September 16, 2009 @ 06:51

Is the planetary alignment calling for deep introspection and questioning of all your life’s choices?  I’m thinking it might be.  A lot of us, in my circle of friends and loved ones, have been.  Me, I know I have.  This week Bear and I sat down and talked about making some major life changes.  Puppy’s development, no victories is a better word, his victories have left me feeling like a woman loosed.  Like I’ve awakened after a two year daze and am blinking at the bright sunlight around me.  It took a real kick in the teeth to wake me.  Turns out I’ve been struggling to maintain a relationship, a pretty major one, in my family that has been a useless effort.  So . . .  I’m done.  Those of you who know me best know that those two words are very meaningful to me.  You wanna move me from the “I’m done” place, you’ve got your work cut out for you. 

And I’m still not quite over that.  But the pain of it is beginning to recede.  Leaving in it’s place a feeling of anticipation.  It took me a couple of days to figure out what that meant.  So you know how it feels when you’ve got the flu, lying in your bed, in the dark, still as possible, just trying not to feel the pain?  You can linger there for days until you almost don’t feel the pain anymore.  But then that morning comes when you open your eyes and it doesn’t hurt anymore.  And you realize how much it did hurt, even though you had borrowed deep under the covers and lay perfectly still and tried not to feel it.  And it feels so good to be free of it.  That’s exactly how I feel right now.  I’m pissing people off left and right.  But I gotta say, I’m unapologetic about that.  I seem to have lost my ability to participate in bullshit.  Good enough isn’t.  Half hearted doesn’t cut it.  And not owning up to the things you have done, or not admitting to yourself the things that you want will eat you up inside.  So I took a good hard look at where we are and I believe that whatever we decide, it will be good.  Because of who we are, Bear and Puppy and I.  So, what do we want to do now?  And more unusually, what do I want?  What do . . .  I . . .  really want.  It’s a short list.  But nothing on it is simple.  I am a bit surprised to discover that I think I know exactly what it is.  But how does one go about getting what they want?  You know, when suddenly at the age of forty they discover that they know exactly what that is. 

September 09, 2009 @ 02:15

Puppy has transitioned beautifully to sleeping in his own bed.  The sleep walking and night terrors had lessened over the past year so we gave it a try.  Three weeks later, the only hiccup has been his bout with a fever virus during which snuggling with mom seems totally the right thing.  But here we are in the middle of week three and I’m four nights into a wicked bout of insomnia.  I may have slept all of 4 hours since Friday of last week.  This is not good.  Today at work I lost a bit of patience in a meeting.  I’ve got a couple of pressing deadlines this week and the meeting was for a fluff project and I just didn’t have the patience to nit pick over things that really don’t matter.  I found myself pushing decisions and cutting off banter in favor of let’s get this shit done.  Later in the day a woman who’s on the same committee told me she had never seen that side of me.  She is a simpering little thing in general and I know I was not openly rude or inappropriate, but still, it made me feel bad. 

What I want to do is go climb into bed with Puppy and snuggle under the Thomas comforter with him and not think about how grown up he’s getting.  He’s doing so well.  So well in fact, that I’m a bit at a loss right now as to what to do next.  I have felt like I’ve been on a roller coaster for so long.  A friend told me last week that parents of special needs children, to whatever degree their special needs may be, must put away long term planning the way most parents do.  Life becomes one day at a time.  I agree with that.  About four years ago, at the first stirrings of the thoughts that something was different with him, I began putting away those typical parenting plans.  Tee ball.  Family vacations.  What the first day of school would be like.  What kind of parent I was.  What kind of grown up I would send out to the world someday.  It’s amazing to me that anyone takes on the job of parent.  Surely if any of us really ever thought about it, we’d all say no thanks.  Here’s an entire human being that will be completely and utterly dependent on you.  Everything you say and do will shape them into the person that some day you will send out into the world.  Good luck.  Try not to make them a serial killer, k?  But that is all countered by things as simple and profound as the first time you feel them stir in your belly.  The first time you look into their eyes.  The way you feel when they fall over and give themselves a Klingon sized brow ridge while learning to pull up on the corner of the coffee table that you swore you would put the bumpers on last week.  It simultaneously makes you a god and an ant.  An ant under a boot when you make a mistake but oh, nothing compares to when you get a glimpse into their little heads that knocks you sideways.  Or when they take that first step.  Read their first word.  Develop a sense of humor.  Profound, all of it.  But it is also so easy, and such a mistake, to take those things for granted.  That those are all things that they WILL do.  But it’s really not a given at all. 

So when they tell you in no uncertain terms that for your child, it is NOT a given, just as soon as you’ve finished howling, you put your head down and you do the work.  One day at a time.  Three years ago we realized what was likely the name for Puppy’s differences.  I put my head down and did the work and then finally . . .  Two years ago we got the diagnosis.  I tackled it hard.  Did everything that we could, between the three of us, Bear and Puppy and I.  Although we don’t live in an isolated bubble.  Puppy’s got the best daddy ever, but the three of us, well, we all live on this little boat, every day.  So even though E’s the best, I don’t know if he’s ever felt as shaken by this whole process as I did.  Maybe I should ask . . . 

But as I took to heart the idea that early intervention is the key, I forgot about a lot of other things that we would have been doing.  No time for tee ball.  Head down, do the work.  One year ago he started school with his peers.  This summer he no longer qualified for any therapy, speech or occupational.  We took our first family vacation.  I began to question my choice at keeping him out of tee ball.  And this year, he’s so much like a typical child that I am now standing here wondering what to do with myself.  Suddenly I’ve got to lift my head and look around and regoup.  I know how to parent a typical child.  Bear is proof.  This week he informed me that he’s no longer saving his money to take the school trip to Europe (next summer and he’s nearly to the savings goal).  Instead he’s decided to keep on saving so that he and I can go together after his Senior year.  He thinks that will be more fun.  So I’m, by god, taking that as a big neon sign that I do not suck as a mom.  I swear that boy saves my life every day.  But since I’ve been so focused on learning how to parent an atypical child, to suddenly be standing and looking down at Puppy and seeing typical looking back up at me?  The deck is pitching beneath my feet.  Now I’ve got to figure out a place in the middle.  And I am going to need some time to figure out how to be . . .  normal. 

I know, of all the problems in the world to have.  And I am grateful.  Just for the time being, bewildered.  I’ve turned off my needs for the last three years.  What now?  I really want to think about real changes.  A whole new possibility for our futures. About how things I’d put on the shelf for myself, might be able to be taken down and considered again.  But maybe I’ll start small and just get a pedicure

September 07, 2009 @ 21:23

Somehow over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found my finish-all-those-projects energy.  Very not like me.  But I have in the last three days done the following: 

Cleaned out two junk drawers and one closet. 

Finished two sewing projects, one of which has been languishing for two years.  No . . .  really . . .  two years. 

Cleaned house and caught up the laundry. 

Packed away summer clothes, sorted through winter clothes, gathering in the process all the things that must go to either consignment or to charity. 

Painted a group of picture frames and then reassembled and hung them all. 

Hung a grouping of a dozen cork board squares and a map of the U.S. and begun adding all the summer roadtrip souvenirs to it. 

Painted some patio furniture.  The patio furniture is definitely my favorite . . .