by lesliedanielle87

TRANSITION{al} Kindergarten

It feels a little weird to be writing this right now…it is kinda like the feeling you get when you revisit a place that was once familiar and still is, but also feels different because so much time has passed. It has been a looong time since I have even considered sharing something in this way.

I am sitting in my room with a list of things a mile long that I could be doing right now, but the overwhelming feelings that come with change and transition have stopped me in my tracks tonight. It has been quite a summer. For a large part of the summer I could not escape the chaos of being “under construction”. There were some home renovation projects, and the first phase of some major upgrades at work, and at one point even my therapist’s office was having some work done to their building which felt like it was mocking me! Things at home have resumed a sense of normalcy, but unfortunately, I can’t say the same about work. Our new school year starts this coming Tuesday and we had hopes of starting it in our newly remodeled classrooms, but as is often the case with these things, there have been delays. If I am being completely honest, I have struggled to process this disappointment. Particularly on the drive home today I was just feeling bummed out about it. I don’t know that anyone handles disappointment well, but I am absolutely certain that I don’t. I have been anxiously awaiting the move into to the new classrooms and have been imagining all the things that I want to do with/in that space. This school year marks the start of a new teaching experience as a transitional kindergarten co-teacher and I am so excited about it! I get to share my love and passion for words and language with the tiny humans at the start of their relationship with words and early reading. So cool! But I envisioned the start of this new adventure in a new classroom…

As I was wallowing in discouragement and disappointment, I began to think about all of my hopes for the littles that I will spend this next school year with and the truth is that none of those hopes require a newly renovated classroom. While there are academic milestones we will work on together, one my core values as a teacher is to teach kids about their indescribable worth, their limitless potential and capacity to learn and do hard things, and how to be good humans that show kindness, compassion, and empathy. I also want to teach them about their ability to be flexible thinkers and how they can adapt to the changes that life [often] throws at us…irony much? In addition to all of this, I have decided that my theme for this year would be “TK Tribe” with the desire of fostering community and teaching them about what it looks like to care for your people. It has been my experience that chaos, while being stressful, also creates beautiful opportunities to have the kinds of experiences that bring people closer together. So, not having a permanent classroom for the first couple weeks of school could be part of a bigger plan for us to learn how to be flexible together. More than anything I strive to create an environment where my littles feel secure, wanted, valued, and loved and when I think about the “places” I have felt that way throughout my life, they were never the actual places…they were the people.  I pray that I can be that kind of person for these kiddos. So, we will adapt and kick off this school year differently than originally imagined and will appreciate the start of transitional kindergarten being filled with “transition” 😊 Adventure awaits and I am so grateful to adventure with the tiny humans in my TK Tribe this year.

If you think of us, would you pray for an awesome school year filled with lots of fun and lots of growth for all of us?

Thank you friends,

Leslie Danielle

by lesliedanielle87

Dusting Off the Cobwebs

For as long as I can remember, writing has always been the way that I could best check my pulse and see where my heart was at. After losing my mom in 2016, every time I would try to write, even just to journal, it was like being flooded with words and emotions at such a high speed that it left me frozen, unable to express. Eventually this turned to a total numbness because I was too scared and too overwhelmed to even begin processing the immense loss I had experienced. In 2012, my dad passed way suddenly, 9 months later, my mom received a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. She battled for nearly 3 years before her body just couldn’t do it anymore. In the weeks after her passing, it was as though every unfelt and unprocessed emotion I had experienced over the course of 4 years just consumed me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I tried to get lost in my work and that worked for a while, but eventually the dam broke. My numbness and depression terrified me. Fear was just about the only thing I could really feel. I had seen what depression could do to a person and the people around them and I was so afraid of it. It was at this point that I reached out for help and began meeting with a therapist. I have been in therapy for a little over a year now and I am in a completely different place. It has been intense and so difficult facing my pain and walking through it, but in so many ways I feel lighter. I have a long way to go, but to see the progress I have made is encouraging. I can do hard things. I actually believe that now. The trauma I experienced over the course of 4 years certainly did a number on me, but what I’m learning is that my story isn’t finished yet. The night my mom passed away as I sat on the stairs so overwhelmed with the pain, drowning in it, my brother came and held me saying “This is a defining moment, but this will not define us.” I don’t think he knows the power of those words he spoke. It can be so easy to feel defined by the things that have happened to us. And the loss of my parents has been so defining, but it is not the sum total of who I am. It has been a huge and significant part of my story, but it isn’t my entire story. Some of the worst things I could have imagined have happened to me, but it has led to an openness in my heart and from that place I am “cautiously optimistic” that the best really is yet to come.

There was a time not too long ago that I truly believed that my writing days were over…but here I am and in a totally different, but strangely familiar way, I am finding that writing still happens the same way…one word at a time.

This feels like it requires more courage than it used to, but it also feels more freeing than it ever has before. So, here’s to dusting off the cobwebs, doing the scary things; the hard things, and to sharing all the beautiful, broken, magnificent, messy, and mundane pieces of this gift called life.

Welcome back to Fearless Dialogue.

Light and Love,

Leslie Danielle

 

 

 

 

by lesliedanielle87

Waiting Room

During the weeks before mom’s official diagnosis when she was in an out of the hospital, I remember having a conversation with my cousin Isaac in which I asked him a question that I was afraid to know the answer to, but needed to know the answer to. Isaac knew what it was to experience your mom being diagnosed and what life after that diagnosis was like. While I was aware that every diagnosis and every person/family is different, my mind that has a strong need to just “figure things out” needed to know his story. With fear I asked him, “what happens if its cancer?” He went on to give me some practical insight into the conversations regarding treatment options and things like that, but knowing the depths of what I was really asking, it was his next response that stayed with me and has shaped so many moments for me in the months that followed. He told me to imagine myself in a waiting room where there’s different doors that lead to different rooms. Maybe one says its cancer, another one says it’s not, maybe there are doors that you can’t even make out the signs on, but the thing is, you’re in the waiting room. You don’t know which door you’re going to have to walk through, so don’t walk through doors you aren’t being asked to walk through. It’s hard, but you’re in the waiting room, so you have to wait. [Isaac is one of the smartest people I know…wouldn’t you agree? He’s one of my dearest friends and life editors AND he just happens to be my cousin too! Score!]

waiting room

Yesterday’s Waiting Room

Since that conversation, I have spent more times in [literal and metaphorical] waiting rooms than I can count; waiting rooms at the doctor’s office, radiology waiting rooms, surgical waiting rooms, and of course the seemingly permanent “what if” waiting room in my mind. Can I be honest with you about something? Even after 3 years and waiting rooms becoming a frequent and normal occurrence, I still suck at the waiting. I spent a large portion of the day yesterday in the surgical waiting room and from the moment we checked mom in, they handed me a pager. I realize that [in their minds at least] it is an efficient way to keep track of the families while their loved one is in surgery and maybe provide some peace of mind and I can appreciate that sentiment, but I also kind of hate the pagers. I think I hate them because they tend to be a constant reminder of the waiting that I’m stuck doing. I can never decide if I want it to go off because these pagers are terrifying when they go off. Ask anyone that has been with me on a surgery day, I jump every time one of them goes off and it’s not even mine! You see, much like the waiting itself, when one of these pagers goes off, you have zero indication as to whether it’s good news or bad news and those moments between it going off and you walking up to the desk are the absolute worst. The truth is, this tangent about the pagers isn’t really relevant to where I’m going with this, but I just needed it to be known, I have a love/hate relationship with the pagers that is mostly hate until it buzzes with the end result of good news, at which point I love it.

Every time I find myself in one of the particularly difficult waiting rooms, I always reflect back on Isaac’s words from the very beginning of this journey. It takes a lot of mental discipline for me to refrain from walking through doors before I’ve been called to and I don’t always possess that kind of discipline. More often than I’d care to admit, I pace the waiting room (both literally and metaphorically) and I just walk up to the various “doors” just to get a glimpse of what they might possibly be if I have to walk through them. Yesterday, as I waited for the God-awful [but also glorious] pager to go off and let me know mom was okay and that I could see her, I had a new experience that added to the depths of this waiting room business. I have always been so blessed that I have never been alone in a surgical waiting room. There are always some of our people there and I can’t tell you how much “easier” the waiting can be when you have your people with you. In addition to that we have such a large network of people that walk with us in spirit and carry us in love in prayer. But yesterday I had a new experience…in the area we chose to sit in to do our waiting, there was a couple sitting there as well. It wasn’t simply because they were sitting near us, there was something else that just made my heart both ache and feel drawn to them at the same time. Throughout the day we learned that they were waiting for their 12-year-old daughter to get out of a 6-hour brain surgery. You guys, I can’t even begin to imagine their poor momma and daddy hearts, but I could see the weight in their eyes as well as the indescribable depths of love they have for their sweet girl. Through conversation I learned that the surgeon that was working on their daughter, was the only one in the country that could perform the complicated surgery that she needed. So, they traveled here from Kansas and will be spending the next 15 days post-op here in a nearby hotel. We swapped stories about how we were all too familiar with hospitals and doctors. We shared relief as they found out that their daughter made it through surgery and then tried to pass the time until they would be able to see her. We talked about the weather in Kansas versus the weather here [unrelated: I’m so glad I live in California] and what fun touristy things they had done so far. We shared the same relief when I came out of the conference room after talking with my mom’s doctor and learning that she too had made it through safely. Later in the day we ran into each and shared the most recent updates on our people and I will probably never see them again, but for those hours spent in the waiting room we became each other’s people. Because there is something that happens when you’re not only in the waiting room, but when you know the agony and pain found in that waiting. I don’t wish that on anyone because the truth is, it’s awful, but if you bear the scars of knowing what that experience is like, you have a unique opportunity to be present with someone else going through it.

I wish I didn’t know what it was like, but I do and because I do, I was able to sit in a sacred space with strangers from another state [that I never even exchanged names with, social awkwardness for the win!] and help carry their burden and they helped carry mine. And when I reflect back on the day yesterday, and the last three years, I woke up this morning completely overwhelmed by gratitude. I am grateful for my waiting room friends. I am grateful that both of our people made it safely through surgery. I am grateful for every, single, painful moment that I have experienced that allowed me to lock eyes with those sweet parents and share a “me too” moment. Friends, I’m grateful for the waiting room because even though I hate it, it has become the place in which I am always met by the unending love, sweet compassion, and all sufficient grace of The One that holds me in the waiting and knows what lies beyond the waiting.

If you find yourself in one of life’s waiting rooms today and you’re hating it, just know that you are actually being equipped to one day come alongside someone in a way that no one else can because of the waiting you are going through now. And if you’re feeling a little lonely in your waiting today, let me come alongside you and hold space for you in that waiting. You’re not alone friend.

*If you think of my waiting room friends from Kansas, would you say a prayer for them? Pray for their sweet girl and speedy recovery so they can get back home to all their people*

Thanks for always walking with us in the waiting,

Leslie Danielle