I am a “professional” volunteer. Since my kids were born I have done Sunday School, Nursery, Vacation Bible School, La Leche League, Protest Organization, Parent/Teacher League, Couch to 5k Coaching, Girl Scouts and various other one time benefits and charitable events. I am blessed to have the time to do it. I love it. And I choose to be self employed so that I can make time for my volunteer commitments. What I don’t earn in money I compensate for in friendships, freedom, and time with my kids.

I have read a few blog articles in my time complaining about being the volunteer and being criticized by the parents who benefit from others setting aside time to make it happen. I get that. I have been ignored, un-thanked, and dismissed. And worse, I’ve been complained about, gossiped about and yelled at. I come home and tell Rob about it, and he asks me if I’m sure this is what I want to do.

Here’s the thing. Just like I’m trying my best, I think the parents of the kids I’m volunteering for are also trying their best. They have less time to commit than I do, but they just as much want their kids to have fun. They have good ideas about how it should be done. They hope that their kids will learn and grow and be better people because they are involved in extra-curriculars. The same reason I signed up my kid is the reason they signed up their kid. The only difference is that I had the time and the inclination to be the adult volunteer.

So instead of complain about how often people talk to (and about) the job volunteers do, I’m going to assume everyone wants to get along and be friends. I’m going to assume that the other parents are thankful for what I am doing, because I know that they are. But just like I sometimes make mistakes and lack tactfulness, so do these other people. So I’d like to make a few suggestions about how to approach a volunteer when you hope they’d made some changes.  

#1- Take into consideration that I am not being paid to do this, so there is no incentive to keep doing it outside of my own enjoyment of it.  

If you bring a lot of complaints, or a whole lot of expectations to me I may quit because I can’t live up to those standards. If I quit and no one else steps up, the whole activity is gone. For your kid and my kid. So, please acknowledge that I am giving it all I have to give and try to accept my limitations. And please, forgive me when I mess up.

#2-  Remember to be polite. 

Some activities come with a lot of stress built in. Like controlling a group of kids in public, or making sure you don’t forget to bring 10 different safety items and the permission slips. I might be trying to keep my cool when I feel seriously stressed out. I might have been arguing with my daughter about dessert in the car on the way here and she has been pushing my buttons for 30 minutes. It might take me 20 minutes longer to get here than you, and my husband is probably out of town so I have all three of my kids with me… And if you bring a grouchy complaint, I might not take it very well. Please and Thank You are for adults, too.

#3- Make your complaint privately.

All troop leaders and coaches have to give you their phone number. And many of them also give an email address. I’d much rather get a call or an email from someone than have them bring up a complaint during an activity. There are others around. I have to think on my feet. It’s embarrassing. And my concentration is divided because I’m trying to keep track of kids and and stuff.

#4- Make sure you really think this situation is important before you bring it up.  

If you have been generally happy but I keep doing one particular thing that annoys you, please consider if you could just let it go. I may not always remember to bring the newsletter. I may get kids’ attention by raising my voice for a moment instead of clapping my hands. These things may not be your preference, but really, they are just the way I get things done.

But if I have missed a few important things, or hurt someone’s feelings (all possibilities, I have a lot on my plate!) please, let me know! Or if you know of some way to get things done more efficiently, please tell me! I would love to save time and I may not know of the amazing efficiency method that you do and I would love to adopt it.

#5- Make sure your complaint is reasonable.

If I haven’t done every amazing thing you hoped I would do in this activity, it’s probably because I couldn’t. I average 4 to 9 hours of unpaid work every week on top of running my own small business and taking care of three kids under 8. I’m not bragging. I’m telling you how it is for all of us volunteers. There are some volunteers I know who do 5 times more than I do and work full time.

If you had some goals for this activity and they weren’t achieved, offer to help make them happen. Sometimes I may seem like I want to do all of the work, but it’s actually just me not wanting to bother others. I really do want some help. But I don’t know what you’re good at, and so you need to tell me. I’d love to pass the torch for a week or two and be a “regular” mom for once while we all enjoy something you are really good a sharing. Call the local business and set up a field trip. Teach us how to make baskets. Or just help me collect end of the year paperwork so it gets done on time.

We’re all trying our best. We all want to have fun. And honestly, I really want to be your friend! I hope these suggestions will help everyone, the volunteers and the drop-off parents, have a better season. We are all here for the same reason. We love this activity, it’s important to us, and we want it to be the best it can be. And mostly, know I am not complaining. 99% of the time we are all having fun. I really do love the people I volunteer for. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love it!

I was wrong. I sat on my high horse and felt sure our family would be different until that high horse marched me right into reality and dropped me in a puddle. I have spent every day in the car home from school with Elise, a very crabby 6 year old who takes it all out on everyone within earshot. I have tried letting her pick the music. I have tried being sure to bring a snack. I have tried bringing books for her. I have tried engaging her in one-on-one talks. None of this has had the power to stop her from melting down after school. She is just can’t keep it together.

Finally, I asked her why she was finding it so hard to be calm in the car. Finally meaning in April, the second to last month of the school year (I’m a slow learner). She was so clear in her response, “I’m so tired after being good all day at school I forget that my words hurt people.”

So I got her an iPod shuffle and she listens to it whenever we’re driving. She’s around people all day. She’s going here and there with me all day. She has to be engaged with others all day, whether she’s in the mood or not. So, reality has once again shown me how parenting really is, instead of how I thought it should be. I was wrong again, but at least this time I’m not surprised. And now our car is full of peace. No one screaming at anyone, everyone enjoying their own down time after school. And Elise is recharged enough after a car ride to hop out and enjoy a day at the park with her family, engaged and participating with the real world.

I stand corrected.

Also this is what I did today while the kids were up and I couldn’t sit down and write without interruption. Cleaning out the craft room…. Still isn’t done….

Something I almost never talk about is the history of mental illness in my family. And I almost never talk about it because we were all hopeless and it was the scariest thing that ever happened to us. The author of the article “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” very accurately explained the way I felt when I lived at home with a person who was mentally ill.

Because the person who was ill has completely recovered, for reasons I cannot understand, I will publicly refer to this person as “my family member” in order to protect their privacy. And I have spoken with this person in the past about having permission to write about our shared past. I have been struggling with the words and timing, but now seems like the right time.

When I was a young adult, the years just before and just after meeting Rob, my family member was dangerously mentally ill. It began as what was diagnosed as bi-polar disorder, and my family member was prescribed prozac, my family member was a minor at the time. We now talk about the increased risk for suicide with the use of anti-depressants, but at the time we didn’t know. When my family member called me at work after taking two bottles of pills, things got scary, with repeated stays in the mental ward of our local hospital.

The eventual medicine cocktail given to my family member, intended to treat their mental symptoms of schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety did not help. Instead my family member went into cardiac arrest in the halls of our highschool. My family member was threatened with expulsion for drug use on campus before my mom was called in to share my family member’s medical history. My mom chose to stop giving my family members any medication because she was worried my family member may die, and was becoming increasingly unstable. Besides collapsing in hallways, they were hearing voices which instructed my family member to kill my grandmother who lived with us at the time. We had no idea what to think or do to help my family member, we just hoped nothing bad would happen.

While my family member struggled to live with their mental illness, they won a $40,000 scholarship to college, and graduated with a higher than 4.0 gpa. After graduation, my family member got in their car and drove out to the west coast. We worried we would never see them again… and lo and behold they didn’t come home in time for college and lost their scholarship. The only reason my family member came home is because on their circuit through to the east coast they crashed their car 80 miles from our home.

There is so much more I can say about the minutia of incidents. And if I did, people could accuse me of trivializing my family member, reducing them to a stereotype of a mentally ill person. I loved this person so intensely, and I knew that every beautiful thing about them was being strangled by disease. For those intense years, this is what defined our family. I feared that my family member would hurt themself, hurt someone else, or disappear all together. And the medical system caused our family more hurt than help. We shared our struggle with nearly no one because we didn’t know what to say. We were hopeless, and my mom was pushed so far, I think she shut down completely.

Today my family member is completely functioning. They are well, they are productive, they have meaningful relationships, they are unmedicated. But what was that? What happened? The system has not even given us the framework to understand what happened so we are left with stereotypes and misunderstandings. Or we just ignore it and don’t talk about it, which is what my family chooses to do most of the time.

It is disturbing. The way we marginalise people with mental illness is disturbing. The way we scapegoat them is disturbing. The way we medicate them is disturbing. Even if 99.9% of mentally ill people are not murderers, it doesn’t change the fact that we need to fix this. We need to understand what is happening within them, and we need to discover how to help them. And we need to support the family members who love the mentally ill, because they are suffering just as much as the one who is ill, and they have no idea what to do about it. We need to fix that. The whole thing is broken.

EDITED:

I spoke with my family member about posting this, just in case they wanted me to remove it. This is what they responded with (and then gave me permission to post):

Keep it up, please. I know a lot of parents read your blog, and I think it is important to discuss these things in an open way. No one shames people when they say, “my stomach/ arm/ head hurts,” but mental health problems are often ignored for various reasons by the mentally ill, as well as those around them, until they reach a critical level. I often wonder what would have happened to me had someone noticed sooner, and had I gotten the right help. I remember being depressed in preschool! There was an elephant-shaped chair I would sit on and cry for no reason. I told my teachers that I missed home because it was the only reason I could think of to be sad, even though I wasn’t sad about it.
We as families and a society need to start taking these things seriously, but also need to realize that the ‘mentally ill’ are not just homeless people talking to themselves. They are our sisters, brothers, parents, friends, etc. They (we) are smart, loving people capable of so much more than the illness allows. And we should not shame the ill, nor should we trivialize the illness any more than we shame and trivialize the diabetic.
Thanks for being respectful and offering to remove the post. I hope, however, that by leaving it up someone may read it and think a little differently about mental illness, and how we deal with it as a country and as people. I love you too!

I have told my own girls that I love them about 3,000 times this weekend. I will give love to them and fill them up, no matter what.

Love is the answer 99% of the time, but when it doesn’t work, what do we do then?

It takes a lot of mental work to make a short sentence interesting to a broad audience. You can write a paragraph on facebook which complains about the crappy driver in front of you, or you can show your subscribers why this crappy driver was worth sharing with them. You can create a common experience. You can log in and say, “I’m having a terrible day staying here with my kids in the rain and they won’t stop fighting.” Or you can bring all of the other people who are also lonely and on the edge of running screaming into the sunset to your crazy house for a minute so you all feel less alone. I enjoy the art of writing small, accessible pieces which mirror my life and entertain my friends.

I have been more active on facebook than twitter, and both more than here on the blog, mostly because I get more responses on facebook than anywhere else. I’m a super extrovert who loves to see that my words were received. But I am really reconsidering where I want to spend my efforts writing. We have owned this domain and the content for 5 years. It’s not going anywhere. One day facebook or twitter could evaporate and all of my photos, thoughts and work developing my writing voice could walk away with the platform. Can I break my addiction to comments and focus on writing here? If I link to facebook and twitter so that I can keep my writing here, where it is mine and it’s safe, would the link bring the readers with it? Would I become irrelevant if I don’t use the corporate social media that is so easy for everyone to automatically get my content? Is facebook the wallmart of self publishing? How many more questions can I fit in this paragraph?

They are made with brown fleece I got out of the remnant section. I cut a 9 inch by 2 inch strip of fleece and put a long bead of hot glue down the strip at an angle and folded the edge over. Then I rolled it into a  cupcake shape, fattest edge in the middle, moving out to the narrower edge. I covered the bottom of the roll with hot glue and stuffed it into a mini paper cupcake wrapper and squeezed a bead of hot glue around between the wrapper and the “cupcake.” After it was all gluey and my fingers were getting a bit uncomfortably warm I stuffed the whole thing into my mini-cupcake pan and put something heavy on top to hold it in until the hot glue dried.

I made a half dozen of the little guys. They’re great stocking stuffers, but I ruined the surprise by making them in front of Cress, so they went straight into the kitchen set toy bin.

It’s cool that I fudged the surprise. I’m making a hand knit poncho for Liv, knitted leg warmers for Elise and a koala applique shirt for Cress, so the handmade goodness is still going to flow.  I’ll be sure to post pictures as I finish projects!

Now I don’t want to pretend that I already had Evans’ concept in my head before I read her book, but I had told my very good friend Jennifer days before I heard the interview that I always default to love when I have a problem with scripture and I fall back on forgiveness when I may have allowed too much acceptance of “sin.”  How could I not read this book when she so clearly understood what I’ve been trying to get out of my heart and into the world for quite some time?

I’ve been reading it very quickly. I am not done with it yet, so I’m not ready to share all of my thoughts on it. Though honestly, I’m growing weary of sharing my thoughts on the internet (especially controversial ones) because then everyone gets to just decide what kind of person they think I am. But I will say this, I am so glad that Evans is representing the Christian Feminist position. She is smart, likable, a good researcher, and willing to change her mind. And though I may not be ready to open up a debate forum anytime soon, I am finally willing to come right out and say, I am a Christian Feminist. I am struggling to figure out what that means. And though I struggle, I know for sure that it means I want to actively work to advocate for women no matter what they choose for their lives/families. And I want to live to see the end of the Mommy Wars. That would be a good thing, too.

But here I am… Opening up again. Maybe it is time to be brave… maybe in my next post.

On Saturday morning Rob lost his grandfather, “Bunkle,” to a long fight with Alzheimer’s disease. His passing came suddenly, and though we were not completely prepared, the medical staff and grief councilors took amazing care of Bunkle and of our family. It was touching to be present in the room where a family took the time to care for each other so deeply. And it was moving to be there, giving reverence to the part of life which brings you into the next one.

So now we stop being fully present in this business of living. The deadlines have remained the same, but we are not attending to them with the same urgency we had before. Right now we are interrupted by remembrances. We are distracted by sorrow. Today we have prioritized loving our family and preparing for a funeral. Making a large meal is of utmost importance. We are taking the time to thank God for the life Bunkle lived, and the family he started. It’s not easy, but it is better than letting the grief pass you by, checking it off the list and moving on.