Parking the Car

In previous posts, I have mentioned my dad and my grandfather. My dad passed away at the end of 2014. There was a very nice tribute written about him on YoYoNews.Com. You can see the post here. My grandfather is still around. (This is my dad’s dad.) We visit him as we are able to. He especially loves my sweet puppy, Bella. She is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and a friend to everyone. A funny side-note. If we are out walking, “everyone” wants to pet her or meet her. Occasionally or probably rarely, we meet someone who isn’t a dog person and doesnm’t even glance at her. Bella always gets confused by such people. She wonders why they aren’t petting her already? It’s really cute. She is a sweetheart. 

[This is a photo of my sweet dog, Bella. She is a fawn and white colored Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Her spaniel ears are the fawn color. She is curled up in a sleepy ball, lying on a turquoise blanket.]

Grandpa loves dogs so much. He told me a story about a dog he knew when he was a boy. I will share that in another blog post. I like to write stories, and I wrote down the story that he told me. It’s a good one. Glad I wrote it down as I am already forgetting the name of that dog!

Anyway, so I have been learning a LOT from my vision doctor, Dr. Tod Davis, and his Vision Therapy team. 

One thing I learned recently was that people who Dissociate (this will be more blog posts) often have a lot of similarities with each other. He said that Vision Problems and Dissociation often go together. It’s a thing. He didn’t say whether one causes the other. He just said that they seem to often be connected. 

He gave a lecture that I got to listen to. I am hoping to see if he can lecture a few more ways, and then I can share the links here for you to listen to, too. Anyway, in the one lecture, he told of an older teenage gal and the issues she has, and then he told about me (with my permission / he interviewed me for the lecture). As he shared the teen girl’s issues, he said that she has trouble driving, parking, gaging her speed when driving …. And I thought, “I have all of those issues, too!” 

It made me think of my dad, and then it made me also think of my Grandpa. 

I think Vision Therapy is a relatively new field, so it is possible that my dad and my grandpa also have or had the same problems that I have. (It turns out that my younger son does, too, and that will be future blog posts, too.) 

I remember being a little girl and my dad talking to me about where he parked the car. He always parked the car at the far end of a lot, where there were lots of empty spaces. He said he didn’t want someone to ding his car with their door, and that’s why he chose the farther, emptier spots. 

It turns out that I also do the same thing. I find it easier to park when there are 3 empty spaces together. I can’t tell how far things are away from me, so I just would rather have nothing near me when I am pulling in our out. I have never hit another car when parking, but I am sure I park more slowly than other people when it is a tight space. Because I can’t judge and have to trust that I won’t hit the other car. So far, so good. 

Anyway, this teen gal said that she also parks far away, where there are many spaces. And I immediately jumped to that little Jodi inside me, walking across a whole parking lot to get to the door of the place we had driven to, listening to my dad tell me about not wanting his car door to be dinged. And I thought about how I park far away, under the trees when I can (just like my dad did), at my local Aldi grocery store. I guess I kind of feel like “that’s my spot.” 

The teen has worked with Dr. Davis now for a while and is driving and parking better. She is now able to gage her speed and how to park. I know I was doing better for a while, before the Corona virus hit and I wasn’t allowed to go to Vision Therapy for a few months. I slid downhill; I park 3 feet away from where I mean to park, again. Hopefully I will get better again now that I am back at Vision Therapy doing the work with a trained therapist.

It is super interesting to see similarities between me and other folks.  I don’t feel so alone or “weird.”