Category Archives: Parenting

Polite At All Costs

Autism, Mischief & Shenanigans, Parenting, , , ,

Politeatallcosts

Southern women are taught to be polite at all costs. Southern mommas are expected to raise polite offspring.

One blistering day, I was driving with my two and a half year old son in the backseat, and I was feeling quite smug that I was going to be early for an appointment. So smug that I thought to myself, ‘You know, I have just enough time to run into the dollar store and pick up a few items.’

I pulled into the concrete strip mall and hustled my son into the store. I was still on schedule, until I got into the checkout line.

I waited. And then waited some more. And even though I was wearing a dress like a good Southern girl does, the sweat from the muggy day started to cause my thighs to stick together. My mostly silent child up until this point started to whimper.

I tried to ignore the noises. I tried to ignore my sticky thighs and the impatient sighs from the patrons behind me.

The line would not move. My smugness turned into panic as I realized that I not only might no longer be early, nor on time, but late.

As it finally became my turn to put my items onto the belt, my son started to cross his legs and cry.

‘Ma’am, can we use your bathroom? We’re potty training and he doesn’t have on a diaper.’

Disdainfully, she looked at me. ‘No. All of outside is a bathroom for boys.’

I stood there, both dumbfounded and livid, as I slowly reached up and clutched my pearls. I felt my fingernails cutting into the palm of my hand as my fingers wrapped around my necklace.

‘Of course. You’re right.’

Crimson shame spread across my cheeks as the long line behind us began to whisper.

I shuffled my son out of the store and looked around frantically. There was nowhere for him to go to the bathroom. I directed him to the nearest corner.

Instead, he walked straight over to the window of the store, pulled his smocked shorts down, and began to urinate on the window, in full view of the register and line we just walked away from. Everyone, including the cashier, stopped in their tracks as this child made the window his personal bathroom. I just stood there and did nothing, with my own jaw hanging open in surprise.

He pulled his shorts up and started leading me to the car as if nothing happened and I followed, speechless.

I waited a year to shop there again. When I finally had the nerve to go back, there was now a posted sign: ‘Bathrooms for pregnant women and potty-training children ONLY.’

Judy Blume is Our Milestone

Autism, Parenting, Serious Stuff,

JudyBlume

I was told recently that my family was one of ‘the lucky ones’, a term thrown around to parents of children with autism who are higher on the spectrum than others.

I’m always conflicted on how I feel about that term. Yeah, I guess we are ‘lucky’ because both boys are much higher on the spectrum than most, but how are we lucky when both children are on the spectrum? They both have high IQ’s, much higher than their peers, but significantly struggle socially—something that while the IQ will get them the places they want to go in life in terms of a career, they need the social skills in order to play well with others once they get there.

Years ago, for Radcliffe, I had to fill out parental assessment forms for the school to do his IEP. That moment my stomach sank when I self scored the test will be forever seared into my memory. In case you don’t ever have to do it, let me just tell you—it sucks. You are holding in your hands a four page document that scores every single inadequacy your child has, the one that you are so proud of, beaming with pride over, all of his issues summed up into a number, tallied by your own words.

We are coming up on his 9th birthday, which means it is time to redo his IEP. The district psychologist called me today to discuss it, and I went on and on and on forever about how proud I am of all of his progress and how much better he is doing. At the end of the conversation, she told me she had sent home a packet of the parental scoring forms that needed to be done again.

Oh.

So, I filled them out. I thought for sure with all of the milestones and progress we had made that the numbers would be so much better, so significantly less that I could pat myself on the back for a job well done after a nine year struggle.

And then I tallied the numbers up. And the numbers are almost the same.

There are so many cuss words I could write about this, so much I could scream about it, so much I could throw myself on the floor and throw a tantrum about, so much I can worry about because I JUST WANT HIM TO BE OKAY AND LIVE THE LIFE HE WANTS TO LIVE WHEN HE GROWS UP FOR GOD’S SAKE.  It is so deflating.

Sometimes, it doesn’t seem like all of those milestones, all of that damn tedious crap you do in order to make them better, doesn’t amount to anything.

But it does.

After I finished scoring the tests, I walked upstairs to tuck the boys in, and read to Radcliffe. This child, who seems like the strangest child I’ve every encountered on many days, is my creative counterpart. Most days, he doesn’t like to read on his own, but we have taken up to me reading him a chapter every night out of a Judy Blume book. He snuggles up to me, underneath his train Pottery Barn blanket that ‘normal’ boys have, and asks me questions and we bond over our love of a story well told.

And then I wonder…what if he wasn’t on the spectrum…what would he be like? What would his brother be like? What would our lives be like? Would they be playing outside with all of the other little boys in our neighborhood? Would they love playing sports like them, throwing the ball in the yard?

The truth is that I don’t want that. Even with the setbacks and heartbreak, I have been given the sons I was meant to have, the ones to stretch me and teach me as much as I teach them and I want them exactly as they are. They are incredible, and while the milestones may be small and minuscule, they are still milestones, and everyone—-even those of us not on the spectrum—is reaching for their next milestone.

So for tonight, my milestone is reading to my freckle-face sweet natured boy who loves Judy Blume as much as I do, and making sure he falls asleep feeling loved. Everything else can wait.

GET QUIET AND LISTEN UP

Parenting, Serious Stuff

SleepingR

I haven’t been to church in a really long time. A very long time. Years.

I live in the deep South, which makes this an unusual occurrence. I was raised both Catholic and strict Southern Baptist, with varying degrees of ideas of what made a good Christian. While in college, I settled into Episcopalian faith. It fit me. It didn’t judge me for not being a particularly religious person, but more of a spiritual one.

We moved, we had kids and I tried to go. But it just didn’t work. I became disenchanted with people that claimed to be a Christian, but only had harsh judgements for others for things they themselves did. I struggled with knowing that the people that hurt me as a child hid behind the teachings of Christ. I struggled when people told me that God only gave me what I could handle, because that’s not my God. I wondered where I belonged in that equation because I just struggled to understand. I had to stop asking to understand, because I know I will never get the answer that I want.

We are all works in progress, though, including myself. And with age comes this hard earned wisdom. This last year I have struggled with the demons from my childhood. As in, I am struggling.

I got hours and hours and years and years of help as a teenager/young adult. And I thought I was okay.

My therapists warned me that while I might feel okay, once I had children, I might feel differently.

I had two children. I did not feel any differently. I thought I was okay.

And then last spring, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was tucking my sleeping child in, covering his tiny body up with a blanket staring at his freckles and all of a sudden, I could not breath. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t inhale and this giant weight sat on my chest.

I was staring at an innocent child the same age that I was when all of the horrific things I worked through happened. The same things that my body is still paying for. The same things that cause me to pause daily.

The overwhelming shame, the anger, and the failure to understand flooded back, blindsiding me and no matter how hard I have tried to breathe, it gets harder. I get angrier and sadder at the same time. The more I try to understand, the less I understand how I share the same world and breathe the same air as these repugnant people.

I’ve gotten much quieter this year with these new emotions, grasping at the slivers of childhood joy I’m watching unfold in front of me, grieving the childhood I’m watching my children have, but that I’ll never know. They have, in all its glory, the innocent childhood I wanted for them. The more joyous I am about that, the more painful it is that it was stolen from me. I’ve gotten quieter because I can’t hear what the universe is trying to tell me because I’ve been drowning in this external noise of pain. I’ve gotten quieter because I need to hear what is being told to me.

Last night, I felt the urge to go to church for Ash Wednesday services. So, I got up today, got ready, and went to church.

I sat there, in a back pew, staring at the exquisite ceiling and the light streaming through the stained glass windows and wondered if I should be there. I thought just get quiet enough to hear. In this very moment, be silent and listen.

The rector started the sermon by referencing the AA meeting that was going on in the next building. He said he was always amazed how well it worked, but he knew why—- because we bond in our brokenness. That we are not perfect, especially not the strong ones of us, and we all need to know that we are not alone in our struggles. We are taught not to talk about our struggles, especially in the South, you just don’t discuss the hard things. He urged us to talk about the hard things, our brokenness, and in that, we heal together.

I started to cry in the back of the church. I’m not alone, and neither are you. My husband, family and closest friends have known I am struggling, but today I am sharing it with you in the hopes that if you need to read this, that you will, and know that it is okay and we are broken together. So you know that even the strongest struggle with being broken. Sometimes, the scars we thought were healed, are really partially still scabbed, and must be healed from the inside out. And that’s okay.

Because no matter how much therapy, no matter how much healing has happened, the pain and continuous striving to heal will never end. That, the acceptance of that, the never-ending pain, no matter how much less it will one day be, because it is already so much less than it once was, is the hardest part of this journey. This is the most surprising, almost startling realization to me, that it will never end. Because, I, like you, am a work in progress.

This Lenten season, my hope for you is to get quiet and listen. Take whatever your higher being/God/universe is trying to tell you and LISTEN UP. I hope that you acknowledge your brokenness and not regress with defeat. I hope your scabs heal and turn into hard earned scars. Lessons abound when you are humble enough to see them.