Heads and Hearts

I just spent the last 30 minutes consoling my 6 year old.  As I laid in bed snuggling her, she told me she thought she was going to cry.  I asked her why and she told me she didn't want to tell.  I spent the next 10 minutes or so talking to her about why it's important to tell somebody when we are feeling sad or when something is wrong, that things don't seem so bad when we share them with someone else and that we usually can make things better or right if we ask for help.  She kept telling me she was worried she was going to get in trouble.  I got her to tell me it was something that happened at school, that it didn't have anything to do with another kid.  She was crying at this point and so I took her into the living room and sat down on the couch with her.  She finally got out that she had broken something at school at the end of the day and had not told her teacher.  She was really worried, said it had been bothering her all afternoon and she knew she was going to have a hard time sleeping because she hadn't made the "right" choice.  She is very worried that she is going to get in trouble at school.  
I've been in the throws of my suicide prevention work the last few days.  There were 2 suicides last week in one of the communities I work with.  I have been talking with community members there trying to understand what happened and help them figure out where to go from here, what action to take in the community to make sure this doesn't happen again, that not one more life is cut short.  It makes me keenly aware of why this work is so important.  In the mean time, there is talk of the funding being cut for this program.  I have sent out a couple of emails to my contacts, professional and personal, asking people to advocate to the Governor's office to keep this funding intact.  I have been touched by several of the responses I have received from folks, one in particular from a woman who lost her son 10 years ago to suicide.  He was being bullied at school.  He had created a sculpture of his tombstone in his art class and yet no one picked up on the warning signs.  No one intervened.   He obviously felt there was no one he could turn to, that there was no one that could help.
It brings me back to the start of this...we have to teach children to be help seekers.  We have to give them permission to make mistakes, to out themselves, to encourage them to ask for help, to have reasonable expectations of them, to tell somebody when something is wrong, either with them or when they notice something is wrong with someone else.    It seems obvious, but so many of us internalize what we feel and things fester and grow until they feel bigger than they are. 
I'm thankful Ruby shared with me what she was feeling. The truth is, I didn't notice anything was off with her after school.  We walked home together, she talked about her day.  We had dinner together as a family.  Kids don't always want to talk when we might want them to, when it's convenient for us.  I was at the home stretch when Ruby told me she felt like crying.  I was tempted to gloss over it and tell her to go to sleep. She has been having a harder time going to sleep lately and often stalls bedtime.  The thought crossed my mind that this was one of her tactics.
One of my coworkers last week talked about her teenage daughters and how the time that they were ready to talk was at 11 p.m. and so she'd have to stay up late so she could come in and lay on their beds and hear about what was going on.  A part of me feels like I'm drawing a parallel between things that don't really sync up, but another part of me recognizes that these patterns start now.  The problems will only get more complex, our lives will be just as busy if not busier as the kids get older, but we can never be too busy to listen, to really listen, with our whole heads and hearts.  It's what life is all about.