Yesterday I wrote a horribly depressed blog post but if you blinked, you missed it.\u00a0 I took it down.\u00a0 I am terrified of showing the ugly despair I feel sometimes.\u00a0 I think it is human nature to want to hide that from the world, like a cat in a litter box.\u00a0 I do show more of my honest and grotesque thought processes than many people, and I do that because after a while I can’t keep it shut inside my own skull.\u00a0 But I need a Medieval barber, someone who can apply a leech or bleed me and let out the toxic spirits.\u00a0 That’s what this blog is for at times.<\/p>\n
The poison comes from self-loathing, or perhaps self-knowledge — meaning that I’ve come to realize that something I do is not the best course of action and yet I do it anyway.\u00a0 Unstoppable habits:\u00a0 this is the stuff that nightmares are made of.\u00a0 We know we shouldn’t — and yet we do it anyway.<\/p>\n
I know I should engage Nat.\u00a0 I know I should organize Nat.\u00a0 I know I should have more expectations of him when he’s home.\u00a0 No, no, don’t tell me that he needs his downtime, the dignity of orchestrating his own weekend day.\u00a0 I know that.\u00a0 I believe that.\u00a0 And yet, as his mother, I am supposed to guide him towards self-improvement and growth.\u00a0 It is my job, just as it is any parent’s job to teach their children the right way of doing things, to show them how to be self-preserving rather self-destructive:\u00a0 to push them to grow.\u00a0 The child’s softness and underdeveloped social and mental muscles have to be exercised regularly.\u00a0 We are the ones who are supposed to oversee that.<\/p>\n
But I’ve let things go for too long here.\u00a0 All three of my sons spin off into their own worlds, deeply invested in their projects, their habits, that for me to step in now would be an enormous effort.\u00a0 When do you decide that your child is fully formed and not in need of your intervention?<\/p>\n
Somehow we can all pretty much say that Max is “done,” and can take care of himself, with minimal oversight.\u00a0 He’s in a committed relationship, he has a good job, he can prepare meals, and he can be left alone overnight.\u00a0 Ben, on the other hand, is not yet “done,” because he doesn’t take care of himself as well.\u00a0 If left to his own devices, he’d stay in front of his art forum and his game design and he’d only eat ice cream when he came up for air. But I figure he will be done pretty soon, once he internalizes constructive habits, once I see him going for an apple on his own, once I see him close the screen and sit down with a book or a pad and pencil.\u00a0 I already see signs of that, so I’m not afraid for him.\u00a0 I see that he can arrange his own social life, he can get his schoolwork done, though it takes hours and hours.\u00a0 I’ve seen him advocate for himself in so many little ways that are actually huge.<\/p>\n
So how about Nat?\u00a0 When will Nat be “done?”\u00a0 The overall assumption is that he won’t ever be done.\u00a0 His disability label takes that away from him.\u00a0 His limitations seal the deal.\u00a0 I am eternally on the hook for teaching him more and more and more, for overseeing his development.\u00a0 Parents of people with disabilities understand and feel that hook and that is why there is so much more anxiety in their lives:\u00a0 the knife of ultimate responsibility sits poised at our throats.<\/p>\n
This is the danger of seeing our children as a long checklist.\u00a0 Having the developmental tasks stretch out before me makes me feel tired and hopeless.\u00a0 It reduces all that we do to effort and mental calculation.\u00a0 How many constructive activities did I manage with Nat this weekend?\u00a0 Okay, well, I brought him to a densely packed Christmas party, where there was even a dog, and he paced from room to room, avoiding the dog and looking for new things to eat.\u00a0 Occasionally I would grab him and introduce him to someone, or give him a kiss, and try to make him respond to people when they addressed him.\u00a0 It’s funny how the others would try to get me not to force Nat to do anything, to let him be.\u00a0 They were anxious about Nat being unhappy.\u00a0 They felt that he was “doing great.”\u00a0 I felt that there was so much more he could be doing.\u00a0 I’m supposed to think that way, to always have expectations of him.\u00a0 But those around me were trying to get me to see that what he was doing was actually very good; he was there, he was happy.<\/p>\n
So which is it?\u00a0 Am I to put more demands on him, to try to bring him more “up to speed?”\u00a0 Am I still working under the model that I have to push him Closer to Normal?\u00a0 Or is the goal Closer to Fine?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I wrote a horribly depressed blog post but if you blinked, you missed it.\u00a0 I took it down.\u00a0 I am terrified of showing the ugly despair I feel sometimes.\u00a0 I think it is human nature to want to hide that from the world, like a cat in a litter box.\u00a0 I do show more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-tI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1843,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions\/1843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}