Behind the Scenes of "There's a Dragon in my Pocket."

It all started about 1.5 years ago.  I was knee-deep in the pandemic anxiety like the rest of you, having moved abruptly back ‘home’ to Canada from Malawi.  It was a whirlwind and we were grappling with what our life even was anymore.  What was home?  What was happening?  I could see the anxiety in my kids and in myself.  We could talk about it, goodness knows we all were, all the time.  But how much did I talk to my kids.  About their fear?  And how?  My kids seemed okay, but then they weren’t. As a nurse, I know that kids can experience the physiological symptoms of anxiety before they can sometimes give words to it.  Recently a friend of mine who is a physician witnessed first hand how this is the case.  She traveled to Ukraine to care for refugees and the hardest part was seeing the anxiety behaviours in children.  They were being traumatized by all that was happening around them and it was exhibiting itself in physical ways through tic behaviours. 

I wanted a tool to help me talk to my kids, a way of making it hopeful, and a way of being vulnerable with my kids about my own fears.  I didn’t want to wait until they had full blown disorders to start talking about fear and all its impacts in their (and our) lives.  I felt like I was in a pressure cooker and one day hid away in a coffee shop to get my anxiety out through words.  Then somehow, this story just kind of fell out of me.  I was processing, I was grieving, I was articulating this experience for both myself and for my children.

I sent the first parts of the story to my kids’ art teacher back in Malawi.  For some reason, she loved it (what?!) and decided to draw the very first images for this book.

The artwork blew me away!  I have never written something and had it come to life by illustrations.  Woah.  The picture motivated me too.  This is an important topic, one we are all wrestling with as this world continually changes around us.  I realized maybe this might not be for just me and my kids, but for other families and communities too.

Stay tuned for more posts about the making of the book and for resources for parents, teachers, and counselors to use it as a tool with kids in your life!

Buy it online at amazon and if you have time, please write a review!