Martha Thompson Has Something to Talk About on Information Morning!

 Having my radio next to my bed side at night, I always catch the early morning show, CBC Information Morning, but sometimes it gets integrated into my dream world if I happen to nod off, which is exactly what I did today. I was dreaming about my very good friend and neighbour Martha Thompson sitting at a table, looking out her sunlit window, but in reality she was actually being interviewed about being a respite foster parent on the morning show, that had found it's way into my dream.

 The reality is I can attest I've known Martha for a over 20 years now and she has so much to offer children as a creative, kind, caring, generous, intelligent and wise woman. I'm so happy she has been able to provide this much needed service and caring to young people. Safe to say Martha and Dan love kids, and had four of their own with grandchildren. I know all of her children who have grow into wonderful humans. I only wish there were more like Martha and her husband Dan, who were willing to take children into their home.

 Martha and I have  long walks together and we often talk about kids in crisis within the system and how there is such  a dire need for available foster parents, and all that it entails.

 I just listened to the interview she gave that I missed in the early hours of the morning. I then gave her a call to thank her and to let her know how much I appreciated what her and Dan have being doing over the past five years as foster parents. They are truly a blessing to the children they bring into their home and to our community.

 As a Youth Care Worker for many years, I got a real bird's eye, close up view into how the system does and doesn't work. That said, being someone on the front lines, working with youth is one of the most rewarding life experiences a person can ever have, regardless of how many problems the system has.

 They rewards might not appear immediately, but they are guaranteed to come and you'll be a better person for it.

"What To Do When People Do You Wrong" - Mercy Tools

Early on in the day when I was thinking about what to blog in my post, I wrote down these two words in my journal,, mercy and tools.

I have CBC radio on just about 24/7. This morning was no different. I wished the news was better. More often than not, you listen to news casts that have more bad news, than good. I expect because it makes better copy for the media.

Today I heard a particular story about a women and her 19 year old son who had been severely beaten while in jail. He had been in a coma, and now was awake, without the ability to speak or move. He was suffering serious brain damage and was completely incapacitated. The correctional authority would only allow the young man's mother to visit with her son for an hour a day, as opposed to being able to have unlimited visits, which she had, when he was in a coma. There were now correctional guards at the door, round the clock.

The young man in the hospital was suddenly considered a threat once again, and was being treated as the prisoner in custody, prior to his hospitalization and complete incapacitation, unable to move or even speak. His mother was desperately pleading to be allowed to see her son, more than one hour a day, in order to assist in the healing of his serious brain injuries, supporting her son, close by his side. It was heart breakingly sad to hear her express her deep despair, and sorrow.

What really struck me was the phone call that came into CBC Radio, in reaction to this situation. The person that called , was so full of what sounded like aggressive, vindictive resentment toward this mother's plea. The caller went on at great length to explain in vehement anger, and self-righteous disgust, why this mother should not be allowed to have more time with her son, regardless of the circumstances. She then made a statement put in the form of a question, asking why didn't she spend the time with her son when he was getting into trouble with the crime that put him in jail in the first place, and where was she then. It left me feeling very sad. I say this because, to me it is a microcosm of what is happening in the world today, that initially starts within in the family, and spreads outward into the community and globally from there, systemically in the form of love and mercy, or in hate and vengeance toward others.

My first thought was disbelief in how merciless this kind of attitude seemed to me. Some folks think that punitive measures toward children who have become involved with criminal activity, should include and extend to the parent as well, in what every form or however judgmental it is.

In my other life before becoming a full time artist, I was a Youth Care Worker for approximately 20 years, with youth at risk, young offenders and with the adult population in custody. I have seen first hand the correlation between dysfunctional families affected by poverty, mental health issues, substance and sexual abuse, racism, addiction, and systemic socioeconomic problems that are all in some way correlated if not directly the antecedents to criminal behaviour.

 It seems the person who made that phone call into CBC Radio, not unlike others I have known, is searching for someone to blame. Fact is, we all must take responsibility.

Vengeance, blame, resentment, even hatred without mercy or forgiveness, are certainly not tools for change in a seemingly hopeless situation or world.

So, it was timely that I found this video today on the topic of forgiveness, by Marie Forleo entitled, What To Do When People Do You Wrong.

No One's Girl - Ashley Ash

Over a period of twenty years my vocation was that of being a Youth Care Worker. People would often raise their eyebrows when I told them I worked with Young Offenders, and youth at risk as if they thought it would be the worse job in the world. The truth is, working with these kids was the easy part, it was my vocation and I was dedicated to Youth Care. Where the frustration, disillusion and heartbreak existed, was in attempting to work within the system, which was lacking in help and support for what these youth needed, and seeing them along with their families, fall between the cracks.

Here is the very powerful, hopeful, and  personal story of Ashley Ash, written in her own words. She advocates for herself, like no one else in the system ever can, or could. She is a shining light of hope, for a generation of youth within in a very broken system.



A lot of people assume that adopted children are orphans, but I wasn’t that lucky. I know my birth parents are alive somewhere in the vastness of India. Unlike an orphan, I’ll never have the relief, the closure that I imagine comes with the death of one’s parents. I know that sounds awful and of course I sympathize with orphans. I read their stories in the popular media: the orphan reunited with her long-lost sister, or the orphan graciously taken in by a rich family, never again to question her early beginnings. Unfortunately, I am not a red-headed, freckled girl whose quirky attitude attracts a Daddy Warbucks. I am one of the thousands of children born in the slums of Amritsar, India, shadowed by the majestic Golden Temple, children who are discarded by our parents because they could not afford to have another child and yet did.
Taken from India at the age of one, I was first adopted by a visiting Canadian family who were so overcome by my helplessness that they decided they had a moral duty to save me. My series of unfortunate events started upon my arrival in Toronto. My adopted mother was bipolar, depressed, and paranoid, a trifecta of mental instability. Let’s call her Mom Two. As a child I could not understand my mother’s erratic personality. I remember standing outside the door to our apartment trying to hear if she was yelling or having a fit. I got so good at it that I could almost intuitively sense her anger through the door.
I have many souvenirs of my time with her, a personal favourite being a grade school photo showing my bruised face after one of my mother’s episodes. She and my father were separated but they couldn’t stand to be far from each other, so he lived on the tenth floor of the apartment building and my mother on the eighth. My father did nothing to help me; he would side with my mother, sometimes joining her in tormenting me. When my mother got so angry with me that she couldn’t even bear to look at me, she would send me up to my father’s for the night, while telling me that men were awful and that I stood a good chance of being sexually abused one day. So I would weep and beg her to forgive me, to let me stay with her. I can still feel the cold metal stairs on my feet and the salty tears in my mouth as I walked two flights of stairs up to my father’s. He was so devoted to her that he could not see she needed serious help. He failed me as a father. I was not a daddy’s girl; I was no one’s girl. He was just the man who made my breakfast and took me to school because my mother was still sleeping when I left.
School was my only escape, six hours a day when I could be a kid, and do normal kid things, like jumping off swings and getting married to my best friend on the playground. I would wish that my kind teachers were my parents and that maybe they would like me enough to take me away from my home, but my wishes never came true.
The scars that never go away are the ones that cannot be seen. The daily reminders of my past come to me in the simplest of forms. Crying while studying genetics in biology because I don’t have a clue what my birth parents’ phenotypes are. A nagging voice in my head telling me my test scores aren’t high enough, courtesy of Mom Two. The unrelenting feeling that I am undeserving of love. These are the things I cannot forgive, the things that I usually manage to keep to myself.
I ignored the enormity of my emotions until I had no choice but to feel them. I would seem happy and fine at school, and then I would have days when I would cry in the office for hours, until I was too exhausted to move. That’s when they would lay me down and buy me a McDonald’s Happy Meal, which did, in fact, grant me some happiness.
My last stay in a foster home was the result of my mother’s worst episode. I had gotten a scab from playing on the carpet at daycare. I didn’t think it was worthy of my mother’s attention so I kept it to myself. One day while I was tipping my cereal bowl to drink the leftover milk, my mother caught sight of the scab and asked what had happened, and if I had cried. I honestly answered no. All was fine until the next evening, when my dad was home—things were always worse when the two were together. It was a couple of days before Halloween and I was watching Beetlejuice in my room, pretending I could levitate like Winona Ryder’s character. My mother started asking me again if I had cried. When I again said no, she took a pen and tried to stab me with it to see if I would cry then. Of course I defended myself, and in the ensuing struggle she cut herself. That’s when my dad stormed in, looked at what I had done to my mother, and came after me. The next day at school I tried to hide my red cheeks with a scarf, but I had to take it off in class. I thought it was very fitting that on Halloween I looked like a monster.
The school knew what to do because it wasn’t the first time. I would be put in the library to wait for the women in pantsuits to come get me and take me to the closest available foster home. They were more like taxi drivers, driving me to the home and leaving immediately after their job was done. Inevitably, my social workers and the Children’s Aid Society would send me back to my parents, and I hated them for it.
Between the ages of three and ten, I lived in a total of eight foster homes. Want to know what it’s like in the suburbs of Peterborough, Pickering, Scarborough, and Mississauga? I could tell you which schools to avoid and which families seem sweet for fostering children but really do it for the money. I can’t remember the earliest foster homes anymore, which is a blessing, but in the last one I was in, when I was ten, I remembering getting a simple radio for Christmas while the foster parents bought their biological daughter the latest game console. There is a great divide in foster homes between the “real” children and the foster children; we are always left out of family dinners, vacations, and events. I would be starting to settle into a foster home, starting to make friends, actually talking to the parents, and then I would have my monthly visits with my mom. She would nitpick and find fault, whether I was too skinny because they weren’t feeding me or I wasn’t being taken care of because my hair was too long. Nevertheless, I always wanted to go home with her. She was the only family I had, the only place I thought I belonged, no matter how awful it was. When you see children in public being abused, sometimes you wish you could go up to them and take them away from their parents, but do you think they’d actually leave their parents to go with you, a stranger? When you’re a child, you know nothing but the security of your parents, no matter what kind of people they are. You have no choice.
After the eight foster homes, the workers at the Children’s Aid Society finally decided it was best if I did not return home. Perhaps they got tired of shuttling me around, or maybe they finally realized that my home environment was not a safe place for a young child to grow. When I got the opportunity to be re-adopted, I ran after it like a dying woman coming across the elixir of life. After meeting the first potential parent, a single mother who had already adopted a child from Guatemala, I felt like I might have a chance at a normal life. Three months later, I was moved in, eager to start anew. My social workers implored me several times to think carefully about my decision. They were worried I was moving too fast, but things couldn’t move fast enough as far as I was concerned. The first thing Mom Three did was put me into therapy, to which I replied, “I don’t need it! I’m not crazy!” But after four years of her helping me through some tough mental work, I fully credit my therapist with saving my life.
My transition was not easy. Learning to love someone after the experiences I had been through took time. I would resist any physical affection, and for the first year the word “mom” was not one I uttered easily. In my mind, I felt like loving and accepting another family would be a betrayal of my old one.
Five years later I can honestly say that I am happy to be where I am: lucky enough to be loved unconditionally in a family where I don’t have to worry about what my adopted mother’s mood will be when I walk through the door. I can have normal fights with my new sister about sharing sweaters or how she takes an hour to get ready in the mornings. There are of course times when I retreat into myself and my past experiences, but those times are becoming fewer and further between. I have things to look forward to, and these things, the hope of something to come, keep me going.
I’m lucky enough to be one of the thousands of foster kids, abused children, to make it out, for the most part sane. I think it just comes down to the age-old fight for survival. Surviving doesn’t always mean fighting back; sometimes it means keeping quiet, enduring what you must to continue living. There were many times I felt like giving up—the human mind can take only so much, and although a child’s mind has a certain elasticity, mine had been pulled too taut. I remembering being so frustrated and confused in my first family that the very first time I thought about suicide I was only seven. I am so proud of myself for not plunging that steak knife into my chest that night 11 years ago, because I would not have been here, alive, thriving in my new life with my new and final family.
If you’ve ever studied math (and if you haven’t, I understand, because math is gross!), you know that a slope is the distance between one point on a graph and another. I see my life resembling a parabolic function greater than zero—a line that started at a low point but has an increasing slope. I am moving forward. I am growing up.
Ashley Ash is the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Student Nonfiction Writing Contest, open to students in grades 9 to 12.

Jesse Krimes - Sentence To Create

Apokaluptein:16389067 - Jesse Krimes

 
I have a close artist friend who a few years back began to do volunteer work in a correctional facility, teaching art to inmates. I saw her own personal transformation as a young woman before, and after. The work empowered her and did the same for the inmates she worked with, for over a long period of time. She related and empathized with these young men incarcerated, as a result of her own personal struggles, and went on to pursue formal education professionally, so she could continue to work in the field of youth and corrections. She'd often express to me how the men she met inside prison felt they had no voice, and were simply forgotten about, out of sight, out of mind.

Some time ago I'd heard about this artist Jesse Krimes  I did not follow up until now, through an article written by Kristin Hohenadel for Slate.com entitled, The Art of Doing Time .

 Jesse Krimes  is a remarkable artist, who has a very empowering story to tell about incarceration, isolation redemption, service and hope for the so called hopeless, through art.

During my own personal vocation as a Youth Care Worker I saw first hand, how art gave voice to the troubled kids and young offenders that I worked with for over twenty years. They may not have been able to express their emotions, thoughts and feelings verbally, but talking about the work was a non-threatening, and indirect way of communicating.
Art can be very personally empowering for everyone on many levels.

"Hope For The Hopeless"

I just finished my second commissioned painting of another lighthouse. The process of completing this painting was what I described as being, a spiritual experience, because of the state of my mental health over the past few weeks, which have been somewhat challenging, as I was feeling anxiety, stress and some depression. Fortunately for me, these episodes never last long, and things always get better.
I have often thought about mental illness throughout the years, because I was personally affected by it at a young age in my own family. Being a recovering alcoholic I have had my time of mental illness, or me being out in orbit, as I call it.
 Lately there have been several items in the media about the treatment of those affected by mental illness and how it is often stigmatized, cloaked in shame and fear.

Many of my loved ones and close friends that experienced mental illness where hospitalized, imprisoned, or tragically succumbed to suicide.
 My loving, tenderhearted, creative, and late husband, whom I met in Toronto at the Young Street Mission, an outreach for street youth, was a writer. He lost his battle with schizophrenia at the young age of twenty six in 1980. He had been diagnosed at sixteen years of age. Through out his young life, writing had always been  his solace, his refuge and light during the storms of his life, that helped him find his way.
I have always been very grateful for having creativity to be the same for me, whenever I experienced times of depression or grief. It is a powerful healing balm for the spirit.

I am not usually a person likely to post recent bills passed in the government halls of the Canadian parliament, and then write in a blog post expressing what I think about them, in relation to how they affect me or others. I am going to take exception to this because it has been weighing on my heart and I felt compelled to share my thoughts, and experience.
Recently I read an article in the National Post where the retired Senator and past chair of the Mental Health Commission, Michael Kirby addressed this issue, where he expressed that the mental health system is turning prisons into the 21st century asylums for those suffering from mental illness. Michael Kirby himself was personally touched by the death and suicide of his own son, and who suffered with mental illness. Undoubtedly I'm certain this experience caused him to become a dedicated mental health advocate.

 Having worked with many youth at high risk in care, with a myriad of mental health and addiction issues, I've seen how many of these youth fall between the cracks, as a result of insufficient support and treatment available to them and their families. So often these youth go on to adult correctional facilities. As a volunteer in provincial prisons, I have met up with some of these same youth, I once worked with, in open and closed custody, years prior to them becoming adult offenders. I attribute their incarceration directly to the lack of support and treatment available to them as youth and children and for their families.


 Bill C-54 will directly affect how those with mental illness are perceived and the increased amount of time incarcerated when criminally charged. 
The Schizophrenia Society of Canada has spoken out about the proposed changes in this bill and I believe addresses many important factors and concerns.

I am happy to see more people, especially in the public eye, speaking openly and candidly about mental health, as it has been long over due.  It gives the much needed hope for those of us affected by mental illness and for a world so in need of hope.
I am reminded of a time many years ago when I went into a local coffee shop. There was an endearing young punk rocker behind the counter waiting on me. He was wearing a button that said, " Hope For The Hopeless". I thought to myself, thank God for that and that will be my mantra!