Day 18: Subject Gets Serious About Her Son

Good morning everyone.

 Behold.  My dude.

I've been having a hard time recently, and, to compound the wretched feeling, I've been pretty hard on myself, too.  You see, my son, Elliot, is what in these modern times is being called a "special needs" kid--  

--That particular label is making me cranky, because don't all children have special needs, in some way or another?  It almost seems like a dismissal of the very real and individual needs that my daughter has.  And trust me, she has them.  Needs for DAYS with that one.  On the bonus side, I think I've been failing my children's needs pretty equally recently, so at least I'm not doing a bang up job with one and neglecting the other.  Go me.--

--but I prefer the term neuro-diverse.   It's a super-modern (and, I'm not gonna lie, just a wee bit hipster) umbrella term that covers a large handful of acknowledged diagnoses and attempts to shift the focus onto them simply being seen as normal diversity in human development, instead of treating them like a disease or malfunction.  You can see why I like it.  From where I stand, my son is not malfunctioning.  He functions just fine.

Me?  Maybe not so much.

Follow me into metaphor for a minute.  Imagine with me, if you will, that we still live in a time when it's wrong to be left-handed.  Why is it wrong?  Well, you can't really write like everyone else, can you?  And you can't use all the tools designed for everyone else, either.  And, plus, there's still that small segment of the population that thinks being left-handed means the devil's inside you.  So really, it's just better for everyone all around if you're right-handed.

But my son--my beautiful, charming, thoughtful, creative, intelligent son--has been born left-handed into this right-handed society.  And I don't think that means that the devil is inside him.  But I also have no idea how to teach him to write, or how to use the tools he needs to get along in the world, because I am not left-handed.  And when I ask other people who are left-handed how they manage to get along in the right-handed world, they don't really know either.  Some of them took medicine to make them right-handed.  And some of them are still stumbling along, trying different ways of writing and using tools, never really settling securely into a way of doing things.  Mostly, though, they just shrug.  "You figure it out."

Of course, I have no clue how to do that, so we struggle along, trying to "figure it out".  I want to burn the world down and rebuild it so that my neuro-normative daughter and my neuro-diverse son can get along equally well, but even if I were willing to wipe the slate clean and start over, I don't know how to build such a thing.  I can't even make my home like that, let alone the entire world.

And thus we come to the crux of the issue.  Because it is bad enough to send my son out into the world knowing it is not suited for him--knowing that they will ask him to be "normal", or, at the very least, to try to do things in the normal way.  But it is so much worse knowing that I am complicit in all this.  After all, the world exists as it does.  I cannot burn it down, nor can I wave a magic wand over it and have it be as I want it to be.  So I, too, continue to try to teach my son how to be right-handed** in a left-handed world, and it makes me feel horrible.

I am trying to shove my kid into a mold he wasn't meant for, and it feels like a betrayal.

Why am I writing about that here in Acceptance365?  I suppose because it's a thing I'm working on accepting.  I cannot fix it, no matter how much I want to.  And I cannot do anything other than my best, even if there are days when my best seems terribly, terribly inadequate.   

Elliot will have to continue to try to get along in a world that was not created with him in mind.  And I will have to keep trying my best, even when I'm not sure if my best is helping or hurting.

If someone is passing out the serenity to accept that which we cannot change, I'd like to get my name on the list for some of that, please.

A kiss for my dude, who I love so much.

 And who loves me.

** Elliot has an intense form of ADHD, which leads to severe behavioral issues in school.  I am clarifying just in case anyone thought I was this torn up about my son actually being left-handed.  He isn't and I wouldn't be.