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Seeing Through the Haze - Fourteen



Today I'll be posting a seat-of-the-pants blog entry, not long and not agonized over as my purpose is to say I hope to be posting in my semi-regular fashion again. The hiatus was not from lack of subject matter but from Real Life, both my own and the fall-out from events that have interrupted the rhythm of life for everyone.  I broke my ankle in May. If you can't walk, can't drive, can't go up and down the stairs, you can't do much of anything and everything slows w-a-a-a-y down.  I had a huge writing project to finish and the ankle delay made that my priority.  The ankle is now functioning reasonably well, PT is still intense, but less tiring, and the writing project is done and sent off.  

A few weeks ago I started a piece called "Smoke."  My daughter has graduated from Dragonfly and has remained in Ashland (OR) where one of the worst fires, small but deadly, started. Mercifully, the day before she had headed to San Francisco to visit a friend. She ended up a refugee and stayed with the family for two full weeks while Ashland endured day-after-day air-quality readings that were "extremely hazardous." 

Several months ago in a pre-ankle essay, I wrote about how Covid was affecting my daughter's life, but since then the disruption has increased so relentlessly it's time for a serious look.  At the most basic level our kids (and we) are experiencing on a global scale, disease, an unsteady economy, the effects of ignoring climate change, the unleashing of bigotry, the potential muddling of church and state, all of it topped off by an appalling lack of leadership. This is a stew of proportions some refuse to face and the rest of us struggle to grasp.  What might all this turmoil mean for all of us who are involved in this therapeutic effort. 

Recently I attended a Dragonfly zoom offering: the Parent Cohort, a place for parents to interact and support and encourage each other.  I was there to provide the perspective of a parent whose child has graduated.  However, when the subject came up, I choked!  At that time my daughter had only been officially out of the program for a little over six weeks, and I realized I hadn't yet formulated any useful insights.  Since then, I have. So that is a topic, for sure. 

My attention at this meeting was most caught by the evident confusion over the CASA model, in this case a parent didn't understand what 'acceptance' meant for her.  This really hit home with me because I had a similar reaction a few months earlier, stumbling over the word 'attunement' in a phone conference with my daughter's therapist.  After hanging up, I realized I had no idea, really, what she was talking about. I looked around on-line and read what I could find about the CASA model.  There was very little (well, nothing) about how the model should be approached by parents.  At the time I did not pursue the topic further, but I was left feeling dissatisfied.  The essay I am currently working on explores the history and meanings of those four words (commitment, acceptance, security, and attunement) as well as my own gut reactions and current reflections.  I hope to publish that essay here in the next few days. 

Three subjects and enough to keep me busy.  1) Global Disruption and Parent Expectations, and 2) Post-Grad Jitters 3) The CASA model. 









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