In January of 2008, the Jugendamt (Germany’s youth welfare office) and police officials surrounded the Gorber family’s Uberlingen home in a surprise raid. Mr. Gorber was away from home at the time of the raid, visiting his wife at a local hospital where she had been admitted, due to complications from her pregnancy with their ninth child. Despite the children’s repeated protests, all but the oldest son, age 21, and a daughter, age 20, were taken into custody by the authorities.
The siblings reported that the 7-year-old was gripped around the waist by a youth home music teacher, dragged kicking and screaming across the courtyard, and thrown into a van. The terrified 3-year-old clung to his 20-year-old sister so tightly that even the police and Jugendamt official could not separate them. Both had to be taken to the youth home, where at last the little fellow’s strength gave out and he was taken into custody. [ . . . ]
[ . . . ] This is especially out of the ordinary when nearly all other western European democracies allow for homeschooling by either constitution, law, or practice. Even formerly communist eastern European countries are loosening up their laws and regulations to allow homeschoolers freedom. Far from escaping the rigidly uniformitarian ideas about society that prevailed in Hitler’s Germany, today’s authorities seem to be perpetuating it through their treatment of German homeschoolers. [ . . . ]
No morn? Not if you’re up all night, nope. No such thing.
No proper time of day? That’s IT! EXACTLY! Oh, it’s day? Oh. Okay . . .
That’s what that distant blue is, isn’t it. Hmm.
Here in these four walls,
connected by two halls,
no matter nature calls,
or if the toddler falls,
or if the baby bawls,
or carburetor stalls,
or dog the mathbook mauls:
Mom to the table crawls
And has her lunchtime!
The traumatic what-ifs happen. They happen to very nice people. They can ruin sleep and even ruin life for people who basically did nothing wrong.
Sometimes we think what if about the future.
What if a tornado were to strike? What if a burglar came to the door? What if I miscarry? What if the thought police read my post? And on and on and on.
We call those what-ifs “worry”. We can make great use of them if we take notes, plan for the future, and then forget it. We stock the basement with candles, drinking water, maybe helmets, and then we relax. We lock the door or place a chair under the knob and then go on to sleep. We take our maternity vitamins and trust our medical pro. Etc. We do, in other words, whatever we can to avert disaster, normally, and then we go on to the next topic.
We call that wisdom.
We are bringing the scary future worries into the present, actual, factual preparations. Dealing with them in the present is what we should do. When we acknowledge actual, possible disaster, it does not seem so scary. When we use known fact to make ourselves safer, we actually benefit. We plan to succeed, maybe update now and then, and let the plan be enough.
Or we fixate on it and go through life abnormally worried about everything. What if the tornado sucks me out of the basement, what if the burglar comes down the chimney . . . We can drive ourselves crazy. We can have nightmares (if we’re not losing sleep.)
We suffer trauma when nothing has actually happened!
PTSD changes from POST– to PRE-traumatic stress disorder.
What a shame. How avoidable.
We call that waste.
However, sometimes we look back.
We look back on our past traumatic experiences and think too much.
We actually worry about things in the past.
Things that only might have happened.
But did not happen.
They are “what-ifs” from the past. There is no way we could ever go back to the past and be in danger from these what-ifs, but we go back there, mentally, and worry about what-if they had happened.
Now, I will grant that once we have experienced actual trauma, our brains are shuffled a bit. That is true. We do not walk through true danger without knowing it, without adrenalin, without fight-or-flight, without some sort of harm or terror.
But we sometimes do not stop there. Sometimes we worry most irrationally: We worry about the future, but we go back to the past to do it.
Sorry, but what we call that is just a bit wacko.
How do I know? I know, because I’ve done it, and I’ve seen others do it.
When my son fell out of the rolling car, I was sleepless many nights. He was fine. He was not crushed. The car did not roll into the street causing an accident. Someone was there to help. We all lived happily ever after.
But I worried.
For days.
What if my baby had been crushed. I’d have probably had to go to court. I could have had my children taken from me. I could be in prison. My poor baby would probably have died. Or worse. My poor teenager would have felt guilty. What if the car had continued rolling into the street, and had struck another car. Or another child. Two children could be dead right now. What if my teenager had to go to court. He was old enough to drive. He could have lost his privileges to drive. What if he had become suicidal….
This is only a fraction of what I suffered, and if you’ve ever gone down this path, you know it’s really a maze that keeps taking you back to the beginning. You never get out. The end of all this is either such weariness that insomnia is impossible, or else the end is insanity.
Oh. An added bonus is that some get to enjoy substance abuse. Why we don’t worry about that is a puzzle to me.
Okay. I did stop worrying about the past-future-what-ifs and I’d like to share with you how to do it, in case you find yourself needing to know.
. . . I left my children, one of whom was a teen (in the back seat) another, a baby (strapped into an infant car seat in the front) in the car while I stepped into a store to confirm an order.
Just for a moment.
The engine was off and in the parking gear. The town was population 100 or so, all friends and neighbors. The street was seldom trafficked.
This was a safe practice 30 years ago.
The baby was in that “twos” stage, when (we all know) it takes expert managing to control their little adventures. He was ready for adventure that morning.
We did not know he’d been studying how to extricate himself from his car seat.
He did.
The teenage child was in the midst of inexpertly admonishing him (from the back seat, remember) to get back into his seat, when the baby grabbed the gear stick and—in direct defiance of the manufacturer’s promises about parking safety specs—pulled it out of gear.
The car began to roll backward.
A grocery sacking attendant happened by at that moment.
And panicked.
And yanked open the door on which the baby was leaning for support.
The baby fell out.
The car continued rolling.
The sacker guy grabbed him, about one second before the wheel could crush him, tossed him back into the car, jumped in, stomped on the brakes, and put the car back in gear, averting further disaster.
He then proceeded into the store where he chewed me out, half explaining and half blaming me, in his total anxiety/trauma/relief-reaction to his recent activities with my children.
I, wondering what he was talking about, left my business in the store to check on my children. All was seemingly fine. They were somewhat upset, but the baby had learned the lesson and was totally compliant about being in the seat, into which his older sib had succeeded in returning him.
Outside of anger that the car could be taken out of gear, when the engine was off and the keys in my purse, contrary to new safety regulations, with which the manufacturer made loud claims to have been in compliance, I really felt only relief and thankfulness for how things turned out.
Of course we always knew they hated us and we always knew why, but for some reason, they are feeling super-empowered lately. Heh, heh. Probably because so many, even on the inside, are taking pot-shots at the U.S., that it appears ripe for a take-over and they think they will end up on top.
Oh, yeh, they were sort of breaking the law. So was Anne Frank. So was Schindler. So was Corrie ten Boom. So were Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, et al. Anyway, the German family got all the way over here, seeking and receiving asylum, when someone APPEALED it.
Can you imagine? Any druggy who crosses over can live here illegally all he wants, but these people trying to do things right are getting an awful run around. Our government SO does not want them here, that they have bent and rearranged our laws — and it could be, and has been, argued: our Constitution — to the point they have struck a blow at home schooling, itself, just to keep them out.
And it doesn’t end there. Either they are maliciously attacking “we the people” or else they are too unknowledgeable to realize: their wording also attacks private schools. We’re all in this handbasket together, friends, and where do you think we are going?
Home's Cool! 