I’ve written about this book before here. It’s a book that changed my life. You hear a lot about positivity and gratitude, both valuable and honorable qualities. But, they’re qualities that have a dark side. When I’m not in a positive state of mind or not in tune with positivity, I feel guilty, even ashamed.

I live in luxury compared to most of the world’s population. Even within the context of the US my life is above average in terms of income and privilege. I have a job I love, a family whom I love and who loves me, I have two cars, ample food, and a wardrobe I enjoy wearing. I’m creative and have access to the materials I need to be creative.

I’m healthy, if not always living a healthy lifestyle. And, I’m particularly aware of this good thing. I’ve seen so much suffering and so much dying since becoming a member of the cancer community. To be miserable and to be healthy seems sacrilege.

But, depression and anxiety don’t listen to this kind of thinking. Not in my life anyway. I toil away in sadness many days, so nervous that I can’t focus. During this pandemic, things have been so much harder. There’s nothing like social isolation to magnify depression and anxiety.

So, why focus on how to be more miserable? It’s a bizarre but amazing phenomenon.

Randy J. Paterson, PhD, director of Changeways Clinic, wrote How to be Miserable because of working with a support group of clinically depressed people, with whom he just couldn’t make progress. They couldn’t turn their eyes to gratitude and positivity. In frustration, he asked the group, “OK, so you don’t know how to feel better, tell me about how to feel worse.”

The group responded prolifically and ended the session in something close to gratitude. They ended up laughing and enjoying the process of crafting ideas about how to feel worse. They included things like this: don’t exercise, isolate yourself, ruminate on bad things, punish yourself, procrastinate, compare yourself to others.

In the process of thinking about how to be more miserable, it became exquisitely clear that they knew deeply how to not be miserable. In counseling and other situations I’m often told to do something good for myself. Treat myself to a good day or a good experience. When I’m told this I frequently draw a blank. I just can’t think of anything that would be a treat.

Many years ago, we had a community manager at ChicagoNow, Jimmy Greenfield, who hosted blogapalooza nights. He’d give us a prompt at exactly 9 p.m. and at exactly 10 p.m. we were to post our blog. It was encouragement to write and to publish. It was also an opportunity to see how our view of the world compared to others in the group.

One night the prompt was, “Tell me about a perfect day. You can do anything you want, realistic or not.” I wrote about how angry the prompt made me, how bereft I felt in the face of it. A perfect day, imagined or otherwise, just didn’t exist for me at that time. My whole world was cancer and grief. The reality of that overwhelmed me and made it impossible for me to even imagine life without the suffering.

That part of me has been healing and growing. I can now tell you about what a perfect day would include: sunshine, sitting outdoors with a good cup of coffee, talking to a friend, laughing, riding my bike, meditating. So many things occur to me now.

In any case, there have been times during the pandemic when I’ve felt so weighed down by my reality that I can’t imagine a time when I felt light. I want to cook, but I need to go to the store and every time I visit a grocery store I am anxious and often end up having a panic attack. Cooking has been polluted by the experience of securing the food.

It occurred to me today that thinking in terms of how to be miserable during a pandemic might be a better way to think about things. Here are a few things I came up with.

• Obsessively read the news, keeping track of how many cases of COVID-19 are around me, noting how many have died, and reading about how poorly the *president is *leading during this time.
• Listen to my neighbors socializing with friends in their backyard and think about how dangerous their behavior is.
• Pay attention to protesters against sheltering in place and others who disavow science and health mandates.
• Sit in one place for hours and watch one Netflix show after another.
• Binge eat chocolate and cookies.
• Ignore my dog who wants to play.
• Stay up all night so that I feel terrible the next day
• Ruminate about the supply chain and about how we might face food shortages.
• Ruminate about anything.
• Keep track of my failures and dwell on them.
• Criticize the one person I have the privilege of seeing every day, my husband.
• Note every dust bunny and clump of hair on the floor, every aspect of my home maintenance that has declined.
• Complain as much as possible about everything. This is especially helpful if I’m complaining about things over which I have absolutely no control.

This is way too easy, but I think you get the idea. Within each way to be miserable is a key to feeling less miserable. For instance, my home page when I open up Safari has been the Washington Post. Every time I open up Safari to check my email or work on my classes, I’m smacked in the face with bad news, even dire news. I finally realized that this is something over which I have complete control. I changed my home page to my email, which is the main source I consult in order to do my job.

This isn’t to say that I don’t check the news. I think it’s important to be informed. But, now I intentionally navigate to my news sources and read them ONCE per day.

I still go to my spot on the couch and watch Netflix, but I’m trying now to be more intentional. I watch one episode of a show I love and then get up and do something else. Really, it can be anything. The key for me is to not spend six hours or more in one spot doing one thing. Literally, that’s how much time I was spending on the couch and I was developing shoulder and back pain because of it.

Other parts of this are harder for me. I’m a ruminator from way back. As long as I can remember, I’ve lived in my head. I’m one of those people who has the perfect response to every situation……..days later after the situation is long over. If I dwell long enough on what I should have said or crafting the perfect, snappy response, I end up feeling less than.

As I edit this and get ready to hit “publish,” I confess that the past few days have been hard. I’ve been in a bad place. But just reading this reminds me that I can take action. I can help myself and care for myself. I can do some things to feel less miserable.

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Don’t reopen the schools. Or keep everyone in the dark about whether they will open.

Illinois parents and students are still at sea, wondering if their schools will reopen in the fall.  At best, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot are vague about when they will.

Lightfoot says that Chicago schools won’t reopen until those all-knowing, all-seeing health experts declare that it’s safe. Ha. As Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson said, Lightfoot’s goal is “aspirational.” As in, I guess, “having or showing a desire to achieve a high level of success or social status.”

Pritzker’s reopening-policies-from-on-high are just as vague and useless. Last month he “advised” schools that they better get ready for both in-person learning and e-leaning depending on whether the data are available to make a return safe. It’s so “unclear,” he added, as if it clarified anything.

His recent state re-opening guidelines are so flaccide as to be useless. Schools can open when the state is in his Phase 4 of the reopening schedule. Phase 4 means: that the infection rate of those tested and hospital admissions continue to decline. It would only begin when a “region” experiences a continuing decline in infection and hospitalization rates and maintains “surge capacity.”

If schools are physically to open, students like everyone else would have to wear masks and maintain social distancing. To help schools figure out what this imprecision means, the Illinois Department Public Health will explain it all. Scary prospect that; “We’re from the IDPH and we’re here to help.” Illinois now is in Phase 2, and no indication when it will pass into Phase 3.

Swell.

If Pritzker or Lightfoot have any idea of the burden this places on children and their parents, they’re ignoring it in their rigid, take-no-prisoners compulsion “to follow the science.” Which they’re not doing. If we’ve learned anything, the coronavirus targets the elderly, not the children. The so-called mystery illness that is infecting children is so rare that it hardly justifies denying hundreds of thousands of children of their right to an education.

It would be nice if Pritzker and Lightfoot would share with everyone  little more specificity about what standards and goals they have in mind. Whenever that might be, parents can’t wait until then. Planning for the next fall semester has already begun. Will single mothers be able to work? Will day care be available? Will high school students looking forward to a college athletic scholarship be able to hone their skills on a school team? Will parents have to shop for laptops or fall clothing? From just annoying to down-right confusing, the questions will be confounding.

This is just the kind of state-imposed intolerable imposition that drives people from Illinois. Just what the state needs–more footloose people who are figuring out that the only way to rid themselves of the craziness is to flee to another state. Bid them a bon voyage, J.B. and Lori.

It’s not a matter of if, but when. That’s what seasoned foster parents will tell you when you first enter the world of foster care. False accusations come with the territory of raising other people’s children, especially when those people are angry, bitter, and possibly struggling mentally.

When those mothers, fathers are in a place of “fight or flight” — and choose fight.

My wife and I have been under investigation by our local Department of Children and Family Services office for the past two months. That sounds dramatic — our part mostly consisted of an interview, then waiting.

Our former two youngest children’s mother was abrasive towards us from the moment we met her. She told us straight away that her children shouldn’t be living with white people. She told us her children shouldn’t be living with LGBTQ people. She told us we had no right to kiss them on the cheek goodnight, or let them sit on our laps when they needed a snuggle. She confronted us in the court lobby.

She told us their struggles weren’t a result of trauma, — of being in foster care, or past abuse or neglect — but a result of living with white people.

She told us she would report us.

And she did.

The first time she called the hotline on us, we considered giving notice. That is, we considered asking the caseworker to remove the kids from our home, to protect ourselves and our other children.

But we couldn’t stomach the thought and took the risk to keep them home with us. Kids aren’t stray dogs to be re-homed, and we just couldn’t toss them out because their mother didn’t like us. It wouldn’t be fair, and it would set back all the progress they had made.

We compromised with the agency – we will keep them home, if we don’t have to interact with the mom ourselves anymore. All communication was to go through the caseworker.

Then she reported us again. I’m not even getting into what she said, because it’s so disgusting and ridiculous it doesn’t bear repeating.

She had told our caseworker just days before that she wanted the kids to stay with us instead of moving back in with their grandmother, whom she has also accused of abuse. She had seen progress in them under our care.

WHAT?!

As you know, grandma did end up taking the children. The same day the move was arranged, we were informed an official investigation against us had been opened.

My heart froze, stomach dropped, anger, fear and disbelief set in. You uproot your life for someone, only for the worst imaginable to happen.

The kids moved. We waited. And waited.

I actually called the investigator myself after I got sick of waiting — “hi, it’s Brittany, a foster parent in McHenry County. I think you are supposed to be investigating a complaint against us? Can you give me a ring so we can set up a meeting to move this along? Thanks!”

The investigators finally came to our house, decked out in gloves and masks as the Coronavirus pandemic was ramping up. They separated my wife and I for interviews. They interviewed our remaining daughter, asked her about what happens if someone misbehaves, what punishments we dole out, is she happy, is she safe? They took photos of her arms and legs, stomach, to make sure they weren’t missing any signs of mistreatment. She told them “Jes and Brittany have never once abused me.”

She shouldn’t have to think about things like that. We are supposed to be that safe haven home, which is what bothers me the most about this situation.

They took photos of each room in our home, gave us some parenting brochures and a business card. They told us not to leave matches or lighters around, to make sure when we cooked the pan didn’t have its handle sticking out into the kitchen, and to lock our doors at night, buckle up when we drove.

They said this rotely, with the qualifier of “I’m sorry, but we have to go over it with everyone. I’m sure you know these things. It’s a shame when foster parents have to go through this, because it’s one less bed open for kids in need. We will try to get this completed as soon as we can.”

They asked for phone numbers of family members, of our kids’ lawyers, of our kids’ CASA workers, our kids’ therapists.

They left, with the promise that “no news is good news”

We didn’t hear a thing from then (March 31) until today.

We haven’t been accepting new placements simply because — in addition to taking a needed break to deal with the pandemic, with the grief and loss — our license has been paused, temporarily closed.

Today we got notice that the report has been deemed unfounded and we can file a document to DCFS that we believe it was an intentional false complaint — which we plan to follow up on.
More than angry – oh which I am –  I am sad that it had to end in that way. I am sad for their mother, who was so insecure and close minded that she attacked the people trying to do right by her children in a time of need and in the end caused even more disruption and trauma in their little lives. It was unnecessary and selfish and I’m sad for the kids.

But now our license is open again. I’m anxiously awaiting our next call, and wondering if I’m batshit crazy for wanting to do it all over again.

Baby baby baby baby baby give me a baby. That’s all my mind is doing right now. I miss having a toddler running around — baby snuggles, chubby thighs, hearing “no” 1,437 times a day — oh, wait.

But that’s another story.

I feel like despite it all — despite loss and heartbreak, despite frustration and drama, despite foster parenting intended to be a temporary situation whenever possible, despite supporting reunification and families first WHEN it’s in the kids best interest — my kids are out there somewhere. I don’t know if they have been born yet. I don’t know how old they are right now. I don’t know where they are or what circumstances will bring them to me. But I believe with all my heart they are out there.

And I will wait in the middle for them, despite it all.

We will see what happens in the future. As shitty as it feels to be put in this situation to begin with, I’m simply ready to move on with our lives and so happy that DCFS saw the truth of the situation.

This foster parenting shit isn’t for the faint hearted.

Dateline: St. Louis, Missouri. October 15, 1966.

On this date, The Chicago Bulls played their first game as a franchise against the St. Louis Hawks. Playing one of the guard positions for the Bulls was Jerry Sloan. The final score was Chicago 104-St. Louis 97. Professional basketball in Chicago was back.

The NBA in 1966 looked nothing like it does today. It lagged far behind in popularity to major league baseball and the national football league. It was probably closer to the national hockey league than the other two leagues. Attendance was low in most of its cities. Many franchises moved from their original location or folded. Owners of the teams were suffering huge losses. Teams would play games in cities other than their own. When Wilt Chamberlain scored one hundred points in a single game, it was done in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The Bulls were Chicago’s third professional franchise. They lost their second team just a few years earlier, when the Zephyrs moved to Baltimore. It was said that this was Chicago’s last chance to have a team.

Acceptance for the Bulls was slow. In the winter, Chicago was a Blackhawks town. They were led by the charismatic Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita. Those Hawks were constantly in the running for championships…always falling just a tad short.

Attendance for those Bulls teams was small, not much different than the rest of the NBA. Fans came out to see the stars of the other teams almost as much as their own Bulls. There were plenty of seats available to see such greats as Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West and the aforementioned Chamberlain.

The first year Bulls went on to win their first three games. They finished with a 33-48 record and made the NBA playoffs. That was quite an achievement for a first year team.

It took a few years and a turnover of the team’s original players, but by the early 1970’s, the Chicago Bulls were contenders. They now had household names, at least in Chicago, of Bob Love, Norm Van Lier and Chet Walker. The one tie from those beginning teams to the now contending Bulls was Jerry Sloan. He set the tone for those ball clubs with his tough defense and rebounding skills.

Like their Chicago Stadium building mates, the Bulls came close to championships, but fell frustratingly short. Still, this run cemented the Bulls standing in Chicago. They weren’t folding. They weren’t leaving for another town. The Chicago Bulls were in town to stay.

Jerry Sloan played for the Bulls through the 1976 season. He averaged fourteen points per game and almost seven and a half rebounds. he coached the team for three season in the late 1970’s. His number four hangs in the rafters of the United Center. He was the first member of the Bulls to have his jersey number retired.

Jerry Sloan was the first face of the Chicago Bulls organization.

His profile became larger in the sports world as the head coach of the Utah Jazz teams that came so excruciatingly close to winning two championships. Ironically, he and his team lost to the team where Sloan made his name, the Chicago Bulls. We saw a lot of him during “The Last Dance” documentary last weekend.

In 2016, Jerry Sloan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy body dementia. Having Parkinson’s and losing control of your body is a tough enough, but to add in the dementia that makes you lose all your past memories is heartless. Sloan suffered for four years before passing away on Friday.

Before Jerry Sloan and his early teammates, there was no professional basketball in Chicago. They made it viable in Chicago. They made it stick. Without them, they may not have been the Michael Jordan story in Chicago. No six championships. No “The Last Dance.” Would it have occurred elsewhere? Proabably, but no one will ever know for sure.

That’s the real legacy of Jerry Sloan. Rest easy!

Related Post: Stan Mikita, Lewy Body Disease and the connection to Parkinson’s

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