A boy named Ben

This is a blog written by the social worker that helped our family when Wil was born, and we also know Ben 🙂

Voices from the Infant, Toddler and Family Field

It’s fascinating to me how my personal and professional worlds parallel the external world, and how certain events help me pause. The world is full of fear right now, and has been for a long time.  I have thought about how that fear has affected me in my work, and in my personal life. The fear has blocked kindness to some degree. And then yesterday and today happened.

Yesterday I sat with a mom whose son is 2 1/2 years old. I’ve known them since he was an infant, when he came into the world way too early, weighing only 1 pound. After 2.5 years, she was able to talk to me about her agony of not being able to hold him after he was born, as it took 4 days before he was stable enough to be held by his mother. Those 4 days were the longest most harrowing…

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Do You See The Yellow?

Check out my latest blog on my website: Wilingness.com

I’m not sure what grade I was in, but I do know I was quite young, when my classroom teacher placed a picture on each one of our desks. She casually asked the class to take a look at it, and then, after a few seconds, she asked us to flip the picture over so all we could see was the white back side.

“Without turning your picture back over, who can tell me anything in your picture that was yellow?”

I wracked my brain yet I couldn’t remember a single yellow detail. Not a one!

A few hands shot up, and I looked around dumbfounded. How could I have looked at that entire picture only moments ago, and not remember anything that was yellow? What else didn’t I see?

Though I didn’t consciously register it at the time, this was an “ah-ha” moment for me. I was beginning to realize that though I believed with every fiber of my being I had seen the entire picture, I was really only recognizing what I had chosen to focus on, whether consciously or not.

Some 40 years, a husband and 3 children later, I found myself rushing around the house on a Tuesday night. Katherine and I were to leave for taekwondo within the hour, dinner was cooking, Wil had a book to read to me, Katherine and Elizabeth were intermittently asking for help with their homework, and I was still yearning for a shower since teaching a 2pm bootcamp class. Once dinner and homework were successfully completed, I zipped across my carpeted bedroom floor, headed straight for the shower in the adjoining bathroom, the movie reel in my mind replaying the same hurried thoughts over and again. Then, just as I was quickly padding past my bed, the glint of something at the edge of the bedskirt caught my attention. My mind and body stopped fast in their tracks….http://wilingness.com/2015/11/09/do-you-see-the-yellow/