When the Husband and I went camping the other night to celebrate our wedding anniversary WITHOUT THE CHILDREN ALONG (thanks to the Mother-in-Law who came out from Salt Lake just for the occasion and spent the time plying her professional-grandmother skills) I had one of those weird, Technicolor and Surround-Sound hormonally induced dreams that occur during pregnancy. Really, pregnancy dreams have enormous production budgets, elaborate sets and casts of thousands. In this one our music teacher Spoke to me. I was trying to deal with this particular student who I had last year for general math.
[This next part is all real, necessary background for the dream] Her skills were that of a second grader because that was when her mother, who was strung out on heroin, stopped taking her to school. She was socially promoted all the way up to the 7th grade, not being able to read or multiply. Mom wound up in jail and she was living with her aunt. Then mom got out of jail and started hanging around again, and this girl started acting out, making it very difficult for me to teach the five or so students in my class who really were interested in learning. Finally, in about February, we got her out on independent study and I didn't hear from her again since she never turned in any work.
So, in my dream I kept trying to deal with this girl, and kept getting frustrated. Then the music teacher Spoke to me. He asked me what my goal in life was, and I replied that I wanted to be happy. He asked me what that would look like. I said that when I was old I wanted to be rocking on my porch, watching my grandchildren run around my big yard and garden. Then he asked me if this girl had anything to do with what I wanted, and I said no, she wasn't part of what would make me happy. Then the Shamanistic music teacher kind of said, "OH!" And the message was, so don't let these ones stress you out and make you unhappy because they have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR HAPPINESS.
