Tag Archives: lessons learned

An affirming phone call

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I want to write this down so that in the future I can remember this feeling. I talked to a buddy in town yesterday; she works in special education in an autism class. This is sometimes complicated for her because her training is entirely in language teaching (usually foreign language to mainstream kids) but this was the job she could get around here. She has been given very little additional training/teaching so she is figuring it out as she goes and reading books on her own to help her in her job. Also worth mentioning that her daughter is Middle Child’s best friend.

We talked a lot about what I’m seeing and what I’m trying to figure out with regard to helping MC. We talked about the areas of severe academic delay (specifically: MC is effectively reading about 4 years below grade level and writing 5-6 grades below level) and the complications that occurred in the classroom when MC attempted to go two years ago. We talked about dynamics in our house around chores/getting stuff done.

She was very clear that she didn’t have a lot of specific advice but she was a sympathetic ear and she talked through her experiences working with families in her classroom. She understands why I am not super keen on pushing more in the direction of the National Autistic Society help and why I have the worries I have. I talked about Auntie who is in her 80’s and has her three adult children living with her because none of them can take care of themselves and live independently. I talked about my brother Tommy and the way he physically abused his entire family and why the tantrums/violent outbursts are so triggering for me.

Side note: in the past couple of weeks it has come to my attention that pretty much all of the friends I have met here have basically no idea that I have/had siblings and they know nothing about my traumatic family background. I made a couple of comments recently in context in conversations in completely different groups and they all responded with extreme shock and complete surprise. “How have I been talking to you for this long and I had no idea any of this happened?” Well… I don’t trauma dump anymore. I don’t share my mental state by and large with newer friends here. It isn’t relevant to mention any of these things if I’m not going to talk about anxiety/depression/trauma. So I don’t. This is part of my strong feeling that I am never again going to make a close friend where I talk about the really hard stuff. I will have surface friends and basically shut the fuck up about my brain going forward. It’s not safe to talk about. I can no longer absorb the consequences of being honest.

But I do sometimes need to talk about educational stuff and I need some amount of support around that. We talked about classroom strategies that she uses and how functional/useful they are for my child. We talked about the possibility of Youngest Child going into school here and the likely outcomes of that.

It is her professional opinion after working in special ed in local schools for several years that my children really are better off at home. The resources are thin on the ground and are only available for the most extreme cases. MC has already been on a waiting list for assessment for over two years and it could be another year or more before they are seen. YC would be looking at four or more years given how the waiting list has expanded over the past two years and possibly more like six years. The resources for private assessment are many hours away and their waiting lists are closed because they will not be able to get through any additional patients any year soon and they don’t want to have a waiting list that goes beyond two years. When they do reopen their waiting lists they will have a strong preference for siblings of children already in their system. Even if/when my children managed to be assessed there are very few resources available for kids at their levels. (She knows my family and is comfortable stating that.) Autism resources are only available for kids at the most extreme/non-verbal end. AHDH resources are pretty much limited to medication or being taken out of a mainstream classroom and not taught much. Other Pervasive Non-Verbal Learning Disorders are pretty much ignored entirely.

She and I have had many a chat over the years about our classroom experiences with special needs and the differences between what is given to 504/IEP kids in the bay area and what is available here. She contrasts this with what is given in her native (other European non-English speaking country that I won’t name for a vague gesture in the name of privacy) country and she is of the opinion that my level of training is higher than any co-worker she has ever worked with. She thinks American understanding of education and specifically special education for disabled kids is head and shoulders higher than anything available in Europe. She is stunned by the sheer variety and kinds of books I have read in order to be a more appropriate teacher for my children. I had previously mostly focused on the ADHD/dyslexia/general atypical neurodevelopmental needs reading stuff in conversations with her.

We shared the perspective that there is a very careful balance with special needs/disabled children and adults between giving them the help they need and enabling/infantilizing them to the point where they fail to learn skills that would allow them to be more independent as adults. When you are in the family you lack the objectivity to see the larger arc and how your actions are impacting your family. When you are in the classroom/an outside observer you lack the ability to see all the nuances and decisions that are creating the entire situation so you are ignorant of the full reasoning behind what is happening and whether it is necessary or not. We talked about how difficult it is for parents to hold the line and insist on many of the pieces of development that work towards independence because fighting every battle all day long is exhausting.

Then I said “And I get to be the parent and the teacher and be with my children for nearly all of their waking hours! It’s great!” She kinda choked for a minute and then gushed about how amazing it is that I do what I do with my kids because she sees the results and she sees us interact and man do I keep it together.

That was so fucking validating. She hosts MC for sleepovers pretty regularly. Her daughter is an only child and she’s pretty happy to have a friend over quite a bit. Her daughter has other local friends but has an easier time with MC than with a lot of the kids from school because my buddy and I have fairly similar perspectives on manners and appropriate ways to interact. Because of the one on one social dynamic and the fact that MC is highly motivated to be liked by people outside the family MC really shines in these visits as they get to show off their pride in being able to help with household chores and how to speak with people.

It’s really fascinating seeing how my personality plus my parenting techniques interact with my childrens’ personalities and needs. MC has a very strong basic need for control and a lot of anxiety around demands being made of them. However they have been raised in a 24/7 environment where there are very specific high standards about how we talk to one another and “we are workers, not shirkers” is the family motto so they have adapted their need to not be directed in somewhat surprising ways. The PDA profile fits them to a T and I can go down the list explaining all the ways they resist/avoid work… yet they still manage to do a significant amount of work because of the desire to be a “good citizen of the household”. It’s complicated/complex.

MC has very much internalized that a lot of the ways I am strict/intense in my demands are because of my internal terror that I will fail them as a parent and they love me; this makes them spotty in how they learn and follow through on what I ask but there is this undercurrent of wanting to try. They may take 6 fucking hours to sweep the kitchen most of the time because it is not ok with them on an internal level that they are being told to sweep the kitchen but when they go to someone else’s house and they want to show off they can do it in 5 minutes and tell their little friend all the specific tricks that make it easier/faster because they get to feel like a teacher and they fucking love that.

Hunh. I just had a thought. I kind of wonder if MC is going to finally be interested in learning to write when they get to feel like they are showing YC.

It is quite a challenge to get them to practice reading out loud to me but they do love to do it with YC. When they babysit (more like “mother’s helper” because everyone else is in the house but distracted with video calls or taking a bath) they do a lot of reading/talking about learning. Very much “Having someone read to you is the best…. let me show you.” So much of my teaching approach relies on careful observation and figuring out how to turn my kids personalities to my advantage. That and one to one teaching gives a level of intimacy that simply cannot be matched in a larger classroom. That is not a slam on classroom teachers in any way. I was not as good of a teacher to anyone in particular when I had 150 students. I did my best and it wasn’t what I can give my children.

I feel so much insecurity and anxiety about whether or not what I can give is good enough. I worry so much about letting my children down. It does so much to increase my confidence when I can periodically touch base with another teacher/educator and I can go through my approach and methodology. I do have a fairly extensive education when it comes to child development and what different special needs entail. I have worked very hard on understanding theory.

Towards the end of the call I said, “Something I am very conscious of with regards to my teaching and parenting is that I literally have more will and force of personality than most people. If I believe I am doing the right thing it doesn’t really matter how hard it is or how much time it takes I will do it. It is part of how my brain acts out hyperfocus. When I feel secure that I’m doing the right thing I have just about unlimited energy. I know that if my children were in a classroom they would lose out on that for a big part of their educational support because teachers by and large don’t have that intensity for a myriad of appropriate and healthy reasons. My kids do have special needs and I knew they would before they were born and I am fully committed to doing whatever I have to do to meet them. It is just hard and scary when I feel like I am flailing and I don’t know what to do.” She said that matches what she sees and my kids are lucky to have me.

I feel a lot better after the phone call. I do cycle through novelty. I do renegotiate how things are taught and what things are taught. I do hold the line on “You have to learn a basic level of functionality in order to be an independent adult and we are going to get you there.” I do push/encourage my children through learning and growing in ways that overall result in them liking themselves the vast majority of the time. Even when my kids struggle with anxiety there are usually pretty obvious organic/social reasons that I am not directly to blame for (obviously with the exception of genetics). I am not mean to my kids. I don’t beat them down. They are pretty happy and healthy and secure. Even when they are struggling for a while it is usually in ways that are predictable and appropriate developmentally and I help them pivot towards the path they want to be on.

I am not the shitty parent I sometimes fear I am. I am not perfect because there is no such thing. I do pretty well though. I refuse to stop learning and growing and increasing my ability to meet their needs. When I fail for a while I use that as motivation to push through towards a deeper level of understanding so I can better succeed as their needs change as they grow.

Part of the modeling I want to do for my children is showing that these periods of disequilibrium mean that you keep trying and learning and growing. You don’t give up and declare yourself a failure. As long as you are alive you have the chance to keep growing. Don’t give up on yourself. If we aren’t going to meet my personal goal of having my kids basically ready for complete auto-didact learning to finish the growth necessary for adulthood by 13 that doesn’t mean you can’t hit that mark by 15 or 18. It’s ok that you need the growth curve you need instead of the growth curve I had in my head as ideal. That is not a failure. It is a miscalibration and we’ll just keep going.

Frankly the way that MC needs to reassess every few months and needs a tremendous amount of novelty in order to keep doing things… looks like how I have managed my adult life. I go through intense bursts of focus in different areas. I have to restructure chores and tasks and hobbies regularly or I burn out. You know what? I’m not a failure. I do cool stuff.

MC will too.

He’s not wrong…

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Yeah. We are “trying” to keep going to school for another month but our hearts aren’t in it. The kids are doing a lot of talking about what they plan to do when we start home schooling again. They each have solid plans. They are quite certain how they want to be spending their time and they are not happy with how much time school wastes.

EC is setting herself a whole bunch of art projects. She has a fairly specific list of skills she wants to master and styles she wants to practice. She would not be able to work on any of that with how many hours a day she has free while going to school.

MC is ecstatic about the keyboard and plans to spend a bunch of time playing every day along with working on computer programming and more maths. She says she will work on handwriting–it will be more fun to do when she gets to pick her topic. She is excited that she will be allowed to read at her level instead of being forced into a lower level reading group because her handwriting isn’t good enough.

I mean, I know we will run into problems again at some point. They are children and their sense of motivation runs out. We all have some executive functioning problems and that’s a serious concern. I need to transition a lot more of that management onto their shoulders; that was one big net positive of school. When EC forgot her computer she had to deal with the mess up, not me. When they forgot to pack the lunch that I made them… they had to cope without me.

They are both noticeably less stressed and upset than they have been over the past month. They asked if we could go ahead and start home schooling stuff over break; do we have to wait? Well–most of the things you want to work on for your personal benefit aren’t the things I police. Yes you can do as much of that as you want over break.

We have meet ups scheduled with home educators. The kids are enrolled in an acting/dancing/singing course that starts in January. We will get connected to the local community. We will make friends. But school isn’t going to be it. I’m sort of glad I didn’t bother getting more involved with the PTA. It would be harder to tell the school/other parents “Yeah this place sucks and we are opting out” than to just tell the Head “My children aren’t happy here and I see no point in making them miserable for the sake of ‘conforming to the system’. I believe with my whole heart that schools are trying to force children into 20th century modes of living and the 20th century is over.”

And the bullying. I’m going to document all of the bullying through January and say that I don’t see a good reason to continue subjecting my children to it when the school isn’t handling it.

I don’t send them to school to get hit. But they are getting hit. That sounds like school to me…

It really doesn’t help that the “feelings” teacher doesn’t like my kids and she thinks there is something wrong with them because they prefer adults to children. Dude, that was 100% how I felt. It is utterly normal for gifted kids.

My kids are 2E. They are more challenging than average; believe me I know. For a wide variety of reasons I am more qualified than most to accept and handle their needs.

And if you think that home schooling means they will never fit into society, apparently you don’t know very many people who have been home educated. They grow up into quite normal, wonderful people who don’t resent the idea of learning the way that a lot of other people do.

Do I want to home school again? Not really. I’m tired. But I want my children to be happy and self motivated. I want my children to not be hit. I want my children to not grow up being told that they are fucking morons or that they should go on a diet. I want my children to think that playing with dolls is more fun than worrying about their selfie game. I want my children to have an intense and deep knowledge of their surroundings. I want them to feel safe and to spend a lot of time outside. People who spend a lot of time on social media (based on statistics and studies) feel more lonely and tend to be more paranoid about what bad things can happen to them.

I’ve had a lot more negative experiences than average in this life. I’m still not afraid of being outside or doing things alone. I’m incredibly confident. I can survive and thrive even if a lot of bad things happen. I want my kids to feel like that.

I want my kids to feel like there is a big wide world made up of mostly good people and they should go out and explore it. I want them to feel like there are a lot of problems that they didn’t make but they can help solve. I want them to feel like a life where you give back feels better than a life where you complain about not being given enough. I mean, yes…. eat the rich. But we are very lucky. We are some of the luckiest people on this planet and that means we should use that luck and try to spread it around. How?

Kiddos, in this life people rarely give you responsibility in a way that matters. You take responsibility for things. You take responsibility for your own actions and fixing the mistakes of others. You take responsibility for finding ways of helping people large scale hurt the planet less.

No one will come up to you and gift wrap an opportunity to be a good person.

You have to just do it.

And maybe, if you waste less of your time in school you will come up with more ways to do that sooner. It’s not that school is all bad–it isn’t. Most parents are not in my position with regards to educate their children and I don’t mean to denigrate or mock that. School is a necessary institution for the vast majority of children.

But it isn’t necessary for my kids. I made sure of that. I worked very hard to make that true.

I don’t need to force them to be in a situation that is to my benefit and their detriment. I can do better.

{heavily filtered} Triggers

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Can I say that I'm getting fucking sick to death of how the word triggers is used?  Mostly I hear it mean: 'So this person is crazy and reacting to ghosts… it's not my problem that they are over-sensitive but I guess I can give a lame-ass "I'll try to respect your 'triggers'" line.'  Fuck you all.  No really.

I'm kind of tired of having people throw it in my face that they are trying to be "sensitive" to my "triggers".  Bitch you don't even know what the fuck that means.  By the way, I'm kind of angry.  Apparently having a trigger means that someone does the same asshole thing to you that someone else has already done.  Or at least caused you to think hard about the previous time and consider how you want to react this time.  People are so dismissive of "triggers" because it is a good way of saying, "You were already hurt here so it's not my fault you are hurting now."

Actually, an asshole act is an asshole act.  Lying is lying.  When you negotiate extensively for activity A and you instead engage in activity B… that's not a miscommunication and that's not about me being triggered.  

You want to know the "trigger" part?  My gut-level response to this behavior is to go sleep in a different bed and cry and assume there is nothing in the world that will change it.  Because that kind of lying is something that people just do.  I should stop listening to what people tell me.  There isn't a point.

Things that were effective coping mechanisms during your childhood are hard to abandon as an adult.  When someone lies to me, I have to withdraw trust.  Fast.  I have to shut down affection towards that person.  I have to stop being vulnerable because if they smell blood… I'm dead.

I suppose that triggering me means acting like my family.  So that I have to act like I do with my family.  It's not about a set word or phrase or experience.  If you act like my family… I have nothing for you.  

My family would set terms on who you can know.  If you had the audacity to want to be friends with someone they didn't like… well… that's going to result in nastiness, name calling, threats of abandonment (that aren't followed up on because the piece of shit bully is dependent on having you around to kick), and of course threats of suicide.  

Wow.  That all sounds like what I say and do when I tell Noah that I don't like him dating.  Ironic.  No wonder I feel like I shouldn't be saying no, no matter what.  Because I have this gut reaction of not wanting to be like them.  It's bad to say, "Actually this behavior is toxic to our marriage for 'x, y, and z reasons.'"  Because then I'm trying to control him inappropriately.  My adult spin on not wanting to be this person is to think that I should start shutting my mouth and putting my head down.

My family would rewrite history.  Oh, it's not that anyone lied.  We just miscommunicated, that's all.  No one ever has to be accountable for their actions.  That's why I have a scorched earth policy.  Someone who is going to lie to my face and then go behind my back and do something else all the while maintaining a dialogue with someone else that perpetuates a lie… wow.  I need to run, not walk away from that.  You want to know what a trigger is?

It's the sure knowledge that a liar is poison.  Someone who will lie to me… I can't know.  I can't be vulnerable with.  I can't pay attention to them.  I can't worry about what they want.  I know it will be a facade and I'll never know them anyway.  As soon as you lie to me, and then tell someone else that we "miscommunicated" well…  Yeah.  Ok.  The solution to this "miscommunication" is for me to assume you are lying going forward.  Sounds great.

I lie too.  I lie compulsively sometimes.  I say things in the heat of an argument that aren't true no matter how you look at them.  And I hate myself for it.  That makes me want to run too.  Because these topics are things that I can't be honest about.  So I'd rather not discuss them.

At any other point in my life this kind of behavior would be cue for an abrupt turn on my heel and exiting the premises permanently.  I would much rather leave than try to fix something like this.  My life is complicated now.

I understand a lot of things differently as life goes by.  I think about why women stay in domestic violence situations.  I think about why my mother and my sister are the way they are.  Why do they lie compulsively all the time?  They were taught to.  That's what hanging out with liars will do.  It teaches you to lie.  

The problem with being married to a sociopath is I am never sure if his vision of enlightened self-interest lines up with mine.  My best-interest is considered to the extent that he wants to manipulate the correct
behavior out of me, preferably while volunteering as little as possible.  Because the less he volunteers, the more control and power he has.  There are cracks in my Stockholm Syndrome.

It's hard having such extreme opinions about Noah.  Mostly I feel better about/toward/with him than anyone else on the planet.  And then sometimes I don't.

(ETA: the formatting is weird and I don't know why.)

I’m going to talk about triggers.

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I've spent the past few weeks reminding myself that my early life was a festering shithole of despair the likes of which very few people survive. I'm running low on empathy for other people. So that seems like the perfect time for me to talk about my expectations of how other people will manage their shit. We all have it. That's fine. If you feel upset by things you are reading on the internet, close the window. If you feel upset by things you are hearing said in person you have two choices, you can try to tactfully change the subject; this is done by hearing a conversation segue and going full steam ahead towards that Shiny Change Of Topic!. Heck, you can even announce, "Look! It's A Shiny Change Of Topic!" as you do it. That's ok. That's a way of trying to be comfortable in conversation.

Or you can get off your ass and walk away. At no point it is it ok for you to start ranting about how people have triggered you and they are all bad bad bad bad people for daring to say something that Hurt Your Feelings.

Wow. Do you think you are the only important person in the world? Do you really believe that in order to be in your life people have to spent 100% of their time doing only activities you approve of? You have issues. Big issues. The kind that can be manipulated by fucked up professionals with lots of training on how to manipulate peoples emotions.

I have a lot of triggers. I could not begin to enumerate them all. They change over time. When I am in a period where I am heavily triggered, I stop participating in the world. I go home. I stop reading other peoples blogs. I stop participating in forums. I still post, because I do so compulsively and I could not stop if I wanted to. But I'm not reading. I don't have the emotional energy to risk looking at other peoples lives. I might get upset. If I get upset I will have days of back lash. I will feel this constant internal struggle between rage and despair because dear god why do people always do this to me?  The truth is, they don't always do that to me.  It happens sometimes.  But when your brain is in whatever chemical state it is in right now sometimes… that's the only state you can remember being in.  That's not a rational feeling.  That's not a true statement.  You have other moods and other ways you feel. Maybe not recently.  But life is long.

Deciding that who and what you are right now is so important to preserve that everyone around must change in substantial ways to make you more comfortable uhm, well… that's fucked up.  I'll be flat with you.  That's disordered thinking.  That's having omniscience problem.  Get over yourself.

People need to go live their lives and have the experiences they have, for good and bad.  The more you try to step in between other people having their lives the farther you are away from having an actual relationship.  People are not puppets.  The kind of person who will only do what you say is generally kind of icki and I don't want to be near them.  People who want to "call the shots" on how I talk about my life makes my skin crawl.  That's my fucking trigger.  And guess what, I'm a grown up.  I go back to my fucking sandbox and I deal with my emotions.  In an appropriate way.  In a limited way.  I'm going to rant through this post and then I am going to roll my eyes and go back to my life.  Because I don't need to deal with other people being passive aggressive and control freaks.  I have better things to do with my life.  

I modify my behavior willingly for the people I live with.  They have a right to ask me for concessions.  At the same time, I push for time to write because I need it for my mental health.  I have to push back there.  I have to push back about that universally, across the board.  I need to not only say that was an epic party, but holy shit I got to play with two hot girls.  One I made smile and one I made cry.  I felt honored by both.  They both teach me different things about life.  And I need to honor the lessons I am learned.  That is something that I need for me.  I need to figure out how to navigate my triggers in life.  Because I have a lot of them.  I'm trying to figure out what that means.  What can my life look like.

I'll tell you that declaring subjects or locations off-limits for other people… that's not part of the agenda.  If it is on your agenda then you should stop dicking around and commit yourself for a while because you are obviously in a place where you are not able to have healthy relationships and you need some intensive therapy for you to figure out that you are not God.

Lessons learned.

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Some of these are things I came up with all by myself. Some came as a result of talking to my mom.

1) New cookie sheets so they are all a consistent color and I don’t burn half the cookies. (Dark cookie sheets need to bake at a lower temperature and you can’t go back and forth very well.)
2) Start baking in early November and freeze the cookies. (This is how Mary Poppins [that’s my mom] managed to have something like 10 different cookies for Christmas.)
3) No more than one or two single batches of cookies in a day. More than that starts feeling like unfun work and cookies shouldn’t be unfun work. (One or two batches can be done in less than two hours. That’s a nap-time project and fun.)
4) If I am not completely ready for a party by a week before I should hang it up. I get too stressed and anxious if I let things get too close to the wire and then I’m not able to have fun. (This is part of managing my anxiety/depression stuff. I have to watch stress. Being good at recognizing these sorts of triggers and dealing with them is why I manage to not be on meds.)
5) Get a different carrier so I can do back carries with Shanna. She is too forking big for me to work around her in front of me. (I can’t SEE!!!! And the moby is too stretchy to use on my back in a way I feel comfortable with.)
6) Don’t try to host an event while I am still nursing all night. It means I have very few hours of the day to work and I’m not able to get all the prep done. (I’m in bed for almost 12 hours a night. No really, I’m not underslept.)
7) Start baking more often, like once a week, so that I get more familiar with how to bake and I don’t make as many mistakes. (I ruined a couple batches of dough. That was frustrating.)
8) As long as I live in this house–make sure that I have completely cleaned off every single surface in the kitchen the day before baking. (There is not room to have anything else out and bake. And if I try to do it in the same day I get angry.)

I think that is enough from this situation. All that said, I’m only mildly twinging on feeling bad about canceling the party. I’m sad to not see my friends, but I can rectify that by making plans to see people one on one. That’ll be a good thing.