SITTING STILL

Dear Persons,

We recently went to my daughter’s middle school concert. To my amazement, my 18-year-old son sat through the entire concert without fidgeting, talking, or calling out unexpectedly to kids onstage. 

It was the first such event I’ve ever attended without breaking into a cold sweat from anxiety over his behavior. That includes, over the years, many, many concerts, movies, plays, musicals and other performances during which attendants are expected to be quiet and attentive. 

I’ve been a mostly solo (my partner, Pardner, is a chef/owner of a restaurant) or entirely single parent for most of my children’s lives. With a couple of notable exceptions, I’ve spent every weekend on my own with them for the past twelve years or so. 

It’s been really hard—and REALLY wonderful. 

Early on, I decided I wanted to be a person and do things, and so I’ve been dragging them along to events all these years. 

I hadn’t realized how much G’s restlessness affected me until the other night. 

There are so many little ways in which life can feel daunting. What we usually do is soldier on, right? 

But it’s amazing to consider all the possibilities that open up when you actually feel free to enjoy an event rather than keep most of your energy on someone sitting next to you. 

Sitting through that concert like that was kind of a big deal. 

And it got me to wondering: How much energy have I wasted on worry over these many years? 

I usually explain and justify my worries to myself as solution-seeking behavior. 

But no amount of anxiety could possibly have hastened G’s development into the amazing young man he is now. 

And, to be honest, my worries probably kept my brain too busy to come up with good work-arounds and ideas. 

Plus, ALL ALONG, G has been the happy, kind, funny, fun, loving person he is now. Just a bit more fidgety. (And, truth be told, he wasn’t always all that into much of the stuff I dragged him to…)

Yet I persisted in worrying much of the time about G’s fidgeting and behavior—and not only insofar as it affected him at the time! I also future-catastrophized about potential impacts on his career and how it  might alienate him from the “regular” social world. 

What good did/does all that worrying do? How many other useless ways do I spend my time anxiously mulling over and anticipating possible disastrophes? 

We all struggle with how to be in society. And knowledge around expectations and societal norms comes slowly to some. So do the sheer physical ability to settle down and key mental capacities, including emotional regulation. 

So why do I torture myself unnecessarily? 

I know I’m not the only parent (or guardian, or loved one) of a child with differences (or parent, period) who does this. 

Frankly, I wasn’t much of a worrier, pre-kids. Somehow the little worries of new parenthood mushroomed over the years—sometimes with good reason—into a constant stream of nervousness. 

Looking back, I wish I could’ve enjoyed myself more as a mom, instead of only now realizing all this. 

I’m going to work on finding a way to avoid breaking into a cold sweat when I go places with my children. 

More to the point, I’m going to take a close look at the ways worry has come to pervade so many areas of my life that it’s often depressing and sometimes even debilitating. 

Because I have a hunch that in all cases there’s a similar element of complete futility.

I’m going to try to be gentle with myself in the process: This worry has developed as a result of a lot of hard stuff. 

But I’m also going to be firm, because I’ve had enough!

Worry is my issue and I’m going to own it. 

I cannot “control” my kids anymore now that they’re teenagers. Nor can I make everything right for them!! In fact, I never could entirely do either. 

I can see now that G has moved on. 

Time for me to do the same.

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

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...And a Small “Boo”

Maybe that “double yay” was a little disingenuous. And disingenuous is Full Spectrum Mama’s LEAST favorite thing.

The truth is, drop-off for the first day of school was devastating and I’ve spent the entire day sick to my stomach.

All summer long, I have been coaching both children (for different-slices-of-spectrum reasons) to spend their first days at their new school observing and listening. We have discussed at length how much there is to learn from taking a step back and proceeding with care. How great it might be to get to know people and what is expected of you before charging forth.

Yet when I circled back to check in on G on the swarming playground, he was standing alone and shouting at the top of his lungs. Kids were already avoiding him, five minutes in.

When I tried to stop him he said he’d made a friend and needed to find him, though G, not surprisingly, wasn’t “sure what he looked like.” I sure hope that’s true, that he’d made a friend and all, but I suspect he wasn’t going about his friend-finding in the most effective fashion. In sensory-overload situations G tends to get super-flappy, as some of us do.

Cheers and prayers for all of us first-day-of-schoolers (workers, etc.) – it’s sense-y and people-y out there!

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

EIGHTY-SIXED

My daughter has an attachment disorder. When she is anything but entirely comfortable she talks constantly, animatedly and without ceasing.  My son has aspergers syndrome. He talks at high volume in an unmodulated voice.

In other words, my children are sometimes rather LOUD.

Consequently, we don’t spend a whole heck of a lot of time in restaurants.  But the other day we had a family date with another mother and her aspergian son and her peppy daughter and, sure enough, the table next to us complained.

See, we had thought we could have a peaceful night out with the kids.

We had walked into the restaurant and immediately seen a large, multigenerational family in the big center table. They’d smiled big, friendly, relieved smiles to see us. They knew we, with our four potentially rowdy elementary school aged kids, would balance they and their two little guys right out. 

But we all knew we’d all be trying to keep our children as well-behaved as possible for the comfort of other diners…

Our sons were excited to see each other. They began putting on raucous, clearly innocent and dorky (vs. aggressive or obnoxious - and why do I feel the need to point this out?) plays with their chopsticks. This friendship has been a beacon of hope for both boys, who struggle socially in their own schools.

Our gals were excited to see each other, chatty, berating their big brothers for being “annoying.”

Maybe four minutes after we sat down, a server approached our table. She was super sweet: “We don’t mind your kids at all but another table is very upset…” They informed us we were welcome to eat in the other part of the restaurant. The closed part? That is usually unused?

We knew it wasn’t her fault and agreed right away, trying to leave as little mess behind as possible, taking our glasses etc. with us, faces burning.

Someone from the other family asked what was going on. Looking straight at the offending table, I informed the nice family in a clear, LOUD voice that someone had complained about our children, despite the fact that they were being relatively well-behaved. I explained that we had to move to another room.

There’s a ferocity to motherhood that once made polite, feminist me hiss the B word at a woman who sniped about my letting my young child play under the table at a restaurant (at the time he'd been diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder and I knew he was overwhelmed by restaurant stimuli). ...A protectiveness that had me retorting “What are you whistling at? You better not be whistling at my baby!” at pregnancy catcallers.

As well as that loving ferocity and protectiveness, there is a sadness when someone judges your child on his or her appearance or on other inevitable aspects of their being. Doesn’t acceptance start in the little things? Allowing children to make a little noise? Reach for their Skittles? Be included even if they are a different color or neurology or different ^$%@%^% ANYTHING?

Don’t ALL children learn through having opportunities to broaden their experiences? By moving outside of their homes and their neighborhoods to restaurants, different streets, neighborhoods, cultures??? Don’t they deserve as many chances to grow as we are able to offer them?

Children who are held to basic standards of kindness yet allowed to make mistakes in the niceties without dreadful repercussions may grow up to be accepting, no?

Post the Zimmerman verdict, I listen to my friends with sons of color talking and writing about how they instruct their sons: “Don’t act suspicious,” “Stay quiet,” “Keep your hands visible, “Don’t make yourself a target”…

A week ago I might’ve ventured to hope that we were moving away from the necessity for such admonitions.

How far are we willing to go to keep our kids quiet? How far to keep them safe????

Acting “erratic” (G) and dining out while brown (Z) are definitely things I see in my kids’ futures. I want them to feel welcome in the world nonetheless! I thought taking them to a restaurant would be a good thing, but our good thing almost got eighty-sixed along with us.

Do you think, stern people of the next table, that we have not tried to have our children fit your behavioral standards?  Do you not think we are doing our best and maybe occasionally deserve the right to go out and eat dumplings?

See those first few sentences of this post where I define my kids as their conditions? You, next-table chumps, have just gone one worse than defining my children by their conditions. You haven’t even given them a chance.

Sure, sometimes a noise complaint is just a noise complaint. But I think we owe it to ALL OUR CHILDREN to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Children raised like that will likely do the same for others.

Anyway, the restaurant had another room and we went there – and the other family actually got up and came over to hang out with us out of solidarity. (Thank you, warmhearted, inclusive, attractive, multigenerational family!)

So things ended up ducky.

Still, the next time you are in a restaurant (or someplace), won’t you smile at someone who is maybe a tiny bit out of their comfort zone? Maybe even ask to watch the chopstick drama?

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

The Incident of the Overactive Extrapolator – Catastrophizer

Many moons ago I speculated that we each possess a certain level of reactivity, and that this reactivity is often exacerbated by parenting. I further postulated that there is a hitherto undiscovered gland that modulates this function, and, being its discovererer, named it the Extrapolator–Catastrophizer Gland, or ECG for short.  (For further information, please see http://fullspectrummama.blogspot.com/2012/04/would-you-ratherii.html .)

Well, I recently discovered that mine is pathologically enlarged. How refreshing! This gives me hope that it may, in the fullness of time, subside!

The incident went as follows: G reported that the daily question in morning meeting was, “What do you not understand about other people – and what do other people not understand about you?”

I asked what his answers had been.

To the first question, my Mr. Literal had responded, “I don’t understand why people say obvious things.”

Uh…hmm.

And for the second?

“People don’t understand why I like to make weird noises.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That’s probably true. I don’t mind them except when you get loud sometimes. But yeah, kids might not understand some of the sounds you make or why you make ‘em. No big deal.”

“Also,” he went on, “people don’t understand why I…why…I…”

A lifetime passed during which my heart broke, my nervous system went into fight-or-flight mode and I mentally outlined a long, putative blog post about this interaction.

“People just don’t understand why I…like stink bugs.”

                                                    Figure I – My ECG at time of Incident

                                                            Figure II – Appropriate ECG

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama