Tag: fear

I Won’t Give Up

I wrote the following words earlier this week: As I listen to the discordant, high-pitched voice trample my love and concern, I dream of the day I don’t have to be my own champion. I wrote them in a fictional setting, but these sentiments follow me into my real life quit often. I thought I had gotten to a place where I wasn’t quite so invested in the behavior of my number one son. I tend to take it personally, though I know he has a number of medical diagnoses that exacerbate the severity of his behaviors, that the words he screams in anger don’t mean anything to him. Yet, I keep running to my room in tears, with my heart-broken and my body heavy with the weight of despair.

I have written in the past about my autistic son who also suffers with anxiety and oppositional defiance disorder. So, he has trouble with executive functioning skills, he has poor memory, he is terribly impulsive, and can’t stop talking to save his life. Also, like most children, he is the center of the universe and wants what he wants. Lately, he has become aggressive again. This time around he is bigger and stronger and louder. I leave rounds of aggression with him and am covered in bruises, and two minutes after he calms down enough to apologize he inevitably acts like there wasn’t a hurricane of emotional tantrum with him at the center. Right this moment, for the second time today, he is screaming about how hurt he is, how much we hate him, how we don’t listen to him, how it is basically our fault as his parents that he is screaming and kicking walls loud enough for the neighbors to be concerned. He is harming himself and breaking our hearts and I don’t know what more to do for him. Have you ever wanted to give up? I WANT TO GIVE UP, I WANT TO GIVE UP, I WANT TO GIVE UP! But I don’t. I DON’T give up. Every day I get up and do it all over again, because he is my child and I love him. But, I am not going softly into the abyss. I continue to work at getting him the best medical care and therapy I can. I am just really afraid that one day soon, the decision on how to care for him will be taken from me and my husband.

Does he understand what he is doing and uses the extreme behavior as a way to escape the things he doesn’t like and doesn’t want to do? Does he really not remember, or understand how he is hurting himself, how he is hurting those around him? I feel I no longer know what is prepubescent boy and what is ASD, or Oppositional Defiance, or Anxiety. Hell, maybe it is some nice combination of it all. That is usually how this works, right? Hardly anything dealing with the mind and body is completely autonomous and I should know that. Only, it is hard to be dispassionate and calm in the face of such anger. I know that I want him to accept and respond to help for this latest crisis, I want him to not only realize his potential but reach it too.

I am scared. I am tired. I am hurt. I will pray and continue looking for a good therapist to add to the roster. I will get up every day and do it all again.

Parenting Through The Hurricane

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.