parenting

24 October 2011

Waiting for Happy Feet

It’s never a good sign when you find yourself trying to decide which part of your body hurts the most.  Without providing litany of complaints, suffice to say that a broken foot results in pain everywhere else, too.  I now understand all too well my mother’s gratitude at having her feet massaged when she arrived at hospice care – no morphine drip provides the same kind of joyous relief and that which emanates from properly rubbed feet.  Turns out that when your feet are happy the rest is sure to follow, and thus the opposite is also true.  Chronic pain emanating from the bottom up can make you an emotional wreck.

So when you rearrange the furniture in your daughter’s room, you cry.  When the Mother’s Day vase topples and breaks, you cry.  When you take that school picture sticker from second grade off the ugly bathroom mirror before they throw it in the dumpster, you cry.  When you find you are missing a family dinner far away, you cry.  When you move the preschool books to the attic, you cry.  And when you drive away from the special education collaborative where you have dropped your boy off for a vocational assessment you cry so hard you can’t breathe.

I don’t have much wisdom to glean from any of this other than I’d better work on healing my feet before they break my heart.

6 September 2011

Okay, that’s not what I meant

When I said that things were going to change I didn’t mean the next day.  I have had countless humbling experiences in my life but breaking my foot is in the top, oh, 100 and moving up the charts fast.  A loose sandal strap, an overabundance of enthusiasm at seeing an old friend, and a menacing threshold, and in an instant I am imprisoned in my house full of stairs (how have I not noticed this?) and faced with the prospect of being burden to friends and family for untold weeks.  There’s nothing like going up and down stairs on your butt to give you a little perspective, unless it’s sitting on a plastic stool in the shower with your trash bad-clad leg sticking outside of the curtain and then realizing the soap is above and  behind you.  Naturally, the stereo is up too loud to hope that a call for assistance would be answered but I’m too proud to let anyone see me in such a ridiculous posture anyway.  Humbling, indeed.

But I am doggedly determined to see the silver lining (but let the record show there is no such thing as a silver lining of any kind at 6am if there are crutches involved) and thus far there are a few notable glimmers.  First, our autistic son is the most empathetic and least likely to engage in emotional blackmail while doing things for me – and every time he passes by, he solicitously taps my big toe and smiles at me.  The others, while helpful to a point, roll their eyes and and ask for take-out pizza at every opportunity.  I have already collapsed in tears once, declaring that I have raised a passel of self-centered prima donnas, but then again that is the definition of adolescence, pretty much.  And just when I think they are doomed to a life lived with the House of Pizza on speed dial, they ask me to guide them through the process of cooking eggs for an after school snack, after which the kitchen still looks clean.  So, even though I hate the sound of it, I have a feeling we are all in for a lot of teachable moments.

And, one more beam cuts through the fog – now I have no excuse for not writing.

31 August 2011

Last Day of Summer

I wonder how many posts with this title are running today? Everywhere the light is changing, calendars are flipping, windows are opening to let in the first cool dry breezes of fall, and parents are rejoicing and mourning the impending first day of school.

Tomorrow we go the high schools – new teachers, new principals, new schedules to conquer. An urge to volunteer for everything and nothing. An itch to get to all of those practical things we meant to do on a rainy day this summer and the bittersweetness of having to do them in an empty house.

23 July 2011

It’s the Little Things

This post originally appeared on the LettersHead site in the summer of 2010.

Living with a person who has autism brings surprises every day, some pleasant and some decidedly less so, but they always catch at your heart, one way or the other.  Take this box of peaches.  I left it in the back of the car for the night, knowing that if I brought it into the house that my son would eat them all before dinner and then I would have no fruit to put in his lunch the next morning.  He is, after all, a teenage boy.  This morning when I went to fetch the box, I found it like this, with four peaches eaten and the remaining pits carefully placed in each compartment (the two empty ones are the ones I put in his lunch).  When I asked if he “sneaked the peaches,” he said, “Yes!  And I left you the seeds!”

8 February 2011

Monday, Monday

The best way to chronicle my slow descent into madness on this day that I would rather not remember is to list what I ate, and where, in order:

  • 2 cups of strong coffee – home after rising at 5:30 to see husband off
  • 1 large cafe au lait – in a cafe while meeting with a School Committee member about Special Education transportation contracts and budget
  • 1 slice of whole wheat toast with cream cheese and smoked salmon – home after picking up sick kid
  • 1 bottle sparkling water – car
  • 2 large white chocolate macadamia nut cookies – parking lot of Whole Foods after another kid has a panic attack in the coffee section of the store
  • 1/2 of a pulled pork sandwich on a white roll – standing in kitchen at home
  • three bites of buffalo chicken pizza – dining room with sick kid who thought that this kind of pizza would taste good
  • the rest of the buffalo chicken off of the slice of pizza – dining room
  • 1 large white chocolate macadamia nut cookie – in front of computer
  • 6 ounces of green olives with garlic and lemon – in kitchen while making a burger for kid who would not eat anything from Whole Foods
  • 1 bottle sparkling water – in bed.
4 January 2011

The Essentials

My theory is that most crimes of passion are committed by people suffering from sleep deprivation.  Having just awakened from a nap after two weeks of Christmas vacation with my family, I am sticking to this theory, and it explains why my mother remembers nothing of our early childhood years, why I regret most of what I recall of my own children’s early childhood years, and why old people delight in napping the day away.  All I can say is, I’m sorry and always remember to let sleeping parents lie.  Lay.  Lie.  Whatever.