Shame

'Owl Love' by Burcak Kafadar

I have been thinking about shame since reading this Buzzfeed article yesterday.  I feel a lot of shame, shame for my anxiety and not being in control, shame about my house and what I eat, even shame about feeling shame.  Shame affects how I look at myself in the morning and my inner dialogue, but when I think about it a lot of the shame comes with colonization.   It is shame related to how we see our bodies and how we live our lives as compared to a particular idea of body and life.  It is shame that my child is not "normal" even thought we have actually worked purposely against some of the "normal" things around us so that our children have something else.  I still worry if I am somehow hurting them by my choices. 

We got Runa's learning assessment yesterday.  While she is very verbally advanced, she is still reading at a pre-school level.  She cannot see how letters got together to make words.  All year the teacher tried to shame us that she was not learning to read because she missed school, but we let her miss so much school because we knew how hard it was getting for her to be there and we knew that we needed to give her a safe place to be.  Even thought I still feel the shame, I am glad we let her stay home and that we gave her this extra space to work through these hard things in her life.  She will be dyslexic forever, but she will only be little for a while.  That is not to say that we don't want to push her, but that we see our role in the larger context of helping her deal with life, not just one little part of it.

I still feel the shame, but the Buzzfeed article has given me lots to continue pondering.