Anxiety in children; when the Caterpillar is too scared to turn.

We don’t ask for much only that you hear. 

Trust us when we tell you it’s a founded fear. 

Stop dismissing us as helicopter mums,

When will  you see anxietys not fun. 

You don’t understand I see it on your face,

every time I leave her here at this place. 

You do not know best. 

She’s not the same as the rest.

Every day I speak with you, every day nothing new,

Suddenly you decide theres a problem out of the blue?

And the reason for this problem, you haven’t got a clue!!

When I speak do you wander in your mind to your secret place,

Nod and smile, but you’re gone without a trace. 

Do you know what anxiety is? 

Can you recognise it? 

Can you see it in a child as they cower from the clouds,

sudden movements, a chill, the shade, a noise that’s too loud? 

Do you even see it, or is she so very quiet you just leave her be? 

If she cried and she screamed and she stamped her feet,

If she ripped her work and kicked her seat,

Would you help her then? 

Would you scour books with paper and pen? 

Would you be afresh with ideas to help my young girl,

Could YOUR understanding of anxiety, change HER world?
Karen Hayward ©2016

I’ll Show You Your Dreams.

Tired and exhausted and my mind is a light

with the everyday life, that for my child is a fight.

But I promise you girl, I promise you this,

i’ll give you the words that you happen to miss.

I’ll be your hope, i’ll be your courage

i’ll be your strength, i’ll be your voice

and i’ll show you every day, that you

have a choice.

We’ll talk and we’ll touch and we’ll

play and we’ll learn,

‘Mum.’ is a title that I’ll truly earn.

I’ll show you your dreams, i’ll hold

your hand all the way,

because I promise you this,

you will be okay.

Karen Hayward (Copyright) 2015.

Free write Saturday- conclusions of a shit week.

Do you know when you have so many thoughts in your head that they refuse to form into coherent sentences, that’s where I’m at right now, so I thought i would free write them all out.

My daughter fell over at school this week, running in the playground. It should have been a simple fall, stinging hands and slightly grazed knees. It wasn’t. She didn’t get her hands out quick enough to stop the fall, so instead she has a swollen face, swollen nose, cut lip, grazes spread across her beautiful face, and knees that are torn apart. It broke me. The school are in a catizzle because she didnt put out her hands, i’ve been telling them this for years, and they choose now to notice. She, the gal, being the problem solver she is, has a simple solution to the problem….don’t run, not ever, she is never going to run again, and i’d like to think this is  a child’s empty threats, but they’re not, for her never running again is the solution. It should end there, the fall has happened and war wounds created, but it doesn’t, her dressings on her battered knees need changing daily. The unknown causes her more fear than anything else, this coupled with her inability to locate certain pains, means that what she is feeling is intense and scary, she is scared, confused and in pain. And as I cleaned the cut, her howling in pain I remembered, I remembered how it feels to be helpless. I felt completely helpless. And I remembered the feelings of helplessness and inadequacy were the reasons I didn’t believe I was capable of becoming a mum or a good mum at least.
So a simple every day experience broke me, I crumbled, all the strength I have fell to the ground as she screamed in pure panic. And perhaps it’s the realisation that I am still capable of breaking, or the knowledge that I am vulnerable that worries me, i’m not sure, I just know that I am not strong I have a weakness that can break me.

Sleeping in a tangled web of damp sheets.

You crept
into my bed
as i slept.
‘I wetted
The bed’
You wept.
I pulled your
Seven year old
Body to mine,
And whispered
‘baby girl
that’s fine’.

Major Mummy rant :).

Grrr don’t you just hate days that start bad? It’s like a bad omen for the day that weighs heavily on my shoulders.  So I just want to start by saying that I am one of the most laid back people you are ever going to meet. I want to say that I just don’t really give a fuck, but that is a lie, I give a fuck, I just carefully choose the battles I get into. See it may seem like I go through life whispering, but I don’t, when I need to, my voice is loud, louder than most. I can argue that black is white and vice versa, I can argue anything that I truly believe in and I do, because I  am a firm believer that if someone else can’t find their voice, then I will help them, I never have problems finding my voice if I feel an injustice has occurred.

Ok so let’s just dive in. I was stood at the front door, you know that little time portal of space between leaving the house on time and leaving late, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a mother fucking spider. It was huge, usually spiders do not bother me, but this one had stripes, bloody stripes I tell ya, and I swear it was eyeing me up for size measurements. So being cleaver I kinda jumped away from the door and pulled it closed at the same time…I caught my fucking finger in the letter box. I’ve a  fucking gaping gash, just below the nail, it’s my writing finger too. :(. Ok so I carry on, as you do,  blood pouring down and dripping off the end of my finger. The girl (that’s my adorable gal, she is seven.) is fussing over me, she’s a fuss pot, worries way too much about everything. It’s stinging like a fucking cunt, and I want to suck away the blood but I know it’s gonna sting. So deep breaths, it’s all going well…..and onto the next rant!

So a new guy has moved in round the corner from my house. I’ve noticed him, I couldn’t help noticing him. Why? Because the very first time I saw him, he looked straight at me, from my hair down too my toes, smiled and said “Wow red is your colour!” ummm thanks! Am I like one of the only ones that just simply doesn’t like it when someone does this? Anyway, whenever he see’s me (which is a surprisingly lot) He’s getting braver, and he is very almost at that point where he is gonna stop and try talking too me. I know this because as I walked along the alley dripping blood, he looked me straight in the eye and hesitated, he stopped and smiled! I skipped past him rushing the girl along. Great, seriously I hate being chatted up, I honestly hate being noticed, I do not go out of my way to get myself noticed. Quite the opposite, i’m the gal that keeps my cleavage covered even in the middle of the summer. On the rare occasions when I get it out, if I sense someone looking at my boobies, yep, I slip my jumper back on! I know right, crazy, but seriously they are my boobies, if you ain’t got permission to look, then don’ fucking look! Ha ha in fairness my hormones might be dictating this anger toward a very innocent person, so I shall move along with the rant…

School. Holy fuck where to even start.

I hate the fucking school, or her teacher maybe, i’m not sure, obviously I haven’t shared this with my daughter though!

Ok so the girl, isn’t able to regulate her body temperature, she runs on super hot at all times, when she gets too hot she vomits it’s the bodies way off cooling her down. The school know this, and in reception and year 1 it wasn’t a problem. Oh but this year the teacher decided she didn’t believe me, she decided she knew best, she decided not to trust the girl to be able to assess what layers she needed, she told the girl that the other kids were cold (it was late autumn) and so she must be cold, she told the girl that if the other children were wearing their cardigans then the girl also needed to wear her cardigan, the girl lasted a couple of days before vomiting all down herself, which the teacher at the back of the class missed, and the one that she walked past to get through the class, she missed it too, and the one on the door also missed the child coming out of class with vomit all down the front of her! Yeah, I went mental, completely mental at the school. So anyway, a plan of action was created, rather than keeping the girl off school for 48 hours every time she over heated it was decided that 24 was sufficient as long as the girl was not sick a second time and showed no symptoms of sickness bug.

The girl was sick on Monday, no other signs of sickness bug (turns out she has a severe ear infection in both ears…she doesn’t recognise any pain or changes that occur inside of her body, she can’t say this hurts that hurts, not if it is occurring inside her body, so it is always extremely difficult to know if she is unwell) , so today I took her back in, she is well enough to go back in, christ she doesn’t even know she is sick!

Teacher stops us at the door.

I am ready.

I expect her to kick off again cos the girl is wearing shorts (I got told off for the shorts last week.) I tell her straight off, she’s wearing the shorts till the end of term, if it’s an issue point me toward whoever, but she is wearing the shorts till the end of term, you guys know she has an above average understanding of instructions and concepts, you made the confusion (this is another story, another day perhaps) you sort it, till then she is in shorts.

Teacher simply smiles and tries to explain to me what happened, in honesty I don’t actually want to hear, trust me I am well aware of how easy it is to cause the girl confusion, and I spend every minute of every day breaking down my words making sure I have explained it in a black and white way, for the girl that can’t see any grey.

Anyway, so then she says, she can’t come back yet, it ain’t been 48 hours.

I actually wanted to growl at her, for fuck sake, seriously we’ve been here. Today ain’t just any day either today, is meet the new teacher day, the girl can’t miss today, she needs today, she needs the reassurance, meeting her another day is just unbalancing the scales.

So I tell her, it weren’t the sickness bug. I swear they are obsessed by the sickness bug.

Teacher: Don’t matter gotta be 48 hours.

Me: Really? That’s not what was decided earlier in the year.

Bloody TA jumps in yeah but that time she over heated.

Me: and this time she overheated?

Anyway fucking twenty minutes, stood at the door waiting for them to make their fucking minds up. Teacher was adamant that the girl weren’t going in. I sent them off to talk to the nurse. The good old nurse, see she gets it, she understands cos she is medically trained.

She laughed, and said of course the girl can come in, it’s the girl, of course she was sick she has an ear infection, best place for her I reckon, knowing the girl it’s unlikely she’s in the mood to sit and rest.

 

Dear fucking god, the teachers face was a picture.

Seriously though school get your fucking act together. Am just waiting for the senco to ring back, I doubt they will. But I shall be kicking off again. The bloody TA let slip that the girl had actually been complaining all day monday of a stomach ache…this is the one single ailment that the girl can express, it can mean she needs the toilet, it can mean she is scared, it can mean she has tonsilitis (the nurse told me that 🙂 ) the school know first hand however that it can also mean that she is actually running a temperature, which is why the plan of action states that she is be taken to the nurse if she still has a stomach ache after completing the classroom steps…did they take her to the nurse? Hell no of course not, cos that would take fucking brain cells! So basically they wanted me to keep her home, for a mistake that they made, had they taken her to the nurse on Monday they would have discovered she was running a temp, she then would have taken calpol, maybe even been sent home, she would not have over heated and been sick! Fucking school!

 

Ok i’m desperate for a wee now, so rant over, finger is looking decisively dodgy and still stinging like a fucker.

 

Blossom666 xx