Obsession with Innocence

As Jonathan VanNess would say, “I’m strugs to func” right now guys. (I told you it was the summer of Queer Eye). My kids both start new schools tomorrow and both situations are not what I was hoping for. One didn’t get into the arts school we dreamed about for years and the other didn’t get the accommodations I was hoping she’d get to adjust well. I’ve struggled with my feelings about this since we started pursuing the options we ended up not getting back in January. And being rejected from those opportunities was really painful and scary for me as a mom.

Tonight, I’m on the cusp of that transition. Tomorrow is the first day of school. Macy will take the bus for the first time, change classes for the first time, have a phone on her for the first time, and just freakin’ be in middle school (the school that everyone I know says is basically the worst place on the planet…still not sure how this is helpful?!?!) And Penny will start at “regular” school (as opposed to Montessori) in a beautiful brand new building with basically no one that she knows. She missed her old teacher tonight meeting her new one. She struggled on the playground equipment. She asked about what it would be like when we left her there tomorrow without anyone she knows.

I’m scared. I’m scared my kids are not ready because I don’t feel ready. I’m scared they’re going to get hurt and I won’t be there to protect them. I’m scared that the adults in charge of them are overworked and understaffed and will miss important things. I feel shame. I feel like I need to be able to control all the things and the fact that I can’t means I’m not a good mother. I know that’s not true but shame is a liar and I am crying tonight with those thoughts.

I’ve done the work to recognize the source of this shame. Between my exclusively Christian education and the purity culture movement, somehow I’ve learned that I’m not capable (so now my kids aren’t) of handling the awfulness that is the big bad world. I’ve learned that innocence is the most important thing - the thing to protect at all costs. I’ve learned that once it is lost there is no way to get it back. You are forever changed in the worst possible way. I feel really backed into a corner because the kids are in situations that I wouldn’t have chosen and cannot prevent. And we don’t have other choices. So somehow, whatever happens to them in these environments represents my inability to “save” them (hello codependency!) from certain, unredeemable doom.

I really think there’s something here. Some sort of parent-based shame. We are taught to be obsessed with innocence. That morality and purity must remain perfectly in tact in order for our kids to be happy and healthy and safe.

Here’s the thing, guys: THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT.

I know it. You know it. Thank God, my husband knows it and has been talking me down through my tears for months. Pain teaches us stuff. If my kids aren’t capable, guess what, the experiences they have will increase their capability! If they are never challenged or shocked or even harmed, how can they grow and learn and hold the pain that life will inevitably bring in adulthood?!?! How can they be compassionate if they’ve never needed compassion? How can they learn to be kind if they’re never treated poorly? Sometimes life lessons are waiting for us on dangerous barely-supervised bus rides and on playgrounds where you cry in fear and adults don’t hear you.

I’m scared. But I’m resolute. We are present, capable parents who will go to bat for our kids if needed. In the meantime, class is in session.

Your Kid Is Perfect. It's Okay That Your Kid Isn't Perfect.

The other day, it was hard to be my child's mother. Sometimes your child is going through things you can't really grasp. That alone is a source of pain and discomfort for me. Love means intimate knowledge in my world, so loving my children deeply and not having a firm grasp on something going on with them is scary and makes me feel insecure in my ability to mother them well. Adding in how an episode, regression, tantrum, or altercation affects a child, their environment and adults involved creates a potentially humiliating element as well. Shame is on the table. Embarrassment comes knocking. And on a hard day, it can be tough to contain those adult dynamics within yourself so they don't spill onto your child, who is already grappling with something very challenging.

On my hard day, in the midst of everything coming to a standstill, I wrote some affirmations for myself on my phone. It was all I could reach with a little person completely covering my torso. I wrote and wrote. I needed to affirm my experience, my process, my feelings in the moment. That is part of the skill set needed to not shame your child when you are toying with opening the door to the shame and pain knocking so loudly in your heart.

I decided to share those affirmations with you. I know so many people who have struggled with their children. I've written in the past about having my child assessed and being afraid of the results. That process is revisiting us right now and I want other parents to know that you are not alone. If you find yourself in a "moment" maybe a few of these will resonate with you while all the things begin running through your mind. Here's what I wrote to combat anything in my heart that wanted to come tumbling down:

It's okay to take a break.

It's okay to be upset.

You have nothing to be embarrassed about.

It's okay to be embarrassed.

Your kid is perfect.

It's okay that your kid isn't perfect.

It's okay to resent how hard it is to be your kid's parent today.

It's okay to be jealous of parents whose kid isn't hard to parent today (resist the temptation to believe that some parents have an easy day every day. It might look like it right now but that's not real. That's Instagram talking).

It's okay to stop what you were doing and comfort yourself and your child. For as long as you both need.

It's okay to resent that the trajectory of your day just changed without your consent and without any warning.

It's okay to be exhausted.

It's okay to be sad for your child. 

It's okay to be sad for yourself.

It's okay to be sad for the people who are confused, afraid or inconvenienced because of an interaction with your child.

It's okay to want to tell those people to go fuck themselves.

It's okay to want other people to "fix" your child (they can't and no one can but it's a human response to atypical behavior).

There are always more resources to support your child (not necessarily within yourself but that you can access when you have the energy to look). 

Your child is trying.

You are trying.

Your child's other parent is trying (even if they handle your child differently than you do).

Your child's teacher is trying.

Your loved ones are trying.

Sometimes trying does not solve problems.

Trying looks different for everyone and sometimes people's best is not even close to what your child needs. That's okay.

It's okay to go back to the drawing board in how you approach your child and their behaviors/abilities.

It's okay for them to regress.

It's okay for you to regress in patience, tolerance and energy.

It's okay to have no knowledge of what triggers a regression.

It's okay to want to be able to explain their behavior.

It's okay that sometimes there's no explanation for their behavior no matter how hard you try to connect the dots. This means sometimes the room will turn towards you to "solve" something and you will have to shrug.

It's okay to be angry at your child.

It's okay if you don't know what to do.

It's okay that not knowing what to do is the worst way for you to feel as a parent.

It's okay to not know what the future looks like for you or for your child.

It's okay for that fact to be very unsettling for you. 

This is not your fault.

This is not your child's fault.

This might be society's fault but you'll deal with that later.

Friends, you are loved. You are not alone. And neither is your child. Lean towards the pain and allow yourself to feel what you're feeling. But guide that process with these truths and any other words that may apply to your specific situation. You matter. Your child matters. And ultimately, whether the answers are found or the struggle is contained or not, love yourself, love your child and be at peace. Because your child is perfect and it's okay that your child isn't perfect. Just like you and me. Wherever they land on the bell curve, they're really no different from us, are they? Sometimes people just don't know what to do with them. So be it.

Separation is Hard

I like to think of myself as a pretty chill parent. I let my kids lead for the most part. We still set boundaries with our children, as you should in any relationship, but I don't have a lot of actual "rules", more like rituals. Anyway, because of the whole one less car issue, I made the executive decision to have Macy ride the bus to school for the rest of the year. She's changing school next year (for exciting reasons I'm sure I'll talk about some other time!) and we are required to drive her there. So this is clearly a 5ish week change. But my darling daughter is me to a tee. She resists change. When I mentioned to her that it was a real possibility, she was upset. We were walking home from school and she essentially raced away and walked home without me. I figured she needed time to process her feelings and wasn't surprised. We had a bus incident (I'm sure it'll come up here eventually) when she was in kindergarten that I had in the back of my mind to revisit so she doesn't have issues with independence in this area and karma intervened. Here we are, taking the bus. 
So we're confronting some past trauma for both of us. We're also making an unexpected change and not really by choice. We're cutting into the precious Macy/Mommy time we have each morning and both of us share Quality Time as our primary love language. And yet, once Daddy explained through the emotional haze that this was a necessary step for all of us (it's really the safest, best choice for the family with one vehicle right now) and that sometimes being in a family means doing things that we don't want to do. Personal sacrifice is part of community and that's an important lesson (one I'm still really wrestling with on the church level) to learn. 

Waiting patiently for me to return after a potty break. 20 minutes, people!

Once I realized that on top of feeling like there's too much change for her (new school next year and getting glasses) that Macy's primary concern was not having as much time with me, I determined that I would get up earlier and make her lunch the night before. Of course, we were ready way early and rather than read together, which I was fully expecting, Macy was ready to skip to the curb and wait for the bus for TWENTY minutes. That kid. This, she also gets from me. Once the change is determined, you face it with gusto. We chatted with the neighbor boys and got the skinny on where to sit (and apparently where NOT to sit. Bus politics have not changed, my friends) and I introduced her to the bus driver. 

Lots of roadside hugs

I came home feeling sad and relieved. This time is different. When you revisit something that was scary, the fears start talking and shame voices gain traction. Sadness or grief pay a visit. If you don't know the word for this type of experience, it's called "triggering." I'm mostly nostalgic that my little girl is growing up and I'm proud of myself for making a hard decision that's still the right one for the whole family. Sometimes my perfectionist brain thinks that what is best for the whole family might harm the individual (this is a theme for me from the trauma of our post-partum depression experience). And sometimes, that's true. But in this case, I believe this is also what's best for Macy. If we can still get her need for quality time met, she will gain confidence and independence through this that will help prepare her to change schools in the fall. I guess all of that is to say, it's okay that "normal" adjustments are hard for you. I know so many people who don't bat an eye at this type of change and probably think I'm silly for feeling all the feels. But I do. Perhaps because I have so many feelings, it has made me the right mom for the daughter who is just the same. 

Is My Child Ok and Other Such Fears

I feel like I have a list of things that I need to process. They relate to many areas of my life and they all drain me emotionally as my life and/or my deliberate avoidance hits the snooze button on sitting in these feelings. One of the things on my proverbial list of things that require a journal entry and possibly some tears is my continual evolution as a mother. In particular, we're at the tail end of a long process of developmental screening for my 2 year old, Penny. As a caretaker, particularly because I've had the strange fortune of essentially raising my two daughters one at a time (Macy started kindergarten 3 weeks after Penny was born, so I'm getting 5 years of one-on-one time of life preparation with each of them before they launch into full-time school), I am good at adapting to my children. This means that I can accommodate their preferences and personalities and mold our daily patterns around what suits them best and for the most part, I'm happy if they're happy. (This is also what makes me a fabulous world traveler, if we're bragging here). My daughters are really different so it was interesting for me to approach parenting Penny in a new way. It's also been 5 years and she's a second kid, so I've changed a ton as a person as well as a mother.
Penny is a really unique kid. She can be so stinking charming. And she can be incredibly intolerant of anything she does not consent to or like. She wasn't an early talker and was frustrated often by that as well as by life in general for awhile there. Things have opened up for her as she's gotten more comfortable socially and better able communicate with words (she was always communicating but the screams didn't go over as well as her words do now:) That being said, I know how to be a buffer for her in stressful social situations, when she's tired or hungry and when her toddler-esque language requires translating. Macy did not require such a buffer (as much) and was more independent socially. It's amazing what you get used to as a parent as you adjust to your child and whatever life requires of you to be what they need. Just ask a post-partum mother who's up nursing every 2 hours for months on end. It sucks. But you can get used to it. It's wild, really, what becomes normal. And then the phase ends and you back and think "how the hell did I do that?" You just did.
As was out in the world with my charming grouch, I began to see which aspects of Penny's development were "normal" and which aspects might be more atypical. I'm perfectly fine to be raising a non-conformist and don't feel the need to use her behavior to make me look good. Sure, sometimes it's emotionally tiring to deal with moments where your child is behaving in a way that doesn't give you positive attention from strangers, but I don't let that dictate my parenting. I just let that give me permission to increase my self-care on those days (and by "self-care" I mean "chocolate intake"). And so I began the process of developmental screenings. Because ultimately, the mommy buffer must stand down at some point and in the meantime, I'd like professional guidance on how to buffer best. And boy, it's a lot of screening! They check fine motor, gross motor, adaptive, speech, social/emotional and sensory skills. This required me to sit on my couch and watch strangers test my child. So many moments I wanted to jump in and explain, rephrase, or just stop the testing. It is so incredibly vulnerable to have your child's abilities be ascertained and placed on a bell curve. How reductionistic to see this magical person be graphed based on the average of her peers! I felt like I was being tested, that if she couldn't answer a question it was because I hadn't asked it, that her potential to be typical rested in my ability to draw her potential out. (This is a really fun experience for a caretaking perfectionist, by the way. I highly recommend cancelling your next vacation and calling up the early intervention people. You won't be sorry!) And while I knew these things weren't true, that she would be her no matter what hoops I jump though, it was very emotional for me to sit back and allow her to be assessed so thoroughly and by such capable professionals. You can't pull one over on these people! 
And as you can imagine, having the sit down after all the tallying has been done and being presented with reams of information about your child is difficult. How can anyone tell me anything about my child that I don't already know? Who are you to explain my child to me? (The professionals through this process have been incredibly gracious and kind. These are just the big feelings the process unearthed.) And what do they have to tell me? What is possible and maybe impossible for my child's future based on the information within these reams of paper? If I burn them up, is the information still true? I'm not going to get into the details of Penny's results because this blog is about me (also why I haven't written much about my husband's job loss and season of part-time employment) but it all came down to this moment. At the end of her initial assessment, the two professionals asked me, "Ultimately, what are your goals through this process? What do you want to see for Penny?" And I said, "You know what? There are behaviors about living with Penny that have been difficult to parent. There are things we'd like to work on. But really, what I want for my child is to reach her full potential as a person, whatever that is. I believe that she will show me that. And I just want the tools to help her be that person. I want to know if my expectations of her are fair. I want to know when and how to accommodate her and I want to know when and how far to push her. Because the world will not accommodate her once she's on her own. I want to build her up and then I want to send her out as prepared for whatever lies ahead as best as I possibly can. And she will take that and do with it what she will. I want to know how to support her and to be whatever she needs however she needs it." And if that isn't motherhood, I don't know what is.