La Frida

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She literally broke open her chest cavity to reveal her innermost innermosts.  That’s why we relate. That’s why we feel so connected to her heart.  She looked trauma in the eye and wept, laughed, fucked, journaled and painted herself into wholeness and came out the other side – an icon, a role model, a cautionary tale, a mujer muy chingona.

I am the wildflower that broke through the concrete jungle and for the rest of my life I wanna take a jackhammer to the cement so that other wildflowers can bloom.

Spring

and in the Spring, we reap what we sow

May 1996, I graduated from the MSW program at UC Berkeley.

May 2001, I gave birth to my daughter - one of the most important people and experiences of my life.

May 2005, I visited Paris for the first time.  A dream of mine since the day my mother enrolled me in French class at my East Los Angeles Junior High School in 1979.

May 2014, I will defend my dissertation. Finally.

May is the month of mother's day.

I am juggling four part-time jobs to pay mortgage, bills and my health insurance. I am co-parenting an amazing girl, as a single mom.  I am spent.  I am happy.  It is happening - the impossible is possible. An at-risk low-income ethnic minority urban girl is coming full circle -from East LA to Westwood and back.  My mom would be so proud - is proud.

My sister, Carol, asked me:  Do you ever thank God for your brain?  Yes, sister.  Thank you, Yesus, for my brain, my mom, my daughter, my family, my friends, my mentors, my teachers, my inner voice, my healers, my readers, my books, my 2000 Toyota Echo, my jobs, my home, my life, my mistakes, my lessons learned, my opportunities, my faith, my hope, my persistence and presumptuousness in the face of sure defeat, and a reader miles away who sent me a note saying "keep writing."   

Happy Spring :)

The. Final. Stretch.

I have written to keep track of ideas, articles and references over the last 5 (!) years.

I have written to help me make sense of what I got myself into.

When I meet or get an email from someone about the blog, I realize this experience serves others too.

I got a request to write about the time commitment of a PhD program.  Here's the quick and dirty, Alison:

1st year: 2009-2010

• 2-3 hours of daily carpool commute with a lovely classmate
• Three 3-hour courses per quarter:  Epistemology, Research Methods, Statistics, Policy, etc.
• Lots of reading and writing.  I remember sitting for 6-12 hours a day to read articles and write papers. Seminars for doctoral students are small, which means you gotta do the reading and present or get called on to summarize the thesis of a book.
• Working a part-time job 10 to 20 hours a week.
• A 6-hour comprehensive examination (four essays) at the end of the first year (brutal).
• No time for friends, exercise, movies or reading the Sunday paper, etc.
• Gained 10-15 lbs. (sitting and stress eating during study times).

2nd year: 2010-2011

• 2-3 hour commute, two days a week, but this time without my lovely carpool partner.  We took different courses based on our research interests.
• Two or three 3-hour courses per quarter.  Cool courses in other departments:  Latin American Medicine, Shamanism and Folk Illness (Community Health Sciences), Family Therapy (Psychology), Stress & Disease (Psychology), Community Partnered Participatory Research (Health Services), Social Marketing (Community Health Sciences).
• Research internship.
• Working a part-time job 20 hours a week.
• Lots of reading and writing.  
• Began writing publishable paper (second comprehensive written examination required by the doctoral program)
• Exercise, nutritional cleanse, dancing, lost 20 lbs.

3rd year: 2011-2012

• Done with coursework, so now I am writing at home (publishable paper).
• Exhausted.
• Publishable paper approved.
• Teaching and working a part-time job about 20 hours/week.

4th year:  2012-2013

• Awarded fellowship to work on dissertation proposal.  
• Teaching and working a part-time job about 10-30 hours/week.
• Successfully defended dissertation proposal.

5th year: 2013-2014

• Working full-time (several part-time jobs).
• Submitted manuscript for publication.
• Requested IRB approvals from University and school districts for dissertation study.
• Data collection and analysis.
• Drafting results and discussion chapters of dissertation.
• Schedule defense for May.
• File dissertation by June.
• Graduate on June 13 :)

Structural Family Therapy Tenet

"One of the central tenets of family systems theory is that the child, the identified patient, is serving an active role in holding the family together by helping the family avoid other problems...the structural family therapy assumption [is] that treating the whole family is important because it improves the symptoms and protects the family, whereas treating only the child may result in deteriorated family functioning."
Szapocznik et al., 1989

Lovable

"We go back...and back...and back...through the layers of fear, shame, rage, hurt and negative incantations until we discover the exuberant, unencumbered, delightful, and lovable child that was, and still is, in us."

melody beattie

Consistency = Trust

"I think that sociopaths (particularly young ones) actually feel happier and thrive better in a world of clearly defined boundaries; when rules are consistently enforced, the child will just start to take them as a given.  I certainly did. I think simple cause-and-effect rules with clear, predictable outcomes for compliance or violation encourage the young sociopath to think of life as an interesting puzzle that can be gamed.  As long as the young sociopath believes that she can acquire some advantage through skillful planning and execution (and finds some level of success, which I feel is almost a given), she will stay committed to the structure of the game you have set up...

The worst thing that parents can do is to be inconsistent.  It makes the child sociopath think that the game is rigged; in that case, it doesn't matter what he does, except to the extent that he can out-cheat the cheater (typically the parent).  Providing me a system defined by clear incentives, my parents laid out a way for me to gain positive benefits while exercising my sociopathic traits.  I didn't have to rely on the soft intangibles of empathy or emotion to get what I needed."

from Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas