music, therapy, and me

This is the first Holy Week in over two and a half decades where I am not leading worship as a church leader. I had a very down day yesterday, and I think that this is part of it. I am still mourning the loss of my part-time church job this school year. I know that they took advantage of me and used me in ways that were not part of my job description, but I still miss that role. I loved the people in the congregation (at least, the ones that didn't make do everything that others wouldn't volunteer to do, the ones who changed aspects of my job every Sunday morning, and the ones who outright lied to me many times), and I loved being part of their worship routine. I don't miss the liars and the hypocrites who felt that I should be doing jobs that were not my own without changing my salary or even giving me a cost of living increase for eight years. Even with all of that, I still miss the job - or is it the worship that I miss? I do not know. The feeling of grief was exacerbate...

Yesterday, I left a job that I have had for 26 years. I left it because it was a toxic work environment where I was used and assigned all sorts of things that I was not interested in. I did not get a pay increase for eight years. They decided to accept my resignation rather than give me the $157 annual increase that I asked for. So, I am no longer working at the church where I have been since 1998. There is a strange type of grief that happens when you leave a job that is similar to losing a person from your life but not exactly the same. I am crying about not being wanted by this community anymore, but I am also so happy about being out of the toxicity that surrounded my job. I spent most of the last year resenting a role imposed upon me that changed every week, often 4 minutes before the start of one of my roles without notice. I was also not given an evaluation, pay increase, or direction for eight years. I asked for a change in my responsibilities to make them more appropriate for ...

Please excuse me as I deviate from my usual Sunday post to talk about today, and its significance to my family. This is my mother's birthday. It is also the day that my father died, three years ago. This day is hard to navigate because while Dad died on this date, it is also a day for celebrating my Mother. It is hard to do both. As a result, I try to mark the anniversary of my Dad's death the day before rather than on today's date. This year, I am reminded of my parents' mortality more than I have been in the last two years. My mom got sick and had to be in the hospital for five days just recently. We didn't know what was going on, and it was pretty scary. We were able to rule out lots of things - not a heart condition, not the gallbladder, things like that - but it took a long time to figure out what was going on. It turns out that it was a reaction to the medication her cardiologist prescribed. She is now off that medication and seeing all sorts of new doctors to...

It is Sentimental Sunday, and my brain is not very cooperative, but that is the nice thing about Sentimental Sundays - I get to review my past posts to see what past me was writing about. Today's post comes from 1/25/2021 and is all about my upstairs neighbors and the incident that drove me (finally) into homeownership! January 2021 was a rough time for my family. My father died on my mother's birthday early in the month. We had to navigate life and grief and COVID and new family situations. It was not the easiest of times, but my family was surviving. I was in my apartment, missing my cat who died two weeks before my father, and trying to grieve whilst away from all that I wanted to be near. To add to all the grieving and changes in my family life, my upstairs neighbors were becoming a problem. Here are the details . I don't know much about them, but I do know that they became very much a problem during this time. In fact, this was the last straw for me, and I started loo...

I woke up late this morning and then found news that the husband of another friend has passed away. This friend also lost her father earlier this year, so she now has to figure out how to move forward in a world where she does not have her husband either. This is my second friend to lose her husband and then face being a single mother to a boy and a girl. My heart hurts for all of them, but it hurts more for the kids. My father died on January 7, 2021. I had 50 years of life with my father. I miss him every day and so much more when others go through grief due to the loss of their own fathers. I know what it is like to think about sharing something with him and then not be able to share that because he is no longer present on this world. I had 50 years. The children that I know did not have that type of time. Now, I know that they do not know the difference. They just know that their Dads are gone now. They will miss the presence of those Dads for a very long time. I mourn the opportun...

I just have time for a very short post today, but there have been many things that I have thought about wanting to write about but those ideas slip through my head when it is actually time to write. I need to write them down - that is the best way for me to remember things that I want to remember... ANYWAY... The reason that I have a short amount of time is that I wrote a long email to a friend of mine. She has lost her husband quite suddenly and is trying to figure out how to be a single parent. We found out yesterday that my sister's best friend from elementary school had a husband pass away. This summer has been difficult for friends' husbands. I am finding that my own grief gets restarted when others experience their own losses. I have to remember that my grief is different from theirs, but I often find myself back in the throes of my own grief when I am thinking about children losing their fathers. I lost mine when I was 50, but Dad's absence still affects me. I am so ...

Note: This post is all about my Father's death last year. This may be a trigger for those who are not comfortable with expressions of grief. Today is the first anniversary of my Dad's death. It is also my Mom's 77th birthday. This is a problem for us because we can't NOT recognize Mom, but we are all missing Dad even more on this day since it is the anniversary of his leaving. Mom is not sure how she wants to mark either of these occasions. I am trying really hard to do my own celebration of life - both the life that ended and the life that is going on - today. I am not sure how to do this, though. My Dad's death was the first death in my nuclear family. My grandparents have died, great aunts and uncles have died, but this was the first time that my immediate family changed significantly through death. Our family unit changed. Dad is no longer on the end of the telephone line. He's no longer there to talk me down when I am too caught up in my emotional brain to ...

EGAD! The last time I tried to write on this blog was a week ago. I didn't finish the post, so there has been silence from this keyboard for this entire week, so let me catch you up with all the stuff that has happened here in just seven short days. My mother and my sister arrived exactly on time (we are a bit concerned about getting them home, but they are here). I got them back to my house at 1am on Sunday morning, shuffled them off to the new mattress sets, and then went upstairs for three hours of sleep before heading off to church to do the children's part of worship. It went off without a hitch - even the littles sang their hearts out! I returned to my house to find that my sister and mother had started right in with the boxes in various areas of the house - the kitchen, bathroom, and office/craft studio. We went to get them a rental car for the week and then went out for lunch and some "necessity" shopping. After that excursion, I was exhausted, so I said goodn...

In yesterday's faculty meeting, I was informed that my music therapy space is once again being taken away from me to accommodate offices. I attempted to ask for clarification, was redirected in front of my co-workers, and then burst into tears in front of the entire faculty. My question was not answered, and now I am humiliated, very upset about not having my music therapy space secure, and ashamed of my response. I am tired of this happening to me. In my time at my facility, this particular situation has happened six different times in my ten moves around the complex. It is always interesting that I get kicked out of a treatment space in favor of giving other people offices. I am taking this very personally at the moment (rational brain is not anywhere to be seen) and did not get an answer to my question in the moment which could have settled this entire situation down if the administrator had just taken the 3 seconds to answer. I am very skittish when it comes to my space, and I ...

Trigger Warning: This post includes conversation about the deaths that my family has experienced recently.   I woke up extra early this morning and could tell it was nowhere near time to get up. I rolled over and actually went to sleep (which is unusual for me). I then dreamed. Now, I don't usually remember dreams unless they are full of negative emotions, and these dreams were just that - full of grief. For some reason, William Shatner was in the first part of the dream and the second half took place in the kitchen and hallway of the church that I grew up in back many decades ago (but that still looks exactly the same as it did back then). There were two people who had lost their adult children in the span of my dream - William and another person (I remember recognizing her, but I cannot remember who it is now). I was there when both of them heard about their loved ones. I woke up fully engulfed in my grief for them and in my own grief. There was just too much similarity between m...

Okay, this isn't too bad. I'm sitting in my hotel room, waiting for my sister and mom to wake up and get going. We made it to our final destination yesterday without too much hullabaloo and spent some time with family. I've already had some excitement. There was a fire alarm around 5am. I panicked a bit, deemed what was most necessary to grab and then made it to the door. The guy next door was less panicked than i. About then, the alarm stopped. I don't think my mom and sister even heard it. You know !e, though. Once I'm up, I'm up. So, now I am waiting for the west coasters to wake up and get going. I'm not really expecting them for several more hours. My cousin told us to arrive around lunchtime today, so we will try for that time... We are getting ready for the memorial service tomorrow. Apparently there will be cousins from the other side of my aunt's family. I have never met any of those family members before. My cousin-in-law and second cousins wil...

As of 3:05pm this afternoon, I will be on bereavement/personal leave and will be heading east towards my cousin's memorial service. I am both looking forward to being there and dreading it at the same time. There are way too many reasons to get into here, but this may be a difficult week for me. I am looking forward to my stay in various hotels as well as spending time with family members, but I am not happy about the fact that we are having to memorialize a family member. Visits centered around grief tend to be very wearing for me, so I am practicing my gracious escapes and breathing techniques to help me get through some of the more strenuous times ahead. The last part of our trip will be with the other side of the family and should be less emotionally charged.  I still have to get through two group sessions and observing my intern as she does three group sessions and an individual session. At that point, I am abandoning her to the responsibilities of an intern for seven work day...

I am going to be gone from my computer most of this and next week, so do not be alarmed if blog posts become a bit less regular. My life now includes a memorial service for a cousin who died in July as well as time with her family and with my mother's family. We all decided to sacrifice our paid time off to head back to their homes to see them. We will be living in hotels and masking as much as necessary, so it should be a strange visit, but also it will be a good one. I have not taken this much time away from work without being sick in all the time I have worked at my facility. (At least, I don't think so...) For the first time ever, I have the tools that I need to provide digital resources to my clients while I am gone, so I am working on using my resources to provide alternative session options to just using the sub plan materials that I always have available for kids to use. I hope that my students will enjoy the information that I put together on different jobs and that te...

It has been a week since I felt motivated at all to sit down and write. There has been lots happening in my life that have spiraled out of control lately, so it has been a difficult week on many levels. Please indulge me as I deviate from my planned post to a catch up type of post as I am trying really hard to figure some things out and move forward in a vastly changed and constantly changing world. This post contains some discussion about grief and loss, so if these topics are not something you feel equipped to go through right now, please do not hesitate to stop reading and leave this place at any time. I am finding that these topics are difficult for me to experience vicariously at the moment, but I am living some of this, so it is something that I need to write about. Last Sunday afternoon, my Aunt called me to tell me that my cousin had been found, deceased. My cousin had left her home where she lived with her parents, two weeks before and was not responding to phone calls, texts,...

Well, the doctor did not mention surgery yesterday. I now get to wear a compression glove on my hand pretty much all the time to try to get my left hand to be less swollen. My Occupational Therapist wants me to get the trigger finger going so that surgery will be recommended and accomplished before I am released from care. So, my job is to use my putty as much as possible to activate that trigger finger situation so I can get it fixed. I really wanted to have some conclusion to all of this, but I got more cloudy future. The good news is that I can debate what I want to do with my next break. I am debating a trip home at the end of this month because I have not been home for over a year, and I need to see my Mom and my siblings and get used to home without my Dad. I think I will wait for my July break to go home - that would get me away from having to hurry right now and would also let me do things that I need to get done here without having to stress about driving back to Kansas with a...

A friend of mine messaged me yesterday to ask me how things were going, and I started to cry. Yesterday was one of those days where clients who used to love being in music therapy were ripping things off the walls, breaking the thermometers, and destroying things, all while trying to hurt me. Actually, it was just one client, but still, it hit me deep. We are very short-staffed at the moment, and the only staff members that were present are not ones that I know. I have no idea if they were trained in our crisis management system or not. All I know is that they did NOTHING to help me out. This happens every Tuesday, and I am exhausted by the situation. The student refuses to talk to me or to use the program that the student has agreed to use. This happens regardless of what we are doing or the sounds we are making which makes it seem personal. The student will bring in noise-cancelling headphones and then destroy them rather than wearing them. add in the fact that the student makes thre...

I am feeling pretty good today - lots less of the hysterics that have been happening the past two days and lots more of the rational brain kicking in (so far, at least). I thank you for reading over my posts lately. I know that these emotions are not comfortable for me to have or to share, but the ability to write things down and then put them out in the world is an important part of my process in handling things that I am uncomfortable with - and sharing my feelings is one of those things that I have difficulty doing. Isn't it strange that I have difficulty sharing my own feelings? This is literally what I encourage my clients to do all the time - share how they feel. Yet, when someone asks me, I tend to just cry. That is my emotional communication style. I cry. I always have, and I hate crying in front of other people because I always cry. I try to stuff my emotional response down as far as I can, but I also know that stuffing emotions is not healthy. It's a strange conundrum...

I didn't blog for an entire week - mainly because grief caught up with me and kept me from doing much of anything. When I woke up on Monday morning, I couldn't face the idea of going to work, so I opted to take my bereavement leave. I spent three days doing things around the house, attempting to help my sister with changing passwords and arranging account information (which I failed at since everything has to be authenticated and I live two hours ahead and do not have access to Dad's cellphone...), and then deciding that it was finally time to put my bedroom into a new configuration. That project is still 77% finished - it has remained in that state since Wednesday when I got tired of it all. All I need to do is to finish the decluttering thing and throw stuff that I no longer want or need completely away! I went back to work on Thursday and Friday and did pretty well. One of my clients stated that his dog died during break, and I almost lost it, but I was able to keep my c...

My dad died yesterday in his sleep. This was not unexpected, but it was somewhat fast when I consider that he was calling me from the McDonalds parking lot the Saturday after Thanksgiving and then collapsed two days later and never recovered from that incident. We were praying for an easy transition, and it seems that is what he experienced. We think he died around 1:30am his time, which is when we all woke up for a moment. I laid in bed feeling like going to work was not going to be a feasible idea, my mother felt a release and went back to sleep, and my sister started crying. My brother called me at 4:30am their time to let me know that he had died and that the hospice folks were on their way to assist with things. My sister called me about 30 minutes later and we sat with our video cameras and cried together for a bit. She arranged some substitute activities for her class of second graders and then went over to the house to be there with my mother. It was my mother's birthday. I...