When I was little I always said I wanted three kids. Two boys and a girl. I don't know if that was ever the truth; perhaps I said it because people always like to hear little girls talk about growing up to be mommies, after all that’s what little girls are supposed to want to be. Us girls could be tomboys and play in the dirt with fire trucks, but we were still expected to want to be mothers. I didn’t know if I wanted that. I thought I wanted to get married, but seeing how I wasn’t much bigger than Tiny when my parents divorced, I didn’t really know what married meant.
As a little kid you don’t see a lot of marriage troubles in movies. A lot of princesses and princes falling in love and getting married, maybe a frog or two, but The End usually pops up around the time the wedding night is to commence. I didn’t know anything about marriage or siblings or babies to even know if I wanted any of it. What I did know was that I hated babysitting and I thought all children were dirty and I swore to god if I had to watch one more slimy boy pick his nose I was never going to babysit again. Thankfully I found a job as a waitress as soon as I was old enough to no longer be considered child labor.
I was still a waitress when I found out I was pregnant. It wasn’t anywhere close to an ideal situation. Even though I wasn’t ready for a baby, I decided that abortion wasn’t my style. I felt intrinsically pro-choice at the time, but it wasn’t a choice I felt was right for me. I’ve made this statement before, about being very deliberate in my choice to have a baby in less-than-ideal circumstance, and often the response I get is something along the lines of:
That’s because you were meant to be
J’s’ mother and have a special needs son.
Excuse me, are you on drugs? I’ve heard parents say how grateful they are to have a kid with special needs because they learn so much about themselves and how much they love their little balls of joy weird. But is that completely honest? Or honest at all? I love my son. I love having him around. When he has good days, we celebrate them, and those days bring me tears of joy. But when he has bad days, he has bad days. It’s the bad days that leave me contemplating all of the why’s.
I often don’t understand the why’s. Why can’t he tie his shoes? Why can’t he do his laundry on a day that isn’t Thursday? Why can’t he look us in the eye? Why do we have days where we’re both left utterly frustrated and in tears? Why me? Why him? Why our family? Sometimes life doesn’t seem fair or right or just. At the end of the day I’m often left wondering this overall question of why. Somewhere there’s meaning in all of this and I just have to trust that I will find out what that meaning is.
But these days I feel that we’re getting closer to things getting better. There’s some sort of light flickering in the back of this dark room, slowly growing brighter. I feel all of us getting happier, even if the road ahead is long and seemingly never-ending.
I’ve wanted to write something about Autism for ages now. I used to write all the time: short stories and fan-fiction. I wanted to start writing something that was deeper for me, therapeutic for me to write, but hopefully therapeutic for others to read. Something that matters. But what matters?
Well you know what? This matters.
If I’m struggling with these feelings of inadequacy and aloneness and fear then other parents out there must feel these things too. Some days I wake up and experience ALL OF THE FEELINGS that exist in the world just in a few exchanges with my son. The Autism, the hyperactivity, all the WTH moments we have in a single day. And I struggle. And I get angry. And confused.
But I so rarely read these things. I rarely hear anyone say it. There may be a lot of parents who don't want to hear it, or want to admit it, but here I am, on my soap box ready to shout it to the world what needs to be said for those parents who are losing faith in themselves because they have no one to give their faith to:
BEING THE PARENT OF A SPECIAL NEEDS CHILD CAN BE CRAP,
BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU DON’T LOVE YOUR KID,
DOESN’T MEAN YOU ARE A BAD PARENT,
DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD GIVE UP.
IT MEANS YOU ARE HUMAN.
WELCOME TO THE CLUB.
