Dodgeball

There it was again.  That wave that simultaneously knocks you off your feet and sucks you under the water where you can’t breathe or get your bearings.

This is the thing with parenting a neurodiverse child.  Your anxiety simmers constantly just at the surface, waiting for the next thing to happen.  Yet, when it does happen, you are still caught off guard.  What I have learnt, is that you are always hit by the curve balls you never see coming and did not anticipate despite being on constant alert.  It’s like playing dodgeball, except you don’t know the rules or the other players, all the balls are being thrown in your direction and there doesn’t seem to be a referee.

As the parent, you often don’t even realise you are in a perpetual heightened state of “fight or flight”.  You just keep going until you can’t.  And then you pick yourself up and forge on, because who else will if you don’t?  It is depleting  – mentally, emotionally and physically.  Hence, I was not even remotely surprised to find out last week (after an annual checkup) that I have exceptionally low vitamin B and need daily, weekly and then monthly injections.  I also seem to have the opposite reaction to stress than most people because my blood pressure plummets instead of being raised.  This is not a “woe is me Pity Party”, just evidence of the drain that we don’t fully acknowledge and the weight of the stress that we carry indefinitely.

So what now (you are probably wondering)?  I honestly have no idea.  Nobody knows whether we should try Grade 1 again at N’s current school or move him to a different environment.  7 professionals and counting and still we don’t have the answers.  Of all the things I have learnt about N over the last 5 years and through all the battles we have fought, not once did I think he would be this enigma, this puzzle with no solution.  It makes you feel so helpless as a parent, lost and flailing without any clarity or a path to follow.  As a therapist myself in the field of neurorehabilitation, I have always told my patients that, as much as we know there is still so much that we don’t.  Turns out this is true across the board.  For all the thousands of children that have passed through this school, N still remains baffling and a learning curve for everyone involved.  I know that he will be my biggest teacher in this life and I think to many others as well.  But come the middle of the night when you are alone with your thoughts, the questions all come back – what did I do wrong?  Is it because he is an only child?  Is it because I didn’t do the right activities and stimulate him enough?  Is it the way that I did/didn’t discipline him?  Is it because he was born underweight and premature?  If each thought was a fishing weight, I would be drowned by the wave.  So few of us ever get the answers that we search for, yearn for.

 So we come out of the wave, coughing and spluttering, trying to gain our balance and preserve our dignity (hoping our swimming costume hasn’t come off in the struggle).  We get back on the beach and take those tricky steps back onto stable ground so that we can steady ourselves until the next wave and dodge as many of the hard balls as we can.