One of the bloggers in my daily reader blogged about a rough day in public with her son, who has autism. While I hate to read about another mother's struggle, I simultaneously crave reading about those difficult days if only because it helps me feel less alone, it helps me feel less panicked and less anxious about the bad days that my kids have. Sometimes I wish my arms were long enough to reach around the world and just hold onto all the moms of children with disabilities and differences. They are My People, my kith and my kin.
Whenever I'm in a public place and I hear a toddler making that peculiar grunting scream of the bipolar child, or I see a mom struggling to hold it together while her child melts down for the umpteenth time, I just want to run over to her and put my forehead against hers, share through osmosis all of my empathy, my own experience, what I know of other moms just like her and what I know about her simply because I have been her, too. I suppose it goes beyond special needs, because God knows that parenting is hard sometimes, even when your kids aren't struggling with issues. But for those parents whose kids have disabilities, visible or invisible, every tough day is especially grueling. We know that it is not the last day we will have like this and we hope we don't have another one like it very soon. And when it does happen soon, we are stretched thin as paper with the tiredness of doing this one more time. And when it doesn't happen for a while, we get cocky and we assume things are better, until the next bad day slams shut on our fingers and says to us "Oh, no, you're not getting out of it THAT easy." And then we panic some more because if things are indeed not getting better as we had hoped, where then are they getting? Is there worse? Can we handle worse? Is there something different, something new and unexpected? And how will we cope with it? And cope with it we do, because we have learned that there is nothing other to do BUT cope. Some days we cope exceptionally well and other days we seem to have lost the limited coping ability we were counting on to get us through; nonetheless, we cope.
We get to the point where days that to another parent might seem fearfully chaotic and difficult are actually quite good days for us, because nobody got hurt and the tears were relatively mild in comparison to the bad days. The tantrums were fewer, there were no calls from school. There is always a reminder that the illness is there, even when symptoms are quiet. Daily medication is a daily reminder of just why it is needed and how important it is that it is ingested in order to ensure that school does not erupt in flames and that sibling interactions will be somewhat less bloody than they would otherwise be.
There are days when I want the moms who have raised children like mine to adulthood to come and place their forehead ever so gently on mine and pass along to me all the wisdom of their years, to show me how they have continued to place one foot in front of the other, continued to gently love their difficult children, continued to smile and hug and enjoy - and cope. To prop me up with their empathy and their understanding and the energy to do this.
There are days when I wake up my children and the first thing I get is an arm wrapped around my neck and a cheek nuzzled up next to my own, with a morning-breath whisper of "I love you mommy." There are days when I go in expecting to wake up children and instead finding that I am trying to rouse Honey Badgers from their dens. There are days where just like Varda, I leave a big chunk of my heart lying on the floor of the playfield or the grocery store or the church, because as I have maneuvered my melted-down child off into the car, I have died a small death from being stared and and in some cases thought poorly of by people who think they're looking at an undisciplined child instead of one who is ill. Oh, I relate to that.
The good days, the bad days, they come and go and we keep getting by. I hope all the other special needs moms in my life, the real-life ones, the bloggers, the Mama's forum ones, I hope and pray you all know just how much I love you and how much I depend on you being there to share your triumphs and tragedies with me. I hope you know how much I love your special kids, how much I enjoy reading about how much YOU love them and how special and unique and precious each of them is.
Come here, and press my forehead against your own. See?
