process is still on going. There are debates about putting video cameras to help watch her daughter and the other kids at the house.  It all sounds like a giant nightmare being waged over the phone by a parent who wasn't able to be present to protect her daughter.  I would be enraged if this happened to one of my children and despite what this customer of mine is going through, she is able to maintain a relative calm demeanor on the phone.  If I hadn't over heard her talking about this issue, I would have had no inclination that anything was wrong with her daughter.  She manages to put on this smile every day, appear to be happy, and go about her life.  Yet, knowing what she must be dealing with inside is heartbreaking.  Having children of my own, there is a deep gut wrenching feeling that occurs whenever something happens to one of them.  The desire to protect and assist, to heal and to care for our children, is inherent in parenthood.  When the ability to do that is taken away through a mental health issue where external help outside the family is needed, it digs out the very fiber of what it means to be a parent.

Who are these people who prey upon those less fortunate, who feel that they can exert their power over them to whatever degree they see fit?  It is something that I can not comprehend and probably will never be able to.  We occasionally hear about similar cases on the news, but often times the abuse has to be more aggravated, more despicable, more horrendous for it to make the news.  How many other cases like this float beneath the radar because it either only happened once or is deemed not news worthy enough?  The cases that involve the mentally challenged either with autism, Down syndrome, or some other mental health issue are even harder to identify as often times the victims don't know how to speak up for themselves or are unable to do so.  The people who commit these heinous crimes, in my mind, are on par with the Bashar al Assad's, the Kim Jong Un's, and anyone else who is in a position of power and exerts that power over those less fortunate either for their own personal satisfaction or some other twisted reason.   The cross that my customer is bearing right now is not an easy one to bear as a parent.   It makes me feel fortunate that I don't have to deal with what she is dealing with.  It is also a reminder that everyone is dealing with something, either small or large, in their personal lives.  We may not know what it is people are dealing with it, but it never hurts to throw an extra dose of kindness into our interactions with others.  A simple smile, a kind word, or a gentle touch is sometimes all that people need to be lifted up a bit out of their problems.  So smile today, or maybe even ask someone, seriously, how they are doing.  

No, It's Not Being Over Protective

I was at a birthday party for a friend's wife this past Friday.  It was a small gathering of adults at their house, most of them with kids in tow.  These friends of ours have a son who is in our son's kindergarten class.  These two kindergarteners are quickly becoming good friends and being that we live right around the corner from them, it is working out quite nicely.  There is a big difference, however, in how we choose to raise our children (both them and us have daughters about the same age as well).  They, along with many of our other friends, have chosen to introduce technology to their kids including TV, video games, iPads, and iPhones.  Nothing wrong with that on my end.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't judge anyone for the way they choose to raise their children.   Another difference in the way we raise our children is when we introduce organized sports to our children.  Their son has been playing baseball for a couple of years now whereas ours just plays with a plastic bat and ball in our backyard.  I have nothing against sports either, but at least for our son, he can wait out one more year before getting involved in a sports team.   We at our house believe in letting our son be a kid, without worry about commitment at this point, and just having the time to play outside doing what he wants.  For those that don't understand why we raise our children the way we are, it is interesting to see the questions that we get.  Our friend's wife, who the birthday party was for, at one point was talking to me about our sons.  We were talking about how they were becoming good friends and bantering back and forth.  At one point, she verified that we don't do video games or TV at our house.  I affirmed that.  Then she asked if I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep him sheltered from all of it.  

I could see where she was coming from with the question, but it was an angle I hadn't thought about.  From an outside perspective, it can seem like we our sheltering our kids and being over protective of them.  The only thing I feel we are protecting them against is perhaps growing up too quickly at such a young age.  I have nothing against TV and video games.  I actually loved playing video games for a long time, and I enjoyed watching TV when we had one up in our house.  Yet, the content that comes through video games and the TV is not what I want our son exposed to on a regular basis.  I want him to be an actual child, with childhood concerns about when he has to come inside for dinner and whether or not he can go play in the rain.  I don't him plastered to a TV discussing video game strategy with is friends while the sun is shining outside.  I tried explaining all this in much fewer words by simply saying, "I know I can't keep him away from that stuff forever, and that is not my intention.  I know he will play video games and watch TV, just not in our house right now."  She suggested at that point that maybe her son could be the one to introduce video games and all that "stuff" to our son.  I agreed.  If our son wants to go to his friends house and play video games instead of playing outside, then so be it, however, it just won't be an everyday thing and it will not change how we operate at our house.  I just found it funny how she suggested that her son can be the one to introduce this stuff.  It's like its some taboo way of living that we embrace, the dark side of keeping technology from our kids.  I actually think it will be benefit our kids more later on as they can develop their creativity and personality without over handed influence of our culture that sometimes tends to get a little heavy through video games and TV.  It is all an experiment of sorts, every parents slightly different way of raising their kids that will only bear fruit as time passes.  

Over protective?  OK, in regards to technology, perhaps.  Yet, if the parents who would say that we are overprotective in general saw the opportunities we gave our kids to explore, learn, and fail, they might think otherwise.  On the flip side of "protecting" them from technology, we allow our kids the freedom in our house to explore, to help cook, to get what they need when they need it.  We are attempting to raise independent little humans.  Our son, at 5, while not an expert with a steak knife, can use one when he wishes, as long as he is careful.  We are also showing our daughter how to use one so that in another year or so, she can get her own steak knife and cut her own food for meals.  Similarly, they are allowed to climb on stools to get what they need, allowed to climb ladders outside, to vacuum around the house, to hold the small jackhammer I own, to help cut the grass, to dig in the dirt, to attempt to pick up every worm and "save" it, to climb rocks and trees, to roam the woods behind our house, to go fishing with sticks in our lawn.  We allow them a very generous amount of free reign in our house, provided that they do things safely.  That is our one requirement.  If they aren't being safe, we show them how to be safe and let them go again and learn.  They will fall, they will cut themselves, they will learn the hard way sometimes.  Our job is to keep them as safe as possible while giving them the opportunity to learn.  I wonder how many of the parents who would say we are protective with exposure to technology allow their children the freedom that we allow ours.  It would interesting to see.  But for now, we carry on our lifestyle, they carry on theirs, and as they intersect, we shall see how things progress.  

Diabetes, The Flip Side

When most people think about diabetes, they think of Type 2 diabetes, where the individual through healthy eating, can both prevent the onset of and reverse the effects of the diabetes.  With Type 2, it is essential for most people to limit the amount of carbohydrates they are ingesting, watch their sugar intake, and strive not to over eat on a regular basis.  Type 2 is most times associated with people who are overweight and are usually older.  This happens when they go through life eating whatever they want and then as they get older, their bodies can't process all the food they ingest as efficiently as it once could.  Their indulgence when they were younger has caused their body to limit the amount of insulin it produces and if it gets extreme enough, forces them to supplement their own naturally produced insulin with the synthetic type that all diabetics receive.  Type 2 diabetes is growing increasingly common and when most people think about diabetes, they think of Type 2.  And while Type 2 and Type 1 diabetes are related in the sense that they deal with a person's ability to produce insulin, the similarities quickly dissolve once you start to look more closely at the two.  When we tell most people that our son has diabetes, they instinctively think of Type 2 and limiting carbs, watching your weight and the amount of food you ingest and have a hard time understanding Type 1 in the sense of eating and what a body needs.  

So with Type 1, carbohydrates are a necessity.  There is a limit on how much someone with Type 1 can have as if they have too much, their blood sugar does spike.  However, unlike Type 2 where carbohydrates are limited extensively, at least for us with our son, it is extremely hard to get him to eat enough carbohydrates.  For some people with Type 1 who don't eat healthy, there is a greater balancing act with eating enough vs. too much.  For us, however, we struggle to get our son to eat enough carbohydrates throughout the day.  He loves proteins like cheeses and meats and for us to get our son to eat enough "healthy" carbohydrates, we really need to struggle.  We need to supplement what he eats with fruits and breads, and even then, it is sometimes not enough.  Sure, we could give him animal and graham crackers non stop, but that's not how we eat and we don't want to just pump him full of carbohydrates that don't also carry some other benefit.  We instead seek to have our son easy the healthier carbs that can be found in fruits and juices.  That is where the struggle comes in.  While he loves fruit, he needs to eat a lot more fruit to make up the amount of carbs his body needs versus the quicker carbs of crackers and breads.  And on top of that, he is only five, so the room that he does have for food is limited by his size.  So we count the carbs in everything we eat and do math every day to make sure he is eating enough and of the right kind of food.  I think it is more of an adjustment for us at this point than it is for him.  We have always eaten healthy in our family so for him, the adjustments seem to be easier than it is for us when we are preparing meals.  Needless to say, we will most likely not be going out to eat anytime soon as the headache that would ensue over calculating the carbs in a meal prepared by a restaraunt would not be worth it.  So next time you hear of someone with Type 1 diabetes, you will know of the different struggles they go through versus someone with Type 2 diabetes.  I know this has been riveting information for a Saturday morning read, but if you have made it this far, your almost done and can get on with your day.  Happy Saturday!