On the day of your party, playing baseball in the yard with bigger boys, your friend took a wrong swing and, smack— the bat hit your face. There I was ready to run and scoop you immediately into my already open arms to hide your tears in my embrace, but I didn't have to. Because you blinked and you blinked and you shook your head and checked your nose with your hands to make sure it wasn't broken and you squared your skinny shoulders and screwed your face into a stone mask and you didn't cry. Not a single tear.
Not in front of your friend, who, after all, hadn't meant it.
On your real birthday, which this year came on Mother's Day, just like the day you were born, I heard you say to your grandfather, over the phone, "I am planning to visit the science center. Did you know they have a new exhibit on Charles Darwin?" and it occurred to me that I couldn't remember ever telling you Darwin's first name. Like so many things you know these days, and didn't learn from me. You read it somewhere, when I wasn't looking.
At the museum you did not want to hold my hand while we walked across the bridge above the highway, and in fact when we came to the plexiglass cutouts in the floor that offer a dizzying view of rushing cars and pavement far below, you, grinning, jumped on one, hard, to show off for a pretty little girl who was scared to look down.
This week, suddenly, as if given unspoken permission by the calendar, you have become a child who runs out the back door without asking me to come with you and watch you play. I watch you anyway, from the window. You sidle, head high, shoulders back, toward the older boys next door, brandishing your yellow plastic gun by way of invitation to a game of Space Police (a game you have invented, and lead with the assurance of a director giving instructions to actors on a stage).
But yesterday you were home sick and you sat with me for nearly an hour on the couch, leaning your head against my shoulder while I wrote. When I finished working you said, "Mommy?" I said, "What?" And you said, "Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?" Smiling slyly like it was a silly joke.
Still I knew what question you were really asking. The one you suddenly feel too old, at the ancient age of six, to ask.
And the answer is yes. This year and next year and the year after that and even when you're 100 years old and I am 123, yes.
As long as I have breath to say the word, yes. Whenever you need me, I will be here.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
An Open Letter to Oppressive Humorist Mommybloggers
Dear Kelcey Kintner of The Mama Bird Diaries (and all other Mommybloggers Who Would Dare Lead Impressionable Women Astray),
Greetings from a suburban mother, housewife and blogger from a flyover state! I don't believe we have met before (Though, some fancy sophisticated East Coast bloggers who ought to have been setting an example for me did convince me to get a little drunk at my last BlogHer, and my memory of subsequent events is a little fuzzy. So who can say for certain?).
I am writing you a letter because I hear that you are apparently oppressing me with humor.
I suppose my female mind has been poisoned by all of the amusing anecdotes about motherhood that I have recently read on the internet, because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out just how it is that you are managing to kill feminism and force misguided Midwestern women like me to be mediocre with your humorous posts about wearing pants.
But now that I have been informed about how dangerous women writers like you are, before I go and try to write another post over at that political blog I write along with a bunch of other mommybloggers (by the way, that blogger who is telling the whole internet that women like you who write about funny stories about parenting are ruining humanity for the next generation of women might want to check our little mom-run political blog out, actually — the First Lady once posted there — I certainly hope we humble mommybloggers didn't corrupt her accomplishments by association), I think that perhaps I ought to cleanse my mind of the evil influence of women who dare to write publicly about the dirty, drudgerly work of raising children by contemplating some dead male social pundits' ridiculous bloviations on the supposed intrinsic inferiority of women:
Wait a minute.
I just noticed something.
All those men. Those unevolved, sexist, influential historical men who believed that women were inherently inferior. In all those quotes I just quoted, they weren't just talking about the inferiority of women, were they?
No, it seems to me that all those sexist men I just quoted mentioned that inferior women were made inferior on purpose so that they would be perfectly suited to the inferior work of raising children. Which is obviously inferior work, because it is done by inferior women, who are inferior!
Hmm.
Could it be that labeling the work of raising children as an inferior occupation that women should avoid talking about so as not to be seen as inferior actually sets back feminism?
Because you know what? I'm pretty sure all those men I just quoted would be really pissed off by a bunch of women writers having the gumption to assume that their stories about motherhood might actually be wortth publishing in public.
Well, Kelcey. I guess you're not really oppressing me at all, are you? In fact, since the rise of blogging, women like you have been successfully subversively pissing off not just certain self-hating feminists, but also the patriarchy. Fancy that!
Carry on, mommybloggers who write humorous stories about pants.
Carry the revolution right on.
Greetings from a suburban mother, housewife and blogger from a flyover state! I don't believe we have met before (Though, some fancy sophisticated East Coast bloggers who ought to have been setting an example for me did convince me to get a little drunk at my last BlogHer, and my memory of subsequent events is a little fuzzy. So who can say for certain?).
I am writing you a letter because I hear that you are apparently oppressing me with humor.
I suppose my female mind has been poisoned by all of the amusing anecdotes about motherhood that I have recently read on the internet, because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out just how it is that you are managing to kill feminism and force misguided Midwestern women like me to be mediocre with your humorous posts about wearing pants.
But now that I have been informed about how dangerous women writers like you are, before I go and try to write another post over at that political blog I write along with a bunch of other mommybloggers (by the way, that blogger who is telling the whole internet that women like you who write about funny stories about parenting are ruining humanity for the next generation of women might want to check our little mom-run political blog out, actually — the First Lady once posted there — I certainly hope we humble mommybloggers didn't corrupt her accomplishments by association), I think that perhaps I ought to cleanse my mind of the evil influence of women who dare to write publicly about the dirty, drudgerly work of raising children by contemplating some dead male social pundits' ridiculous bloviations on the supposed intrinsic inferiority of women:
The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility, and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive.- -Paul Topinard
Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end that they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. -Martin Luther
Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted — in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place. -Arthur SchopenhaeurWell, that was certainly an effective washing of my mommyblog-addled brain! A bracing reminder of —
Wait a minute.
I just noticed something.
All those men. Those unevolved, sexist, influential historical men who believed that women were inherently inferior. In all those quotes I just quoted, they weren't just talking about the inferiority of women, were they?
No, it seems to me that all those sexist men I just quoted mentioned that inferior women were made inferior on purpose so that they would be perfectly suited to the inferior work of raising children. Which is obviously inferior work, because it is done by inferior women, who are inferior!
Hmm.
Could it be that labeling the work of raising children as an inferior occupation that women should avoid talking about so as not to be seen as inferior actually sets back feminism?
Because you know what? I'm pretty sure all those men I just quoted would be really pissed off by a bunch of women writers having the gumption to assume that their stories about motherhood might actually be wortth publishing in public.
Well, Kelcey. I guess you're not really oppressing me at all, are you? In fact, since the rise of blogging, women like you have been successfully subversively pissing off not just certain self-hating feminists, but also the patriarchy. Fancy that!
Carry on, mommybloggers who write humorous stories about pants.
Carry the revolution right on.
Friday, April 09, 2010
We Didn't Have a Choice
When my little brother was six years old, he set our house on fire. While my sister, my mother and I were all inside it.
He found a discarded disposable cigarette lighter in a neighbor's yard. No fuel left in it, really, but it still sparked when he spun the little metal wheel with his thumb. It was the weekend, and my mother had been out earlier that day raking leaves in the back yard. She'd stacked several paper yard waste bags full of dry leaves against the back of the house, leaning up against the cedar siding.
We knew better than to leave my brother unsupervised, anywhere, for very long. But it only took a minute. Flick. Flick. Flick. Whoosh.
He stood and watched as the bags caught fire. He stood and watched as the flames licked up the cedar siding. He stood and watched as the entire back side of the house, with his family inside it, burst into flames.
My six-year-old brother was still standing there, watching, silent, when a neighbor who lived behind us happened to glance out his kitchen window, saw our house on fire, and ran outside, grabbed his garden hose, vaulted over our fence, and started screaming, "Do you know? Your house is on fire!"
And still my brother stood, seemingly unaffected, as our neighbor, and the fire department, saved our house.
This wasn't the first time my brother had started a dangerous fire. The first time, actually, he was only four years old. While my mother was taking a shower, and my sister and I were at school, he unlocked the child safety gate to the kitchen, pushed a chair up to the refrigerator, stacked two phone books on the chair, climbed on his makeshift stepping stool, and retrieved a can of charcoal lighter fluid from a high cabinet over the fridge. Then he went out to the front yard, doused a live oak tree (and, by accident, his own clothes) in the fluid, and used a discarded lighter (collecting discarded disposable lighters was a habit of his, you see), and lit the tree.
When my mother found him, the fireball had very slightly singed his eyebrows. But by some miracle, his lighter-fluid-soaked t-shirt, and the child inside it, were perfectly unharmed.
As a young child, it seemed that my brother had no sense of danger, to himself, or to others. He was defiant, persistent, and angry. He hated being told what to do. He flung toys across rooms and broke them. He threw cats across the room, and hurt them. He climbed too high and jumped too far and pushed too hard and screamed too loud. He hit people. He bit people.
If you think this had anything to do with my mother's parenting skills, think again. She had raised me, after all — a straight-A student who showed proper manners at the dinner table, helped elderly neighbors shovel snow, cleaned her room (eventually) when asked, and never once earned a high school detention.
And keep in mind, she raised me when she was a struggling teenage mother. When my brother was born, she was 30, and much more financially stable. He was her third child. She was experienced at handling kids. She was one of those moms who could make rowdy neighbor kids shut up and stand up straight just by giving them a look.
And yet, she could not control my brother.
She took him to various specialists, of course. And while everyone could agree there was something Not Right With This Child, no one could agree on a diagnosis. Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Childhood Bi-Polar Disorder? Impulse Control Disorder? Autism Spectrum Disorder?
Child Sociopath?
The experts didn't know. We didn't know.
I'll admit it. We were afraid of him.
Was he really insane?
Would he seriously hurt someone?
We knew something was wrong. And we didn't know what it was. And we were afraid.
But we never, ever, ever, ever seriously thought, not even for a second, about giving him away. He was my mother's son. He was my brother. He was part of our family. He was permanent. He was ours.
And if there was something terribly wrong with him? Well, that was our problem to solve.
When he couldn't handle school, my mother homeschooled him. When she couldn't stop him from throwing rocks at neighbors' windows, she moved to the county, to a farm. When she caught him drinking beer and smoking well, well underage, she didn't kick him out of the house.
She kept trying. She just kept trying. She's his mother, after all.
She had no choice.
My brother is a teenager now. He's obsessed with Avatar, and Star Wars. He likes to play board games. He's an excellent reader, and wickedly smart. He has lots of friends. He's not always great about doing chores on time, but he helps my mother a lot, raising chickens and rabbits and horses on the farm. When my family came to visit last year, he insisted on carrying my mother's luggage out of the trunk of the car so she wouldn't have to lift it.
He goes hunting deer sometimes, with my stepfather. With a rifle.
Because he's the kind of kid you can actually trust with a gun.
He wants to be an auto mechanic, or maybe a construction foreman, or maybe an electrical engineer. Some job where he can use power tools and build things with his hands. (And yes, maybe occasionally set something on fire.)
He's a really awesome kid, my little brother.
* * *
I did everything right during my pregnancy. I stopped drinking alcohol the day I saw the plus sign on the test stick. And not only that — I cut out caffeine. Entirely. I cut out soft cheese and bean sprouts and sushi. I didn't smoke. I didn't even hang out around smokers. I ate a very carefully balanced diet.
I exercised. I made my husband change the cat litter. I avoided gasoline fumes. I read seven different reference books on how to have a healthy pregnancy and delivery. I arrived at every OB-GYN checkup ten minutes early.
Apparently, none of that mattered a whit when it came to the small tumor that formed on my son's skull while he was still in my ridiculously healthy womb.
* * *
My son didn't sleep through the night on a regular basis until he was two years old. From the time he was a newborn, until the time he was about eight or nine months old, he actually never slept more than three hours together at a time, and some nights, he would wake up just about every hour.
Which meant that I had to wake up, every hour.
By the fifth month or so of this I was such an exhausted mess that I stared to hallucinate, sometimes. I'd see weird shadows morph into monsters at the corners of my eyes. It was not good. I knew it was dangerous. What if I fell asleep sometime, holding him? What if I dropped him?
But what could I do?
I tried everything to get him to sleep. Co-sleeping. Not co-sleeping. Gentle training. Gradual sleep training. Ferber. It didn't matter. Nothing worked. If I tried to leave him alone in his crib when he woke up at night, he would just cry more and more loudly, until his cry turned into bloodcurdling screams, and he would hyperventilate until I thought he might vomit.
Whenever I turned on the vacuum cleaner, or the food processor, or a power screwdriver, or anything else that made a certain pitch of whrrrrr, my son used to widen his eyes, arch his back, turn bright red, and scream as though he were being flayed alive. Even after I turned off the offending machine, he would shudder and whimper for several minutes afterward. Like the noise had horribly, physically hurt him.
My floors got very dirty.
As a toddler, whenever people sang or clapped in unison, my son used to cry and shiver like he'd just seen a ghost. I found it necessary for us to excuse ourselves from the singing portions of birthday parties. We could not take him to church services or weddings or children's events involving clapping or singing, or even restaurants where people might sing, without risking a meltdown.
Until the age of three my son could not stand blankets. As an infant, whenever I would try to nurse him under a blanket, he would tear it off. If I put it back on again, he would cry or stop eating. If I kept on trying to cover him, he would bite me.
At night, he would not sleep under a blanket no matter how cold it was. I could only sneak blankets on him after he was already sleeping.
Which was easy enough to do during the two years I almost never slept.
All of these problems paled, of course, in comparison to the eating issues. After the surgery to remove his tumor, he stopped eating. He was terrified of trying new foods. He would spit and gag and act like he was choking on a spoonful of soft stewed peas. There were some days when I spent hours and hours just trying to get him to take a single bite of a single cracker.
I spent thousands of dollars taking him to doctors. An endocrinologist, a gastroenterologist, a food allergist, a nutritionist. I didn't care how much it cost. I just wanted them to fix him.
At his thinnest, you could see every rib and every knob of his spine, and legs were like sticks and his belly curved inward. Like a starving child in a public service poster. Every time I changed his clothes, I fought back tears.
There were so many times when I thought "Why me?" or "I didn't expect this. I didn't ask for this." There were times, especially late, late times during yet another night of too little sleep, when I fantasized about running away.
But did I ever think, really, about giving him away? Hell no. He was my child. His problems were my problems. I would fix them or I would die trying.
I had no choice.
* * *
So forgive me if I cannot understand this:
How can a parent who has a adopted a child who has turned out to have special needs feel that she has a choice about whether or not to continue to care for that child?
How does one justify returning a child like a piece of defective or mislabled merchandise?
"I'm sorry. This box said PERFECT FAMILY ADDITION! on the label. There was nothing, nothing at all in the ingredient list about EXTREME SEPARATION ANXIETY or DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS or EXPLOSIVE ANGER. I demand you make this right!"
The very idea of someone returning a child they have chosen because that child turned out to be difficult to parent makes me so angry I shake.
Do not, for a moment, misunderstand me.
I understand how it feels to be told you're about to have one kind of change in your life, only to realize you are faced with something entirely other. I understand how headbashingly difficult parenting a child with special needs can be. I understand how utterly terrifying lifeshakingly hard it can feel when you realize that instead of that nice trip to Italy you planned, you just got a one-way ticket to Holland. Or Swaziland. Or, hell. Antarctica.
I've seen families torn apart by the strain of raising children with serious health or mental problems. I've seen happy couples get divorced. Healthy children get neglected or hurt. I've seen people lose jobs, homes, dreams. Years of their lives.
I've stood in a house that was set on fire.
I understand feeling desperate. I understand feeling scared. I understand feeling like you just can't live this way anymore. Like it's not fair. Like you shouldn't have to face this. Like you're going crazy. Like you're at the end of your rope.
What I cannot understand — what I do not think I, as the mother of a child with special needs, will ever understand — is how you can feel that you have a choice about being a parent to a child you have already chosen and claimed as your own.
Those of us who choose to bring children into our lives through our own wombs do not get to totally abdicate responsibility for those children just because they, at some point, turn out to be less healthy than we hoped for or expected.
I when I was going into labor, I didn't get to check a box on some form saying "Not willing to give birth to a child with special needs."
It was my choice to have a child.
I didn't have a choice about having a child with special needs.
It just happened that way.
No matter how you become a parent, you cannot, ever, fully control how your life with your child will turn out. Every child will have problems. Every child will cost money you don't have. Every child will exhaust and hurt you and make you secretly dream, at some point, about running away. And some children will make you have that dream more often than others.
But the point of being a real parent (no matter whether your child was born into your arms or crossed an ocean to come home to you) is that, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how tired you are, no matter how much help you have to ask for, you don't abandon a sick, hurting child who needs you.
Real parents don't allow themselves that choice.
He found a discarded disposable cigarette lighter in a neighbor's yard. No fuel left in it, really, but it still sparked when he spun the little metal wheel with his thumb. It was the weekend, and my mother had been out earlier that day raking leaves in the back yard. She'd stacked several paper yard waste bags full of dry leaves against the back of the house, leaning up against the cedar siding.
We knew better than to leave my brother unsupervised, anywhere, for very long. But it only took a minute. Flick. Flick. Flick. Whoosh.
He stood and watched as the bags caught fire. He stood and watched as the flames licked up the cedar siding. He stood and watched as the entire back side of the house, with his family inside it, burst into flames.
My six-year-old brother was still standing there, watching, silent, when a neighbor who lived behind us happened to glance out his kitchen window, saw our house on fire, and ran outside, grabbed his garden hose, vaulted over our fence, and started screaming, "Do you know? Your house is on fire!"
And still my brother stood, seemingly unaffected, as our neighbor, and the fire department, saved our house.
This wasn't the first time my brother had started a dangerous fire. The first time, actually, he was only four years old. While my mother was taking a shower, and my sister and I were at school, he unlocked the child safety gate to the kitchen, pushed a chair up to the refrigerator, stacked two phone books on the chair, climbed on his makeshift stepping stool, and retrieved a can of charcoal lighter fluid from a high cabinet over the fridge. Then he went out to the front yard, doused a live oak tree (and, by accident, his own clothes) in the fluid, and used a discarded lighter (collecting discarded disposable lighters was a habit of his, you see), and lit the tree.
When my mother found him, the fireball had very slightly singed his eyebrows. But by some miracle, his lighter-fluid-soaked t-shirt, and the child inside it, were perfectly unharmed.
As a young child, it seemed that my brother had no sense of danger, to himself, or to others. He was defiant, persistent, and angry. He hated being told what to do. He flung toys across rooms and broke them. He threw cats across the room, and hurt them. He climbed too high and jumped too far and pushed too hard and screamed too loud. He hit people. He bit people.
If you think this had anything to do with my mother's parenting skills, think again. She had raised me, after all — a straight-A student who showed proper manners at the dinner table, helped elderly neighbors shovel snow, cleaned her room (eventually) when asked, and never once earned a high school detention.
And keep in mind, she raised me when she was a struggling teenage mother. When my brother was born, she was 30, and much more financially stable. He was her third child. She was experienced at handling kids. She was one of those moms who could make rowdy neighbor kids shut up and stand up straight just by giving them a look.
And yet, she could not control my brother.
She took him to various specialists, of course. And while everyone could agree there was something Not Right With This Child, no one could agree on a diagnosis. Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Childhood Bi-Polar Disorder? Impulse Control Disorder? Autism Spectrum Disorder?
Child Sociopath?
The experts didn't know. We didn't know.
I'll admit it. We were afraid of him.
Was he really insane?
Would he seriously hurt someone?
We knew something was wrong. And we didn't know what it was. And we were afraid.
But we never, ever, ever, ever seriously thought, not even for a second, about giving him away. He was my mother's son. He was my brother. He was part of our family. He was permanent. He was ours.
And if there was something terribly wrong with him? Well, that was our problem to solve.
When he couldn't handle school, my mother homeschooled him. When she couldn't stop him from throwing rocks at neighbors' windows, she moved to the county, to a farm. When she caught him drinking beer and smoking well, well underage, she didn't kick him out of the house.
She kept trying. She just kept trying. She's his mother, after all.
She had no choice.
My brother is a teenager now. He's obsessed with Avatar, and Star Wars. He likes to play board games. He's an excellent reader, and wickedly smart. He has lots of friends. He's not always great about doing chores on time, but he helps my mother a lot, raising chickens and rabbits and horses on the farm. When my family came to visit last year, he insisted on carrying my mother's luggage out of the trunk of the car so she wouldn't have to lift it.
He goes hunting deer sometimes, with my stepfather. With a rifle.
Because he's the kind of kid you can actually trust with a gun.
He wants to be an auto mechanic, or maybe a construction foreman, or maybe an electrical engineer. Some job where he can use power tools and build things with his hands. (And yes, maybe occasionally set something on fire.)
He's a really awesome kid, my little brother.
* * *
I did everything right during my pregnancy. I stopped drinking alcohol the day I saw the plus sign on the test stick. And not only that — I cut out caffeine. Entirely. I cut out soft cheese and bean sprouts and sushi. I didn't smoke. I didn't even hang out around smokers. I ate a very carefully balanced diet.
I exercised. I made my husband change the cat litter. I avoided gasoline fumes. I read seven different reference books on how to have a healthy pregnancy and delivery. I arrived at every OB-GYN checkup ten minutes early.
Apparently, none of that mattered a whit when it came to the small tumor that formed on my son's skull while he was still in my ridiculously healthy womb.
* * *
My son didn't sleep through the night on a regular basis until he was two years old. From the time he was a newborn, until the time he was about eight or nine months old, he actually never slept more than three hours together at a time, and some nights, he would wake up just about every hour.
Which meant that I had to wake up, every hour.
By the fifth month or so of this I was such an exhausted mess that I stared to hallucinate, sometimes. I'd see weird shadows morph into monsters at the corners of my eyes. It was not good. I knew it was dangerous. What if I fell asleep sometime, holding him? What if I dropped him?
But what could I do?
I tried everything to get him to sleep. Co-sleeping. Not co-sleeping. Gentle training. Gradual sleep training. Ferber. It didn't matter. Nothing worked. If I tried to leave him alone in his crib when he woke up at night, he would just cry more and more loudly, until his cry turned into bloodcurdling screams, and he would hyperventilate until I thought he might vomit.
Whenever I turned on the vacuum cleaner, or the food processor, or a power screwdriver, or anything else that made a certain pitch of whrrrrr, my son used to widen his eyes, arch his back, turn bright red, and scream as though he were being flayed alive. Even after I turned off the offending machine, he would shudder and whimper for several minutes afterward. Like the noise had horribly, physically hurt him.
My floors got very dirty.
As a toddler, whenever people sang or clapped in unison, my son used to cry and shiver like he'd just seen a ghost. I found it necessary for us to excuse ourselves from the singing portions of birthday parties. We could not take him to church services or weddings or children's events involving clapping or singing, or even restaurants where people might sing, without risking a meltdown.
Until the age of three my son could not stand blankets. As an infant, whenever I would try to nurse him under a blanket, he would tear it off. If I put it back on again, he would cry or stop eating. If I kept on trying to cover him, he would bite me.
At night, he would not sleep under a blanket no matter how cold it was. I could only sneak blankets on him after he was already sleeping.
Which was easy enough to do during the two years I almost never slept.
All of these problems paled, of course, in comparison to the eating issues. After the surgery to remove his tumor, he stopped eating. He was terrified of trying new foods. He would spit and gag and act like he was choking on a spoonful of soft stewed peas. There were some days when I spent hours and hours just trying to get him to take a single bite of a single cracker.
I spent thousands of dollars taking him to doctors. An endocrinologist, a gastroenterologist, a food allergist, a nutritionist. I didn't care how much it cost. I just wanted them to fix him.
At his thinnest, you could see every rib and every knob of his spine, and legs were like sticks and his belly curved inward. Like a starving child in a public service poster. Every time I changed his clothes, I fought back tears.
There were so many times when I thought "Why me?" or "I didn't expect this. I didn't ask for this." There were times, especially late, late times during yet another night of too little sleep, when I fantasized about running away.
But did I ever think, really, about giving him away? Hell no. He was my child. His problems were my problems. I would fix them or I would die trying.
I had no choice.
* * *
So forgive me if I cannot understand this:
How can a parent who has a adopted a child who has turned out to have special needs feel that she has a choice about whether or not to continue to care for that child?
How does one justify returning a child like a piece of defective or mislabled merchandise?
"I'm sorry. This box said PERFECT FAMILY ADDITION! on the label. There was nothing, nothing at all in the ingredient list about EXTREME SEPARATION ANXIETY or DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS or EXPLOSIVE ANGER. I demand you make this right!"
The very idea of someone returning a child they have chosen because that child turned out to be difficult to parent makes me so angry I shake.
Do not, for a moment, misunderstand me.
I understand how it feels to be told you're about to have one kind of change in your life, only to realize you are faced with something entirely other. I understand how headbashingly difficult parenting a child with special needs can be. I understand how utterly terrifying lifeshakingly hard it can feel when you realize that instead of that nice trip to Italy you planned, you just got a one-way ticket to Holland. Or Swaziland. Or, hell. Antarctica.
I've seen families torn apart by the strain of raising children with serious health or mental problems. I've seen happy couples get divorced. Healthy children get neglected or hurt. I've seen people lose jobs, homes, dreams. Years of their lives.
I've stood in a house that was set on fire.
I understand feeling desperate. I understand feeling scared. I understand feeling like you just can't live this way anymore. Like it's not fair. Like you shouldn't have to face this. Like you're going crazy. Like you're at the end of your rope.
What I cannot understand — what I do not think I, as the mother of a child with special needs, will ever understand — is how you can feel that you have a choice about being a parent to a child you have already chosen and claimed as your own.
Those of us who choose to bring children into our lives through our own wombs do not get to totally abdicate responsibility for those children just because they, at some point, turn out to be less healthy than we hoped for or expected.
I when I was going into labor, I didn't get to check a box on some form saying "Not willing to give birth to a child with special needs."
It was my choice to have a child.
I didn't have a choice about having a child with special needs.
It just happened that way.
No matter how you become a parent, you cannot, ever, fully control how your life with your child will turn out. Every child will have problems. Every child will cost money you don't have. Every child will exhaust and hurt you and make you secretly dream, at some point, about running away. And some children will make you have that dream more often than others.
But the point of being a real parent (no matter whether your child was born into your arms or crossed an ocean to come home to you) is that, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how tired you are, no matter how much help you have to ask for, you don't abandon a sick, hurting child who needs you.
Real parents don't allow themselves that choice.
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The Break That Wasn't
Last week, my son was home with me all day every day for spring break. And despite the fact that I knew that would mean I would get a lot less work done (especially since my husband had a Big Work Project planned that would keep him very busy and not so much available on the parenting front), at the beginning of last week, I was very happy about the prospect of hours and hours alone with my kid.
Since he has started full-day school (and moved to a school all the way across town), I've missed having him around. There are days now when I literally don't see him for more than an hour or two before bedtime. I had grand plans for all the wonderful things we would do in a whole week together.
We would go to the zoo! We would have a play date with another blogger and her daughter! We would bake bread, and cookies (all peanut-free) and plant broccoli seedlings in the garden. I would play all of his favorite board games (all the ones I got so sick of before he was in school, that I now sheepishly admit miss).
Yeah, no.
Tuesday morning at 3 a.m. I was awakened by excruciating, burning abdominal pain, from my left hip straight up to my bottom left rib. A few hours later, after various tests and consultations with two doctors, I found out I'd had an abnormal ovarian cyst rupture. (More on the interesting medical saga related to that discovery later, when I feel well enough to write it.)
If you've never had this happen before, either because you are one of my ovary-less readers, or because, unlike unfortunate me, your womanly parts have all always functioned beautifully and harmoniously as nature intended, allow me to describe the pain:
1.) Less painful than natural childbirth.
2.) More painful than anything else that has ever happened to me (besides, of course, the last time I had a dangerously large cyst.)(Oh yes. Did I mention this has happened before?)
3.) If you are still not understanding this description of pain because you're one of those humans who bear their reproductive parts outside the body, just imagine one half of one of your testicles exploding.
(You're welcome.)
So, yeah. That sucked.
Later that same day, as I lay in bed really starting to regret my decision to not take the prescription for heavy narcotics the GYN who confirmed my diagnosis had sympathetically proffered, my son started complaining of a headache.
The next day, he developed a full-blown miserable, snot-nosed head cold from Hades.
And so it came to pass that, instead of "resting for a few days, limiting physical activity and monitoring body temperature for any signs of infection until the pain subsides" as a doctor had oh-so-helpfully suggested, I spent the next few days trying not to yelp in pain every time I hauled my sad sorry, busted-lady-bits-bearing self up off the couch to get my feverish, exhausted, kid with a sinus headache and a hacking cough a cup of water or a tissue or another dose of medicine, while we both sighed and muttered and whined and watched bad TV.
Leaving the house, at all, was pretty much out of the question.
By Monday we were both feeling a bit better. By Tuesday morning, he was well enough to go to school.
And me? Well, I could finally take the stairs down to the basement without wanting to cry.
But I'd caught my son's cold.
I need a vacation.
Since he has started full-day school (and moved to a school all the way across town), I've missed having him around. There are days now when I literally don't see him for more than an hour or two before bedtime. I had grand plans for all the wonderful things we would do in a whole week together.
We would go to the zoo! We would have a play date with another blogger and her daughter! We would bake bread, and cookies (all peanut-free) and plant broccoli seedlings in the garden. I would play all of his favorite board games (all the ones I got so sick of before he was in school, that I now sheepishly admit miss).
Yeah, no.
Tuesday morning at 3 a.m. I was awakened by excruciating, burning abdominal pain, from my left hip straight up to my bottom left rib. A few hours later, after various tests and consultations with two doctors, I found out I'd had an abnormal ovarian cyst rupture. (More on the interesting medical saga related to that discovery later, when I feel well enough to write it.)
If you've never had this happen before, either because you are one of my ovary-less readers, or because, unlike unfortunate me, your womanly parts have all always functioned beautifully and harmoniously as nature intended, allow me to describe the pain:
1.) Less painful than natural childbirth.
2.) More painful than anything else that has ever happened to me (besides, of course, the last time I had a dangerously large cyst.)(Oh yes. Did I mention this has happened before?)
3.) If you are still not understanding this description of pain because you're one of those humans who bear their reproductive parts outside the body, just imagine one half of one of your testicles exploding.
(You're welcome.)
So, yeah. That sucked.
Later that same day, as I lay in bed really starting to regret my decision to not take the prescription for heavy narcotics the GYN who confirmed my diagnosis had sympathetically proffered, my son started complaining of a headache.
The next day, he developed a full-blown miserable, snot-nosed head cold from Hades.
And so it came to pass that, instead of "resting for a few days, limiting physical activity and monitoring body temperature for any signs of infection until the pain subsides" as a doctor had oh-so-helpfully suggested, I spent the next few days trying not to yelp in pain every time I hauled my sad sorry, busted-lady-bits-bearing self up off the couch to get my feverish, exhausted, kid with a sinus headache and a hacking cough a cup of water or a tissue or another dose of medicine, while we both sighed and muttered and whined and watched bad TV.
Leaving the house, at all, was pretty much out of the question.
By Monday we were both feeling a bit better. By Tuesday morning, he was well enough to go to school.
And me? Well, I could finally take the stairs down to the basement without wanting to cry.
But I'd caught my son's cold.
I need a vacation.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Conversations with a Five-Year-Old: The Pain and the Pedant
MOTHER: Please go wash your hands before dinner. Your fingers are covered in marker. I don't think you want ink in your food.
CHILD: Aw, man.
MOTHER: What?
CHILD: I have to wash my hands again? I just washed my hands at lunch time.
MOTHER: Yes, you need to wash your hands more than once in a day. Go wash your hands.
CHILD: Hmph.
CHILD stalks slowly off toward the bathroom, muttering to himself.
MOTHER: Oh, there she goes again. Your mother. Always trying to take care of you and keep you safe and healthy. Always trying to keep you from doing things like eating food flavored with ink from a marker. She's such a pain.
CHILD (whispers): In the B-U-T.
MOTHER: What did you just say, young man?
CHILD: Nothing.
MOTHER: You're missing a T.
CHILD: What?
MOTHER: Butt, as in your bottom, rear, posterior, that thing you sit upon, is spelled B-U-T-T. You mean to say I am a pain in the B-U-T-T.
CHILD: Oh, right! I always get those confused.
MOTHER to FATHER: We need to work on his ability to spell insults.
More conversations.
CHILD: Aw, man.
MOTHER: What?
CHILD: I have to wash my hands again? I just washed my hands at lunch time.
MOTHER: Yes, you need to wash your hands more than once in a day. Go wash your hands.
CHILD: Hmph.
CHILD stalks slowly off toward the bathroom, muttering to himself.
MOTHER: Oh, there she goes again. Your mother. Always trying to take care of you and keep you safe and healthy. Always trying to keep you from doing things like eating food flavored with ink from a marker. She's such a pain.
CHILD (whispers): In the B-U-T.
MOTHER: What did you just say, young man?
CHILD: Nothing.
MOTHER: You're missing a T.
CHILD: What?
MOTHER: Butt, as in your bottom, rear, posterior, that thing you sit upon, is spelled B-U-T-T. You mean to say I am a pain in the B-U-T-T.
CHILD: Oh, right! I always get those confused.
MOTHER to FATHER: We need to work on his ability to spell insults.
More conversations.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
To My Friends Who Work Outside the Home
To my friends who are mothers who work professionally full time (or more than full time), and often must leave their children:
I have told this story before many times in various ways on various comment sections on various working mothers' blogs, so I apologize if you have heard this before, but it I think it bears repeating.
When I was a poor college student putting myself through school, one of my three jobs was being a part-time nanny, for several years, for a busy professional couple with two little girls. The girls' mother, who loved her children deeply, was a professional writer and small business owner. She sometimes worked from home in her office while I watched the kids, but sometimes her business meant she had to leave, for hours, or for whole days at a time.
When the girls' mother had to leave for work, sometimes, they would cry. They would throw their arms around her and beg her not to leave. As they got older, and could articulate their feelings, they would say things like, "Don't leave me Mommy! You leave too much! I miss you when you're gone."
I could see the guilt and longing in their mother's eyes, on those days, as I pulled her tearful, clinging children away, and she walked out the door to the sounds of their sobs. Not yet having a child of my own, I did not then understand her pain as fully as I do now, but so I could sense that these moments weighed on her — that echoes of her daughters' cries would linger somewhere in a corner of her mind all day.
Five or ten minutes after she left, the kids would recover completely, and start laughing and playing with me just as they did on the days when their mother was in the next room.
Sometimes, the older girl would get out a box and pretend to type on it as if it were a computer.
"I'm a Mommy. I'm working," she would say. "I'm a writer writing things."
And that little girl would sound so proud.
Your children miss you when you cannot be with them. Of course they do. And they miss their Dad when he isn't around (or their other Mom, or their Grandma). And when they're home alone with you, I bet they miss their favorite babysitters and teachers, too. All kids would prefer to have all of their favorite people available 24 hours a day, to be summoned or dismissed at childish whim.
But they love you, the whole of you, more than anything, and even at an early age, they understand that your career — your drive to create things of value with your skills and your mind, not just at home, but out in the wider world — is part of who you are.
And because they know that about you, they also know that one day they can also be great parents AND great workers. They are the girls who will play games of "Office" alongside their games of "House." They are the boys who will see no problem with Daddies who push strollers or Mommies who get invited to speak at conferences.
And they will be women and men who, one day, I hope, will come to understand how you felt (how I've sometimes felt, too) about having to walk out the door on those certain hard days, as your children cried. Who will realize that even on those days you walked away, you were doing it, as you did everything, for them — to support them, to build a better life for them, to change the world, for them.
And I do not think they will hold those times against you.
I have told this story before many times in various ways on various comment sections on various working mothers' blogs, so I apologize if you have heard this before, but it I think it bears repeating.
When I was a poor college student putting myself through school, one of my three jobs was being a part-time nanny, for several years, for a busy professional couple with two little girls. The girls' mother, who loved her children deeply, was a professional writer and small business owner. She sometimes worked from home in her office while I watched the kids, but sometimes her business meant she had to leave, for hours, or for whole days at a time.
When the girls' mother had to leave for work, sometimes, they would cry. They would throw their arms around her and beg her not to leave. As they got older, and could articulate their feelings, they would say things like, "Don't leave me Mommy! You leave too much! I miss you when you're gone."
I could see the guilt and longing in their mother's eyes, on those days, as I pulled her tearful, clinging children away, and she walked out the door to the sounds of their sobs. Not yet having a child of my own, I did not then understand her pain as fully as I do now, but so I could sense that these moments weighed on her — that echoes of her daughters' cries would linger somewhere in a corner of her mind all day.
Five or ten minutes after she left, the kids would recover completely, and start laughing and playing with me just as they did on the days when their mother was in the next room.
Sometimes, the older girl would get out a box and pretend to type on it as if it were a computer.
"I'm a Mommy. I'm working," she would say. "I'm a writer writing things."
And that little girl would sound so proud.
Your children miss you when you cannot be with them. Of course they do. And they miss their Dad when he isn't around (or their other Mom, or their Grandma). And when they're home alone with you, I bet they miss their favorite babysitters and teachers, too. All kids would prefer to have all of their favorite people available 24 hours a day, to be summoned or dismissed at childish whim.
But they love you, the whole of you, more than anything, and even at an early age, they understand that your career — your drive to create things of value with your skills and your mind, not just at home, but out in the wider world — is part of who you are.
And because they know that about you, they also know that one day they can also be great parents AND great workers. They are the girls who will play games of "Office" alongside their games of "House." They are the boys who will see no problem with Daddies who push strollers or Mommies who get invited to speak at conferences.
And they will be women and men who, one day, I hope, will come to understand how you felt (how I've sometimes felt, too) about having to walk out the door on those certain hard days, as your children cried. Who will realize that even on those days you walked away, you were doing it, as you did everything, for them — to support them, to build a better life for them, to change the world, for them.
And I do not think they will hold those times against you.
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