It works! It really works!

Today when I said it was time to go home after playing in the school yard, Taryn said, "Okay," and came with me.

Let me repeat that: Today when I said it was time to go home after playing in the school yard, Taryn said, "Okay," and CAME WITH ME. NOT A FUSS TO BE HAD.

This was not a typical scene for the Daly household even last month. I have so often felt frustrated and helpless to affect my children's behaviour. I tried to rely on positive reinforcements and consequences to get the right messages across.

I have tried attachment parenting now for a few weeks and I am sold. My children respond to me because I am responding to them. I am learning how to really love and care for them instead of focusing on their behaviour. I am finally, truly getting it.

This hits me at so many levels - intellectually (which is the usual pattern) emotionally (rarer) and spiritually (almost unheard of). I can understand cognitively what is going on in their little minds and hearts. But more than that, I am acting out of a place of feeling, which is something I usually suppress quite well. And spiritually there is this sense of journey, of how what I am learning from so many places is all part of a whole which God's hand is on.

I went to hear an author at McNally Robinson tonight: Mary Gordon, who wrote Roots of Empathy and founded the program by that name that runs in many Manitoba schools. She told a story about a student in this program. I'd heard the story before. But I cried. Let me repeat that: I CRIED. It's not that I'm incapable of crying - I do that lots, but usually in response to my own pain. Other people's experiences don't provoke tears as readily. I've learned to be very very guarded, and even when I've wanted to let down barriers I have felt like somewhere I walled myself in. Even as I write this, a part of me is saying, Jude, this is a moment of silly sentimentality that has no meaning in the whole of your life. In a couple of days you'll just be your usual steady self. And maybe that part of me is right. But at this moment, it feels really right to feel.

Feelings - Taryn had to see her baby pictures tonight to draw herself for her homework. Which meant Ashlin had to look at all her pictures, too. And there he is, my dad, holding his baby grandaughters, playing in the part, napping with one of them on his lap. They will not remember him. They will never know him. It is so sad, so bloody, horribly sad that he had to go.

Time to get my Con-Con to bed. But before I do, just want to say thanks to you, my friends, who have blogged and called in the last while. This place I'm in feels kind of weird and unsteady and it helps to hear that what I think and feel resonates.