I was looking for a place to toss a shovelful of snow that I’d just dug up next to the car when I thought about Nat.\u00a0 Nat was still at the group home, but we had told him that as soon as the snow stopped and we were dug out, we’d come get him.\u00a0 I threw the snow right or maybe left — we are really running out of space and the drifts bordering the driveway are about five feet high by now — and I imagined Nat and his brothers shoveling.<\/p>\n
We are all really good at shoveling these days.\u00a0 I pictured handing the shovel to Nat and seeing him push it down and push the snow aside.\u00a0 No problem. But it used to be.\u00a0 Such tantrums!\u00a0 He couldn’t be outside with us.\u00a0 And if we left him inside, he’d freak out in there, watching us working outside.\u00a0 The horrible feelings I had, knowing I couldn’t be inside or outside.\u00a0 There was no place to go, no place to be on this earth because my child was so unhappy and he could not understand what was going on.<\/p>\n
Now he shovels snow willingly and competently.\u00a0 Yet another skill, another feather in Nat’s cap.\u00a0 How did this come to be?<\/p>\n
We made him do it anyway.\u00a0 We lived through tantrums.\u00a0 We had shoveling (shopping days, movie outings, parties, holidays, vacations, meals, sleepless nights) days that ended badly.\u00a0 Nat has been exposed to a lot of activities.\u00a0 It’s as simple — and difficult — as that.\u00a0 The more Nat experiences, the more he is able to do.\u00a0 As soon as we realized that we needed to familiarize Nat with as many things as possible, we started to take him out, make him be around people and go to new places.\u00a0 It was almost always really, really hard.\u00a0 We tried a Cape Cod vacation:\u00a0 terrible.\u00a0 Each year, not as much.\u00a0 Stayed with my parents:\u00a0 it got better.\u00a0 Switched to the ocean, rather than the bay side and brought boogie boards:\u00a0 success.\u00a0 Still difficult, because he walks in circuits and ends up too close to others’ blankets. But still, we enjoy ourselves for a lot of it.\u00a0 Not all of it, but enough.<\/p>\n
Challenger T-ball; failed.\u00a0 A year later we tried Special Olympics gymnastics: success.\u00a0 But bumpy success.\u00a0 Nat sometimes slapped people or had tantrums or spaced out.\u00a0 We stuck with it.\u00a0 Or rather, Ned did.\u00a0 I’m the coward of the two of us.\u00a0 I find out about stuff and dream things up, but Ned very often ends up following them through. You gotta have at least one parent who doesn’t mind people staring, or an occasional pinch.\u00a0 I think that even if you are a single parent, you should find a way to have a second person around sometimes.<\/p>\n
Vacuuming.\u00a0 Food shopping.\u00a0 Parties.\u00a0 Shoveling.\u00a0 We took Nat places.\u00a0 Even for abbreviated visits and outings.\u00a0 Because even if he had tantrums during the event or activity, it was becoming a part of his repetoire.\u00a0 Stored data.\u00a0 Information he could draw on for the next time.\u00a0 If there was a tiny seed of it already there in his mind, no matter how sharp and horrible that experience had been, it was now lodged there, resting in his gray matter.\u00a0 And that is the most fertile ground there is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was looking for a place to toss a shovelful of snow that I’d just dug up next to the car when I thought about Nat.\u00a0 Nat was still at the group home, but we had told him that as soon as the snow stopped and we were dug out, we’d come get him.\u00a0 I […]<\/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-1872","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-uc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872","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=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1873,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions\/1873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}