What is it like to have your heart on fire for your children?
Especially for their differences, it has taken quite a bit to unlearn
The word deficiencies. Spoiler alert, it came from me contending with my own.
What erupted was magma, alive, alert, a deep, deep desire to destroy.
It pops up in big old moments, the ones that you have to work hard to muddle through.
The father and son calling your son a crybaby because his autistic brain makes it loud in his cranium,
He was simply enjoying his time in the pool, slipping in and out like an otter and it didn’t take much but it also didn’t take much to move through it because the sun was shining and the water was absolutely fine, the sound of laughter and squeals all about.
And in that crowd laughter and points, meanness for the sake of it. You saw it and your heart opened in all sorts of manners.
Manners. Is there such a thing in such instances?
I’m still not sure, those moments leave me unguarded.
Moments like when an educator told your oldest that they have a girl name and that means they use the girl bathroom when they had shared with such a quiet, calm manner that they do not ascribe to any gender and they were letting out their needs in such a tender form.
You wrote the principal and the response was lacking.
Statistics and clients and worries crept into your heart like water, flowing, streaming, you of course work hard to let it pour out of you.
If you held it all you’d explode and then no one will listen,
They will step back and confirm you were crazy all along so your ideas weren’t worth a damn.
The smaller moments are actually harder because they stack and multiply and they attach to themselves like little sticky, crawly creatures, waiting to pop back into the framework of your life, your lens, your way of being, and, the most painful part, your worth.
These are the subtleties where you gave yourself away, where you apologized when you wanted to scream, when you did tell the kids to be quiet when you really wanted to say no-yell all you want, this very thing we are in is all fucked up.
LIke the IEP meetings and the time he wouldn’t sit at the neurofeedback office, and the way adults want to give you side eyes and you want to shrug your shoulders and say, I know, they are really awful aren’t they? But you don’t believe it. You think, in your bones, they are pretty wonderful and you are not sorry and you want to surround them with so much power that some of these moments won’t even penetrate.
Sometimes I am better than others.
Sometimes I am too tired.
Or hungry or sad.
Sometimes I don’t give a fuck, except I do, all the time with all I am.
Sometimes, most of the time,
We just need a little help.