Awareness jewellery. Awareness
ribbons. Awareness stickers. Awareness scarves. Everyone has something they
want to bring awareness to. Sometimes it’s just for themselves, sometimes it’s
to make others think, and sometimes it’s just to support a cause.
Lori Anderson and Heather Millican
teamed up to host the Art of Awareness blog hop. The concept was for everyone
to purchase a word bean, a polymer clay bead, in the colour of their choice and
with a word of their choosing on it.
I have many things that are
important to me and that I want to remember, so I bought 3 beans. Remember these?
Well, here’s the final word
revealed:
My first plan had been to make a
necklace with the 3 beans strung in a Y layout. When the beans arrived I was
surprised at how large they were. I’m not sure what I was expecting but it was
definitely tinier. Not a problem, resilience is the order of the day.
I decided to make 2 separate key
chains instead. Here’s the first one and
its story:
The orange colour was chosen to
bring awareness to Attention Deficit Disorder. The word butterfly is part of
our personal family history.
When our son was a little boy we
noticed very early on that he was easily distracted, losing his concentration,
almost running from activity to interest and back. Through his first few years
of school his teachers kept commenting, almost complaining, that he did not pay
attention, was not learning, and even could not understand. He was enrolled in
a French Immersion school, an enrichment program in Ontario. This meant he was
not entitled to additional enrichment support, like counselors or evaluations.
The teachers and the school wanted us to move him to a regular school and non-enrichment
program. Even then it would still be a year before he would be eligible for
further evaluation.
Well we knew our son. We knew he
was very intelligent! It was something he showed every day. In the parent
teacher session where we were first told he did not have the capacity to
continue in French Immersion, my husband and I did not allow the teachers, yes
there were 2 of them there, to push us into moving him. We asked question after
question, about his behaviour, about what was being taught, about what happened
on quizzes and tests, about whether they had ever tried to ask him “surprise”
questions when they thought he wasn’t paying attention, about his responses to
those surprise questions. With every answer it became so very clear to the
teachers, he was learning, he did understand, he did participate in his own
way. They admitted that “yes”, they knew he was capable but they just couldn’t
help him.
At that point my husband and I
stated that we would pay for the evaluation and counselling required. The
teachers and the school were totally shocked that we would do this. Apparently
no parent had pushed their commitment to keeping their child in French
Immersion the way we did.
To make a long story short(er) our
son was evaluated and was diagnosed with ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. Many years of counselling
followed, many strategies tried, many tools used. We did not rush to medicate
him. Finally, after 2 years we sat down with his then current teacher, a woman
with incredible patience and love for her job and her students.
She told a story about our son’s
school day. The analogy that struck a chord was about an event that had happened
a couple of days previous. They were studying dinosaurs, like any typical
little boy a favourite subject of his. He was fully engaged, participating and
asking and answering questions. Then out of the blue a butterfly floated past
the window near him, and that was it. His attention was out the window with the
butterfly, and he was oblivious to the rest of the learning session.
We recognized we could not help him
without going to the next step and finding the most appropriate medication. It
was a long road, the counselling continued throughout, the type and strength of
medication changed many times to meet the needs of that time. Now here we are,
20 years later, and he is a fully trained computer science major, working at a
job he loves. All the medication stopped 2 years ago when he and his doctor
(our family doctor who was on the journey the whole way with us) agreed that it
was not making any difference for him anymore. In June we go to Waterloo to
celebrate at his commencement ceremony where he will receive his bachelor of
mathematics, computer science.
It was worth every step.
And now the story of the other 2
beans.
This is my daughter’s story and it’s
not over yet. The green colour is for Mental Health, and the teal for Anxiety
Disorders.
Our daughter also has ADD,
diagnosed when she was a teenager. All through school she did not have a great
social life, bullied, ostracized, ignored. She would cry many days after
getting home, until eventually she found some friends. She also learned to put
on a tough outer shell, ignoring the cruelty, refusing to stoop to their level
but refusing to let them continue.
Even so, it was always apparent to
my husband and me that she was not as happy or confident as she should be. She’s
a December baby and did also exhibit the younger maturity sometimes seen. We
convinced her to stay an extra year in high school, do the grade 13 that the
Ontario government took away a few years previously. The thought was it would
give her a chance to grow a little more, gain more confidence, and be ready to
go away to school.
Our daughter has always idolized
her brother and wanted to follow the same career path. The year she applied
there was an overload of submissions and she did not get her first choice,
instead was offered an alternate program with the potential to transfer. So off
she went, away to school. If we had known then…we would have tried to convince
her to…do what? I don’t even know.
All I know is her calls became less
and less frequent, she was often studying when we called, was down and unhappy
when she came home for a visit. At Christmas we almost didn’t let her go back.
By mid January I was over there almost every weekend, taking her out,
getting supplies, bringing her home for a few days.
By the end of January she wasn’t
going to classes anymore, would hardly leave her room or talk to anyone. (Her
beloved brother was away on an 8 month work term. She felt there was no one
there for her.)
We finally convinced her to see a
school psychologist. Preliminary diagnosis? Mental anxiety disorder, potential
clinical depression. Within the next 2 weeks, with the help of the counsellor,
we supported her through the steps to officially withdraw from school and
brought her home. It’s been 16 months of counselling, suicide prevention steps,
medication, and doctor’s visits. For the longest time there were no sharp
instruments to be found anywhere in our house.
This story has taken long enough so
I won’t go into all the details of those 16 months. I will tell you though that
as a mother there is very little worse than knowing your child doesn’t want to
live anymore and not having the ability to just make everything better. I was
lucky! My child is still here. She is doing better and is preparing to go to
college in September, in a different course that fits with her love or art and
animation. Is she better? No, not yet. I am confident though that she will be.
Oh, and the words? Be Free. Be free
of the anxiety, be free of the fears, be free to explore her dreams and grow
her own butterfly wings.
Thank you for having the patience
to stay with me. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to write both stories. Doing
so has been cathartic and I am grateful to Lori and Heather for making this
possible. I am keeping both of these key
chains to continue to remind myself to be aware. I hope you find your reason
for awareness, your cause, and it works out for you.
Please see Lori’s site to read the stories from all the other bloggers who are participating
