Zen Dandelion Too Poster*
Hello Everyone. I am gonna be writing for you for the first time ever in my life. I think it is the first time I ever written anything. I am a helper child. She has named me that, “ Child Helperâ€. Some people call me a Little. I’m not sure exactly when I was borned so I can’t really tell you that. I can tell you the first time I knew that I was good and helpful.
My Mommie, and I thought I would call her that and then I thinks about it and I realize that she cannot really be my Mommie. She really is my Deneen instead of my Mommie, cause I live inside of her. But alls of us in here, she is Mommie to. She runs the show (when other people will let her), except sometimes, she can not run the show. Sometimes, she gets very sad and she can’t hardly move. Sometimes she has a bad thought of a thing that happened to her, or some other part inside of her (like what I am, but not me—cause, so far, I don’t have memory thingies that shut me down, but I do has some bad, bad memories and I just hafta go away when they come, and if any shuttin down needs to happen, a grown up takes over to do that so I don’t have to worry about it). I jus realized that mighta confused some of ya’lls, so I will tell you a little bit about how it feels when I hafta leave.
You know how when you go to sleep, you shut your brain off and you try to get it to stop talking? Like maybe your favorite pet died and it is on your mind and you keep seeing the image over and over and it won’t stop and it makes you sad? Well, you want to stop being sad and thinkin about the bad thing, so you push it back into your mind. Maybe you pile other stuff on top of it to stop the thinking. You might watch a movie or read a book, or have sex. Yes! I know about sex even though I am a Little! Deneen doesn’t really allow any of us to deny things about sex. We have to all know them and talks about them and keep the bad things of that from happening to any of us. This is one way my whole system works together, and I am very proud that we do that, even though some of us have to suffer and be unhappy because of it. It’s the best way for us to do it and where most everyone is safe. That’s our jobs when we are out running the body. We have to make sure that EVERYONE is safe. That’s very scary and hard to do because we don’t all know each other in a way that we can all sit down at a table in here and plan or complain or tell our stories to each other. I hope one day, we can do that. I think that most of the people in here in our system are very nice people, and they like me.
Back to my stories, though. Okay. So, when I have finished doin somethin I needed to do, or if someone is around that makes me uncomfortable, or if someone sees me and tries to start talking to Deneen, well, its time for me to go. I WANT to go. I only have a few functions and I am very good at my job. VERY good! As a matter of fact, Deneen leaned on me heavily the last time she got out of the hospital. That was about five years ago. One of our Littles, she had very bad memories come where people were very mean to her. She got panicked and thrown back to when she got borned. Deneen let her have the body to try to work her things out and it turned out not so good for nobody could get back out and do normal things that we have people for. Like walking. Like writing. Like answering grown-ups questions. So, you see, it is possible to get “stuck†out, and you can’t get back in. That has happened to me a couple of times and I got really panicked. I tried just relaxing to go back, but it didn’t work. I got very scared and sad and stressed. I knew Deneen needed to be out talking, but I was out stuck in the mouth.
Oh! That’s somethin else that happens to us! When Deneen is doing the thing C-o-c-o-n-c-s-i-o-u-s, Deneen says it is, when she does that with us (and with some she can and some she can’t, and some always and some just part of the time), we have all of her big words available. They are here in the mind and we know the meaning, and we know it is a good word and the right word…but we are stuck in a time when we didn’t know the word and our mouth cannot say it. So we have to think of simpler words our mouth knows how to say and say it that way. It is slower and it takes longer—but everything does with us. We will get to that in a minute. We were trying to tell you when we go back inside and stop running the body.
It’s like when you are trying to fall asleep and you just shut things out, like closing doors. In my case, I open a door, and I fall into it. Like anti-gravity. Like a cool movie set. I almost feel the wind as I pull back into the mind and through the darkness of the door. Sometimes, other things pile in after me, cause you see, I have become the thing that needs to be squashed down and to be hidden. I have to be held down and put to sleep so that the body can call up someone else who can run the show. The show that is the Deneen Show! That’s kinda funny! That I AM part of a show, like on TV. Except the TV is this body, walking around doing things.
When I first comed out and stayed and put my foot down about letting me do things is when some of us thought the body needed to go down. The people who are there the most when that happens are Suicidal Girl, Skeleton Man, Shaky Girl, one or some of The Screamers, and Mute. As their names give away, most of them can not help the body to function and do working tasks when such tasks are needed to be done. Sometimes, when Deneen would be taking care of her grandchildren, and she always wants all of us to see them and play with them and talk to them and do things with them, she would got flashbacks sometimes that were very, very bad for her. Or she would get really upset and over react to some thing that hurted her feelings. SHE would go back through the door and start going to sleep, and she had a list of things that needed to be done! She knew that there was all of this stuff to be done, but Deneen could not do it. That’s when I started to come in a lot more. This is where I am most helpful to our system.
I can focus on one task at a time, and I love doing work! I can go inside to Deneen’s list and ask her the most important thing. She kinda’ mumbles it to me and I know she can’t feel her lips or her hands or move the body at all. Let’s say we had a picnic planned for the kids and she has gone to sleep over some trauma memory. I can fix the food for the picnic and put it in the basket! I have humming songs and I talk to myself a lot, but these things keep me very calm and focused and on task. Then, I ask the next thing on the list. Maybe we need to load the picnic things in the car, and then pack swimsuits for the little girls, and a swimsuit for me. I do only the ONE important next thing! I cannot multitask like Deneen does. I do one thing at a time, very carefully and very slowly. When everyone else is screaming inside, behind the doors, and when little people are trying to climb out of the pits of the screaming and get closer to the top (I hope they are coming to tell us their stories, and that this is their goal, though I can’t speak for them), when all of this is happening, I am still able to move the body and make it do the working tasks. It may take me a whole hour to do something that other people do in five minutes, but the fact is that I have a lot of weight I am carrying and lugging around while I do the thing. So far, it has helped us still keep to our needed things being done, and things that are important. I hope that my helping my system this way is something good.
One other thing that I want to talk about, and then I need to go back and drink the tea that I just made Deneen, and I got cheese and crackers for her. Shaky Girl is right under the surface, and nightmares are creeping in, and the screamers and groaners keep opening the mouth to make their starting noises when she starts to fall asleep. It’s important that we don’t scream and wake the partner in the bed, so we try to drive the screamers back under. One day, it needs to be their turn, but I don’t know if anyone will ever be able to sit and hear them and let them scream and flail and bang things. Maybe they SHOULDN’T come out. They might hurt the body. I don’t know. I’m no expert. They cannot speak yet except to repeat their scared statements in a loop, which gets nobody anywhere. I feel bad for them because I have fun doing the things I do, and I am very proud when I finish a task for Deneen and all of the others. The screamers, they have no goodness for them. I wonder if this will ever change.
The last thing to say is that I’m glad that I got to write and I think I got a little better at it just this time! We can learn fast because some of us get access to information we didn’t know from some of the others. If we all knew how to do all of the things, that would be good! But, when would I know that Suicidal Girl was getting dangerous and that the body needed to be put down so it can’t act? Only Skeleton Man can make that call, and I would hate to think of us without him to BE our protector like that. His job is boring and not pleasant for him, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t feel anything anyway. We are lucky to have him. He knows that he saves us all, and has many times.
Okay, here’s me with that “last note†again! Deneen’s partner doesn’t like children. Their energy wears her out. She likes them in small doses, maybe, but not large doses and she needs recovery time. She barely tolerates grown-ups, so the children should not feel bad (and Deneen is creeping in through me and saying things when it is supposed to be my turn!). The bottom line is that her partner doesn’t know how to act when I am out and running things. We are still trying to work on that one. I got stuck “out†once for a couple of hours and she was not at work (usually when I’m out) and it was the most stressful couple of hours in my life! Other than when I did have a flashback that was shared with Deneen and I almost took the body running into the bushes to let the screamers out because they were begging me to. Thank god The Male came out and saved us all from embarrassment. Deneen was gone for a long while that day, and I hung back watching, not buried behind the door, but not wanting to take control either because I was afraid.
This body is very tired now and in a lot of pain, so I’m going back in to sleep and I’m asking Deneen to please post this for me tomorrow, but make sure to ask me opinions of Jim Dollar’s picture to go with it (we love his pictures and we like to look when Deneen is looking through them. We love pictures!) and other things. And also, do NOT change our sentences to be perfect and YOUR sentences! Cause you said we could write it, so this is us writing. Apparently, I have a helper because we keep saying us. Maybe Child Helper has a Helper, too? Maybe writing more will help me, Child Helper, figure out who the “we†is who keeps sharing in the making of this. At present, I do not know. Maybe “The Writer� I do want to go on and on and on! Back pain is putting this to a close.
Thank you for reading me! I’m not out much here, but tonight, I was needed, and I helped!
*From The Deneen: Child Helper would like for me to let you all know that she chose this photo of a Dandelion, by Jim Dollar Photography (our thanks and thanks again and always to this remarkable artist!) because when we were all children, we loved to find these flowers. Below is a link to what they looked like BEFORE they turned into the remarkable miracles represented at the top of the page. The thing that made them miraculous was that if you blew on them, and blew all the seeds away in a single breath, all while making a wish (we usually closed the eyes), the little parachutes with their seeds attached would go out and find a way to make it come true! We made a lot of wishes! Some of them even came true. Some, we’re still waiting for. A lot of us came out for that blowing event, or watched from inside. It was very special. These are nice memories.
Dandelion In Full Bloom: Zen Dandelion by Jim Dollar
This post is dedicated to: Child Helper. The rest of us don’t know how we’d ever make it without her. We’re very grateful for her birth, and her continued help inside the system that is The Deneen.
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