Looking for Dr. Good Dentist: Meeting the Needs of the Modern Family Through Technology

Technology can make or break your relationship with your customers. It’s a lesson some businesses understand intuitively while others simply choose to ignore.

Take my dentist, for example. She uses a telephone auto-dialer system to remind patients of upcoming appointments. It’s a great idea in principle -- but the system she has chosen doesn't work well in real life.

Instead of making one telephone call to let patients know that members of the same family have appointments at the same time, the auto-dialer system calls your phone number (or leaves messages on your voice mail), back to back, repeating the same lengthy message for each patient. It’s inefficient and extremely annoying.

And that's not the worst of it, unfortunately.

The phone message on her telephone system informs patients that they have to provide the office with 48 hours’ notice if they wish to reschedule an appointment. Unfortunately, patients are also informed that they are not allowed to leave messages on the voice mail system: they must call back during business hours, when a staff member will be available.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there were other ways of making contact with the office: if patients could communicate via email, Facebook, or Twitter; or log on to a secure area of the dentist’s website to cancel and rebook appointments. (If we can book our own airline tickets online, why can’t we schedule our own dental appointments?)

A dentist open to engaging in two-way communications with patients could enhance relationships while keeping patient information up to date. Patients could verify personal and billing information (thereby reducing the number of health insurance claims that get rejected), indicate their interest in receiving dental health info-bulletins, and sign up for online or face-to-face dental education events (for example, a session on dental care and the child with special needs). The dental practice, in turn, could share information about its patient care philosophies (which, hopefully, would be reasonably in synch with this really progressive child, youth, and family health patient care code of conduct from the UK).

At this point, I fear I’m dreaming of dentists who haven’t even entered the realm of fiction. (When was the last time you watched a TV show or a feature-film about a happy or well-adjusted dentist?) But I’d love to be proven wrong.

Maybe there is a Dr. Good Dentist out there somewhere. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have such a dentist:  someone who is a great dentist, technologically savvy, and personable and patient-friendly to boot. Anyone know such a dentist?

You Can’t Call Yourself a Family-Friendly City if You Treat Childcare as a Non-Issue - Part II of III

It’s one of those dirty little secrets that comes out in conversations between parents: how a society that pretends to be child-friendly is often anything but.

Shadow a family with young children for a day and you’ll get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Someone rolls their eyes (or groans audibly) as they take their seats on a bus or (heaven help them) a plane with a baby or toddler in tow.

A nursing mother is subtly (or not so subtly) redirected to a less conspicuous spot in a restaurant or other public space so the sight of her feeding her baby won’t offend other patrons. You know, the kind of patrons who hate to see a baby eat.

All too often, society treats children as inconveniences (as opposed to members of the next generation that we have a collective interest in nurturing along) and their parents as the perpetrators of some crime against society, for bringing these unpredictable, noisy, uncivilized beings out into public.

And yet, when it’s time to feel pride in our country or our city, we're awfully quick to highlight its family-friendly characteristics. Never mind the fact that the data generated by objective third parties paints a very different picture than the one we may be carrying around in our heads. It’s much easier to feel a misplaced sense of pride than to accept the fact that Canada today isn’t the Canada it once was.

What happened this week in Toronto made it painfully clear how far out of touch some politicians have allowed themselves to become with the needs of real families in this city - and how willing they are to put the needs of a vocal few ahead of the rest of their constituents. That's a lesson parents in this city can choose to heed - or ignore at their peril.

But back to the politicians - and the lack of political vision they exhibited this week.

Being a child-friendly society, circa 2009, means making access to quality, affordable daycare a priority. As any employed parent who has faced a childcare crisis can tell you, childcare is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

When your childcare arrangement falls apart, your family and work lives cease to function until your childcare crisis is resolved. The crisis doesn’t just affect the family (in terms of massive stress, work-life conflict, and potentially lost wages). If affects the employer (who has to deal with reduced productivity, because an employee is off the job), results in unhappy customers (if that reduced productivity leads to unmet promises or reduced levels of service), and stressed out coworkers (who have to pick up the slack for the coworker whose childcare arrangement has fallen apart).

To put it simply, childcare isn’t a family problem. It’s everybody’s problem. That attitude should be reflected when childcare policy is being set at the national, provincial, and local level, don't you think?

And the Stroller Moms Marched Again - Part I of III

All parents have their limits. And when they’re pushed past your limits, they’re compelled to take action, whether the person who requires a reality check is a kid or a politician.

The folks at Toronto City Hall lost sight of that simple fact this week (and it really is a very simple fact, once you’ve committed it to memory: you can only push a parent so far).

You don’t have to be a genius to figure our that messing with daycare means that your going to end up with a lot of highly-energized stroller-pushing moms (and one dad) in your face (parents who organized their meet-ups via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, by the way: this generation of parents knows how to put technology to good use).

With a chronic shortage of quality, affordable daycare in this city (and across the country) parents have no choice but to take to the streets to protest City Hall’s decision to declare a one-year moratorium on the creation day nurseries on a three-block stretch of High Park Avenue.

Toronto parent Lindsay Viets feels that parents across the city need to send a clear message to City Hall: this kind of action won’t be tolerated by the parents anywhere within the City of Toronto: that an attack on daycare anywhere in the city will be considered an attack on daycare everywhere in this city.

“This City decision sets a dangerous precedent for all of Toronto; and anyone who needs daycare, or might need daycare in the future, should be angry about the decision.”

Until it finds itself dealing with a surplus of childcare spaces, The City of Toronto doesn’t have the luxury of calling a moratorium on day nurseries. To do otherwise is to put NIMBY-ism before sound social policy. And what politician wants that kind of decision on his or her voting record, come election day?

Earth to out-of-touch politicians: Babies and toddlers might not be old enough to vote, but their moms and dads certainly are. You might want to make a note of that in bright red crayon.

Engaging The Whole Child in Learning

 “Holistic education engages the head, heart, hands and spirit of the child.
It is a curriculum that makes connections –
community, earth, soul, subject and mind-and-body connections –
and it develops intuition and inquiry.”

- From the curriculum documents for The Whole Child School,
a Toronto District School Board
alternative school which opens this fall

The parents who received phone calls telling them that their children had secured spots in The Whole Child School reacted as if they had won the lottery. And, as it turns out, they had. Demand for spaces in the new school  was so great that the school had to conduct a lottery to allocate spaces as fairly as possible, says Shari Walczak, a mother of two who has been serving as parent co-chair of the school’s organizing committee.

When The Whole Child School opens its doors this September, it will start out with seven classes: three combined JK/SK classes (Walczak’s 4-year-old son will be in one of those classes); full classes at the Grades 1, 2, and 3 level; and a combined Grade 4/5 class. The school will grow with its students, eventually offering classes from JK through Grade 8.

It isn’t difficult to see what has attracted students to this publicly-funded alternative school. The Whole Child School (which will be sharing space with Roden Public School in the Gerrard and Coxwell neighborhood) will be following a holistic curriculum that has been developed by a highly skilled team of educators, with input from Professor John P. Miller of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

One of the key challenges that the school’s founders foresee will be managing parent expectations. No school is perfect--even if the curriculum documents make The Whole Child School sound like a learning paradise on earth. What the Whole Child School community can promise to do is be open to learning from the mistakes that will inevitably be made as the school gets through its novice year. “We’ll be learning and adjusting and changing as we go.”

Walczak and other members of the organizing committee are counting on The Whole Child School’s parent community to play a hands-on role in shaping the school during this first, formative year. “We’re looking for a real time commitment and involvement level from our parents. We want them to be involved with everything from fundraising and identifying potential partnerships to providing input on the curriculum and vision.”

If all goes well, The Whole Child School could end up serving as a model for the kind of education every child should be receiving in order to be able to meet the challenges of the future, says Walczak. “We would love for The Whole Child School to become the norm for all children down the road.”

"Holistic education is an effort to cultivate the development of the whole human being.  Where conventional schooling views the child as a passive receiver of information and rules, or at most as a computer-like processor of information, a holistic approach recognizes that to become a full person, a growing child needs to develop – in addition to intellectual skills – physical, psychological, emotional, interpersonal, moral and spirited potentials.  The child is not merely a future citizen or employee in training, but an intricate and delicate web of vital forces and environmental influences."

- Ron Miller, one of the major thinkers and contributors
to the field of holistic education, on the role holistic education
has to play in the development of the whole child,
quoted on The Whole Child School website

Destination ImagiNation: Non-Profit Program Emphasizes Creativity, Teamwork, Problem-Solving Skills

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.”
Thomas Edison

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? That’s how we should look at our not-quite-successes, but, all too often, we forget that there’s an upside to making mistakes. We increase our knowledge of what doesn’t work.

That’s the kind of smart thinking that allowed Thomas Edison to accomplish what he did. If it had been paralyzed by a fear of failure, he might never have had that bright flash of discovery.

It's also the kind of innovative learn-through-discovery kind of thinking that underlies a Destination ImagiNation a non-profit program for kids that combines creative thinking, team work, problem solving and ends up with fun.

The program may not be very well known in Canada, but it’s extremely well established in other parts of the world. Each year, DI (a community-based, non-profit, volunteer-driven educational organization) works with more than 250,000 children and young adults in 50 U.S. states and more than 40 countries around the world.

Kids on two- to seven-member teams are challenged to find solutions to both instant challenges and team challenges (which take many months to solve). They present their solutions to appraisers in tournament-style settings. (See second video, below.)

When team members are first confronted with their menu of challenges at the beginning of the DI year (each team tackles five challenges each year), the initial reaction is likely to be, “There is no way we we’re going to be able to solve this problem,” says Kris Bordessa, mother of two, DI volunteer, and the author of the book Team Challenges: 170+ Group Activities to Build Cooperation, Communication, and Creativity (Zephyr Press).

But then they get down to business and the impossible starts to look plausible -- even probable.

Everything is very hush-hush, of course (as is the case with all the very best clubs and discoveries).

One of the cardinal rules of DI is that there is no parental interference. In fact, if a parent suggests a solution or material for the team challenge, the solution or material suggested by the parents is declared off-limits. Kids are taught to respond to helpful hints from well-meaning but overbearing parents with a powerful one-liner that is designed to remind moms and dads that DI is supposed to be building skills in kids, not parents: “That’s a great idea, mom/dad. But now we can’t use it."

The DI year builds toward state (or provincial), national, and global championships. But even at the highest levels, competition is kept in perspective, Bordessa stresses. “There’s no sense of, ‘Ha! We won.’”

Bordessa’s two boys have reaped the benefits of being involved in DI. (Her oldest son has been involved for seven years.) “They’re better at solving life’s little problems. Little things don’t throw them the same way any more. They’re capable of looking at several different ways of solving the same problem. And they are better at communicating whatever it is they want to say.”

These videos will give you a sense of what DI is all about. For specific information about the costs involved in purchasing DI curriculum materials, visit the DI store or contact CreativePrograms.org (a DI affiliate in the GTA).

The Challenges of a Mega-City Pregnancy: Mega and Minor -- A List in Progress

Clearly, it's no cakewalk being pregnant in New York City. According to writer Emily Nussbaum:

"No one offers you a seat on the subway. Everything smells terrible. It’s normal to walk twenty blocks through rain and heat and snow, just like a postman, except nonunion and with the mail sack tied to your abdomen. There’s remarkable pressure to look stylish and put together even when your ankles have swollen up to the size of Murray’s bagels."

Nussbaum's musings got me thinking about how being pregnant in New York compares to being pregnant in the GTA.

Here's what I've got on my list of challenges (both mega and minor) so far.

The scarcity of public washrooms. Face it, the GTA is Scroogeville when it comes to the availability of public washrooms. In fact, I have long suspected that washroom scarcity is an undiagnosed cause of pregnancy rage. Ever try to schedule your life and plan your errands around the availability of public washrooms?  Try doing that for nine-and-a-half months at a stretch and see how your mood is affected.

Lack of recognition for multi-season heroics. Depending on the date of conception and the date of delivery, a GTA mom-to-be can count on schlepping through slush/snow, splashing through puddles, and sweating through heat waves. And yet she doesn't get hailed as a hero in the same way as the folks who carry our mail do. What's with that?

Traffic: construction and weather-related. There is no such thing as a quick zip across town anywhere or anytime in the GTA. Whether your midwife is traveling to your home or you're heading to the hospital to give birth, the traffic facts of life will have to be factored into your birth plans. You can mull this over while you're commuting with a too-full pregnant bladder.

The shortage of midwives, obstetricians, and misc. healthcare resources. The supply of pregnant women hoping to have their babies delivered by midwives vastly exceeds the supply of midwives. Yep. You don't even have to be born yet to end up on your first health-care waiting list.

Now it's your turn. If you're pregnant, you've no doubt spent time in the middle of the night pondering the highs and lows of being pregnant in the GTA. And if you know a pregnant woman, you've no doubt been on the receiving end of some rants on this subject. Do tell....

Parenting Predictions: The Top Three Parenting Trends for 2009

Here are my picks for the top three parenting trends for 2009.

The Year of the Parent Activist

2009 will be the year of the parent activist.

Now don't get me wrong. Parents have always been activists: the ones organizing playground fundraisers and food-drives at schools; advocating for their kids' within the educational, social service, and/or health care systems (a slightly crazy-making experience at the best of times); and showing up at city hall en masse to work for the betterment of their neighborhoods.

But we'll see that mom-and-dad activist activity ramp up like never before as the 60's-style citizen activist and political movement from south of the border catch fire up here as well.

Frankly, it can't come quickly enough -- at a time like this when economic change is fast-moving and ruthless and the environment is being seriously harmed; we need to reinvent our cities and suburbs; social justice issues are demanding attention; and one of our most valued sources of information is under siege -- again.

Who can afford the luxury of standing on the sidelines at a time like this?

As Dan Carter, a one-person activist movement based out of hard-hit Oshawa, likes to put it: the time is now. In other words, if you're waiting for the economy to improve to start working for change, forget about it. Bad times are the best times to work for change. (Watch for my profile of Dan in my next column.)

A Get-Real, Let's-Work-Together Parenting Style

Parents will continue to gravitate to what can best be described as a progressive parenting style.

This style has been emerging since the mid-1980s and now it has become a full-blown parenting movement that recognizes that all family members, especially children, deserve to be treated with respect; and that family life is immensely richer when relationships are based on love, not fear.

This style of parenting recognizes that there are real problems to be deal with in our society and in our families and that the only way to deal with these problems is by acknowledging that they exist (as opposed to playing ostrich).

This style of parenting is consultative rather than dictatorial (input from all family members is sought, where appropriate: the three year old doesn't get to choose her bedtime because she doesn't have the same understanding of child development as the grownups who've been given the privilege and responsibility of raising her); and parents welcome input from a variety of sources so that they can benefit from a variety of ideas and then decide what will work best for their families.

Celebrity Baby Bumplets

The celebrity baby bumps will dwindle into celebrity baby bumplets. Consider what this LA plastic surgeon had to say about the nouveaux conceived recently: "Women are just not gaining as much weight as they used to. Particularly in LA - you can't even tell they're pregnant." That will either increase the pressure on ordinary moms to look freakishly non-pregnant from conception through delivery day -- and to bounce back Hollywood-style. (That means with the help of a nutritionist, a personal trainer, and -- if necessary -- a post-baby "mommy makeover" plastic surgery package.) Or it may convince ordinary moms that celebrity pregnancy has finally gone to far. (Or not far enough on the weight gain front.)

The Ideal School: Where The In Thing is Inclusion [ Part I in a new series on making change ]

Have you heard about The Ideal School of Manhattan – a school created by a group of parents whose vision of learning is truly all-inclusive? Not only does the school welcome students with special needs (25 percent of the spaces in the school are reserved for such students): it's become one of the most popular and most respected schools in New York City, period. There's a waiting list for spots -- this despite the fact that tuition costs $32,000 US per student per year.

The Ideal School is a rare gem. It's not unusual for kids with special needs (particularly those that manifest themselves as behavioral issues) to end up moving from one private school to another as they repeatedly wear out their welcome. If the parents of the other children at a school have been sold a round-peg-only vision for that school and your child is obviously a square peg, there may be subtle (and then not-so-subtle) pressure on you and your child to start acting like a round beg or move on.

That's what makes the Ideal School's policy of welcoming a variety of different-shaped pegs -- or children -- stand out in such a positive way. This is what education should be like -- and yet in both the public and private system, too often the reality falls far short of the Ideal. The public system is underfunded; the private system tends to be too exclusive, with administrators trying to perpetuate an alternative vision of what an educational utopia should be like -- an educational environment that may not include a classmate who is struggling with a behavioral problem.

Maybe that's what well-meaning parents and administrators think they should be protecting Johnny from -- anything that could distract Johnny from learning -- but creating an artificial learning environment -- one that doesn't reflect the reality of the real world -- isn't providing that child with much of an education. Sure, the child may master his times tables a little more quickly, but as for learning important life-lessons in tolerance, acceptance of differences, and getting along with all kinds of people -- those lessons kind of get lost along the way if every child in the classroom is uniformly mainstream.

The benefits of inclusion are powerful and well-documented. As the Ideal School website notes:

"Students, both with and without special needs, benefit academically from the teaching strategies and classroom adaptations employed, such as personalized lesson plans, activity-based learning, differentiated instruction, peer mentoring, cooperative group learning, and the use of instructional technology. As students have positive experiences with children with special needs, they become more appreciative of differences, have an enhanced awareness of fairness and equality, and improved self-images. An inclusive education provides each student with an excellent academic foundation and empowers each child to succeed in a truly diverse society with self-confidence, acceptance, and compassion."

So what does this mean in practical terms? By the time they graduate, students at the Ideal School will have learned that we all have unique strengths and abilities to share with one another -- which means that none of us have to strive to be perfect. What a liberating message to pass along to kids from privileged families who might otherwise feel pressured to build upon the legacies of generations of over-achievers. Instead of perpetually focusing inward on what they themselves should be achieving, those students can celebrate the achievements of other classmates.

It's bold thinking like this -- thinking that is born of the dreams of parents who want something better for their kids -- that has the potential to change the world, one kid, one school, and one neighborhood at a time.

Obviously, the cost of this particular option makes this particular solution, as presented, unaffordable to all but a select few. That's not what I'm suggesting we build upon here. What I'm suggesting is that we borrow the vision -- the idea that parents can solve problems by engaging in innovative, forget-the-way-we've-always-done-things thinking and by working together. That's a model that's worked time and time again: grassroots parenting initiatives driven by genuine need and parent passion. It's a pretty unbeatable recipe for making change.

Family Triage

I don't think my husband has seen the latest Statistics Canada sandwich generation stats.

He's been too busy being one.

The thickness of the slices of bread in that sandwich (two aging parents, four growing kids) and the skimpiness of the filling (one severely stretched 40-something guy) vary from week to week. Tonight my husband is looking like a the filling in a sandwich that has fallen to the bottom of someone's backpack: kind of squished and flattened.

He's made two separate trips to the city where his parents live –- a city two hours from our home -- and he'll be making at least one more trip before the week is finished.

Both of his parents were admitted to the hospital this week with separate health concerns.

At times like this, we switch into family triage mode. My husband focuses on caring for his parents while I do my best to hold things the most important things together on the home front. It's the only way to get over the hump.

When I compare my situation, as the oldest of four girls in a family, to my husband's situation, as an only child, I realize how lucky I am. When my Dad had his pacemaker surgery back in the spring, I had the luxury of sharing the worry load with my three sisters. My husband, being an only child, is on his own. And so are my in-laws, much of the time.

The health care system conspires against families – or so it seems at times like this. While we would love to have his parents move to our community so that they could live out their final years close to us, the chronic shortage of doctors in our community makes that impossible. It would be sheer insanity to move two elderly people with chronic and acute medical needs to a community such as ours: a place where 1 in 5 residents can't find a doctor. And so my in-laws struggle on day-to-day, two hours away from us, lonely and isolated much of the time; my husband burns up the highway between here and there and is slowly but surely burning out himself; and the health of three people close to me is being affected (four, if you count our son with Aspergers syndrome, who finds it really difficult to cope with his dad's many absences).

I try to provide whatever help I can to my husband, but I can't download the worry and frustration he is shouldering. All I can do is listen from the vantage point of someone who has been there and who knows that you have to do whatever it is you can do and feel you have to do and, at the same time, forgive yourself for not being able to do it all.

Often what you want to do is just be there -- to make time for both conversation and silence. I spent the night before my grandmother's death sleeping in an empty hospital bed in her room so that I would be there if she woke in the night and had something to say; or if she simply needed reassurance that she was loved and that someone from the family was near.

Just as you can never get back those early months in your baby's life, you can never recapture those final chapters in the life of someone who is growing older. And because you do not know ahead of time just how many chapters of that person's life story will ultimately be written, you don't want to take for granted any of the scenes in that story as they play out. After all, you're writing the script that will ultimately form more of the text of your memories -- the stories you pass down to your children and your grandchildren when they say, "Tell me about your parents...." many years from now.

* * *

Worth noting: "Boomers now live in a world of paid work, caring for children (with more adult children still living at home) and increasingly long-lived parents and friends. The size of the “sandwich generation,” the generation caring for children and older parents, is likely to grow. The aging of the baby boomers will result in a much larger proportion of seniors in the population. With lower fertility rates, there may be fewer adults to care for the elderly. Seniors already provide a significant proportion of care for other seniors."
- Eldercare: What We Know Today by Kelly Cranswick and Donna Dosman

Mother Metamorphosis

My first year of motherhood was all about change: watching my daughter wriggle and crawl from baby stage to baby stage and feeling myself make the mind shift required to move from the intimacy of the-two-of-us to the much more complex family that is born the moment baby makes three. It was no longer me and him: it was me and him and me and her and her and him: three times as many relationship combos to maintain in the same small space. No wonder the house suddenly felt so much more crowded. The house wasn't simply overflowing with piles upon piles of baby stuff, piles that grew by the day as new parcels arrived by mail, courier, or baby-obsessed neighbor. The house was fully charged with the high voltage energy of new relationship possibilities, possibilities that were both brilliant and dark at the same time.

I remember feeling this strange mix of anxiety and joy: being simultaneous head-over-heels in love with my daughter and freaked out about how much my own life was changing, particularly my relationship with my husband. I couldn't believe that a person could be so happy and so sad at the same time. Were he and I destined to drift apart at the same time that we had the best reason in the world to want to stay together? If we couldn't even carry on a conversation without arguing about something,would we ever come out of this dark place as a couple?

I've been thinking back to this time a lot lately, because I've emerged from another year of growth and introspection. At first everything seemed scary and uncertain in the wake of my youngest son's Aspergers diagnosis, but now my husband and I have found our way back to something resembling the new normal again. In the early days, weeks, months, I remember feeling like a new mom again; realizing that I didn't even know what questions to ask in order to figure out what I needed to know.

For the longest time, I felt like I was walking around in a daze that was eerily reminiscent of the isolating fog of new motherhood: unable to concentrate and yet thinking all the time. My husband felt much the same way, and yet we were each in our own, separate fogs. This time, with the benefit of knowledge gained over 20 years of parenting, we groped through the fog until we found one another. We knew we needed to remind ourselves that we were on the same team, not at war with one another; that we needed to support one another while we were supporting our son.

When I signed up for this motherhood gig 20 years ago, I thought that being a mother was all about raising children. I had no idea that my children would also be raising me – providing me with opportunities to learn and grow more than I ever thought possible, particularly during those times when I was challenged to the max as a mother.

Don't get me wrong. I certainly wasn't grateful for those soul-wrenchingly painful parent development opportunities while I was living through them, but, looking back, I know now that I wouldn't have developed the ability to care deeply for parents and children in all kinds of circumstances nor would I have evolved into the person I am today if I hadn't been given the opportunity to experience so many different types of highs and lows myself. If I'd set up parenting digs at 123 Easy Street, I might easily have assumed that all parents and kids live on streets like that street. I would have been terribly wrong.

Because our family has spent time on Infertility Crescent and Stillbirth Street and Learning Disabilities Lane and Eating Disorders Drive and Depression Drive and Aspergers Syndrome Street and at other assorted addresses, I know that Easy Street is a very tiny street; and that some of the families who have houses there are living in a state of self-delusion. They aren't really living the picture-perfect existence they think they are living. At any time, the foundations of their houses and their lives could come tumbling down.

Parents who've lived on the streets that spiral off from Easy Street know what it's like to feel as emotionally downtrodden as a partially stepped on or totally flattened caterpillar -- the kind of feeling you get when your something worrying or terrible is happening or has happened to your child. At first you think you're going to stay in flattened caterpillar mode forever. And then you decide that what has happened to your child will not be in vain: you will find a way to make something positive come from this experience. And so you start to inject life back into your squished caterpillar body even though, at first, your body says, "What's the point?" At some point, you find the courage to wriggle out of the what's-the-point cocoon you retreated into when you were at your most vulnerable. You reach out to the only ones who can truly understand (a group of formerly squished caterpillars who have somehow morphed into butterflies). You work hard to heal yourself and the rest of your family and to recreate your life in a new way. Then you watch yourself soar above the worries of the day, knowing you have what it takes to help yourself and your family weather the next storm.

Note:
I've just given my personal blog -- The Mother of All Blogs -- a major revamp. I've moved it over to TypePad and added links to hundreds (there may be over a thousand) of links to parenting resources and articles (with many more to come). If you're used to linking to http://www.motherofallblogs.com, you don't have to do a thing. You've moved with the blog. If you used to link to the blogspot address, you need to change your link for my blog over to the new address.