Acceptance

This blog was intended to be written more than annually, but this year was hard. I feel like I am crawling out of a cave. And I really have had much less disruption than many. I am still employed. I am facilitating several more community based groups than I was one year ago. My mother, who has fairly advanced Alzheimers disease, survived COVID. Because she is no longer fighting to stay in her old community 4 hours away, we moved her close to me so I see her often now. She lives primarily in the present and I think she is happier than she has ever been in her life. Acceptance is working for her.

On the other hand, when mom caught COVID before Christmas, her memory care kicked her out to a fairly frightening jalopy of a facility willing to house people with COVID. We did finally clear out her house. This is the 5th time we have moved her, 4th time in the last 2 years. I missed the birth of my youngest granddaughter, and I am not that kind of grandmother. She was 5 months old by the time I was vaccinated and able to safely travel. Then there is work. What a year! I learned how to facilitate mental health groups, including crafts, on zoom just in time to teach students how to lead mental health groups online. There is so much of that class I would have never considered teaching online before COVID. I became the client for their learning to administer through zoom hands on assessment tools that they usually get to handle in labs. Just as COVID sent us all home, we began an entirely new curriculum with a second cohort that is being developed as we teach it. Because my mental health content occurs in their second year, I have spent the past year teaching other content that I have to first update myself on (practice has changed a bit since I learned it a couple of decades ago) and then study intently before teaching.

All of that has left not nearly enough time for writing Aaron’s book, keeping up with this website or the regular clearing out of spaces that I typically do end of each semester. I have so many piles everywhere. Did I also state that we decided to repaint the house a lovely spring green and replace our windows ourselves? And then finally, as the spring semester drew to a close, I had the opportunity to lead a dedicated group of students as we built occupation for somewhere around 2500 unaccompanied minors in the emergency shelter closest to me. Turns out, just the preparation for activities with that many boys is a massive task. I still have a lot of writing to do for that work, but the boys are all safely transported now to other spaces that are ready for them. And we helped create a safe and supportive space for them to catch their breath, while once again affirming the power of occupation!

This summer my primary job is to write. I have carved out the space to, I hope, complete Aaron’s book and get it out the door. I still have several ongoing community groups plus a couple of new ones that students will need supervision for, and a seemingly self perpetuating long list of tasks that are way overdue. But this summer, I have the opportunity to practice acceptance and leave some of that other work undone another season. Perhaps acceptance is really all about ranking the importance of my effort. I remind myself that my priority is writing and so other tasks will certainly get less of me. I may not stay on top of some things that others see as priorities. I may run in through doors winded and askew, and wing it a bit … okay, maybe even a bit more than is usual. I will model adaptation rather than perfect preparation. I may share problem finding and solving instead of neatly prepared solutions. Really, when I think of the journey Aaron took us on, these all seem like small things to accept.

Perhaps the bigger bit of acceptance is diving back into that journey and looking again at opportunities missed as I try to thoroughly lay out the paths we might have taken instead. I have to ask myself if I have allowed all of those other everyday priorities to clutter my time as a means to avoid this? So, today, I dive in deep again, knowing that acceptance is key. I accept that I made choices with insufficient knowledge, that the better path was obscured or sometimes even just a virgin landscape, untrod. I also have to accept the grief that comes with knowing now what I did not know then.

I remind myself that I seek to clear away the brush so that another mama might see where to walk. And I accept that there will be still other paths that are yet unknown. I have a season to write and that is what it is.