Saving Mr Banks

helpThe darkness and light of the never-ending questions.

Parenting is a marathon effort. Some days you’re running alongside your children and others leave you standing on the sidelines. Watching those stages from baby to toddler, child to tween and those awkward spaces where your teen suddenly emerges into adulthood and then casually slips back means you are constantly running to catch up with their changing needs. You walk that fine line between encouraging them to grow and then wanting to shield them from the tough stuff.

During the long school holidays I took my older girls – 8, 12 and 14 to see Saving Mr. Banks. A PG rated movie whose previews suggested a jolly old story behind a movie that’s on high rotation in most houses, and the houses of many parents as they grew up – Mary Poppins.

Once the popcorn had been purchased and the last pit stop to the toilet taken we settled down in the dark waiting for the familiar show tunes to pipe from the speakers. As the movie stretched on the darkness and light that sits behind that classic PL Travers novel – who quite proudly grew up in Australia – started to unravel and with it I began to squirm in my seat.

Saving Mr. Banks was inexplicably sad – telling the story of an enquiring little girl managing the harshness of rural Australia and the love for a Dad who just quite couldn’t get there some days. It explored the impact of alcohol use on a family, physical illness, mental health, death and what happens for those on the sidelines when the pressure of caring for three small children with an absent dad pushes people to their limits. My eight year old spent a lot of time whispering across asking what was happening, why the mum was crying so much and why the Dad was behaving like he did. I answered as best I could in hushed tones and asked her to wait until afterwards where we could chat in peace.

Raising children involves a lot of stimulating conversations . They are discussions that we plan for, that we try to up skill ourselves about in order to show them that the way we cope with life can transform our ability to get right back up when we fall down. They help to teach our children that to be human is to live with both the ups and downs, all at the same time.

Families often ask about the right way to answer the questions that sit on the periphery of our experiences. In working with families and in raising my own it can be helpful to ponder the following ideas:

  • Don’t apply additional layers to their questions – answer what they are asking. If they ask for more, answer more.
  • Link situations back to them as often as possible. Children see the world from their own lens; if you make it relatable rather than abstract they are more likely to grasp what you are discussing.
  • Be age appropriate, its OK to provide one layer of response and then provide further information as they grow and mature.
  • Choose your timing. The great conversations can never be planned but finding the right space for you – in the car, over the dinner table – can help you communicate what is required
  • It’s normal to worry that you haven’t answered a question the ‘right’ way. Remember that you know your child best – answer based on where they are at, not what others suggest.
  • Get support – ask your friends with children similar ages about how they answer the tough questions, check in with your Counsellor (if you have one) or go to some of the online forums and get some ideas.
  • Engaging your children in conversations about those spaces around stories of mental health, drug and alcohol use, premature death or trauma allows them to slowly paint a realistic picture of the world. Increasing their awareness at a slow pace can help them to build on their empathy for those within their family and in the wider community.

 

As our children grow older and life transitions from G to more PG rated ideas the inevitable questions about how the world functions come along for the ride. Taking a breath, finding a way to respond to their inquisitive minds can teach you about the marathon journey you are all on together.

For more information about asking and answering questions visit here (http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/ask_real_questions_pbs.html)

How do you answer the tough ones?

To arrive where we started

TS eliot

TS Eliot shared those words. It was a line in the last section of the phenomenal movie Philomena. About the search within and the search outside for a woman who lost her son – through adoption and then through death. I raced home from the movies – eager to find the quote and to stare at it for a while.

In the last month I have transcribed over 50000 words of my PhD interviews with families who have lost a child or a sibling or a partner. In standing back and looking at their words I was struck by how, no matter what was shared we came back to the same place time and time again. That to live with loss is to live with pain. That to hope for a future meant that that hope would be without a person that was so wanted.

In counselling there are many moments of searching. Many questions where people are looking for ways to live alongside their sadness. Not to push it to the past but to travel in a pattern where they can move parallel to what has happened – the moment we ask people to achieve closure or to move onwards we ask them to forget what brought them to their sadness in the first place. Ingrid Poulsen explained to me that she doesn’t need to read the newspaper or watch the news to know that evil exists in the world – whether we engage in the viewing or reading or consuming of it, it still continues on regardless. When something traumatic happens to us it shapes the way we view the world. The nightly news doesn’t have to remind us.

New Years is always full of resolutions – its just a by product of one year ending and the new one unfolding. My goal this year is to be more open to hearing the stories of the journeys we all take when we walk along our sadness. To not be consumed by all the awfulness that happens in the world – to know it exists without it filling my lounge room. To write more of those stories for others to hear because when we become consumed by only the reporting of the evil or the tips as to how we ‘get past’ them we fail to hear the other pieces that come with it – the resilience, the darkness, the moments of life and the way hope might begin to seep back in to peoples lives.

We can search for many things in life when something catastrophic happens but we will always come back to ourselves, back home, back to what we know. We just might have learnt a few more things along the way.

Happy New Year to all my lovely friends out there in the online and real world. Thank you for letting me walk alongside you.

 

Women and emotional health – lets work together

 

helpI’ve only had one mentor in my working career. When we got to the third session I veered off into private world territory and they quickly reminded me we are not hear to talk about that. Safe to say session four didn’t get a look in.

When Nicola Roxon was announced as the Federal Attorney General a while back I expressed my admiration for her via twitter. The only response I received was from a friend correcting the spelling of Nicola’s surname. Nothing worse than promoting yourself as a writer that cant spell.

When Nicola announced her resignation I took to my phone wanting to express the same admiration but I couldn’t find the words. There are a lot of old woman in shopping centres reminding the parents who wander around in a daze that they grow up too soon. That the time spent teaching them the little things will move past in a blur and we will find ourselves telling the next generation to slow down, it moves too fast.

Working Mums Masterclass announced their mentor list for 2013 and my little picture takes pride of place on that page. Penny, who owns WMM, listened to the career I’d had and the experiences I’d survived as a mum and asked me to work with mums, to promote good mental health and to explore the challenges of teetering on the edge of that old chestnut, the work/life balance. To be honest the balance isn’t possible. Not just because of the multitude of responsibilities that pull us in every direction but because the playing field changes on a daily basis. We can’t balance out what we can’t predict, all we can do is learn some skills to develop resilience, to look after our minds and to find ways to move forward.

For me, when I first became a mum the work/life balance was non existent. I worked and then looked after my girl. There was little space for a life in between that and to be honest it was my saviour. My chance to be in the workforce, to be more me than I could be at home, to earn and provide for my daughter and to feel good that I was achieving even if it was just writing policy documents that would never see the light of day.

Fast forward five years and the arrival of my son saw me playing a whole different ball game. Acknowledging the busy-ness of the kids, the need to reassess my career and the teetering across the slippery slope of change pushed me out in to areas where some days it was more life than work and vice versa. It suits me to mix it up. I’m not on the see-saw anymore, I think I’m on that thing that spins so fast it takes a day for your eyes to adjust.

Nicola’s heartfelt speech, her acknowledging about how much time would be lost if things didn’t change was comforting and sad at the same time. I did think for a fleeting moment  but she’s has given up so much because the work that would have been required to get to the role would have been immense but on the flip-side the option to do what you love and be home for the good stuff is just as valid. Its also her playing field now, not forever.

Reaching out to people who recognise what playing field you are on, what you need to keep you out there or conversely what you need to take a break is what mentors do. Work/life balance gets thrown out there in most articles about women and careers. Balance doesn’t have to be a dirty word, it can be the key to making choices you never thought you had.

Click here to make an appointment with me.

Have you ever had a mentor? Was it a positive experience? 

 

The see-saw of hope

There are a few words that creep into our sentences, into the conversations we have in our hearts and minds each day. Those words tend to change and flex as we grow, as our vocabulary widens and we begin to understand the words we use.

My seven year old tends to use ‘actually’ with a hand firmly placed on her hip these days. Im hoping that will soon be replaced by a word not sponsored by Nickelodeon.

I was reading by the pool yesterday. Highlighting the important words with my crayon as I’d left my highlighter 800 kilometres away on my cluttered desk. Hope in a time of global despair was the chapter that caught my interest on that lazy Saturday afternoon.  Hope is a word that creeps into most peoples stories about now, then and beyond. We hope for good outcomes when we cook a meal, when we accept a job, when we get bad news about our health, when we live with sadness. Hoping for the fog to lift, for the light to shine and for the feeling that comes with hopefulness to carry us through. Strangely despite the over-use of the word there has never been much written about it – its like hope sits atop the seesaw of the local park with despair quietly waiting on the other end. My job as a mum has found me perched in the middle more often than not, trying to keep the kids balanced until they both grow to be similar heights and weights. My hopefulness and hopelessness oscillates when working with families yet I am always cautiously optimistic that people will find new ways to thrive.

The author explored hope through her life as a therapist but also as a woman living with cancer

‘hope can be a wish, an expectation of something desired. I hope I live the six months until clementines (the fruit in her neighbours yard) reappear. Last winter, unbeknownst to me, my partner froze a batch of clementines and we ate them like popsicles in July ‘you have lived to eat clementines again’ he said as we savoured the cold, sweet, orange sections and the moment’.

The key to hope, in all its functions, is that it exists in the minuscule and majuscule moments of life. Embracing hope serves as a tool to balance out the despair. Some of us tend to sway towards being indifferent to the feeling of hope – its a natural way to exist -whereas others tend to sit amongst the feelings of hopelessness looking for ways to search out a way to shuffle up and balance out the see-saw.

Both sensations – of hopefulness and hopelessness – are profound, they are part of our lived experiences.

Which side of the see-saw do you tend to exist on?

Weingarten, Kaethe (2007) Hope in a time of Global Despair in Flaskas, McCarthy & Sheehan; Hope and Despair in Family Therapy, UK.
Image from here

Faces in places

 

One of the reasons why I started blogging was to practice my writing skills and to give me some respite from the essays I was finishing for uni in the first year of my masters. The research coordinator suggested I try out some real life writing as a way of making my research meaningful to a wider audience. Make it relevant.

Eden posted a story last week about the use of social media and small people. She talked about how invasive it is in our lives now and wrestled against the idea of how it might be for our kids given the speed in which its moving. My stepdaughter has started taking selfies for her Facebook page now that she is 13. I suggested she take some shelfies – pics of books on her shelf as a way of protesting against the use of all our pretty little faces to identify us on social media. She wasn’t impressed. I thought it was funny.

Eden mentioned in the opening line that social media has some legitimate uses with one being the locating of missing children. Sitting square in the missing persons world Ive seen in the few years Ive been working with families that the use of the humble missing persons poster hastily taped up on telegraph poles has been fazed out. It used to be that they went up everywhere – on community notice boards or even on peoples windscreens was the way people spread the word, for the lucky few (or as Carole Moore calls it ‘pretty white woman syndrome’) media attention is offered to the newsworthy cases and for others they just had to wait and see what the Police could drum up. In the early days one of the families I worked with started a blog to keep families and friends updated about the disappearance of her son, it was the first blog I ever read, I dont think I completely got it back then. In the last handful of years social media and missing people seem to have been a match made in heaven. It takes a second to set up a page, a twitter account, heck there are even pinterest pages with peoples images splashed across them. There isnt a lot of data that tells us if people are found using these mediums, they do help in spreading the word, in raising awareness about the reasons why people go missing but the result of actually sharing, finding and them bringing them home is still a little grey.

There was a story floating around the new sites last night that I remember seeing a couple of years back – some remains were located in the Belanglo forest in NSW in 2010 but no one knew who the young girl was. I immediately looked at the image, thinking that it looked like a young girl whose family I knew had been looking for her for so long, but the DNA tests said it wasn’t her and still to this day no one knows who she is.

The images we use in the media, the little snapshots taken that are used to tell us that someone is missing are always taken at happier times. No one could have predicted that in taking that shot it would have been used to tell us all that someone was lost but what is even sadder is the idea that an image of a young girl who was probably traveling far from home is lost but no one knows who she is. No one can take her back to where she belongs.

The key to being missing is that you have to be missed. How could it be that she isn’t?

What I know about {remembering}

To remember:

to recall to the mind by an act or effort of memory; to think of again.

This time last year I wrote a post that I argued over in my head for a long time. I sent it to a mate and asked her point of view. I worried that in writing a post about the bad it would negate the good. To remember is to relive and to relive is re traumatising.

There is power in remembering. It allows you to see where you have been as a way of predicting where you will go. To watch the hands of time and make sure they keep moving. In the chapters I submitted to my supervisor this week I wrote a section on the way in which counsellors sit with people, remember with them – as a way of finding new ways to cope in the future. We look to the past to see the ways that we craft little coping mechanisms to see if they might fit with what is happening now. We are all experts on our own experience.

Between research, parenting, relationships and writing I’m forced to remember over and over. Remember the snippets of joy families have shared with me when they have worked out new ways to survive catastrophic losses, remember the smiles of the day I birthed my babies, remember that to be truly in a relationship I have to remember my potential to fall back on old ways of doing things. I stop myself and start again. I remember to write in a way that is true and honest but doesn’t find me in the foetal position in the corner of the room.

Strangely enough every time I type corner it comes out as coroner. My work in the death field has ruined my touch typing skills.

In 2007 I got to spend a week at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide. The lovely Micheal White spoke for 5 days about narrative therapy – about helping people reauthor their own lives. I think that I learnt a lot about the skills I might need in the counselling space but more importantly it gave me the power to reauthor my own life. Michael used to talk about ‘saying hello again’, about the bonds we could establish between people that are here and the people that are lost. A continuing bond that can occur even after a loss has happened.

I learnt that week to say hello again to myself. To remember that in all the connecting we do, we have to reconnect with ourselves.

In November, we remember.

What do you know about remembering?

Link up an old or new post below and then pop around and read the other posts x


Wear it red

Today is Day for Daniel.

Its an important day that asks people to reflect on the need for child safety but I guess even more than that, safety for all of us. Big and small. To go about our lives, to not live in fear of what is around the corner and to see the unknown with possibility rather than with concern.

Bruce and Denise are people that I call friends, friends in the sense that Ive helped them out and in return they have helped me appreciate what I have around me. Possessions and fancy things dont rate heavily in my world. My kids, my husband, my friends and my brain are what I hold close. And coffee. There is always coffee.

They also started me on my writing path – my first piece about them was my first published piece and from their Ive had the chance to write about people like Loren and Faye and Sarah and Kate. They all live with loss and sadness but they all seek to find new meanings and a laugh or two.

Ill be away from here for a week finishing off a big hunk of writing. Next time Ill be back Ill be hosting a discussion on what people know about remembering. If you have a blog or just thoughts Id encourage you to leave a link or a comment about what remembering means to you.

It reminds me of the last bit I did when I remembered and I thought how much good comes from looking back and then looking forward.

Have a lovely week and see you back here next Friday.

Sarah x

What I cant un-see.

There is an image of a lady floating around FaceBook at the moment. She is missing after a night out in Melbourne and people are desperately sharing her picture in the hope that it will bring her home.

A few months back a friend wrote this. She spoke about the ways in which the careers we chose shape the way in which we see the world. When I was 19 I worked in a rehabilitation hospital on a social work prac, I did a visit one day to the Department of Forensic Medicine as part of the learning about the ways that social workers can work together. Its the place thats also home to the morgue. As part of our tour we were taken into that space where people are brought when they die suddenly and without reason. The group of students I was with shuffled into a room only to be asked to move to the left as a trolley was wheeled past with a person on it. A deceased person. A person who had been someones parent, or sibling, or lover or friend but a person I had no way of knowing. I saw no part of that person only the outline of their body under a large sheet, it was the body that no longer housed their soul. I caught my breath, I backed back against the wall and I felt a surging heat rise up my chest, along my neck as if someone was tightening their hold on me.

When your old friend anxiety comes to visit for the first time you don’t realise who they are until well after they have left. I remember mumbling something to the lovely social worker that was taking us on this tour – I turned and ran up the long and winding stairs and pushed a door open and ran out into the street. I remember standing for a moment and feeling blinded by a sunshine that I hadn’t noticed before. I smoothed down my hair, took a deep breath and wandered back to my car. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened because I didnt really understand it myself.

Ive been back to that same building umpteen times over the years, for meetings, for court cases, to have coffee with old colleagues who have became friends and despite glancing around corners I never saw that door again. The one that allowed me to escape from what lay below.

I think part of the reason I embrace the world of the space in between, about losses that aren’t quite clear to us, about the world of missing is that it signifies hope  – it might be false hope, it might be positive hope but it still leaves that door open a crack to provide the possibility that we all live happily ever after.

I hope the lady is found, I hope she just took a wrong turn and that someone reveals the door to her.

Does seeing the image of a missing person fill you with hope for a good outcome?

 

 

Happy Birthday to you

A year ago I sat down at my desk and began to type. Id been promising myself every New Years Eve that this would be the year that I’d take the leap and start to write. For the last 8 years before that I’d spent my time writing down the stories of other people. On some level I think I had waited for someone to ask me what was my story, I gave up waiting and created the platform for myself. If I genuinely believed that everyone had a story worth telling then I had to believe the same for myself.

A blog can change a lot in a year, I thought Id spend most of my time writing amazingly insightful pieces about life, the universe and me but what I found was that the more I shared the more I wanted to keep some of my universal truths silent. That baring your soul makes you feel more vulnerable some days and that a bad mood can swiftly pass but a blog post remains forever. (unless you delete it, but that’s beside the point). That was when I stumbled upon the idea of asking people about their spaces, where their gaps existed between themselves and other people. I actively sort people out who had a new perspective on life, one that I thought other people could benefit from.

Over the next 365 days my blog wasnt far from my mind. It shaped the way I viewed the world, every experience was a potential post, every heartbreak a possible share and every achieement a possible exploration. Ive worked out that not all of my stories are mine to share and Ive also found that the power of telling my story has released me from its stronghold. Onwards.

For all 22123 visitors over the last year, for the average Joe or Josephine that stayed for around 3 and a 1/2 minutes I say thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy days to read and comment…when I looked back over what I’d written I felt both proud and amazed that in between 2 chickens and 2 step-chickens I found the energy to tip tap away on my trusty mac. Perhaps Ive just been avoiding the washing up for a whole calendar year?

For those new to my blog, or those keen to know what stood out, the most popular posts about other people’s stories can be found here, here and here.

The ones where I laid my little heart on the line resonated here, here and here with people.

Thank you to my husband for reading and listening and for kissing me on top of the head, not using any words when he reads something he doesn’t know about me, thankyou to my new lovely friends at Sydney Writers Centre who push me to keep going, thankyou to my new friends in the online world and thanks to my brain – for trusting that what I thought might be worth jotting down.

Hip Hip Hooray

The art of storytelling

This week is all about the story. I was reading with my girl in bed last night, about some re-worked fairytale classics where the goal was for us to work out the story behind the story. The one she chose focused on a little boy called Hyacinth who had a big nose and everyone around him stretched their nose to compensate for his social anxiety. After a lifetime of being surrounded by pinnochios he met a girl who had a small nose, fell in love with her, and they lived happily ever after. I pointed out to my daughter that I loved her step-dad not because of his big nose but because he was a good person. She pointed out that she loved her bestie even though she was ‘heaps taller than her’.

Its coming up to a year since I started my little blog. There are a couple of thousand visits a month from corners across the globe but the thing that brings them back time and time again are the stories. Not necessarily the ones about me but about the people I come in to contact with and they bravely say yes to be interviewed. Having people share their pieces of the world with me has pushed me out to other areas where I’ve taken the leap to write about them and then pitch those stories to print media. I still get surprised when my perspectives on what spaces we might like to read about are embraced by editors.

Someone from a writers centre asked me a few months back about the art of asking the difficult questions. I explained to her:

From a freelancing perspective the stories of trauma and resilience are always going to be interesting. People have an innate curiosity about how people survive disasters or significant losses.

My biggest tip is to be truthful. One of the biggest challenges clients have shared with me, in a counseling space, is the uncomfortableness people radiate when they try to acknowledge that something awful has happened. They talk around the issue; they talk about ‘a loss’ rather than naming the person who was killed or missing. People have survived the unimaginable, it’s OK to name it.

When I find a person who I think suits the story I’m writing the first thing I think about is how I’ll introduce myself. I point out, to prospective case studies, what other stories I’ve done to demonstrate how I have dealt with the topic sensitively. I explain why I think it will be useful for them to share their story and I invite them to clarify points with me.

I also try not to fall back on well-worn clichés…I don’t say ‘wow’ or ‘that must have been hard’ I let them tell me what it was like. I empathize but I don’t sympathize.

I also provide a chance for people to pull out at the last minute – which can be frustrating for the writer but if its isn’t the right time to talk to someone the story is not going to be as powerful.

I guess the short answer is don’t presume that you understand the experience; everyone has a different take on how they have survived.

Looking back on these words brings me to the point where I am now, where the lovely Kristen from Wanderlust has shared my blog on her storytelling directory, so that people in times of grief and loss can find the stories that have been shared. Its also brought me to people like Seema from This Place is Yours whose whole project is about the art of the storytelling – my story about Lori and Lisa, led her to me.

Storytelling doesnt always need a happy ending like the ones that my daughter reads. I dont persuade her to read things other than ‘and so they lived happily ever after’. She’s 6, its OK to think that at her age. During a twitter chat about Happiness last night people raised their concern that we shouldn’t expect happiness all the time. My contribution was this…the ups and downs are just as much part of the space in between.

 

Whats your take on storytelling?