I am back and running after a week of preparations, moving targets, and no power after Hurricane Irma came through. I feel blessed to have come through with our family intact, along with our home. As we continue the clean up efforts, I want to talk about parenting through hurricanes, or any storm. Particularly, parenting exceptional children of differing abilities. In my family, the differing ability we struggle the most with during storms is anxiety.
Anxiety is often thought to be the exclusive purview of adults. It is also portrayed as a person who is afraid to go places or to start things. I’ve learned that anxiety can look like anger through actions and words. It can inhibit sleep, and yes, just plain make you worried about the smallest chance of something going wrong or being different in your well-ordered world. For anxiety sufferers, storms might be right at the top of the list of things they never want to encounter. That is because storms are inherently unpredictable and bring more unknowns than they feel comfortable with.
We have spent years helping our children embrace who they are, including the anxiety. With that, comes lots of plans on how to calm our bodies and redirect our thoughts to what is more likely to happen, not what seems to be the worst scenario. With storms, we try to follow a plan of action meant to minimize their fears and keep them participating in life, rather than focused on the storm. The plan includes being truthful and direct, talks about what we will do in different outcomes, and reminders of past success of making it through storms. That is for the kids. For the parents, the plan is a lot looser. Parent Plan for the Hurricane is a lot less regimented and designed to help us not go crazy trying to manage the fears of the anxious ones. Remember though, it is hard to help anyone with fears that don’t always look like fear and leads them to act out, regress, and spend a bunch of time destroying things in their attempt to control their environment. So the parent plan includes adult beverages and laughter. The adult beverages help the laughter, which keeps everyone calmer.
As Irma made its way towards our state, leaving death and destruction in its wake and on the heels of the devastation in Houston, all parenting had to be done with laughter and love. My kids were scared and extremely concerned about everyone in the path of the hurricane as well as those affected in Houston. Parenting through this time requires patience and dedication. And really, I am a little skeptical that parenting and patience actually go together anyway! Irma caused a lot of damage, yet we were minimally impacted. We will spend time cleaning our home and helping our neighbors to show them how we come back from bad things. I hope it helps, because, hope is all we have. No one knows how well we are helping them, they can barely articulate their own feelings. I also don’t know how well we handle the patient part after the millionth questioning on the same topic. But we try, when we screw up, we talk about how it isn’t easy for adults either. We all just have to keep at it. And then we do that, keep at it. This week we won while parenting through the hurricane. I pray you get some parenting wins this week too.