Tags: growing up

Kim reveals her struggle with letting go, illustrated by her experience working with a group of foster youth. She connects her own life and admiration for a grandmother who always took care of people with her tendency to be needed, and comes to a place of understanding about the importance of being able to watch youth move on.

In this story, created in a CDS hands-on three day community workshop, Joan reflects on the ways in which her youthful experience with scoliosis impacted the formation of her adult identity. She traces her years wearing a brace and hiding the shape of her back, and finally shares the strangeness – and sense of rebirth -- of having surgery much later in life, to correct the curvature in her spine.

In this moving story, Soraya and her sister visit their grandmother in Haiti for the first time. Soraya climbs a forbidden tree and is told not to play that way. She reflects on this memory, as an adult, and on how she envisions the future for her own girl children. The story was created in a CDS hands-on three day community workshop.