Counting Down

I remember a conversation I had with my mom when I was a kid. I'm trying to remember the context. I don't recall being very old, but I really can't place where we were, what we were doing, how it came up. Perhaps we were in a store like Target or K-mart. I have this same conversation sometimes with my own kids in that context, so I'm thinking it must have been there.

My mom made a comment about discontent in the form of always living for the next big thing. In this case, I remember we were talking about holidays. She said something like this...

I feel for people who are always living for the next big thing, the next holiday, the next day off work, the next vacation. It's like they don't have anything worthwhile in their lives, so they have to wait for some big event to be excited about.

It was a simple comment that hangs there as a memory with really nothing else attached to it.  But I thought of it today because I saw this picture posted on a news site.

And I liked it.

It made my life feel so much more bearable. Only 127 days until Christmas. That doesn't seem too terribly much. I'm wondering if it's too soon to make one of these:

When I think about the last year, I get overwhelmed pretty easily to then shift to thinking about the year ahead. I wonder how we'll make it through another year if it is like last year.

I haven't posted a lot about the various trials we faced this last year, but let's just say that I've learned a lot about mental health systems and spent a good amount of effort and time on legal battles advocating for my son. It's not fun. I'm not even sure yet if it's worthwhile.

We haven't reached conclusions on anything yet, so honestly, there are days when I wonder if all the time, effort, energy, and emotion that I've put into this year will pay off at all.

Regardless, I find myself trying to just get through to the next thing, sometimes wishing away the here and now to just fast forward to see what the outcome of all this stress will be.

Peaceful Pleasure

There's a feeling I get sometimes as a mother. I don't know how to describe it except to call it peaceful pleasure. There's this small stillness and joy that comes when I look at pictures of my children. Sometimes, I feel it when I am watching them without them knowing it. I'm not a creeper, I swear. But you know what I mean. It's like if I'm volunteering at their school and I see them line up with their class after recess, but they haven't seen me yet.

There's just this calm content of watching your child, knowing they're yours, feeling the deep love that only parents can understand.

But raising a child with an attachment disorder makes this hard.

My son has this distrust built in him, stemming from early trauma. It's sad. It's understandable. But it's hard to be his mom sometimes.

I want to have these happy feelings when I walk up the stairs and see family pictures, but it's not always how it is.

But rather than focus on that today, I am really happy to report that my son was fairly annoying in the car this morning. That's not the happy part. That's the normal part. He talks incessantly and ignores social cues often. He can tell me the guidelines for car conversation (keep voices down, talk about something that at least 1 other person is also interested in), but he often doesn't follow them. I have to remind him a lot that we're all trapped inside a small box with him and it's not fair to others to be forced to listen to his shenanigans. At home, I try to let him have his silly time and his loud times because others can leave the room if they're not feeling it. But in the car, it's not okay. The car is a place to practice respecting each other's boundaries.

But here's the fun part... the part that made me happy:

Brian was explaining a picture to me and giving me way too much detail, but my response was amusement. I took pleasure, rather than annoyance, in his idiosyncrasies.

We've had a good start to the school year, which has been nice. I was very worried over the two weeks leading up to school. He was being a punk, honestly, for most of those days. I was experiencing elevated heart rates, stomach pains, the works. It was miserable. I wondered how long I will be able to live like this.

So, perhaps we only have a week or so of reprieve until school becomes hard again. But I'll take what I can at this point.

Hard Questions

I came across this article today about an inmate who drowned his cellmate in their toilet. The murderer was obviously re-arrested and will be charged again. He is already in prison for quite a long sentence for a murder that he committed when he was 17.

This is where someone like me - someone who generally abides by the Consistent Life Ethic - runs into the difficult questions. Every philosophical stance has these kind of questions. There are times when a viewpoint or belief system is very clear. It's easily applicable and there's little disagreement among adherents and the general public alike.

Child molestation, for example.

Oh, yes... I forgot to mention that the cellmate that was killed was an egregious child molester, convicted of lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 12.

I made the mistake of reading the comments on the Kron 4 facebook page. Some highlights:

 - They should make public his number so people can put money in his books

- Should give this man time off of his sentence not rearrest him on new charges.

- RESPECT to a real man. My thoughts are with his family while they must see and hear of their loved one being slandered for making the world a better place. 

I'm frankly appalled.

But I'm also conflicted, although not with regard to the situation in the cell. The death penalty is a hard topic and child molestation is a sick crime. But here's the thing. The child molester was given a life sentence. Theoretically (yes, I know) he cannot commit his same crime again. He could perform other sex-related crimes, but it's probably unlikely since pedophiles target vulnerable children. The fact that the others in the prison are his peers, rather than young people unable to defend themselves, lowers the risk of this. In my view, with my grasp of the consistent life ethic, this child molester deserves to live.

In the least, he does not deserve to be killed by an individual. The death penalty is something that is governed because that is supposed to make it something that has accountability. Of course, I understand that this isn't what actually happens, and this is a huge part of why I'm opposed to it. I'm also opposed because I think that everyone should be given an opportunity for redemption. I won't go into here how flawed our prison system is to actually deliver that opportunity, but for the sake of time, I'll assume that being alive in itself gives you more opportunity toward redemption than being dead.

So, I believe that both the 17-year-old murderer and the child molester deserve to have their chance. They deserve to be in a place that will protect society from their evils, while simultaneously protecting their right to life. This is the ideal that jail is built on, however messed up our implementation actually is.

But now that the murderer has killed again, I start to see the hard question.

When we've put a person in a place that protects others from their dangerous crimes and that person commits the same dangerous crime again, what is left for this situation? Solitary confinement, perhaps. Some would say that this is a form of torture.

So, is it better to die than to be alive and face a slow, permanent torture? Is it right to allow this man to live until he kills a jail guard? Then what?

Hard questions.

Changing Seasons

School starts in 2 weeks. Neither of the kids are particularly excited about that, but they are both eager for the annual school shopping. The backpack we ordered for Ashlyn arrived today. It's not a great one. You know how you can tell kind of just by feeling how papery the material seems? The other day, Eve and I were at Kohl's and we saw some JanSport bags, and I thought how much I always love JanSport backpacks. I had one that made it all the way through high school and well out of college. The only issue was that the front pocket zipper broke - twice. JanSport has - or at least had - free repair for life when you buy a back, but I learned the hard way that it can take 6 weeks to get a broken zipper replaced. Then said zipper can break again within a few month, so probably not worth the hassle. Regardless, I definitely got my money's worth on that bag. But it was actually pretty ugly. Anyway. I'm not here to talk about back packs. I'm here to talk about life change because who isn't down for that kind of conversation at 8:40pm, after the sleeping meds have been ingested and before Jane the Virgin finale has been watched. I was thinking today how different things are now than I thought they might be 5 years ago. 5 years was still when we were in Huntsville. It's funny how there are things that I complained about when we lived there that I would kill for now. (Not literally. I'm pro-life.) There were relationships I had that had more strain in them than I wanted. What I wouldn't give to have some of those people a short drive away. I'm very different, too, though. Five years ago, I was signing my kids up for school for the first time. Eve was entering 8th grade; Ashlyn - 2nd. Brian was starting his full-day schooling adventure (ha!) in kindergarten. The year was about the best I could have possibly anticipated... well, for the girls. Brian's education experience has been rough, to say the least. 5 years ago, I was a college-educated SAHM who hadn't earned in income for years. 5 years ago, I was someone who had the energy to not only think about volunteering, but I actually did it quite a lot. 5 years ago, I was someone on a spiritual path with people who were important to me and vital to my faith experience. 5 years ago, I was someone who could sit and write a blog post without stopping ten times to see if I'd met my goal of 15 minutes of journaling. I was also someone who wanted to be accepted by the "cool kids" in various places I went. This is a weird one, I think. I was 35 years old then, and it honestly caught me off guard that there even still were "cool kids." Either way, I'm glad that I don't care so much about that. I realize more and more that my mom was right all along that the cool kids are often then ones that feel insecure themselves. It's weird how that works. I still have 3 minutes to write until I reach my goal. I wish I had something better to say here. I wish I had some profound thing to say about growth and change and what that means. To say something about the good that has come though hardship. But really I just see it for something that is. Not for something that is good or bad, but just is. I'm different than I was five years ago. And I suspect I could write this same thing again in 5 more years. 2 minutes to go. Well, here's one thing that hasn't changed. I have such little internal motivation to keep going. I'm highly tempted to say, "eh. close enough." But today, I'm much more able to do that without feeling like a failure.