Proxy mom

there are millions of images and messages passed on from one person to another on the topic MOM, like "if you love your mom send this message to 100 or 15 people" (do not understand the logic,how about spending that time speaking to your mom), or "if you want your mom to live 1000 years, like it in 2 secs" (do you really want your mom to suffer till she is 1000? how about helping her in her work so that she suffers less when she is alive?) since we live in a country where we are never supposed to find faults with our parents, or answer them back or disobey them (the biggest example being the Pandavas or the five brothers marrying Draupadi just because their mother said so!), we try to give as much credit to the mothers as we can. but then my notion about this concept changed as i started counselling so many children having 'mother-issues'.
i do not know about other nations, but we live in a country where marriage gives you the licence of mother-hood. i somehow feel it is a full time job and like we give interviews and pass trough different sessions for a job, it should be the same for being a mother as well.
i met a child of 10 years, yesterday. he lives in hostel and it was his birthday. he said, his parents did not remember to wish him or come and meet him. so he was wondering if i could be his mom for a day..... Proxy mom? we gave proxy attendance for our friends in college (yeah i know it is wrong but we were in college!!!) i did what he wanted me to do. i went to his hostel and took him out for the evening with his friends. Though i know for sure , anybody from my profession would say that was unprofessional. but it was something i had been doing since i took up this job.
most of the time, all that a child wants is a mother figure to ask him/her at times about his/her life, without judging him/her or lecturing him/her.
and i understand mothers also are so busy these days. then how about making a new job for PROXY MOTHERS? you do not have time to teach your son guitar, you send him to a teacher. your son is missing out on the affection and QUALITY time (not quantity mind it!) with his mother, get a proxy mom!
trust me, i am too amateur to have solved so many issues in school children. but they did get sorted out. all i did was smile at the child, tell him that it is ok to be naughty at times, and no matter what you do,i am always there to listen to your part of the story and i am never going to judge you. and this had done the trick on more than 2000 children, i guess!!! call me unprofessional, but i love to see them demanding time from me, or small favors, or just to be there during their recitals, dance etc.
and i love being a PROXY MOM( though many students are hardly 10 yrs younger to me!)
it's the joy of proxy-motherhood!!!!

punctuation marks in the profession

at times i relate people in my professional world to the punctuation in the English grammar.
for example, there are some colleagues as well as students whom i find confusing (not unpredictable, mind it).
they are like a big '?' question mark to you. you do not know what is going on with them. you seem to have so many questions about them all the time....what is he/she thinking about this?....what is he/she exactly going through?....do you think he/she is not happy here??.....so on and on... like a receptionist, forced to keep a smile on face but i wonder what she is actually thinking...
and then comes the ',' commas. They would not sit with you and chat for hours(how do you read a comma?....a short pause, remember?) you see them,stop for a while and the best part they keep you connected with the others(commas connect two or more sentences). like an English teacher you meet in the library at times and he shares with you and others some double meaning jokes in English....making you laugh for some time.  i love the 'commas'!!!
Semicolon ';' people are basically those orthodox whimsical completely narrow minded people who in the name of old traditions, refuse to learn anything new or even give it a shot.semicolon separates two completely different meaning words. and i do not know about others but i am completely different from these people.
hyphen '-' and dashes '__' are your close ones.both join words.hyphen people are closer than dash people though.(as hyphen means shorter pause than dash). for example the colleague who joined on the same day as you. no matter how different your streams are, you develop a friendship.
Apostrophe ' ' ' are basically those people for me who give me the feeling as if some part of their personality or brain is missing ( apostrophe is used for the omission of one or more letters, eg, DON'T, o being omitted).i find them irritating at times and thank goodness for the modern sms lingo, we do not use apostrophe much nowadays!!
people who are always excited (either in positive or negative way, like the old p.t.teacher who is so angry all the time! or the young primary teacher, who is so irritatingly chirpy all the time and to top it all, falls in love!!!!!) they surely remind me of exclamation '!' mark!
full stops are those who are not connected to you all the time but when you meet them, you chat with them for hours and hours and your worries stop after the sharing. but you do not drag their thoughts to the next day of your life. you pause.
well, i know we mostly talk about these many punctuation marks in our daily life. but i have one more- the dots '.........' yup, these people also exist in our professional life. for example a date or two with a colleague and then it ends....you do not know why.things had given you feel-good-factor.so you do not want a pause. you do not want exclamation also. and you can not be hyphenated as well. so you drag the feeling next day as well. hence the dots '........'.....

hypocrisy

As my job demands i need to trust an individual completely. I believe in the Rogerian theory which, in layman's term talks about trusting the goodwill of every individual, in my case, my clients.

and in my 2 years experience of this job, i have no shame in admitting that i had been fooled many a times. i believe in a story completely by an individual and later land up finding the truth is quite different. well, i am supposed to draw out the truth from the individual. these people..i call them manipulative, at times. they manipulate for a certain benefit.

and i call some of them escapists as well. they do not want to come in terms with the truth or keep denying it.( i guess, i do not have to say that as a professional, i am not supposed to call them anything!!!!!)

and then comes a group...the hypocrites! we all hate them...but we do not realise when we become hypocrites ourselves.

one day i was taking a class on sex education for teachers.and came up on the Delhi rape case. there were a few male teachers ridiculing the situation to an extreme extent....the way we all felt. i was pleased with the fact that they still say women should be respected like mothers. later i took a class with the girls of 12-13 yrs old, trying to make them aware of 'good touch and bad touch' (or, sexual abuse in adult lingo) and it was shocking to know from them that those male teachers are the ones who make these girls the most uncomfortable. hypocrites!!!touching a child's back or breast is not raping her, but the impact that it leaves on most of them is no less than a rape...
 then after observing them for some days i understood that these male teachers under the cover of love and affection, touched girls in a sexual way. i also learned that they were not like this earlier. something must have made them this way (being a follower of Rogers....everybody is good!!!) i do not wonder the reason now...

what i wonder is...do they know yet that they have become hypocrites??

do we ever question ourselves.... have we become hypocrites yet??

about the journey...

well as the name suggests i am just an amateur shrink...or as it should be said....'a counselor'.
in this amazing (at times frustrating) professional journey, i come across various kinds of people and various kinds of personalities. being an amateur, i don't really understand if i should really let my profession (my clients) influence my personal being. but what i know is, as of now they do.
so this blog is going to be about basically my professional journey, where i learn something each day. as they say we should always try to learn from our environment. so i try doing that! and as they also say, knowledge increases as you share it. so i am doing it!!