The Ladder Herald

What Are You Masking?

Jonah's obsessed with masking tape. He used an entire roll today, making sculpture, toys & necklaces for Rye, boats, water pipes, bridges, houses, scones, wheels, and crowns.

When I asked him why all the tape he said, "because when I try to draw it doesn't come out like what I see in my mind."

He calls them his "projects", as in "I can't give you a kiss! I'm too busy working on my projects!"

He's inspired me to remember my old paper tricks: fortune tellers and newspaper hats. It's fun to make stuff. It's incredible, actually.

Here's a link to a good explanation of how to make a fortune teller out of paper:

Enchanted Learning

Some of the fortunes we've written are:

1. You will eat trash soup at Yukky Restaurant.
2. If you turn around quickly, you will see the invisible Splorgak. Too late!
3. Sneakers will soon be edible.
4. Your robot's name will be Zaza in the year 2040.
5. You will find a secret cave where you can hide your treasure from the pirates.
6. A guinea pig will follow you home.
7. You will invent salad ice cream.
8. You will go camping on the moon in the year 2050.

If this seems adorable or precocious in any way, let me just add that he is also farting continually, really stinking up the apartment. This includes times when he is sitting on my lap.

Babies Who Wear Glasses, Are Gasses.

Also kind of wanted to call this: Rye-Colored Glasses.

Wry Rye.

Here is Rye in my favorite picture ever. Wearing the pipe cleaner glasses that Jonah and his teacher Miho made for him. They made a pair for everyone in our family. Mine are yellow and pink. Maybe we'll all wear them for a Christmas/Hannukah card photo.

I think it is so cool that Jonah includes Rye in our family. He's new, but he's already one of us. When we get glasses, he gets them too.

I am sure I am going to learn about rage and destruction in my Human Development class at CIIS when we study siblings, and I certainly have memories of my own, as the older sister of two younger girlies. BUT, it is still a blessing when your kids love each other, in addition to the other feelings they may have or will have...

School for Shrinks

I start classes at the California Institute of Integral Studies next week: Human Development, Psychodynamics, and Therapeutic Communication. This blog is for thinking and writing about my training to become a therapist. It may also contain writing about hetero relationships, mothering boys (I have two!), family, friendship, San Francisco and Mission neighborhood city life, and poetry and other things I'm reading. Welcome!

"Between human caution, stubbornness, and our beloved theories, it is surprising we know anyone." — Leston Havens, Reflections on the Art of Psychotherapy.

I have a brilliant therapist, and my time with her has made me really interested in the way that intimacy can heal people. I think it's done that for me. Intimacy in other relationships has healed me too, from the parenting I received to the man I love. Allowing yourself to be seen and known, or seeing and trying to know another—it has some kind of transformative magic to it. Here is something my shrink wrote when she was running a school to train "master listeners" (I was in this school and it didn't survive, but more on this some other time):

"In this program we ask: How might we draw closer in our listening to the idiosyncratic individual who comes to speak with us? How can we be still, attentive, watchful enough, sufficiently unburdened by ourselves to catch that fleeting uniqueness before it enters our particular organizing system?"

I love how this highlights the grapsing after a person's "uniqueness" as one of the important goals of therapy. I have several friends who completed the program at CIIS and it made me hopeful that perhaps it might have a similar approach to training shrinks.

But I knew for sure I wanted to go to CIIS during the group interview. It was really fun!

With very little explanation we were each given an index card with a statement we were to read to the person next to us. The task was to respond to the statement you are read by saying how it makes you feel. The facilitator explained that much of our work at CIIS would be in groups, and this was a way of seeing how we reacted and worked in a group situation.

My card read, "I don't believe what you are saying and I don't trust you." I turned to the man beside me and read it aloud. He froze and was silent for several agonizing minutes. I resisted the strong urge to ask him questions to draw him out. Finally, he said, "this does not hurt my feelings, because I know this is only an exercise." It was just too hard for him in that moment to say what he was feeling. It seemed understandable, but it was also fascinating. Was he too nervous? Was the situation too false and pressured? Did he have absolutely no idea what he felt? Was he ashamed of what he felt and could not say?

The facilitator let him off the hook and he read aloud his card to the woman beside him, "I am attracted to you and I hope something can happen between us."

"Ok, uh, that makes me feel...curious. And, I want to know more about you..." She seemed to be feeling her feelings as if he were declaring his real attraction. Again, so interesting. Was the sentiment too overpowering to think about calmly—that someone would be attratcted to her and say so directly? (I think it would have been for me and was glad I hadn't had this one). Was it threatening? Was it true—was she picking up on how this guy really felt in those few minutes?

Then she read her card to me, "I am jealous of the power you have in this group." I was lucky to go third. I had had time to prepare and think about feelings, but it was easy for me to blurt out what occurred to me, "that makes me feel worried—like there will be retaliation against me for having power and causing jealousy. And it makes me feel pleased, because I sometimes like to be a leader in groups."

So strange, in a way, to be going to school to learn such ordinary things: how to know what I am feeling, how to be able to say what I'm feeling, how to listen with care, how to think about other people, how to watch for brilliance, uniqueness, and originality. A good society would have no need of this as a specialty, maybe. Maybe if we do it right, people will someday be capable of making a good society.