When you first have a baby, you make a million promises. Someone hands you that wonderful, terrifying, amazing bundle of joy, lays him on your stomach and in those moments you make pacts with whomever is listening. I will keep you safe, you say. I will protect you. I will make a better life for you. I promise. I promise. You whisper it into his skin, into his hair, along his belly, behind his knees, between his toes as if those prayers will somehow be absorbed, form some layer between him and the rest of the world.
You can’t. Of course you can’t. You can only do your best and hope that the universe will do you a solid, which is asking a lot of an inanimate object. If you’re the praying sort, you do that, but that’s also asking a lot of a being that has His fingers on the pulse of, well, everything. Most of us hate being micromanaged anyway.
This has been a humbling year, as far as being a mother goes, in so many ways. There was Kid C’s arrival and the ensuing health scare in the weeks and months that followed, a cold, hard reminder of how little control I really have over anything. That no matter what I do, there are limits to what I can provide for my child.
But tonight I am thinking about Kid A, my fiery one. We have been through so much together, he and I. He is super smart, scary smart, test scores that are wicked high and a photographic memory which basically means that he sees or hears something once and he knows it, can repeat it back. Which is a blessing and a curse. Unless we’re talking about reciting episodes of “Super Hero Squad” from start to finish, ad nauseam. Then it’s mostly a curse.
Anyway, he is funny, and bright, and sensitive, curious about the world around him and as much as he wants to know about it there’s a part of him that is overwhelmed by it. He had a rough summer at camp - kids picking on him because he’s a little awkward, and he has a really hard time picking up social cues so where others might get a hint he just tries harder to be liked. Which, yeah, that backfires, generally speaking.
4K was awful, kindergarten (here in the boonies, after we’d moved) was mostly good, but first grade has been somewhat of a struggle. I feel so, so lucky to be in a district with such amazing teachers, to have him working with someone who recognizes a good kid with some cognitive hurdles, not behavioral ones. He goes under the tables when he gets overwhelmed, he takes a walk. He gets frustrated at himself when he doesn’t get it right the first time, he says things out of context and repeats them, to the confusion of those around him.
He saw a therapist when we were in Milwaukee, and we started back up as he was starting school this fall. The struggle has always been how to help him process what his brain is inputting, to make sense of those cues when his brain has already demonstrated just how capable it is. I don’t want him to be the butt of jokes, I don’t want him to be picked on. I’m not worried about the academic piece, not even remotely because he taught himself to read when he was three. But I lose sleep over the social piece, already, because kids can be real dicks, and it only gets worse the closer to puberty you get.
The bottom line is that we’re moving closer and closer to a diagnosis. Asperger’s, except for how the folks in charge of such things have apparently decided to get rid of the term and push all those kids into the Autism spectrum. We’re not quite there yet but so many of his behaviors are there it doesn’t take someone with multiple years of medical training to connect those dots and honestly it’s almost a relief.
Except for how it makes me feel inside. I’m his mom. I’m supposed to be able to fix things, to kiss a scrape or bandage a cut, tell a dumb joke to make him smile and this is going to be a challenge for both of us. All of us, our family.
We talk all the time about the good things, the great things, my kid is the best, etc., and all of those things are absolutely true but we all have those moments where we feel like a fraud for all the promises we make we may not be able to deliver on and I guess I’m just having a night where that feels uncomfortably close to the truth. I’m being reminded that I overreached, and that there’s only so much I can do.
Long post is long, and the bottom line, of course, is that everything I ever promised him in those moments after we met - hell, before we met, even, my hands over the swell of my stomach and my feet propped up on my bedroom wall - mean no less to me now than they did then. Probably more, seven years and two more kids later. We are parents, we are human, and I guess I am reminding myself that as much as I want to think otherwise I am more the cruise director than the captain on this ride, and I just have to do the best I can to get us all where we’re going, to ride those waves and have faith that if we’re a little banged up when we get to our destination that we’re better for it.
He is such a great kid. The best kid. I want the world for him. I want him to find his way, and I want the patience and faith to believe that it may take a little longer, but we’ll get there.
I will keep you safe. I will protect you. I will make a better life for you. I promise.
I promise.
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