I'm not sure what's going on sometimes. I'm not seeing everything. I'm not hearing everything. I looked up the word, "perplexed" and discovered this picture. It appealed to me immediately!
Look at the frown she has... It reminded me of something from the past: "Turn a frown upside down." This was the original motto of a group of parents, of which I was one... who set up an organization to help parents of children with cancer. Back in the early 1970's, this group of parents were meeting monthly to support each other in dealing with their children's dreadful diagnosis and to help those whose children had died. At some point these parents, with the encouragement of the physicians at the local teaching hospital who cared for these children, decided to raise funds to assist other families and to aid the continuing research to find a cure for childhood cancer. My husband became the first president of this new group.
As the years have gone by, the small organization we parents started has become a successful foundation. I am amazed at its growth. It has been able to branch out in many directions. Ideas that were just dreams for us have become realities. The focus of the group changed a bit over the years because increasingly, children with cancer and leukemia were living much longer and many have apparently been cured. This is great news, for in the early days, a diagnosis of childhood cancer was a death sentence. So today, for many many families, the frown has turned upside down.
It has been a long time since I was part of this organization. After spending many years as part of a pediatric cancer team, counselling the families of these children, playing with these children and of being present to parents during long nights as they watched their children go through the final stages of their disease, it became time to move on...
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My goodness, it is interesting what direction this blog article took. This is not what I intended to write about. But guess what? Don't you know that turning a frown upside down makes it a SMILE!
Image: "Perplexed" by Vida Khadem, 2008
