I'm not an extraordinary mom, though I hope my kids think I'm at least above average. Whatever their assessment, I consider myself a dedicated mom, one who tries to get better, to be better, to do better. How I get there has been complicated by the circumstances of this pandemic, but in some ways, those same circumstances have made the role of parenting that much more urgent. Essential, even.
There's the stuff of parenting that continues as a through line, even in a pandemic. There's the nurturing, the supporting, the encouraging, the providing of boundaries and guardrails. There's also the haranguing, the prodding, the reminding. There's appreciating your kids when they're helpful, and wanting to murder them when they are not. In our home, there's the familiar aggravation of providing three different dinners for four people, because we've utterly failed to enforce meal conformity for so long (primary thanks to our uber-picky autistic son) that there's no way we're going to slay that dragon now.
There is wanting to murder my daughter for keeping her room in a perpetual pigsty state, as if she's trying to drive me mad. And no, closing her door so I won't see, as she unhelpfully suggests, won't diminish my aggravation. But I also know that having a messy room is not--and never has been--a life and death issue. So I try to move on. My husband reminds me that she's been attending all of her online classes and seminars, and following up as needed regarding summer work or classes, if work falls through. And yes, that matters. Especially for a child for whom that kind of follow through hasn't always been a given.
The days when I'm tempted to rip my not-graying hair out (that's just how it is for most redheads), are counter-balanced by my daughter's reporting that she got her autistic brother to go on a three mile walk with her. "Did you threaten him?" my husband and I asked in unison. She gets him to do things we never seem able to. We often chalk it up to his being afraid of her, but maybe she just has a better technique, drawn from growing up with him, and her experiences working with disabled kids at summer camp. Whatever the reason, we're grateful for that kind of outcome. Not so grateful when she argues with him, gets in his face, or provokes him with a word or a flick of some sort. Brings me right back to wanting to murder her.
That emotional parenting seesaw is nothing new, I suppose. It's just that there's no real relief for it during a lockdown. No one's going anywhere, so we can't create the distance that might allow us to decompress, to walk away from and walk off the tension, the anger, the disappointment that bubbles up in families, however frequently or infrequently.
But something else--somewhat unique to families like ours--that this pandemic has made space for and allowed me to see, is its impact on my autistic son. When his face-to-face programs shut down--including the work training program at Invictus that he absolutely loved--I wasn't at all sure how that would turn out. What happened for the most part was that for the first six weeks or so, from mid-March on, my son slept. And I mean slept...as in 18-20 hours a day. He would get up, have his breakfast and take his meds, announce that he was tired, and promptly go back to bed. Many nights, I had to bring him his anti-seizure meds in bed, because I couldn't get him up for dinner, or to come to the kitchen to take his pills.
I also couldn't get my son to go outside, not even for a short walk with the dogs. He remained housebound, and nothing seemed able to change that. But he also didn't seem unhappy or distressed. When he was awake, he did what he's always done when he's had nothing else to do, or was unwilling to do anything else--he spent time on his computer. He was either noodling with the spreadsheets he's made about construction equipment or restaurants, or watching age-inappropriate videos from Sesame Street or Barney. But then my daughter encouraged him to do puzzles.
We had a bunch in our apartment that were just too difficult, at 1,000 pieces each. Not sure why my husband ever got those, but so be it. My daughter was able to find a 300-piece puzzle online and when it arrived, my son spent hours completing it, with his sister. Hours. That was a revelation. Both to see the two of them deeply immersed in a meaningful activity together, but also to see my son emerge from his near-hibernation to engage with something that held his attention as nothing had for months. It was a magical, nearly miraculous thing to observe. And it reminded me that, for all the challenges of cohabiting during a crisis, there might still be some bright spots.
Some of that, I think, might derive from lowering expectations. I've done some of that myself. I've thought: I should use this time to learn a new language, to learn to knit, to learn to play guitar, to try out new recipes. I've failed to do any of that, though I did spend a few minutes with a language program on my phone. I think it's my increasing distractibility that's been an issue, but it's also the fact that I actually hate online learning. It just doesn't hold me. I have enjoyed some online classes, where I basically just listen. But the "interactive" stuff, where you put your questions into a chatbox on Zoom and wait to see if your question will be answered, leaves me feeling a weird kind of disembodied numbness, like I'm having an experience, but not really having it.
But back to my children. So after the triumph with the 300-piece puzzle, my daughter decided to up the ante. She managed to snap up a 500-piece puzzle for her brother. The day it arrived, he spent 5.5 hours working on and finishing it. Did I mention that he spent 5.5 hours on it??? Did I mention that for weeks prior, he'd been sleeping 18-20 hours a day? Did I mention that he's autistic, that I couldn't get him to go outside, to be off his computer for the few hours he was awake? His engagement with puzzles has been a revelation. It taught me something about him that I'm not sure I ever really knew. And this learning has coincided with a kind of miraculous flowering of his speech. The kinds of questions he's been asking, the words he's been using, the curiosity he's shown, have been revelatory. Sure, all of that has coexisted with some familiar, perseverative behaviors and speech, but the overall trajectory has been kind of stunning. And I'm not sure if I would have appreciated it if I'd been out and about, distracted by all the shiny objects of daily life. Instead, I've been inside with him, hunkered down, with ample time to look, to see, to listen, to hear. I've been able, during the awfulness that is this pandemic, to experience something wondrous, something that might or might not last, but that has acquainted me--in the close confines of living with my quirky kids--with the gift of radical amazement.
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