Christmas but comes once a year…
Trying to make it special, trying to meet psycho social, emotional, dietary,financial, needs, trying to enjoy, following my heart…
It all seems to contradict each other at the moment.
The happier I am, the more unhappy my family seem to be.
I just dont get it.
I think I just need let go. Let go of my control. Let go of my role.
Just see what happens.
If I free them maybe they won’t come back, maybe they will.
I need to let go…
I’m proud.We made our first dinner for friends.
Reframing trauma is starting to work.
I created some christmasy ingredients with a twist -dishes.Turkey breast in a tomato, spinach and Chorizo sauce. Chocolate cheesecake with sweet cranberry sauce.
He made Thai soup and delicious sides. We danced around each other, sharing our cooking space elegantly. A symbiosis of kindness meets kindness.
What a team we’re becoming! Our guests loved being waited on and it was a total pleasure.
The Prosecco flowed and the laughter reigned. Long may this continue…
Was so great to be in the presence of a dear friend today.
We need connection so very badly. All of us. No matter how much we may love our solitary sojourns, other voices keep us tied into a wider community.
I need the affirmation she gives me. It feeds me and strengthens me.
She’s always believed that I have been abused and that Faith in my Word is more valuable than Gold.
She’s always believed that I’m a good mother and again this contradicts my ex and the ICOC church that denigrates women to pre feudal times.
She’s always been adamant that I am capable of looking after myself.
Beautiful sentiments that keep me living and breathing.
Let the good times roll.
So lovely to be in loving company. Feeling warm, fuzzy and happily hazy. So nice to be a little girl again, attended to and loved.
Re writing my skewed childhood in my 40s.
Why not?
Thank God I’m going out tonight. Hoping to find some positive energy to turn that down pression toward light and sun.
Winter is seeming to drain the life blood out of me.
This week feels like its put alot of us on the back foot
Days are hard and night seems to be the most inviting. Itching for unconsciousness to take me far away.
Ofsted under the brand spanking new framework put the whole school on heightened alert and tension.
Failing hot water drove me and the kids to biting one liners, filling up kettles and buckets with boiling water, incessant moaning and endless calls to the Council.
Proving I should retain child benefit that my ex is trying to take from me, find witnesses for an oncoming court case and fight for benefits that are my Right: enveloped me in mounds of hard, unsympathetic, blank, crackling, white paper – the canvass for hard evidence, I Must Find.
This is too hard.
It’s All on me.
4 hours of driving each day in a derelict car that needs daily top ups of water and oil filled me with exhausted numbness.
Couldn’t even write a blog. Couldn’t enunciate the sadness fog.
Can’t even find it in me to care if the Conservatives get in again, or look forward .. .
After witnessing something close to shell shock, when my students had to do an assessment…I decided to drill down and find out why…
We had a little ‘family chat’ in between analysing some Steinbeck and their feelings and views bit me to the core.
They believe that if they fail their GCSEs- their life will be over.
It’s as if they have one shot at success and that’s it. Do or die.
One teacher told them that they’d end up homeless if they didn’t get their gcses. Other teachers constantly threaten them with failing their exam in over 2 years if they don’t memorize yet another key bit of information.
They said their assemblies focus on GCSEs the whole time and they’re already fatigued by this incessant threat of possible failure years before the real thing.
As they’re in a lower set, they already feel inferior to their peers and many just expect themselves to not understand or write very little. (Here in lies the issues around setting.)
I know this is how most children feel in Secondary school and the clear pressure they feel from school to get it right NOW is turning more and more children off. This immediately negates a nurturing environment into a monolithic, minimalist definition of success.
I told them straight that you can restart your life at any given moment. There’s no finishing line! That GCSEs or anything else do not define their worth.
After doing some intensive timed work to acclimatise to exam situations, I then sang a couple of verses of an Adele song and they left happier and more confident than before.
I have some beautiful students.
Beautiful souls. Eager, delicate, in need of gentle guidance.
We debate, we reveal parts of our personalities, we experience time together…growing older together. Appreciating genius words, colliding with notions, crashing into history and showering us with emotion.
Don’t think for a second that my classroom is idyllic- it’s far from it. I get seriously wound up and so do they. I admit I’m a smothering Matriarch.
But it’s safe. I really work hard to make it emotionally safe.
Until we had to do out first assessment today configured loosely around GCSE exams.
Some of them literally crumbled before my eyes. They wilted. The stress was palpable and they’re 2 years off the real thing!
As teachers we act as a conduit for the extreme expectations of the management. The kids feel our intense burden of how do their books look, are they making adequate progress, are they engaging enough…how that makes Us look.
The current education system makes us care about our career and professional prowess over forming young minds.
It’s agonising to watch. Supremely painful to watch their bravado, their insight, their brilliant inference meld into a quivering wreck.
My bouncy, intuitive student couldn’t find a word to put to paper: despite my empathetic nudges, she had to leave the room, cry and tell me how much she cant cope with getting it wrong. I told her to chill and read a book.
Another boy, spent the whole lesson in sick bay after some sorry attempts of mine to prompt him.
So many students couldn’t remember their quotes and were flummoxed. Any hurdle tripped them up.
Others needed constant reminding sentence by sentence after weeks of prep.
We talk about building robust future citizens. I think this new exam heavy curriculum is creating a massive chasm of the haves and have nots.
The few who can do tests and the many who find the order too tall.
Yes I learnt some important pointers today about their low self esteem and the need to practise the complex requirements of exams in tiny swallowable chunks.
But this kind of pressure definitely takes the joy out of Learning.
I am with my dear friend.
Have you ever felt like the broken you can only reveal itself in front of very special people?
I don’t even reveal this self to me.
Somehow, the honesty and realness of this connection means the painful stuff just oozes out.
I find myself behaving in strange ways that I don’t recognise…from the strong,independent, black, conscious, single mother I have been told I am.
I find myself filled with fear, a little girl, a baby sucking my thumb, I’m scared of being used, I’m scared to voice my feelings, I’m trembling to say ‘no, I don’t want this’.
Somehow, connecting with this traumatised child inside me is healing me, piece by piece.
Hearing her, holding her, accepting her is eschewing a new serenity.
Thank you Nikolas.
I love to celebrate craft, pursuit of excellence, Quality with a capital Q in whatever field.
Well we all know how much our hair means to us. All of it or none of it. Hair plagues the image-conscious- confidence.
My hairdresser has taken me through many life – hair styles. She knew me when I was living the lie- of Happy Families and ‘holier than though’ church.
She saw me try and assert Me in a coercive church and relationship.
She witnessed me go through many breakdowns…she witnessed me leave my family and crawl back in a suicidal state.
She watched me get help from Mental health workers, domestic abuse support, Judges, Social workers, nearly end up in a refuge, sofa surf and be finally housed for domestic abuse by the council.
Then she saw me start to listen to my intuition, my soul, my Politics, my Purpose in a cocoon of new and old loving friends and equilibrium.
Check her out. She does hair of all races, all styles. Dawnette, North London, UK
Mobile 079-563-30484
Boris Johnson called Muslim women letter boxes. So don’t vote Conservative.
This is the logic the anti Corbynite-Semetic movement are applying.
Jews don’t feel safe and it makes headline news to the point of impacting on an election mmmmmmmm
How safe do Muslim women feel? Their well being in the UK doesn’t make the front of the BBC news over and over and over.
In fact how safe do I feel as a Black woman? Completely vulnerable actually, not that anyone cares.
The difference between me, the Mulsim women Boris Johnson massacred and the Jews is We don’t have an equivalent of the Jewish Chronicle to voice the racism we endure at the hands of Jews and others in the establishment.
Another ‘spot the difference’ between me, my Muslim sister versus my Jewish compatriots, is we don’t have the economic power to get heard quick, destroy careers of genuine do gooders like Ken Livingstone (who gave me a Cambridge education for free) and JC (who unlike all politicians who we see sprawled over our screens campaigned for evil empires like Apartheid), or fill the obsequious boots of the establishment with trembling fear at the notion of us leaving the UK if the political party we abhor wins.
Money talks.
In fact, I think a lot of people in this country would say ‘good riddence’ if the racial likes of me and my Muskim sister departed from these British shores.
We suffer in silence. We are invisible. While anti semitism makes the headlines.
I won’t explain this one away as ‘Jews own the media’. Something we are all now banned from saying incase you lose your job, become ostracized by bullying and peer pressure that is being aggressively used in this election.
Political correctness controlled by the few, not the many.
What I will share is a story a lovely Jewish woman secretely told me when our teachers union were being squashed for being anti semetic, by Jewish teachers for supporting Palestenian schools; when the black teachers didn’t even turn up for these motions cause their cause and unfair treatment is irrelevant and unimportant, of course!!!!!
She said that she hated the way Jewish people go on and on and on about their suffering. It embarasses her and she violently opposes the way they go on and on in the media and the union.
She insisted I keep this quiet when with the Jewish teachers for fear of negative repercussions in her political life.
If a Jew said this, what hope have we got for a fair election?
allandnothingsokoya 