Selah

Click to enlarge. Family Shelter Service DVA training booklet Note 1: I extend deep gratitude to my lovely friend Amy, who sponsored my training. Though modest, the cost exceeded our budget, and this important work I'm doing would not be possible without her contribution. ♥ Note 2: While I will usually refer to the victims and survivors of domestic violence as female (most are), I recognize, as do the training materials, that many victims are GBT men, and some are heterosexual men.  My state mandated Domestic Violence Advocacy training (in order to volunteer at the local shelter) began this morning, and already, I'm learning so much. The training is comprised of eight 6-hour sessions, each jam-packed with lectures, notes, role-play, videos, and more. I filled four pages with notes today, even on top of what I was given in handout form. I've made some of the more pithy statements into graphics. Feel free to share/pin/etc if you feel so moved. More below. I th...

When my oldest child, Quentin, was younger, we knew he was a little different. He was precocious, talked like an adult, and while he loved people, he didn't seem to have any sense of social graces. Since he was only about two, we didn't think too much of it.  Sometime between ages 2 and 7, my husband and I came across a description of Asperger Syndrome, and it was like a lightbulb went off. "Ohhhh," we thought. "That explains so much about our kid." In what may be typical confirmation bias style, we continued to notice more and more about him that seemed to fit the AS profile. But it was never a big deal, just a way for us to understand him, and we didn't seek a diagnosis because we didn't need one.  During his seventh year of life, we started to notice that his speech patterns (particularly a "reverse stutter" and halting speech) were starting to interfere in his ability to effectively communicate his thoughts. He seemed anxious, ...

Yesterday morning, as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, I came across this post , "An Open Letter to the Church from My Generation," pleading with the (Christian) church to be more progressive on LGBTQ issues. I admit that I guffawed a little at the idea that *that* would ever happen, growing up as I did in an extremely conservative Lutheran Church. When I was twelve years old and in the seventh grade, the pastor of my church taught my co-ed  confirmation  class, and I have a powerful memory of the class in which he taught that homosexual men and women defecate and urinate on one another to derive sexual pleasure. On Confirmation Sunday, when there were many guests come to see this right of passage, he chose to preach not the gospel, but hellfire and damnation for Gays. At seventeen, I discovered the Original Soundtrack of the musical RENT , and the culture shock I experienced cannot be overstated. I think I listened twice before I realized that Angel (my fa...