Reading to Heal A Traumatic Experience

 

A Terrible Thing Happened

By Margaret Holmes 

Illustrated by Cary Pillo

Y's friend in the kindergarten was injured in the forehead about more than 1 month ago. She recovered from the physical hurt but seems to have connected the horror of the injury to the ambulance that carried her to the hospital. She has been refusing to leave her mother fearing of the separation just like when she was taken to the hospital to get treatment. 

The mother and I had a brief chat about this last week. I feel very sorry to see the mother drained of energy because of worries. I have been wanting to help. At first, I thought picture books featuring ambulances might help but was unsure if the child would simply be scared by the images of an ambulance. Then I started to think about the situation in relation to PTSD. After a search, there are books about how to help children suffering from psychological wounds. 

A Terrible Thing Happened by Margaret Holmes is a book recommended to children during the time of COVID pandemic in the USA. It is more like a book to help children to start getting psychological therapy. The story itself charts the ways in which the raccoon protagonist reacts to the horrible experience he has seen, unusual and unconscious behaviors and emotions unknown even to himself. With the guidance of a therapist, he gradually sorts out what has been going on in himself since the terrible happening. 

T was also injured in the forehead before he turned one. He does not have any solid memory about the accident, while I, a mother, was more traumatized by the experience of witnessing one's own child bleeding and of being unable to find a place to treat the child because of my low Japanese fluency at the time. I have been wanting to turn that experience into a picture book, too. Maybe it is a time to being the project of a picture book about wounds. 

Reading While Housekeeping: February - March/2024

 Literature

Italo Calvino, "The Dinosaurs" 

P.D. James, The Children of Men

Tolstoy, Leo. How Much Land Does a Man Need? Ronald Wilks, trans. Penguin Classics, No. 57. Penguin, 2015. 

Picture Books

Klassen, Jon. The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale. Candlewick Press, 2023. 

Academic Articles

Potten, Edward. "The Library and Commonplace Books of Mary Booth of Dunham Massey (1704-1772). The Library, 7th series, vol. 23, no. 4 (December, 2022). 

Siegel, Kristi. "Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics: Qfwfg's Postmodern Autobiography". Italica, Spring, 1991, Vol. 68, No. 1. Perspectives on the Novecento (Spring, 1991), pp. 43-59. 

Home Pharmacy

 

Spring in Japan is the most dreadful season to me. I have been suffering from serious hay fever since I started living in the country. If the symptoms are combined with a cold, a situation that usually occurs, it simply turns into an unescapable hell in my case. Whenever I have a cold, I will develop a persistent cough that might last as long as 3 weeks. A cold induced by hay fever, as pollen is also full of germs, makes me sick of life, especially the spring break is usually the longest vacation I can have in a year when kids still go to school and kindergarten regularly and I can finally work on research. However, coughs just prevent everything from happening. 

What is worse this year is that, there has been an unbelievable shortage of cough medicine across Tokyo since last year due to the spread of COVID and influenza. Last November, I visited three pharmacies to finally get some cough pills, but it was still a substitute medicine and was only half of the amount that was prescribed. The pharmacy said that it could only give me half of the amount because they need to secure their stock for other patients, too. Last week, I went to get prescribed cough medicine, too, but there wasn't any. In the second pharmacy that I visited, the pharmacist contacted the doctor to change the prescription, but I did not know exactly what it was. A week's portion is never enough to help me recover, but something is better than nothing perhaps. I have been coughing to the extent that my collar bones ache, and the muscle on my belly starts to develop. It is also a season when there are many school and kindergarten events in which I need to appear. My coughs pain me and scare others at the same time. 

Therefore, after the prescription was all taken, I decided to begin a home pharmacy by concocting my own herbal medicine. Some childhood memory about the names of some herbal medicine for cough remain clear, and I collected whatever I could get, processed them into power, and swallowed my own concoction. They are helping, I feel. Perhaps it is just psychological effect, but I have nothing but trusting myself as an amateurish apothecary. 

I remember one of my wishes these years is to study the science of herbal medicine to prepare for my second career. There is probably a light shed on the career path. 

 

God Help the Child, by Toni Morrison

I came across this illustration by Olaf Hajek for a book review of God Help the Child on The New York Times. Immensely enchanted. 

Wound

 

Some months ago when Charles the Prince of Wales (then) succeeded Queen Elizabeth II in the throne, a friend wrote a SNS post about the ways in which royal titles are passed on and inherited in the line of succession in the royal family. The information was not particularly niche but still rarely understood. It was new to me, too. My focus here is not about the information but the last line to his post. 

"That's it. Useless knowledge," he wrote in the end. 

Immediately, I believed that I knew exactly that he was using the line, casual as it might have seemed, to harm himself by trashing his own specialty and profession. I know, because I have been doing the same to myself, too.  

Around the time of his post, he was removed from a job, and his search for a tenured position in higher education hasn't been fruitful, just like most doctorates in the world now. I have been one of them, for more than ten years. 

My signature for my email account consists of my part-time affiliations and academic title. What would a secondhand bookstore owner have anything to do with my professional title? (the image above) Anyways, I just let the signature show. They are not the things that I am proud of; instead, the part-time status has been to me a mark of failure and shame. I insist on keeping it there partly to identify my social relations but mostly to humiliate myself. Recipients of my email would probably pay little attention to what tails to an email, but I know. The signature stabs my pride over and over again whenever it appears, and I let it. Publicly ridiculing one's own profession is exactly the same approach I take by exposing my peripheral existence.