LEAN IN, SPD STYLE

Picture my physically adept daughter sitting at the dining room table. She is leaning back in her chair with her feet up on said chair. I remind her that feet are not allowed on chairs at the dinner table. She removes her feet...but somehow manages to retain the exact same lean, with an expression of utter disdain and indifference.

Now picture me sitting at a different table, working in the faculty lounge of the local community college. You will notice – but I will not, at least until my neck pain tells me something is off, several hours in – that I am sitting at an extremely awkward angle.

 

                           Figure I – Awkward and Ultimately Injurious Angle of Seatedness, Not Noticed

Those of us with sensory processing differences may find ourselves in a myriad of awkward and uncomfortable situations/positions because of our divergent vestibular and proprioceptive systems, the systems that tell us where we are in space and how our movement and body location relates to what is around us.

Whereas my daughter Z’s balance, movement, and self-awareness in space are appropriate and allow her to do things in healthy, if sometimes snotty, ways, I fear I’d be barely able to function without my many, many years of ballet and yoga.... G’s study of Tae Kwon Do has done similar remediation for his vestibular, motor, and proprioceptive functioning.

I was uncomfortable sitting there at a random angle from the table, but I am so used to feeling awkward that I didn’t even wonder why, or take steps to address my discomfort, until my neck pain began to eclipse my concentration. When the normal smells and lights and sounds of daily life hurt your brain, what’s a bit more pesky input?

Becoming aware of these goofy and discomforting phenomena is the first step in trying to devise ways in which to avoid actually harming myself. But here’s the thing: mostly, I don’t even know I am doing things “differently” until something lets me know – another person (“Hey, [FSM], why don’t you put on a sweater, since you are shivering?” “OHHHHH! Great idea!”), or actual pain...

What other things do G and I do like sitting at wide angles to tables? I don’t even know. Probably plenty! Do you know a wide-angle sitter? A curb-tripper? A walker-into-walls?

Love,
Full Spectrum Mama


Welcome to the Sensory Blog Hop -- a monthly gathering of posts from sensory bloggers hosted by The Sensory Spectrum and The Jenny Evolution. Click on the links below to read stories from other bloggers about what it's like to have Sensory Processing Disorder and to raise a sensory kiddo! Want to join in on next month's Sensory Blog Hop? Click here!

An InLinkz Link-up

THE BURNING BRAIN

As a variation on the theme of the Sensory-Processing-Differences-induced Full Brain, I offer The Burning Brain:

     

                                                                Figure I – The Burning Brain

And just one little Burning Brain story among many: There was a family-welcome, community-building meeting for our local Autism Spectrum Disorders group a few weeks ago. I’d never been before because I always have the kids with me at night, but thought I would go since kids were welcome this time.

En route to the meeting, we stopped by our town’s First Friday celebration where there is art and music and stuff. That was our first mistake. Two events? What was I thinking?

I began to get a headache.

We arrived at the meeting and there was a ceiling fan! And bright lights! You can see where this is heading…And there were a bunch of very, very nice people, mostly educators and paraprofessionals, at whom I could not look. No other kids, but hey, my kids are a lotta kids.

By this point I could barely see or hear. I could feel the inflammation inside my skull (see above), and my head felt like it was about to explode. Just throbbing with pain. The fans, the lights, the conversation, the nice, nice people? Unbearable.

I drove home trying not to vomit, got home, vomited from pain…

One single burning thing I was able to think during this episode: I can only imagine how a child would handle this!

This is Sensory Processing Disorder: a relative overabundance of stimuli (whether of activities or sensory input) causes migraines for some people. This same overabundance can also cause some of us to feel overwhelmed with despair, or anxiety, or anger and - especially before we are aware of Sensory Processing Differences - to not know why we feel this way. Kmarie Audrey has written wonderfully about this subject here. 

Again, imagine how this process of Sensory challenges leading to emotional/social/physical pain and/or overload would affect a child! A huge meltdown or tantrum seems almost – dare I say it? -- ”under-reactive” in this context!

My son, who also has Sensory Processing Differences, tends to shut down, or get more flappy and loud than usual when in Overload Mode. I talk to him about it, and hope he will have the words and wherewithal to deal with it as he grows up.

Me? I mostly get Burning Brain these days. Once I am in that state (and by this point medications do not help) my migraine will amplify any sensory input so as to make the smallest thing (lights, sounds, smells, movement) literally agonizing.

On the most basic level, I get why a clothing tag might make someone scream, why swinging on a swing soothes some and dysregulates others, why seeing a bright color could cause nausea or even vomiting…

There is a great deal of skepticism around Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), so I write this for those who cannot put their experiences into words as well as I can (at least in writing), and/or who do not have an audience. As an adult, I have a certain legitimacy, where a young child might not. I am able to be articulate in ways that a non-verbal or less verbal person might not be...As a college professor and an individual with some level of “success” in life I implicitly have the credibility that those who are even more profoundly affected by Sensory Differences might not be freely given by others.

SPD is not an “excuse” for me – I have a good life! – but it is very real and very challenging and as a label it does explain some of my lived experience. For some of us, including many children and people with autism/autistic people, SPD – while it may have its positive aspects (about which I have written before and will write again) – can make life quite difficult.

We may need help. We may need accommodations. We may need creative solutions and adaptations. We will need understanding.

Please believe us.

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

An InLinkz Link-up

...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

Ancestry

Holidays can be a little bit tricky in a Full Spectrum household. Take Easter, please. The morning egg hunt presents huge problems when one child goes Machiavellian (strategy, speed, ruthlessness; goal: vanquishing cousins, sibling…result: victory) and one goes aspergian (general neural overload - candy, neural/visual/auditory overload – frolicking cousins, warp-speed sibling; goal: vague…result: paralysis, tears). (Please see self-explanatory Figures 1 and 2.) Ditto, Birthdays: think piñatas, favors &c.  We have adapted by focusing on the pre-filled Easter basket, the set number of packets – one for each child – in the piñata, and so forth.

                      Figure 1                                                                                            Figure 2

St. Patrick’s Day, too, has its potential pitfalls. Over oatmeal breakfast on that fateful day, I was sharing an uplifting story of how the children’s Scots great-grandfather would wear a button on his bum that read, “Kiss me, I’m Irish,” much to their Irish great-grandmother’s chagrin, when Z asked me, “Mama, am I Irish?”

[Censored!] I was completely tongue-tied. There was a long and (to me) somewhat uncomfortable silence. I’d’ve preferred to have been thinking about many other questions right then, including my ongoing internal debate over which is better as the face ages: the jowl-less wrinkles of your skinnier folk or the wrinkle-free jowls of the pleasantly plump?

Ahem. Since Z was adopted from China, I have a ready-made response for one of the hardest questions: “Why didn’t my birth mother keep me?” China’s one-child policy –for all its questionable aspects – offers the option of a simple answer to this complicated question: “Your birth Mama gave you up because she had to, since in China most couples are allowed only one child.”

But what about this question? Is Z Irish or not? Clearly she is not genetically Irish. But her maternal great-grandmother was fresh off the boat from Ireland. Pardner, G and I are all genetically part-Irish. As I sat there, mouth agape, Pardner (Thank you universe for Pardner! Thank you! Thank you!) came to the rescue, assuring her in a strong brogue that, “Everyone’s Irish on St. Paddy’s Day!”

“Good,” she said, “because the leprechauns are going to come to our school this weekend and turn everybody’s chairs over.”

Oh.

Walking into school several weeks after St. Patrick’s Day, Z asked me, “Mama, if we can have ancestors…can we also have ‘anbrothers?’” After I stopped laughing and, frankly, bragging to everyone I ran into over the next few hours about how funny Z is, it hit me that she is still thinking about ancestry a great deal.

Maybe all those Easter eggs – and all those other material, tangible, often-edible (and sometimes eaten even when not-edible) things -- feel vitally important to a little girl who’s not quite sure what’s inside herself.

Next year I am just going to say, “Yes. Yes, you are Irish baby. Because you are mine.”

Love and leprechauns,

Full Spectrum Mama