Tuesday, December 28, 2010

MHA thanks the 20th Century Club, Kiwanis, & Licking Memorial Hospital

Thousands of Licking County families have benefited from the generosity of the women of the 20th Century Club. Since 1977 these women have provided the money to send newsletters to new parents with the goal of helping families raise mentally healthy children. The women’s service club also provides volunteers to mail the letters to new parents for the first 5 years of the child’s life. That is 34 years of supporting Mental Health America of Licking County in the agency’s ongoing efforts to promote good mental health and wellness.

A few years ago, Newark Kiwanis Club also supported this effort by providing some additional funding to help pay for rising costs of mailing the newsletters. Licking Memorial Hospital is to be commended for gathering the names of the new borns and distributing the first issue of ParenTalk in the hospital.

In 1977, the newsletter was called Pierre the Pelican but it became outdated and ParenTalk replaced Pierre. ParenTalk is written by Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Mental Health America of Franklin County. All first-time Licking County families are eligible to receive the 20 issues by letting us know the date of birth plus name and address of the parent/guardian. Our phone number is 740-522-1341 or email us at mhalc@alink.com.  The age appropriate letters are sent out monthly. We do ask you to let us know if you move, so you will not miss an issue.

ParenTalk deals with everything from post-partum blues to differences in children, to discipline and safety, bottle and breast feeding, tantrums and brain development, eating and sleeping habits, doctor checkups and difficult behaviors, self-esteem and getting along with others, early intervention and sharing, stress and family fun, communication and “telling stories”, learning and creativity, dealing with emotions and expressing anger plus a reminder that parents are a child’s first and most important teacher. Each issue is full of information, advice and resources for additional help.

Another big thank you to the 20th Century Club for inserting into ParenTalk the Licking County Reading Foundation flyers that say Read for 20, a reminder to parents to read aloud to your child 20 minutes every day. Reading aloud to your child is the most important thing you can do from the day your child is born to prepare your child for success in school.

Mental Health America of Licking County is blessed by our Board of Trustees, donors, volunteers, clubs and organizations, a great staff of dedicated individuals and with funding provided by United Way and the Community Mental Health & Recovery Board.

--Paddy Kutz
Executive Director

Sunday, December 12, 2010

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

I used to have a tabletop pre-transistor AM radio that would emit this warm orange glow through its back grill. It wasn't a very bright light, but you could make out the shapes of objects a few feet away. It was like sitting next to the embers of a dying fire.

The radio had a large yellowish tuning knob and I would run that from one end of the scale to the other listening for someone to tell me a story after my mother had left the room and turned out the lights.

There were the local stations like CFCF, CJAD, and CFOX, but on a clear winter night I could also pick up stations in Boston, Chicago and New York City. These stations would come in only after the dial had been manipulated with the delicate touch of a safecracker and even then the signal would be riding a wave of static that would routinely rise up and drown it out completely.

Between the peaks of static, I would hear about traffic on the Dan Ryan, nor'easters threatening the Cape Cod, Boston and the Maine coast. It was while listening to this radio that I was introduced to "traffic and weather together on the eights" and to "The Shadow."

On various nights at different spots around the dial, I would find rebroadcasts of old radio shows. These programs would mix sitcoms like Fibber McGee & Molly with shows like The Whistler and Inner Sanctum. These programs were once mainstays of the airwaves long before call-in shows and before computers replaced disc jockeys.

The Shadow was ideally suited to radio because only at home, in the dark, could you accept the idea that one man could convince another that he was invisible. In real life, if you saw someone talking to an invisible crime fighter then you would contact organizations like ours.

Whereas radio sitcoms tended to thrive when translated to television and the movies, the spook shows were much less successful. The camera could never show anything as vivid as the images conjured by the imagination. It's the same reason that the best ghost stories are the ones we hear around the campfire, or from our friends. We remember these stories long after the punch lines of a great joke, the phone number of that cute girl, or where we left our car keys. Our brains file them some place different, some place more primal.

***

It will come as no surprise then that my favorite Christmas story is a ghost story.

"A Christmas Carol" tells the story of a man haunted by memory, by perspective and by possibility. Though often read to children, the story of Scrooge is the story of adults and their changing perspective on the holiday.

Children don't need ghost stories to know what Christmas is all about. They learn very quickly that it's all about them.

This is such a powerful idea that the traditions of the season become like critical ingredients in a recipe that we try to follow throughout our lives in order to recreate the perfect Christmas. What we learn as we grow older is that, like in cooking, some ingredients are not always available and substitutions are inevitable.

When we were children, those ingredients seemed to be in abundant supply. With few exceptions, the tree and its decorations, the meal and its menu, the guests and their jokes didn't vary all that much from one year to the next. And that was pretty comforting. No matter what happened throughout the year, Christmas was a red and green colored constant.

After I left home, the reassuring consistency of a family Christmas became even more important, but instead of having the whole month to marinate in it I only ever seemed to have a few days.

Compressing Christmas into smaller and smaller windows seemed to make it all the more important to get home and reconnect and regenerate. The traditions that evolved over time became desperate stations that had to be checked off in the hopes that some of the old self-affirming magic would return.

It was no wonder that the holidays were exhausting and came to be anticipated with a certain amount of dread.

And then there came the years when I couldn't be home for Christmas and even that couldn't be experienced without mixed emotions: I was both disappointed and relieved.

Dickens' story does a pitch-perfect job of capturing the contrasts and the mixed emotions that Christmas evokes in me. Christmas Past haunts me, Christmas Present is unsettling and Christmas Yet to Come is always challenging me to change my ways.

As I think about Christmas today, I find myself in a kind of a neutral zone trying to figure out what is left after all of the trimmings have been packed away.

There are no default answers. I do believe that it is important to work for peace on earth and goodwill to all. I like finding the perfect present and bringing a smile to the faces of the people I care about. (In the absence of a self-affirming answer, I will settle for affirming others.) I take comfort in making time to watch "White Christmas" and "Scrooge" (the 1951 version with Alastair Sim). But, unlike Scrooge, I don't think I have yet woken up from my dream. I think I am still working on the meaning of the season.

***

When I was growing up, one of the holiday staples was the annual Christmas show of local broadcaster Paul Reid.

Each year, he would devote one night of his show to stories of his childhood growing up in Peterborough, Ontario, as one of sixteen children, interspersed with holiday readings and Christmas music.

Reid had a magnificent voice for radio. It was warm, mellow, deep and tinged with a bit of sadness. He would guide his audience through the evening on a snowy Montreal night and make us think we were seated in front of a crackling fire listening to familiar tales.

Reid's fondness for the depression-era Christmases of his childhood was as undeniable as it was removed from his position as a big city radio host. It was almost as though he was telling these stories as a way of keeping them alive for himself.

I used to look forward to this show each year because it was something to look forward to. It was a fixture and a benchmark of the approaching holiday, like opening the doors on an advent calendar. I have been thinking about it recently because I recognize and connect to Reid's need to present it as a way of sustaining himself.

In the end, maybe that's all there is. Perhaps it is in the act of creating joy and obtaining some measure of satisfaction that we are really learning from the ghosts that haunt us.

Happy holidays.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

Friday, December 10, 2010

Thinking About those who are Struggling, Especially Children!

For 29 years, I have been writing about holiday stress and offered strategies on coping. There now are many sources of learning how to deal with life, some in the newspaper, some on the radio, some on television, and tons on the internet. Be sure to check out our website at www.mhalc.org to Live Your Life Well using our 10 tools which will help you to cope better. Let me offer my advice and referrals if you need it by calling me at 740-522-1341 or send me an email at Paddykutz@alink.com

All year long, not just during the holidays, it is appropriate to stretch beyond your own problems and issues and think of those less fortunate, especially children and youth. One way is to consider the poem by Ina J. Hughs who is often quoted, but not given credit. As you give thanks remember to:


Give thanks for children who
sneak popsicles before supper,
erase holes in math workbooks,
never find their shoes.
And offer love and hope to those who
stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers,
are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead,
never go to the circus,
live in an X-rated world.
Give thanks for children who
  bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
  hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.
And offer love and hope to those who
never get dessert,
have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
watch their parents watch them die,
can’t find any bread to steal,
don’t have any rooms to clean up,
whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser.
Give thanks for children who
spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
like ghost stories,
shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub,
get visits from the tooth fairy,
don’t like to get kissed in front of the carpool,
squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone,
whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.
And offer love and hope to those who
will eat anything,
have never seen a dentist,
aren’t spoiled by anybody,
go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
live and move, but have no being,
whose nightmares come in the daytime.
Give thanks for and love and hope to children who
want to be carried and for those who must,
we never give up on and for those who don’t get a second chance,
we smother….and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer!

We are grateful for our volunteers, consumers, Board members and donors to help us keep on helping for 57 more years in Licking County. I also appreciate the author, Ina Hughs. Remember, there is no health without mental health so look after yours and when you need help let me know. I’ll be waiting for your calls and your checks. Thank you.

Mental Health America of Licking County is partially funded by United Way and the Community Mental Health & Recovery Board of Licking/Knox Co.

--by Paddy Kutz
Executive Director