Support Groups Blog

If you have ever read a book about raising children there is bound to be a chapter on handling emotions and meltdowns. The advice will probably sound something like this, when a child is melting down and tired, remember not to yell or respond in kind, you are the adult, remind the child to use their feeling words, such as, I am tired, hungry, overwhelmed, sad, etc. Identify what is really going on, give them a hug if they wish to be touched, or time alone if they need a moment to regroup.

We live in a society that while touting that all bodies are beautiful, mental health is important, we need to eat to fuel our bodies, brains over beauty…we learn from a young age, that while these slogans are empowering, the reality is, beauty is coveted by all, regardless of race, gender and nationality. We are indoctrinated constantly, via social media, the actors we see in all our favorite shows and movies, the fitness instructors we follow, the magazine covers we see at the supermarket checkouts, the musicians we listen to and the social media we scroll through.

Is it only us or is homework getting harder? We are here to tell you that with smart kids comes homework questions and requests for project assistance that makes our stomach turn a little queasy and an internal monologue consisting of, “did we even learn this?” repeatedly swirls through our brains. While we valiantly reach back into the very dusty recesses of our brains to try and find the answer, it is often with a wish and a prayer, along with a healthy helping hand from the gods of Google, that we don’t make a complete fool of ourselves.

For those of us in the age 30 and up category, our childhoods included trips to Blockbuster to rent VHS tapes that required you to rewind them once viewed (remember the slogan: “be kind, rewind”). It was the height of cool to have a tape rewinder, a machine where you could pop in this huge chunk of VHS plastic and in a few seconds, TA DA, rewound! We of a certain age can also remember when tv could not be paused or rewound. In the magical present where you can regularly pause and rewind a host of tv shows and movies, occasionally something goes wrong and everything freezes.

Life is all about making decisions. As we come up on the 2 year anniversary of being in a pandemic, the decision making that is a part of regular life seems, in our opinion, to have multiplied. There is the choice to act as if nothing is happening, we can ignore all the medical advice as hubris and much like the story of Chicken Little, go about our lives while the sky is indeed falling. We can also decide to listen to medical advice and get our vaccines and wear our masks.