The Battle Of Peer Dependency: Chapter Four - Part Eight

Good morning, readers! 

 I've had an eventful day - and it has barely started.   

I've been working a lot more than usual for the few weeks due to a coworker having an unexpected death in the family.   I took a few of her shifts on top of my own so instead of working 25-30 hours, I worked 44 hours.   

I was really tired last night, so I set my morning alarm for the wrong time.   I had 30 minutes to get myself and my 3-year old fed, dressed and on the road to drop Spawn off at school at the right time.    Thankfully, our morning routine went well and I thought I'd be just on time or maybe a few minutes late dropping him off which is no big deal since the kiddos play on the playground at the start of the day.

I get out to our minivan and the driver's side slider won't open.   I can open the driver's side door- but not the slider.   I try locking and unlocking all the doors.  No change.   I try manually opening the door and nothing happens.  I try starting the car - and I can't open the door.   Spawn is starting to freak out a bit - he's not fond of change or stressed mamas - when I realize that repeatedly trying to open a stuck door in hopes it will open on the 6th, 9th or 20th time is literally Twain's definition of insanity.

I regroup.   I get Spawn settled in the living room with some books, some toys and a television show.    I start searching the internet for solutions.   I find a few pages about the actuator in the door failing - but that doesn't sound right.   I can hear the motor that automatically opens the door engaging and the door moves a bit- it's just that the door seems stuck in the locked position.

I try a few tricks to see if I can reset the lock and the key fob by pulling on the interior door release while using the fob to lock and unlock the doors.  No dice.    I can't really see if the position that I'm moving the interior door release is the unlock position so I walk around to the passenger side slider to climb across the captain chairs to verify that pushing towards the front is unlocked.    

The passenger side slider will not open either - and it's doing the exact same thing as the driver side slider.    

That was an unexpected problem - but I realized in one of those flashes of insight that the problem was probably not with the doors - but with something else like the onboard computer.    The chances of both doors having identical mechanical problems at the exact same time is pretty much zero - so I needed to reboot the computer.   

Well, I looked up the steps online - disconnect the battery for 10 minutes, reconnect battery, and turn car to "On" without starting and the computer should reboot - and started the process.   Actually, finding a wrench to remove the battery leads took the longest time, ironically.      

During the wait time with the battery disconnected, I contacted Spawn's school to let them know he wouldn't be coming in today due to car trouble.   Spawn was happily watching "Grizzy and the Lemmings" while piping up "Mama, fix car!  Mama, try!  Mama, try again to fix car!" whenever I left the house and "Mama on 'pewter' (computer)" when I was in the house.

I reattached the leads and turned on the car.  

I hadn't realized how little hope I had that rebooting the computer would work when I tried the slider - and it opened!   I whooped happily - and got a late take-out breakfast for Spawn and me.

Parenting has been a wild ride.  I feel like I'm flying by the seat of my pants while not being a hundred percent sure I know where I want to end up - let alone how to get there!   It reminds me of the first few years I taught.   The one advantage of teaching in traditional schools, though, is that teachers have a few years of classes about teaching behind them, a student teaching experience and other teachers to trade tips and tools with.    One of the tips I remembered was trying to avoid assignments that could be extremely stressful for some students.   In Biology, an example of this is not requiring students to make a family pedigree of traits based on their actual families.   A college professor I was working under assigned that over Thanksgiving because the students would be at home with their families.   I pointed out that that assignment would really suck for adopted kids, refugees without family at home, and large families (mine would have required a few pieces of posterboard just for my first cousins on both sides of the family).   When I assigned a "make your own pedigree chart", I let the students do any creature, traits and inheritance pattern they wanted.   Occasionally, a kid would do their own family - but I also got dragons, aliens, unicorns......you get the idea.

With my background, you can imagine how cringe-worthy I found this next section:

One day during English class, Chris was asked to write about a wonderful time he had experience with his father. As he read the assignment, I watched his face and waited for his response. As he finished reading, he looked up at me and the tears begin to flow. "Why did God have to take Daddy?" was his question.

I called him over to my desk and sat and talked to him about the many possibilities as to why it was time for Daddy to die. We talked about people who had come to know Jesus as Savior, marriages that were strengthened, and the many ways in which God had become real to us as head of the home and the father to the children. All of these things were wonderful, but they didn't help heal the hurt in his heart. (pg. 56)

One advantage of homeschooling that makes sense to me is the ability to specialize curriculum to the needs and strengths of family members.  Your kid likes dinosaurs?  Use that hook!   Your kid's dad died in a tragic car accident when he was seven?   Rewrite the essay prompt to "write about a wonderful time you had with a family member?  Boom!  Homeschooling at its best.

Instead, Mrs. Sears was either not paying much attention to the essay prompts she was assigning - or she was mining her kids for tragedy.   I hope it was the first - but based on some stories from later in the book I suspect she likes to mine other people's tragedies for her own purposes.   Especially when her initial response to her son's heartfelt expression of anguish over his father's death is to make a list of all the great things that happened after Jeff died.

That's sick - and it shows how much Mrs. Sears has been consumed by proving that God takes care of widows and orphans through her life.

I finally asked him, "Do you want to tell God that you miss your daddy, that you wish he wouldn't have died, and that you don't understand what is going to happen in the future?" He nodded his head yes.

I told him, "It is alright to tell God these things. Can you also tell God that you are going to trust Him that your daddy is where he needs to be, and that you are exactly where you need to be?"

As he bowed his head and spoke these things to the Lord, I saw the invisible baggage of hurt and responsibility which he had been carrying, fall to the ground. His pain, left alone, would have turned into rebellion and further devastation in this life. (pg. 56)

This quote distills everything I dislike about CP/QF prayer at once. 

 Prayer is communication with God.  For that to be true, believers need to be able to discuss everything with God - not just how great everything is all the time.  Mrs. Sears takes the obsession with forcing everything in life to be great to palpably absurd lengths when she explains to her sobbing son that his father's tragic death was a good thing since random people have stronger marriages - but that insane response drives home the inherent fakeness of that style of prayer.  

My parents are alive and well, but I do remember my younger brother dying when I was four.   Mrs. Sears' blithe assertion that her son was fine after a single agonizingly botched conversation about his father's death feels unlikely to me.   

Maybe Chris was a rare kid who needed a single moment of compassion from his mom to completely heal. 

I worry, though, that he learned never to bring up anything serious about his emotions with his mother ever again.

*Sorry for the delayed post!  I thought I had published this last Monday - and life continued in a standard, crazy fashion - so I didn't realize I missed publishing posts until today.*