…that our home is full of stress, and often negativity, and not necessarily brought on by the people living in it. Rather it is often the outside influencers who bring it into our lives. That being said, the way that I handle these stresses often adds to, rather than takes away from, the feelings of stress and negativity we all experience. It is difficult to stay positive when you feel like you can never do enough good to achieve a good outcome.
I have a hard time seeing the good in the events that affect my life because it is overshadowed by the mass amounts of negativity that I have thrown my way everyday. Getting yelled at for enforcing rules, being hit by the kids I work with, having parents send me nasty messages because they are too ignorant about what is going on in our home to see (or accept) the good that we are doing,
The good that I see on a daily basis is precious to me. The smiles when kids at work “get it”, the support that we as a family get from the parents who see the good we do (or at least the effort we put into trying to do good), the growth we see in our kids. While these positives may be short lived, they are no less important than the negative, in fact the good is so much more important than the negative, it’s just difficult to recognize the positive as often as we recognize the negative.
It’s overwhelming to start a new, high-stress job; have a new (almost) teen join our family, and start homeschool because we can’t get guardianship of him, and keeping up with court orders that allow others the opportunity to negatively impact him; have a child leave our family when we’ve seen so much progress, and almost constantly worry about him losing that progress in his new environment; having to place so much responsibility on our newly graduated almost 18 yr old; the start of a new semester, and losing hours at work. I know that my stress is more than some deal with, and I’m also fully aware that others see my stress as trivial. My stress is sometimes more than I am able to handle.
Working in SPED is giving me more tools that I can use to help me be more positive. I’m learning to point out more of the good and ignore more of the bad. This a talent that doesn’t come natural to me, although some of the people at work seem to think it does. I’m grateful I have a good place to learn and practice these new skills. As I push through the tough times and work towards being happier I can see that I can have a positive impact on others.
Garcia Family Journey 