compassion

How to Be the Village

/ Sara Lynn Payne / Leave a comment

Be the Village

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It’s March. Unfortunately, the weather hasn’t realized that it is already spring and yet, snowflakes danced around my kids as they headed to school this morning. Yes. Snow.

While I normally love the whole winter-wonderland thing, it doesn’t love me back. Fibromyalgia has given me the weather-sensing superpower that just means life hurts more when the temperature drops. Like right now. In March.

All (joking) bitterness aside, it is ironic how something as mundane as the weather can feel so overwhelming. Invisible consequences of an everyday kind of event (generally speaking, at least, since snow is common other places) don’t really register on other people’s (weather) radar. In between errands, work, and homeschool, the idea of not noticing things because they are so “normal” hit me.

Normal is relative.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place: the Dark Truth Why CPS is So “Ugly”

/ Sara Lynn Payne / 12 Comments

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

It seems like it has become trendy to complain about CPS. You’ve probably seen the stories of parents ending up in the crosshairs of CPS because their 11-year-old was playing outside by himself for an hour and a half while his parents were caught in traffic. Or the mom who was on Dr. Phil insisting that CPS had wrongly taken her baby and the truth was that he was just sick…

I made the mistake of reading the comments on these articles and it was…well, ugly.

People were bashing Child Protective Services, saying they are just causing trauma by removing kids, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore. People ask why CPS wouldn’t comment and why aren’t they answerable for cases gone wrong and insisting that the whole system needs to be done away with.

“The system is broken.”

I’m sure you’ve heard the sentiment – or even felt it yourself.

There are two competing narratives going on regarding CPS and foster care.

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Invisible

/ Sara Lynn Payne / 18 Comments

 

I love working in Photoshop; in fact, it is one of my favorite parts of my job. I get to take images and pull out the beauty from them, add text or graphics, and create. The way the program works though took me a while to get used to since it is very much unlike how I learned to create art by hand. The program uses layers to manipulate the images and that pull together at the end to create a finished product.

It’s eerily reminiscent of life in general. We don’t see all the layers of a person’s life at first glance, just the sum of everything. It’s even possible for us to turn off a layer so it isn’t immediately visible to those around us.

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