Completely Real, Completely Complicated, and Completely Awesome!

 

I am part of a group on facebook that offers support for autism and the daily struggles parents go through. It has been very interesting to read all the things autism brings to families both good and bad. Some of the moms have more than one child with autism and some have been living with the difference for years. Others have children that are newly diagnosed and I can tell you there are new members nearly every day. Parents who are reaching out to find people who understand how it affects daily life.

Sometimes it’s comforting to know there are people who completely understand how different your parenting style has to be, and the public ignorance that provokes nastiness at times. How the weight of that can really start to make it hard to lift your feet off the ground every day. I love seeing posts of celebration. It can be as simple as a first word or one of my own posts was my son taking his own shirt off. Little things we wait for and when it comes the feeling is like winning the progress jackpot and we just have to tell someone right away. Others can be a show of emotion or love. We know our children feel it just like you and I, but autism doesn’t always allow them to show it so when they get to break out of it for a moment and it comes through, we celebrate. Regardless of the stigma out there that says autistic kids don't show emotions, parents know better. Our kids are full of emotion and they do show it. The difference is, it's real emotion and not fake like so many people in life have mastered. I tend to think that makes autism a superior difference when it comes to human nature.

Other times my heart breaks for the struggles people face that they really have no control over. In many cases the child is grown and controlling them in a meltdown is a daunting task without help from another source of support. It's not always the child that ends up in uncontrollable tears but mom is right there to, desperately trying to find a way to bring peace to their child.

A question was posted yesterday that really grabbed my attention, they all do, but this took instant hold of me because I think about it all the time. The question was and not exactly her words but she asked if after having to adjust to the difference for so long, would it be easy to let your guard down and go back to normalcy? My instant thought was no, the daily adjustments actually do change you as a person and parent. We spend every day on guard and waiting for progress that eventually autism really becomes a part of us because in order to make the adjustments needed, we have to think like our children would. Or at least how we think they would because even after being with them every day we still don't always know. We are constantly thinking even when we don’t have the energy to and we just can’t let that guard down.

When we had our son diagnosed we gave into the fact we needed someone to help us learn ways to adjust for him and ourselves. It is really what finally led to him being tested. We just didn’t know to help him and felt someone must know these answers. From my own experience I can say we found ourselves being offered advice that would have worked perfectly for our non autistic children but for Phillip? Not so much. It was much more complicated than that. We have adjusted in ways that work great one day and maybe the next it won’t work at all, so we are constantly thinking of how to figure him out, how to protect him, how to help others understand him, and how to help him make progress.

Mostly what we think about is….how to unlock that autism door that we keep knocking on. He slides clues under the door every day to keep us guessing, or opens it for a bit but for the most part all of us are just trying to figure out how to keep that dang door open so we can stick our foot in it and show every one whats on the other side because we know how amazing our children are and what they have to offer. Completely real, completely complicated, and completely awesome.