To the Anonymous BCBA: Anonymous Online, but not in Our Hearts
Without your decision last year to take over the clinical supervision of our son’s programs, Tony’s ABA programs would have entirely ceased to be, and his ABA RBT would have had to take another job. I honor your desire to remain unknown on these pages, but as a mother, you have every thousandth of an ounce of gratitude this intervention could have call for. Thank you also for working with us to expand the number of authorized hours covered by his insurance. Our family deeply appreciates everything you contributed to keeping these programs that our son so desperately needs in place.
A Few General Notes:
First, I would like to publicly congratulate BCBA1, who has recently earned her BCBA and been promoted to the position of Tony’s Clinical Supervisor going forward. We are delighted that someone so familiar with our son’s needs will be able to fill that position going forward, and we are also welcoming two other members to the ABA team who may or may not appear in the posts about his programs, depending on what their personal wishes are as we discuss them.
Second, we are heading into the holiday season, which is always a lot for me to manage. From the end of October through the beginning of January, it’s always a bit more stressful for me trying to pull together the accoutrements for our celebrations while juggling the other aspects of our life. So, for the next two months, I am going to be breaking down what probably would have been a couple of mega posts on ABA into much smaller posts that spread over the course of the holiday season…because I would maybe like to enjoy all of this a little bit more this year than I’ve been able to for the past couple.
Setting up the ofrenda earlier this week, baking the pan de muerto…our family celebrates Dia De Los Muertos because our son’s birth mom is from Mexico, and we want him to know his cultural heritage.
Third, my reading recommendations for the next couple of months are going to be mostly aimed at escapism, with a couple of shorter articles thrown in for the more serious minded among us. Family will of course know this, but there has been more than one death in the family, and higher levels of stress and distress have been the unwelcome guests for many at their proverbial tables…so I want to keep things mostly lighter when it comes to the reading for the next couple of months. I will lead in with the more serious recommendations, and I will be keeping my remarks on all of the items here quite brief.
I think the circumstances described in this article are difficult all the way around. I do not want my words to add to the heap of criticism that the internet piled at the doorstep of this family, but they are here merely to ask each of you to think equally about both sides of this type of issue. Those of you who were at Vida’s funeral already know how I handle these types of situations where the cultural norms aren’t supportive of the level of engagement Tony is capable of having at this type of event: neither Tony nor I show up. The other side of that coin though is that I rarely get to go to family events that I would love to be at, and in addition to the disappointment of constantly missing everything, the isolation I feel sometimes is extreme. Many people had no problem stepping into the shoes of the bride to be. Now I am asking each of you to step in the shoes of her parents and sister.
I think it is important for each of us to remember daily the degree to which social media platforms are endeavoring to modify our behavior in ways that benefit the platform developers by increasing their revenues from advertisers. The degree of intolerance that has arisen for different ideas and beliefs on these platforms is deeply concerning. Just even from an academic perspective, “group think” and tribalism tend to lead to inferior, if not heartbreaking, outcomes. As I consider back and forth whether or not I want to join any of the main platforms to gain easier access to certain social or support groups, as someone who has absolutely no interest in being an influencer, I think a lot about how necessary it is to be aware at all times of the very real risks these platforms pose and how the money making models operate.
The Mermaid and the Bear, by Ailish Sinclair
I loved this book, like in a skipping through the meadows, singing under the rainbows, dancing with the wildflowers, and tossing glitter up in the air kind of way. This book is a romance (clean for the sake of my lovely in-laws), but it is romance done well. The author bases her story on historical events, but gives the heroine in the book a much happier ending than occurred in the real life version of events. There is an incidence of rape touched upon in this book, for those who need a trigger warning on that, but I was impressed with how the author handled this in a way that kept it from darkening up the piece too much.
House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A. Craig
This book is an imaginative and compelling twist on the Twelve Dancing Princesses. There are elements of fantasy, mystery, and romance (cleanly done) in the plot. As someone who loves all three of those genres, I definitely found this book to be an enjoyable and diverting read.
That is one shattered screen… All photos by Ariana
“He’s growing so tall! He’s doing so well! He’s being so patient!” We were finishing up a quick trip into a local grocery store this morning with a new ABA behavioral therapist that is working with Tony in the mornings, and those were the cashier’s comments to us. As I have explained before to those of you who have been reading with us for a while I explained to this new therapist: employees of the places we often work with Tony in tend to remember us because we’ve definitely been memorable over the years.
Yes, he’s made some fabulous progress in his ability to function in public spaces (and not just in the inches he’s grown), and he’s gotten so much more patient…until you have to tell him “no” for something. For Tony, level 3 Autism and ODD synergize together in a way that makes most any “no” a battle. He doesn’t relate to the social structure or need to defer to authority, he doesn’t recognize the safety risks, and he gets hyper-focused on what he wants. And, if you have to tell him he can’t do something, just hearing that is like waving a red flag in front of every ODD related behavior he has.
BCBA1 & Tony Oct. 15, 2021: he’s giving me the stink eye because I’m taking pictures.
That cracked screen in the picture I led in with is on his iPad mini that I bought him for educational apps. We also have a copy of his AAC (alternative and augmentative communication, aka a speech device) vocabulary program on it because one of the new goals we are working on at the direction of his clinical supervision team is having him carry his own device in public. The iPad mini is much lighter than his NovaChat, which is easier for him to carry—and much, much cheaper to replace should it become broken.
I know he wasn’t trying to break it. He got told he couldn’t walk a certain direction, and using all of his strength, he leaned his shoulder into me and tried to push is way through me towards the street, dropping this device screen down on some landscaping gravel. We ordered a new device, because the cracks are bad enough the glass could splinter into his finger if he tried using that screen again, and the device is old enough that repairing it really isn’t the better financial decision.
Grabbing for the shirt allowed me to stop him enough to get an arm around his waist and drag him out of the street as the car was slamming on it’s brakes.
Owing to the pandemic, Tony’s ABA clinical supervisory team only returned to our home this past summer. The first walk BCBA1 was able to participate on in person in nearly a year and a half happened last month, and she too noted how much progress he has made. But for every bit of that, any situation where a “no” must be involved has to be managed carefully to prevent it from turning into a nightmare. A device can be replaced (but certainly not all the time, and certainly for some families even once would be more than they could afford). Our son, however can not be replaced, and he doesn’t pay one bit of attention to what cars are on the road when he’s become obsessed with a certain outcome. He tried to dash into the road about a month ago when he was walking with Andy and I, and I made a grab on the back of his shirt that left scratches which bled and ultimately scarred his neck as I moved at top speed to keep him from getting hit by an oncoming car.
This is part of the importance of his ongoing ABA services to our son and our family, as we have therapeutic programs we are working on to help him more calmly and safely tolerate a “no.” The program started with getting him to wait calmly without dangerous behaviors for up to 20 minutes, then focused on teaching him a tolerance acceptance response, and now we are working on throwing in a small amount of “no’s” in public settings.
There’s no way around it, this program involves risks and it hinges on my ability to physically be able to block and stop as needed any attempt Tony makes to get somewhere that involves crossing traffic. Someone asked me recently why we take him out in the community to walk and practice these skills if he tries to run into the street. My answer was that we each of us are taking risks every day we leave our house, but we wouldn’t be giving Tony any quality of life whatsoever if we didn’t do everything we could to help him gain the skills necessary for him to function safely in the community.
I consider all factors of a setting. This Unitarian congregation I visited last Sunday would not have been an appropriate place for him to practice skills in based on the needs and expectations for that congregation. Yeah, that’s my foot…flowers, blinged out sandals…it kinda has to be 😉
I consider many things as I structure our walks, and the first is the ability to give Tony some wins along each route, so that he feels less angry about being told “no.” I am also trying to make sure, that unless I have no other choice, I’m not setting up our walk to put us on a path where I am going to have to give him a “no” he’s going to feel more strongly about. So, the goal is to give him “no’s” at this stage for things he wants just a little less intensely until he’s tolerating that calmly. Then, we will work him up to items or directions he feels more strongly about.
Generally it’s better to avoid having to tell him “no” on a street with a lot of traffic, so how I structure and time our walks is really important. Managing routes based on time of year has become important also. Because my heart rate is going up higher in the summer months, we took a couple routes off of our working rotation this summer (because they had items like the community pool that he had strong desires to push towards at all costs) so that I wouldn’t be put in positions where I physically might not be able to match everything he was coming at me with. I also ask Andy to be on standby if there’s a situation I think might provoke Tony more so that he can be prepared to come rescue our little team in a car if Tony refuses to stop trying to push towards the street in a particular area.
Tony & I sitting on a bench swing taking a rest during a recent walk.
And, because I am his mom, if he does any pushing over five seconds, Tony looses walks outside the house for a day. I start a verbal countdown each and every time he starts trying to push through me. He loves walking around our community, so this is really about the only consequence he will take seriously, because there honestly isn’t a reinforcer or reward with sufficient power to entice him to calmly take “no” for an answer at this time. As BCBA1 has noted, he clearly understands this as a consequence (though it doesn’t always stop him from pushing too long, he certainly tries a whole lot harder not to). What he wants in that moment has become more powerful than any other thing he enjoys, so I feel like part of our future success depends on our current fidelity to holding him accountable every single time for the amount of pushing he does. I make sure to tell him that as he gets bigger, people aren’t going to let him just push his way to whatever he wants- they’ll just stop taking him out on walks.
Because nobody wants to see “no” turn into a nightmare for him or us in real life.
When we are practicing safety at stores, the accompanying therapist will push the cart so I can keep my hands free to block Tony. We’re following Casandra here…Tony gets to watch his kindle in stores, but not on community safety walks because we are trying to teach him to pay attention to the street.
One more brief makeup note for my sisters-in-law so that I can lighten up the end of this post for them:
This Wednesday, overlined most of the bottom lip.Yesterday, overline in a slightly deeper color under the center third.From the two days this past week I overlined….
Because Randi mentioned my lips in a comment a couple of posts ago, I am going to own up that I have never loved my lips…I feel like they are too thin. Much (but not all) of the time I overline, and that makes my lips look fuller. I don’t overline by a lot (because too much and it looks like you’re overlining), and sometimes I do my own variant of the Makeup by Mario Lip Flip: I overline just the center part of my bottom lip with a slightly darker shade than my lip shade, which creates the illusion of more volume. Also, I sometimes use a tip I learned off a Raw Beauty Kristy video when she was trying to replicate some of Snitchery’s tricks: I use a small amount of contour or bronzer directly under the center of my bottom lip to make it look fuller. And I’m going to leave my fab fam with one more video for those of us in the over 40 category…I think Wayne Goss has a lot of great tips in this video (and I love his thumbnail where he describes his model as beautiful before makeup and after). Notice that he uses a lipstick as a base for her blush- a good cream lipstick can be substituted entirely for a powder blush, avoiding some of the aging effects of powder on the face, and letting your makeup collection multi-task. You just need to make sure it will play well with your foundation and not cause it to break up.
Sometimes right now my days come together in stages. On the right, headed out the door to PT at the park in partial makeup because I flaked and forgot we were meeting there. Left, managed to get it done a couple of hours later, at that point the shimmer had moved around, but time wise I just had to go with it. All photos by Ariana
The past several years have felt like life coming at me as I stood, like Amy Lee in the video for Bring Me To Life, on one circumstantial ledge after another, trying to climb up from an effort to solve one problem to a solution for the next. And every time I get to that next ledge, something shoves me off before I can get a solid emotional footing, and emotionally I am falling, falling, falling as part of me pleads, “wake me up inside!”
The roses Andy bought me a few days ago…
In hitting one emotional rock bottom after another, I found myself grappling up time and time again. Eventually, I started to visualize myself as needing to be tethered to an emotional bungee chord. I know that given the totality of our circumstances, I’m going to continue getting pushed off of the edge of difficult situations. And I know I’m going to have to try and bounce back through everything as one part of my emotions sings to another, “bring me [back] to life!”- and I try and remind everyone around me, to borrow from another of that band’s songs, “don’t try and fix me I’m not broken.” To walk through the entirety of these circumstances- not just what I have written about but what I have also dampered and kept off-line- is the price for admission one must pay before I am likely to entertain the validity of a critique of how I’m handling all of this.
January’s ledges gave me some harder things, things that created new physical challenges for what I need to do to care for my family and maintain Tony’s therapy programs. My allergies are going through a more dramatic period of changes than I have seen from them in a couple of decades, and the new food sensitivities are trickier for me because they involve more foods that I love, and have put me in a position of having to return to eating meat.
2 hives from the black beans, one pimple…acne, a curse even in the middle ages…
In trying to climb up to a happier ground for my health and my emotions, I hit a point where even I stopped trying to hoist myself back up onto the bean ledge. Each attempt with a different type was producing larger hives, the black eyed pea hives were double the size of the kidney bean hives, the mayocoba beans were easily quadruple the size of the black eyed pea hives. I felt the wisest course of action was to defer to the recommendation of my allergist, and stop trying with any of the beans for now. And, given the more rapid escalation in hive size, when he decides to try and reintroduce them a year from now, I am going to feel safer doing that in office. I may often seem to be in an emotional free fall, but I’m not actually legitimately crazy when it comes to how I do things.
POTS is putting me through a slower upwards climb. When I first started trying to exercise in the days after the cardiologist telling me I met criteria for POTS, I was only able to do 20 strokes on my rower before I had to wait one to two minutes. After a few sets of 20, I would have to decrease to 15 strokes and a wait, then to 10, then to five, because my heart rate would start to spike up higher faster the more sets I tried to do. Now I can do 8 minutes straight. Going for walks in progressively warmer temps up to 106 degree temps trying to get my autonomic nervous system to try and tolerate heat better. Cooler temps still have lower heart rates for me, but the difference isn’t as dramatic as it was in early May. I try not to focus on where I was with my fitness before January, because it makes me unhappier to compare that way. Instead, I try to focus on being thankful that I can jog for short distances again, that I can do everything I need to to care for my family, that I was able to finally do a full circuit training workout with my free weights a couple of weeks ago without resting as my emotions soared to Savatage’s Hall of the Mountain King, as I can feel my autonomic nervous system’s ability to tolerate exercise oh so slowly coming back to life.
Some of those dampered things are harder to climb back from, the knock down flinging me past seemingly dozens of emotional stories. For many, many months now I have being pulling myself up from some of those things by the gilded chords of my makeup routine. I have been wearing make up off and on since I was in the fourth grade. Yes, that’s young by our country’s standards, and it may not have been your choice as a parent to allow that (and truth be told my mom thought that I was incredibly frivolous for wanting to at any age, though she clearly didn’t stop me), but that is exactly how long I have been enthralled with the ability to transform things that way on my face. I have taken breaks from time to time as circumstances required, but it’s something I long have loved.
Going to church in this…
Ice, given life by fire on the edges, the orange shimmer in the corners and duochrome on the lid didn’t photograph true to color
Similar, but different to the church look. This is copper and plum, that had peach and burgundy
As some of my emotions have slowly scabbed over and fused together through the healing power of color and self-care, I have found it easier to read plot lines with tension without it ratcheting up my own…I finally reached a point where I felt able to finish Deadly Sanctuary, and then took to binge reading Mercedes Lackey. Some of those books weren’t as easy. Because a few of them I read (and loved) decades ago, I knew there were some darker plot points, but the knowing helped me be prepared and prevented me from being knocked off a ledge by the emotions of what I was reading.
Sometimes it’s still harder for me to go out and meet new people -both emotionally and schedule wise- though I am trying. The past few years have made me wary and weary of how easy it is to get pushed from the ledges of people who find our circumstances for one reason or another don’t work well for their lives. They have that right. But when the pushing is done by people you knew for a while and had an emotional investment in, it’s harder to emotionally come back to life from that. Some things are just hard and take more time to wake up from.
I loved this quote used in Pastor Susan’s sermon last Sunday…
So I enjoy the time I do have with friends who have clutched my hands to try and keep me from falling off some of those ledges, like Gena and Emily. And T, you know who you are, and since I’ve not asked if you are ok with your name being on these pages that’ll have to do for now, but I’m looking forward to us getting together more often now that you’ve moved local. And of course, there are moments of joy with my family. Walking in the rain with Hannah. Walks with Tony and Andy. Tony finding joy in some sprinklers at the park. There is so much life to love in those moments.
I had a dream a few days ago, and in it our country had been invaded and our family was one of many taken prisoner to be used for manual labor. I woke from this dream feeling how much I have in my life to be profoundly grateful for no matter how hard it might seem to people outside of it, how much of a life I really have even when I feel like I’ve been emotionally kicked off of the side of a building. We love, we loose, but we still live, and we are still there for each other, to be the hand at the ledge, to be the heart that reaches out when another is crying out, “bring me [back] to life!’
Just one more side note for my fantastic sisters-in-law during this Halloween season: I am putting a link below for a Cruella Halloween look in case any of you are interested in going that route (the title of the video and link will be after my pictures). But, I am going to take aim and issue with a couple of things Spencer is saying. You know, I think he’s fabulous of course, and when it comes to the beauty industry, obviously I am absolutely a nobody in comparison and certainly I don’t work in that industry. That being said, I respectfully disagree with his comments on powdering as you age. I am putting up a picture from a year ago with a high end powder and an under eye area that was moderately powdered, not even baked. Yeah, that’s me- from a YEAR AGO- and I look a good decade older. I was trying to get the powdering mix right to survive masking on that particular day.
Sept 20, 2020…a very normal amount of powder for someone in their 20’s. On a woman in her 40’s? Not so flattering…
I am playing show and tell with some other shots that were taken this week to make my point. I reiterate from last week, as you age, unless you want to visually age yourself even more, powder products are not your friends and need to be handled with care! Each is cranked to the same degree of smiling as the original picture from a year ago, but to save space I am only showing the eye area and one picture giving you the level of smile. Yes, my one side crinkles more…a life with a bit too much sardonic and half-cranked sarcastic smiling will get you there. And, the concealer alone on the eyelid thing that he did…unless you are just doing your makeup for pictures, it will do you dirty in my opinion and you definitely need an eye primer, in my opinion. Just saying. Here are the pictures, and again the link will be after that.
Same level of smile, no makeup, first thing in the morning, eyelids still puffy from sleep, October 20, 2021. A full year later, no plastic surgery…seriously, even if I wanted it, we can’t afford it!
The top picture in this series is with a thin layer of concealer applied with a sponge, not patted in, and a minimal fairy dusting of powder. The next picture is with a thin layer of foundation over (pay attention to how that moisture decreases the appearance of lines), the next is with light powdering but more than the minimal set I did in the first shot, and the second to last is after setting spray. The very last picture is after a walk where my skin moistened up a bit and soaked in much of the powder under my eyes. As you can see, same day, and the lines are way less exaggerated than when first powdered. Click on the gallery for bigger pictures if you are viewing this post from my website directly using your phone, that will make it easier to see the differences.
The first picture here is with a thin layer of concealer patted into the skin, a very minimal fairy dusting of powder, and the second is after I have applied all of my other face makeup and the setting sprays (I use two, one to set and one for a bit of dewy glow). Note the difference from the pictures above where light powder application is used. Patting in a thin layer of concealer and setting with even less powder will allow for amore natural effect.This is the facial expression that is used in the full pictures for all of the above pictures…this was taken same day (and just moments after) as the set above showing a patted concealer and minimum powder setting. My goal with my face makeup is to have it look like it could actually be my skin, I’m not interested in having my entire face look as plastered as my eyes….
Recently I have been blessed to be able to correspond via e-mail with someone else who has blogged, and she told me that my content is “very raw and real.” I try always to be real about what is going on, I want to be here in meaningful ways that only the truth can accomplish for the people who might need to hear about the types of experiences we are having, but the truth is my writing has many dampers. Memories that have been dimmed and turned down with only fragments put on display, hurts that have been muted so that they wouldn’t turn my wounded heart strings into weapons with which to strangle others on the internet.
Even with those dampers, my fingers can race along these keys, pulling words from my mind and shaping them into imagery vivid enough to evoke what it feels like to regularly have the skin ripped off of every emotion you have on a daily basis. Sometimes that isn’t a great fit emotionally for the reading needs of my loved ones who read with us each week. Just a month ago my children lost their grandmother, my husband and his fabulous siblings their mother…and I think perhaps even I am not feeling like, in returning to writing this week, that I am ready to be quite as “raw and real.”
Therapists who work with our family in public settings already know this about me, I am random sometimes and easily distractible by so many details and things. Shopping with me is kind of like being out with the dog from the movie “Up,” except innumerable other things are chased after instead of squirrels. This week is going to seem incredibly random and off-topic to most of our readers…it’s not a permanent direction shift for our blog, more like a brief but emotionally necessary detour. BCBA1 and our ABA team will have many posts dedicated to what is happening with that part of the therapy team next month. Even next week I will start walking a bit more towards the more serious sides of life, but for this week- “SQUIRREL!”
This is a more natural look for me personally, and it’s still much more makeup than many of my loved ones would ever wear, no matter how much they appreciate what I do for myself.
So, some of you may remember that my fabulous sisters-in-law (and Amara…many thanks to all of you again for that compliment!) felt like I should start a YouTube channel for makeup. Totally not happening any time soon. They wanted to know how I do what I do, and I referred everybody to a couple of applicable channels because I don’t have the time to do step by step for all of my processes. And, truthfully, I think Halloween is the only time I could picture any of these wonderful women wearing the amount and style of makeup that I do.
That being said, there are a couple of things I do differently from what I have seen on beauty YouTube, and one of them helps me solve some of the challenges that can exist in applying powdery eye shadows to maturing eyelids (for those of you who don’t know, I am 45 and definitely have some of those problems to solve)…and I’m going to be going over that eye trick today for the sweet family I married into, any other woman reading my blog headed into their middle ages or beyond, or anyone who just wants to chuckle and cackle at tiny snippets of my pasty self with partial makeup. Everybody else, I am so sorry, this post might not be your cup of tea and you can click off without offending me- I promise!
So, for those of you still hanging in there on this one, let me start off by emphasizing a point that some of you may have discovered: as you age, powdery face products are definitely not your friends. They will generally age your skin years within a matter of seconds the heavier you apply them. I kind of like Wayne Goss’ philosophy that aging is natural and we should embrace that more in beauty, but generally in our society we don’t…and I realize I don’t watch every video he produces, but I don’t see even him saying that any of us should do something that makes us look even older (outside of a theatrical production of course). I know grammatically that was way too many negatives in one sentence, please don’t come for me, this post will already be long enough without a grammar quest. I’m absolutely not going to be giving up bright eye shadows anytime soon, and generally the best, most vivid shades come in super powdery mattes. So this is how I personally get away with applying copious amounts of powder to my eyelids:
MOISTURIZE those lids with an eye cream…A LOT. Even before you apply your makeup. And then, put a very small amount of Maybelline Baby Skin primer on your lids and the area just under your eyes. If you put too much on, you run the risk of creasing, so pay attention to the amount shown on my finger and use that per eye. Then, put a cream eye shadow in a tone similar to your skin over that (this provides the advantage of allowing you to do less work with whatever eye shadows you are using when a simpler/more natural look is desired), then fairy dust it with just a small amount of beige powder to set it down. When I say fairy dust, I mean a small amount that just barely kisses your cream products, because you want the primer and the cream shadow to be able to soak up whatever colored powder products you lay down. The pore primer keeps the cream product from getting too goopy in the looser folds of your skin (and fills in some things), while extending the moisturizing capabilities of the cream based product.
Literally this little per eyeAfter Baby skin, ColourPop cream shadow, and dusting of powder…the super shine on my skin is the light reflecting off of sunblock and all of that pasty skin underneath 😉Taken the same day as the primed lid picture used above.Several hours in on a very colorful dayAfter a full day of more than 8 hours wear, and as you can see by the sweat on my face, just came in from a walk with Tony and Andy that involved a lot of jogging. No creasing, no fading.
As long as you don’t pack on a hefty number of layers of eye shadow, the end result will look like you were working with either a cream or a cream to matte, which minimizes the aging effects of the powder products. However, I also recommend spraying a fine mist of a good setting spray over the eye shadows when they are done, this will help any excess powder melt better into your skin and give it some extra life. My favorite for this is Urban Decay All Nighter.
I am using ColourPop’s cream shadows currently when I do this particular trick, but this does also work with Mac paint pot. Here’s the thing though: ColourPop’s is significantly cheaper, but the texture isn’t quite as nice…and it appears, since ColourPop is no longer stocking this on their own website, that this particular cream shadow is being discontinued (though it is still available online only at Ulta). This technique is going to play well with a cream eye shadow base, but bear in mind if you branch out to trying this with other products, you are playing chemistry on your eyes and this won’t work well with many other types of primers.
You can also use the Baby Skin primer with Elf’s putty primer for the eyes, but it will cause a little bit of extra crinkling with the skin as the product dries that cream shadows won’t. Also, while the overall effect isn’t bad, it isn’t as effective at minimizing the appearance of aging related texture as a cream shadow base will be. In general, I don’t love Elf’s putty primer as a stand alone base because the shadows can stick too much to it, making them harder to blend- but using the Baby Skin primer and a dusting of powder does help reduce that problem. The pictures for my demonstration of this are going to be used to discuss how I think most of my sisters-in-law will prefer to apply either product in the use of creating more natural eye shadow looks.
Pale pink matte on lid, hints of brown in crease, minimizes lid textureSame look, just added very neutral shimmerElf putty primer with Baby skin underneath, and three very light dusting of different shades of matte brown. A small increase in crinkled appearance and texture using these products
I am now briefly going to go through some other eye base options you can find at our local Ulta and why I either do or don’t recommend them for aging eye lids, and then I am going to give a few other pieces of general eye shadow use advise for those of us committing to aging without blepharoplasty.
Just concealer with the Baby Skin: don’t even go there, it will over-emphasize texture on your eyelids, crease in under two hours, and your colors will fade. You will notice that I am using a white concealer in this picture, that is because I am working with pastels, and if you want those to show up vividly, a white eye base is necessary. The downside for any white base is that unless you are planning on taking colored eye shadow all the way up to your brow, you will need to have an eye shadow that matches your skin tone to place over it on places not covered by your other eye shadows.
Extra Texture that isn’t normally there!Everything but the mascara makeup wise is on in the middle picture, I was running late and needed to get us downstairs for speech therapy, so I did that mascara after this picture while Tony was saying hi to his therapist over zoom. The picture with the arrow was taken right after speech therapy, so less than two hours after the makeup was applied, and already the color is creased down to the skin in the corner of the lid and color is lifting up out of the rest of the crease color. Major bummer…knew it was going to happen, but I took one for the sake of making this post…
Urban decay primer potion: hate it and you might want to consider avoiding it if you are my age or above. My sister and I had the same father- I swear!- but sometimes I don’t think you can tell…she got the genetics that called for a light golden skin that doesn’t sunburn so much. I somehow inherited mostly transparent (to the point that when I was in high school, people used to tease me by saying I was the invisible woman because of how readily my veins can be traced through my skin) that mostly burns, blisters, and peels…and leaves me pasty pale after shedding all that burned nastiness. Years of sun damage has finally produced a golden hint on my arms…a hint. But I have veins in my eyelids that I want to cover, and primer potion is transparent. Eye shadows applied over any discoloration, such sunspots or veins, on your lids will look mottled and blotchy. Also, it makes the eye skin pucker and crinkle in a way that adds ten years to my eyes. Literally I feel like it makes my lids look like a piece of paper that got crumpled up when normally that isn’t how they look. Unless you have opaque and fully plumped and firm eyelids, I can’t recommend this primer.
There’s primer potion on that wrist…the bumps are from my brush with liver disease a few years ago.Behold the splotched appearance with eye shadow….The eyelid veins in all of their cracked glass glory…they don’t photograph as vividly as they can appear in real life.Primer potion with a concealer underneath to cancel out my veins, liberal use of setting spray helps ease the crinkling, but doesn’t fully get rid of it.
ABH: not bad, I like it well enough to use it sometimes. The grip is fabulous, but it will give you the appearance of more texture than either Baby Skin with a cream product or my Juvia’s Place primer. The downsides for this product are the cost and the stark white color…if you are using this, you want to pat it down into a thin layer and give it a minute or two to set down, it does not need to be set with powder.
drier look and more texture with ABHFull look with ABH
Juvia’s Place Prep/Prime Primer: LOVE it. The price point is good, especially for the amount of product, and it will hold everything I put on my lids in place for the entire day of every crazy thing I am doing, including working out. Generally I use a thicker layer than many makeup artists will recommend, in part this is because the product can get a bit streaky in a thinner layer (which I don’t like for evenness of application, and if I want to use a thin layer I will pat on a tiny bit more in places that have thinned out), but whether it is thick or thin, this has a creaminess to it that will soak up a ton of powder on the eyelids without causing any sort of extra crinkling.
thick as heck layervery thin layer, with extra time and effort spent to pat on thin layers of product over streaky areasSame brand and pink eye shadows as with the look done on ABH primer aboveThe hold is great, this is after an entire day and all the therapies, walks, etc. right before I scrubbed my face. Yes, it looks like a unicorn vomited on my eyelids, but it matched the sugar skulls on my leggings…
Placing the eye shadows: You want to look down and have your eye closed tight when you are putting color in your crease. This will help hold the skin firmer, which will reduce areas with uneven color application. If you have a lot of extra skin, you may even want to life up on the side of your eye while you are applying. Many of us as we age get a bit of a downward trending flap of skin. You can create an illusion that lifts your eyes up by having your color go up in a diagonal from the end of your eye to the end of your eyebrow…and this can be done effectively with very natural color placement also. And, if you’re not afraid to go dark, that will create a bit of an illusion in the crease that seems to wipe out that flap altogether 😉
The finished makeup for the day I used the Elf putty primer and more minimal, nude tones. I tend to pair a darker lip with a more natural eye. As you can see, even with a significantly more toned down eyeshadow, the illusion of uplift is still there….Tony is standing off to my left, that’s his shoulder.
Also, if you are going bold on the eyes, in general, the darker your lipstick is, the more it will compete as the focal point of your face. So if you want people to notice the drama on your eyes first, go with a lighter lipstick. Also, I recommend doing your eyes first before your face makeup. As you age, any powder in the area under your eyes will age that skin in a very undead sort of way, and unless that’s what you’re going for, the only way to not ruin your foundation and under eye concealer when eyeshadow fallout occurs is to put a heavy coating of powder on that area. For minimally or unset under eye makeup, that eye shadow will stick and bleed into the other makeup in ways that will not look so pretty (if that is your aim) and will be harder to fix.
This lipstick is competing for where your eye lands first!Lighter, but still competing…Boom, light enough that the eyes are the focal point.Fallout happens with even the best brands, and can ruin your under eye makeup unless that area is caked in face powder. It looks innocent enough, but if you try and clean this off on foundation, it will smear and leave streaks of color under your eye. The eye primer is Baby Skin with the ColourPop cream shadow as a base.
A general note about other products: if you are a family member or a friend, and you want to know my thoughts on brands, you can send me a private message and I will give you my thoughts based on your needs/makeup preferences…and if you live close enough, you can come visit me some morning and play with my eye shadows to see which ones you prefer yourself.
And, since we are in the Halloween season, I am going to leave you all with a link to a video I saw recently that I think does a great job of explaining some basics for more Halloween specific makeup application. I love this particular makeup artist’s channel, she and I have a similar aesthetic…which may not be your aesthetic. And that’s OK. However you style yourself daily or for Halloween, I hope that some of this has helped! Much Love, Ari
A few days ago I was walking with Tony through one of our local parks, when I spotted a group of Monarch butterflies hanging down from the tips of some flowering plants like amber crystals from a chandelier. I instantly thought about how much Hannah would have loved to see that (she was in school), and I began trying as quickly as possible to get anything that even remotely approached a credible picture of the moment for her before Tony chose to try and walk of after loosing patience with waiting. And, I didn’t want to scare too many of the butterflies into flight so that the moment was lost. Trying to juggle so many elements with a phone camera that isn’t the best and still get pictures that were recognizably butterfly enough to share with her was a bit of challenge.
Some moments are easier to document then others. And sometimes, attempts to document anything should be put on hold for a while for the sake of everyone in the family- myself included. As previously mentioned last month, the we are now at a time where owing to the current needs of myself and my family, I will be taking a month off of writing for our blog. The current planned return date is October 15th…ish. We may need wiggle room of an additional week or two depending on circumstances. When I return, I will resume posting initially with previously planned content about the ABA planning and meeting process. I appreciate each of you who are not part of the immediate family in advance for your understanding and patience in this matter. Wishing you the best of health and safety, <3 Ariana
BCBA1 giving training instructions to Casandra, Photos by Ariana
BCBA1
For over two years now as the assistant clinical supervisor for Tony’s ABA programs, you have patiently and quietly interacted with our family each month, providing support to us, Casandra, and each supervising BCBA…and even by my calendar a thank you is long overdue. I am so grateful for the way you believe in Tony’s ability to progress, and your calm patience with him when you are working with him to generalize skills. I will always be thankful for your willingness to meet him where he’s at developmentally…I remember a couple of years ago when he sat himself down on your lap so that you could read to him during a team meeting, and he was already nearly as big as you were, and you didn’t try to discourage him, you just read to him. I have always been so touched by that and so many moments that followed.
Thank you for all of the support, feedback, and on-site training you have provided when we have worked with Tony on the community streets and in the stores. I appreciate the way that you get back to me right away if there is some sort of problem or concern. I am grateful for the support you have given us in trying to help Tony generalize cooperation skills with others, and I greatly appreciate the concern you have always shown for Tony’s health and safety. Thank you.
BCBA1 working with Tony on a joint attention therapy exercise.
Some Viewing and Listening to Consider
This month, I’m keeping the recommendations lighter in terms of the time commitments out of respect to our family’s current circumstances, and I am just sharing a couple tools I find useful in a self-care rescue kit.
I feel like both of these videos have an overall similar message (that just because we have a thought about something doesn’t mean we need to accept it as reality and that our thoughts can create or add to our suffering), though I think Therapy in a Nutshell goes into a bit more specifics when it comes to ways of challenging particular thoughts. While this is a bit of an overlap in messaging, I felt like some of my audience would be more open and receptive to Ms. McAdam’s approach (she is a marriage and family therapist) and some of my audience would be more receptive to Mr. Tolle’s (he’s considered a spiritual leader in a more secular sense…he quotes some Buddhism, he quotes some Christianity, he’s not dogmatic and he’s not a therapist). So I give both as a recommendation so that each of you can decide which one you’d be more comfortable listening to if you feel like that type of self-care tool could be beneficial to you personally. For all videos listed in this post, you can click on the title for a link.
Crystal singing bowls aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, but I find them super soothing to listen to when I am stressed out. Healing Vibrations is on both YouTube and Spotify, and they are my personal favorite singing bowl channel. I absolutely loved this duet, so I chose it as an example of their work.
I find the sound of rainfall to be so soothing, and sometimes I really want a rain track for sleeping at night. However, I also tend to be more sensitive to certain sounds, and one of the things I love about this track in particular is that it will last me the whole night and there is absolutely no thunder– which makes it great for those of us who are more easily woken by that kind of cracking or booming sound. In general, Chris’ channel is one of my favorites in the relaxation genre, some of his videos are visually very compelling, and I appreciate the variety of instruments he uses for this relaxation channel. He also does make jazz music under his full name (Christos Anestopoulos), and that can also be found on Spotify (as well as some of his shorter meditation pieces under the Chris Anes moniker).
Tony & Emily, practicing French Fry Flexibility, March 20, 2021. All photos by Ariana
About 3 years ago, I had just headed out on a walk with Tony and Hannah when Andy called me. The garage door had broken free from its rails and he was trapped inside the garage. Because I was strength training pretty heavily still at that time, I was physically the strongest person in our family and he needed my muscle to help get the door up so he could get his car out. We were about two blocks from our house.
I let both of our kiddos know that we would need to be going back to help out their father. Tony was not happy (that is definitely an understatement), making multiple attempts to elope and push past me, ultimately refusing to go back. So I had no other choice than to carry him back to the house because he wasn’t going to cooperate on his own. I realized then that we had more problems with directional flexibility than I had heretofore realized, because typically we never had to go back to the house right away. But sometimes life circumstances require us to do just that, and I knew as fast as he was growing because of Sotos, a time would be fast approaching that he would be far too big for me to safely carry.
What follows is how we implemented an idea of mine starting first in habilitation with Emily, which has now been expanded into Tony’s ABA sessions with Casandra. This is a therapy goal that we started and stopped a couple of times until early last winter (when we incorporated it permanently into his programs until mastery).
For Tony, who has level 3 Autism, he is not motivated at all to complete something he finds aversive for praise. He can love you and still feel that is a very separate matter from whether or not he should cooperate with something he doesn’t want to do. He also does not do well being promised rewards in the future that he can earn with certain choices or behaviors (therefore token systems- which he finds far too abstract to apply to what he wants- also aren’t very effective with him) because his impulse control issues are substantial and he’s very focused on the now and what he wants in that moment.
The top two motivators for our little man are french fries and TV. Because he gets french fries less, they are much more effective to use as a reward for modification. How we set this up was the first few times we ran this program, Emily would walk ahead of us about 20 feet, stop, and then tell Tony to come to her for the french fry. If he didn’t wait for her to call for him, he didn’t get the french fry until he came back to me, waited appropriately, and came when she asked. I would stay with Tony to be the blocker in case he did something unsafe, like try and elope towards to road. If he did elope (or run towards some place he shouldn’t), he would also have to go back and start over until the process was correctly completed.
Emily holding the french fry and calling to Tony, December 2020
Tony, running towards the fry.
Waiting for Emily to ask for him to come to where she is
Once Tony had his french fry, Emily would then walk back the opposite direction a random amount and we repeated the process of having him come to her when she called him. The first day we just worked on going back and forth for random distances along one direction of the street block our house is on. The next session we ran this program we would do it on a different side of the street block. After a few weeks of this, we expanded it to doing back and forth directional changes for longer walks, making sure we did not closely mimic any of his preferred routes initially so that he could focus on the concept of flexibility. Then we moved to making these kinds of changes along his typical walking routes. And once he adjusted to the idea of making route changes, we stopped having the therapist go ahead and call for him, he is just asked to follow or walk with that person and then given the reinforcer once he’s successfully walked about 50 feet or so in the appropriate direction.
When french fries are involved, he can tolerate as many as 30 directional changes per walk. Without french fries, we can get up to three with a reinforcer. Without anything he finds motivating to offer him, flexibility on the community streets rarely happens.
Currently if you want Tony to have high levels of flexibility and be safely cooperative on a walk on the streets of our community, french fries are needed. But if french fries are used too often, they loose motivating power. So when we looked to expand this program so that he could generalize flexibility with other providers, we spoke with his ABA team and we decided that we would make a few modifications for implementation with Casandra.
Since we couldn’t use french fries, we’d have to use a reinforcer that has less motivating power. We tried out a few different things (preference assessment) to see what would be effective, and ultimately landed on mini gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. For his ABA sessions with Casandra, we focused first on making only one change per route. When he could do that without pushing or eloping over a period of time, we increased the number of expected changes to 2. Just this week he advanced to a third change per route, though right now depending on the day it’s too hot to walk when Casandra comes in, so progress on this goal and generalizing with her has slowed down over these past couple of months, where evening temperatures are often still above 110 at the start of her shift.
When we go into stores, we can’t use food motivators right now because we are still having Tony wear a mask for his own safety. What I have found in those environments is that we have benefited greatly from him being out of the stores for nearly 9 months because of the pandemic. I was initially quite concerned that the severity of his sensory issues would give us some significant regression in his ability to tolerate public places being out that long, but thankfully there was only a modest decrease. However, the length of time we were out of the stores coupled with the practice in making route changes outside meant that he was able to more easily let go of his preferred walking routes inside of stores that we had done extensive work in, and his flexibility on those trips is currently unreinforced and at a much higher level than it is for community safety walks run with cookies alone.
As the weather cools down, we’ll soon be making a switch and giving Casandra the power of the french fries so that we can more rapidly expand the number of changes he is willing to make for her, with the ultimate goal of fading the reinforcers to the point where they are no longer needed on the community streets also. This typically happens once he has habituated a certain behavior and it has become his new routine. French fry flexibility is what works for Tony- his preferred motivators might not be as interesting to another individual with similar desires for a rigidly unvarying route or routine. But the concept can still be used as needed with just swapping out the reinforcers to something valued more by the particular individual.
Tony running towards Casandra after she has called to him, and sitting on a different day with all of his cookies he earned from Casandra. Sometimes he doesn’t want to eat his cookies at the time, but he still will make a change for them as long as the cookie is physically present.
Tony in JC Penney, wearing a mask, and telling us what he wants to do using AAC technology. All photos by Ariana
I am often asked what my plans are for Tony in terms of public or private schooling, especially around this time of year when school age children are typically headed off to one classroom or another. In previous years, my answer was there were important behavioral concerns we were addressing in therapy at home that were best suited to being worked on in that environment. For example, self-harming, inability to stop when asked to to so by someone other than me, and lack of directional flexibility (Tony’s ability to go a direction indicated without pushing and making every effort possible to go a different, preferred direction regardless of the reward offered for compliance) were sizable barriers to his success in a classroom. We have never been able to control his ADHD symptoms enough through medication to please a teacher (I am quite certain of that) so we are just talking about what was needed from the standpoint of safety for everybody involved
This year we are in a unique and slightly different position. Years of working at these goals has paid off in a way that would have allowed him to move into a public school classroom for part of the day until we were able to meet the 100 day requirement to file for ESA and have him moved to a private school better suited to his needs. In Arizona, special education is not funded at a level where the public school system would easily provide him the dedicated one-on-one support he actually needs to learn and grow.
When Tony was in a local public developmental preschool several years ago, his therapy team and medical team all made statements to the school that he needed a one-on-one aid. His geneticist even wrote a letter affirming those were his needs, but we were told by the school that they didn’t feel he needed it. Everyone who has ever worked with Tony knows he needs that kind of support, the school didn’t want to spend the money on that because funding resources are limited and let’s be honest, many people don’t see providing that level of support to someone like my son as benefiting society nearly as much as they believe it would to provide it to a kiddo perceived to be higher functioning. We would have had to pay for an attorney and sue, and once we spent all of that money to get a court to order his needs be met, a public school can still pull that aid to cover absences for paraprofessionals in other classes. I ended up pulling Tony out instead of lawyering up for a host of reasons we’re not getting into right now, but part of it was my intuition told me the speed at which Tony was gaining size because of Sotos was going to quickly give us challenges that would best be met at home for a while.
Public Therapy, Fry’s, practicing directional flexibility, etc. Casandra & Tony
However, now self-harming is almost entirely extinguished. Directional flexibility in stores and other public facilities is dramatically improved, and he will sometimes respond to a directive to stop when given by another person. But home he is staying, because we are still in a pandemic, and my decision about whether or not to send him this year boiled down to vaccines and masks. Tony can’t be vaccinated right now (and his medical team will want an echo done before they will approve him for a vaccine because of the increased risk of cardiac problems that comes with Sotos).
Anyone in Arizona can tell you masks are hotly contested here and our current governor has signed a law banning mask mandates in the public school systems. Masks never should have been politicized. Never. This is a public health measure and matter. Masks are all about protecting other people in the community who could be harmed in the advent that a person is contagious and doesn’t know it yet or at all. There’s a reason surgical staff are required by hospitals to wear masks- it is to protect the patient from any possible germs from the hospital staff. I don’t hear anybody saying they want their health care providers to stop wearing masks and gloves during procedures, and rightfully so. After all, it protects the patients! If everyone is wearing masks, they are highly effective in reducing viral illnesses, and Delta is significantly more contagious than the original strain of COVID. More than 620,000 Americans have already died from COVID. More consistent mask wearing from all of us could have prevented some of those deaths.
I hear people cite freedom as a reason masks shouldn’t be required. And yet, we as a nation have long standing traditions about making laws and ordinances prohibiting things that could lead the harm of another person. I can’t go up and slap someone for saying something hurtful to Tony or I’ll face legal consequences no matter what they said that could include fines and/or jail time. We don’t allow drunk driving. We require people to get auto insurance, wear seat belts, heck, I can’t even modify the outside of my house without getting a permit from the town I live in. I see people who cheerfully pay their HOA fees each month protesting mask requirements, and with HOA’s we’re basically paying someone to limit a whole bunch of freedoms by giving us a list of things we cannot do to the outside of our property (enforceable by fines) so that everyone’s property values stay consistent. Most communities in the area I live in have mandatory HOA’s, meaning you can’t opt out of them if you want to live there and if you don’t pay the fees, they can legally come after you and take your house. Should we be caring about our property values more than the lives of the community members around us? And, if we really need to go there, most stores have rules about the amount of clothing you have to wear to be a customer entering into their building and receive services from them…I as a woman certainly can’t walk into one without a shirt and expect to avoid having the cops called. Masks are just another piece of clothing from my perspective.
Most of us who are having to live out the repercussions of the banning of masks for political reasons aren’t in the privileged position of Texas’ fully vaccinated governor, who in recently catching COVID, was able to immediately request and get a monoclonal antibody treatment not easily available to most of us. In his state, parents of children in some areas have already been told there is no hospital space left in pediatric ICUs if their kiddo gets sick enough to need that kind of help, that someone else will have to die before there will be room for their child to receive treatment. As cases rise in Arizona, without more mask wearing from everybody, we could soon be in similar circumstances.
Practicing waiting and keeping our hands to ourselves when needed, Walmart, today.
From my perspective, when it comes to masks and sending Tony to school there are two problems. As we’ve discussed, masks have been banned in Arizona schools. Some schools are pushing back, and one group has already issued a lawsuit trying to get the law overturned. But for now, there wouldn’t be enough people wearing masks in the school to reduce Tony’s risk of infection. And, he wouldn’t be able to wear the mask long enough to do the same for others. He can wear a mask for about an hour right now, but that’s not enough for school.
Hannah is going to school wearing a mask with filtration comparable to an N95, and despite being vaccinated she originally agreed to do so to reduce the risk of bringing anything home to her brother because she loves him very much and wants to do everything she can to reduce his risks. So I felt comfortable sending her into her school vaccinated and with that kind of mask. Everyone in our house wears masks whenever we go out now to protect both ourselves and others, as new studies have indicated even vaccinated individuals can spread Delta if they catch it. And, we have learned this week that immunity provided by the vaccines begins to decrease after about six months, so more fully vaccinated people could be infected by COVID until boosters start rolling out.
But for Tony, without masks and vaccinations, public school isn’t safe enough for him to be happening…not this year.
A couple of weeks ago, my mother-in-law went in to an urgent care accompanied by one of her fabulous daughters. Though the provider there was told multiple times that there was a sudden onset of symptoms between one day and the next, the individual involved repeatedly dismissed that and said that it was probably just old age and maybe a UTI. A few days later, when symptoms continued to worsen, my mother-in-law went directly to an ER. Tests were performed, revealing multiple tumors throughout her body and one rather large one in her brain, which had been causing the symptoms noticed. Certainly a delay of a few days in appropriate diagnosis would not have changed the outcome here, but if she had been having a stroke, it most certainly would have.
Many years ago I had a friend who was experiencing abdominal pain. She repeatedly went to her doctor and was told that it was just her weight. After several months of this, she convinced a provider to do a scan, and she was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, and sadly, passed away a very short time after that. If her original assertions of pain had been not written off as the effects of being overweight, she may have had treatment options that could have extended her life.
And, many women, myself included, have gone in to receive evaluative care for symptoms to be asked, “Are you sure you’re not just having an anxiety attack?” (or to be flat out told that was what the provider definitively thought was happening) only to be diagnosed with something medical other than anxiety after persisting. Emily and I were speaking about this recently and she said to me, “you know, I don’t really think of you as anxious. I’ve seen you be stressed out, but when you are there’s always something really stressful going on.” Yep.
Ageism. Obesity biases. Sexism in regards to how pain is evaluated and treated. Studies are clear these elements can and do negatively drive outcomes in healthcare. And yet, I know that many providers genuinely care about doing the best they can and are in a really tough spot when it comes to providing care. The current reimbursement model in the US requires super short visits, and it’s not easy to get a comprehensive history in that period of time, and when the human body itself functions as an entire system, treating one symptom as if it’s independent of other areas really doesn’t make good health sense…but time wise, that’s often what everyone is left doing.
But, if the family member or patient asserts something unusual for them really is going on, there is no benefit to withholding tests. The patients or their families are the ones who will be paying for those, after all, and as expensive as things are right now in the US even with insurance, most people aren’t rushing in for something just because they want to waste healthcare resources or their own money. When I was seen in the ER for anaphylaxis this past January, a member of the ED team said to me that if she ever got sick enough to need an ER she’d probably just stay home and die because she couldn’t afford to pay her portion of the bill. So when people are willing to spend the money, I think their reasons should be taken seriously.
What I would want each of you to know right now is that it’s OK to seek a second opinion right away if you feel that a healthcare provider was perhaps dismissing your symptoms due to some sort of “ism” or bias. You (or your insurance for the portion they are reimbursing) are a paying customer. Your willingness to go in for check ups and care is part of what allows each healthcare provider you see to have a job. Yes, medical providers may have healthcare training and education that you don’t, and especially in difficult times like our current ongoing pandemic many of us owe a great deal to the sacrifices made by front-line providers,. But they are also as human and as fallible as any other human. Yes their education and position is absolutely worthy of respect, but so too is your account of what is being experienced.
You and I were talking many years ago it feels like at this point, and you were telling me how you could tell that I spoke sweetly to Hannah because she always spoke sweetly to you while you were watching her, and you thanked me for the way I was raising her. I was always so grateful for that moment of tender recognition, just as I was grateful for the phone conversation we had a couple years after that where you noted how thankful you were to see that your son was so happy in his marriage to me.
The truth is, our sweet Andy is the way he is I think because he was raised by a very kind woman. I owe much of my ability to feel safe in this or any other relationship to the tender kindness that was instilled in him from you. At the time he and I were dating and for several years into our marriage, I couldn’t handle being touched in certain ways without having flashbacks. In fact, my former therapist was so concerned about me having a panic attack on our wedding night that she gave me her cell phone and told me to call her no matter what time it was. I never needed to, because always Andy gently respected my boundaries, held me softly when I couldn’t fight down the past, and never saw or treated me as broken. Thank you for being the mother you were as you were raising him and the mother you will always be to him.
You and I didn’t even meet until Andy and I were engaged, and even then it was because you had to rescue us because his truck died on the way back to our side of town from the Renaissance festival. But from that moment on, you treated me like part of your family, and I have always been thankful for that. You came to help take care of Hannah as a baby when I was struggling to recover from my c-section, and you came at a moment’s notice just a couple years later to help care for her without asking questions I was too heartbroken to answer that time I had lost enough blood I couldn’t stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. You always looked for ways to try and help Tony feel loved and involved when we were able to visit with him. Because showering your family with kindness and service has always been part of the gift of love you freely give.
Thank you for loving me. Thank you for being such a fabulous mother and grandmother.
