Set free

Two large eyes look back at me. They are questioning. Why is the world so confusing? Why do we ask him to do tasks that seem completely meaningless? Why can’t you see how tuned in I am to what I need and only force your wants on me? They are my son's eyes – beautiful and clear but nowadays more often than not swimming in tears because what used to be merely confusing previously is now bewildering beyond belief.

We have a difficult relationship my son and I. We don’t see eye to eye on anything. I am the impatient mother always trying to tell him what to do and berating him for not listening. He is the eternal carefree child even at age eleven – always seeking joy and laughing at the simplest things – reveling in little pleasures. We are two extremes. I want him to be bent and shaped to fit in with the rest of the world because to stand out would be a crime. He wants to be set free with his mind soaring to heights I cannot even imagine. 

With my logical brain and conforming nature, I am yet unhappy a lot of the time. I do as I am told or as I have been told is ‘right’. I have followed well-beaten paths all my life. I never strayed and explored the interesting sights that beset the road. And I am gifted with a child who will never ever even comprehend the idea of a path already laid out. He will forge his own ways through life and I will have to stand by and watch perhaps not even understanding why he chooses to go where I could never follow. But he is happy and I do believe he will always be so. Maybe what appears to me to be an invisible path is really quite clear in his mind – he knows what he wants and he knows how to get it but he will not let me in on his secret. So I continue to fret and worry and go through a thousand headaches because I do not know what the future holds for this fairy child.

Sometimes I long for normalcy – when I see my friends complaining about how much they have to work at raising their neurotypical kids, I smile sadly. I count myself lucky that my child is someone capable of unstinting love and affection. He is a master of living in the moment. If only I could learn from him, my days would be far easier and my nights more restful. Of all my son’s different ways of enjoying life, my favourite is his rousing belly laughter – it sounds the same now as it did when he was a few months old – a whole body shaking , eyes-closed, totally immersed kind of laughter – so contagious that no matter how blue I am I laugh out loud when I hear it – so indicative of happiness that the whole world looks brighter – so beautiful to see that my heart skips a beat...if I had but one wish granted to me , it would be that my son should always keep his laughter...

Difficult days.

Yesterday I had a difficult time with my son. He wouldn’t wake up on time, he wouldn’t eat a thing after getting back from school, wouldn’t go out to play, and wouldn’t agree to anything I asked him to do. I felt the familiar band of tightness on my forehead signalling the onset of my frequent stress headaches. On top of all that the heat was bad enough to leave me in a very irritable mood. My husband took one look at my face and told me to go sit by myself somewhere – sometimes just calming down would be the best thing I could do. So I sat by myself and played Scrabble mindlessly till my head cleared sufficiently for me to relax. Appu apologized soon after and he went off to sleep.

I headed upstairs still unhappy that I was constantly caught up in a cycle of trying to get him to do things on time, failing, losing my temper and then feeling miserable that I ended up losing it! Why was I unable to get out of that rut and do something positive to break the cycle? I tried to think about what upset me in the first place. True, he had been giving me a hard time especially in the last month. He had lost weight since he would eat almost nothing. He had an increased resistance to going to school so much so that both my husband and I dreaded waking him up. It took ages to get him off the bed and frequently both of us would simply end up mad at him for making mornings so unpleasant.

After somehow getting him off to school, my relief would be tremendous but when he got back, it would be another round of fighting to get him to eat something. If he had his special classes in the evening, another minor upheaval would follow with me promising the world to him if he would just leave on time. After that things would be fine till bed time assuming he had no homework. If he was required to write even two lines, another massive wave of effort followed and by the end of the day I would feel so tired, it was almost as if I had run a marathon. I didn’t even want to wake up most days to face this crazy routine.

I tried to figure out where I was going wrong. Clearly the poor kid was even more upset than I was. He never likes to see me sad either so what was the issue that kept him from just going through the day without resisting every part of his routine? Was my reaction and anticipation of a difficult day causing more problems for him? What if I woke up thinking that the day would be a good one? Its not quite as easy as that of course while dealing with a child who has a tough time merely existing. His sensory overloads together with the hormonal changes of a 11 year old was making things rather difficult for him. He has never had it easy all through his young life. And here I was just being a lousy mother more bothered about my stress levels than whatever painful hell the poor child was going through.

Perhaps I needed to take a step back and not interpret his every action as a symptom of some incurable problem. Maybe if I left him alone when he was upset and didn’t continually expect him to be like my other child, he wouldn’t feel so inadequate. And if I simply refuse to raise my voice at all, surely it would make him calm down sooner? Changing the way I look at every word and deed would probably make both our lives easier. Expecting a child to cope with a mother’s pain and disappointment on top of the confusing complexity that is his daily life is simply unfair and I can only see that when I distance myself. For Appu then, I simply have to try harder...