When you don't know what you're doing?

One of the difficulties of being a mother with special needs children is not knowing every single one of the triggers that may set off my children.  Now, I'm grateful for the ones I do know, for example:

- Loud noises will trigger my autistic son, especially when it comes from my daughter.
- Mixed textures in any food will set off all three kids
- The inappropriate food at all will set off the kids
- Lack of decent sleep will set off the kids
- The wrong texture of clothes will set off the kids
- A parent misinterpreting anything will set off the kids

Now I have three of these kids. They are amazing, miraculous, incredible, beautiful, generous, lovable, adorable, and so much more.

But there are days when I have absolutely no clue what in heaven or earth has set off my kids. Like today. Like the entire last week. The kids are overreacting to the littlest things and overreacting to the most extreme. I feel bruised, battered, emotionally torn and exhausted, and extremely overwhelmed.  I have had very little sleep, I'm eating poorly, and I'm incredibly crabby. Sometimes I wish there was a magical translation stone to help me understand, because its moments like this when I feel totally helpless. Like nothing I doing is the right thing for them or for me. So here's a prayer from me to all special needs parents who are enduring similar situations. I'll pray for you and you pray for me. Together we'll make it through. We'll find the answers.

How Life As A Mom Can Be Scary & Fun

Here for your enjoyment is the story won me 3rd place in the Adult category for our local Halloween Scary Short Story Contest last night. 

Asylum

by Karen Pellett

October 2015

 

The sun tucked behind the distant mountains, hiding her escape but also making it impossible to see where it was safe to run. Cindy’s skin prickled with the kiss of bitter smoke on the wind and the sudden drop in temperature. She grabbed hold of a nearby tree to steady her weakened knees, but the coarse bark cut into her palm until it bled. The rain-soaked ground undulated beneath her feet, resembling the body of a serpent slithering below her in the fading light. The pain and numbness from the drugs’ lasting effects only intensified the hallucinogenic feeling.

Clawing her way up the tree-blanketed hill side, her hair fell in shriveled threads out of its ponytail, creating temporary cracks in her vision. She brushed the errant strands out of her eyes looking for a path through the forest brush. As she stepped over a fallen branch, her foot sunk into a puddle of mud, leaves, and slime. Cindy tugged her foot hard until it pulled free with a slurp and a pop. The frayed pink strap on her sandal snapped and sank silently into an oozy grave.

Her heart pounded like a jackhammer on steroids, but she had to think. How long had it been? Ten, fifteen minutes? They must have discovered her absence by now. The marks on her wrists from the ropes that once bound her felt tender. Memories rampaged through her head. The people hidden behind surgical masks. The experiments. The pain. The screaming.  The smell of burnt nylon and skin so real she nearly gagged.

The crickets ceased their chirping. Cindy bit down on her cheek to quiet the pending sob until blood seeped through her lips. As she slid down the trunk of a nearby tree, the bark tore at the fabric of her stained shift and tearing at her back. What were a few more scratches to the tally she’d already earned that night?

The crisp leaves crunched under her weight as she shifted, startling a garden snake from the safety of its hole. She gasped. A low guttural sound rumbled the woods from down the hill in answer, sending a feral echo through the night. A flock of birds escaped into the safety of the blackened sky. Cindy closed her eyes, wishing that she could sprout wings and fly with them to the safety of the stars—away from the Hunters.

She peeked out at the forest around her. The white of the quaking aspen trunks looked like skeleton fingers digging their way out of the ground, grasping for air, for life. She shivered and rubbed her arms to erase the feeling, leaving a single bloody trail on her skin; she looked down at her feet—the one pink sandal still holding tightly on her right foot, blue nail polish worn and scratched. Wrapping her arms around her knees she rocked to and fro, the sandal coming in and out of view.

Pink. Forest floor. Pink. Forest floor.

The rhythm soothed her aching heart as she counted along to the time of her rocking. But something tickled at her conscience. Something felt off.

You mean more wrong than being hunted as prey, she thought to herself.

Pink. That inkling tugged at her pained skull. Something about the color.

What’s wrong with pink?

She stopped rocking, staring down at her feet. The pink glared at her against the darkness, a beacon in the night. She fumbled with the strap; her fingers numbly tugging at the metal until the leather strap broke lose.   Ripping the sandal free from her foot she clawed at the moist soil until the dirt broke away in chunks.

No. No. No.

She shoved the shoe into the hole and desperately dragged the crushed leaves, twigs and dirt to hide the signs of its existence.

A few moments later, the muffled sound of the Hunter’s young voice reached through the darkness. “I think I saw something over this direction . . . It’s one of her shoes. We’re close.”

Not yet. Please.

The trees to her left thinned too much for Cindy to escape into; to the right, a mesh of long forgotten shrubbery which just might lead to safety. Moving to her hands and knees, she crawled in the direction of the hedge.

“Shhh, I think I heard something,” said the young male hunter.

Cindy inched further toward the bushes. Rounding their worn edge inch by inch, her arms trembled, her body worn out, until she spied the framed of a cabin. Her heart pounded as she debated the still slow crawl or a mad dash to safety. The bushes behind Cindy rustled. She leapt to her feet and ran—the safety of the porch mere feet away.

“Gotcha!”

Two heavy bodies plowed into Cindy, knocking her to the ground. Her hair knotted with the debris from the pile of leaves she landed in.

“No!” she screamed.

An animal jumped around the edge of her vision, growling and barking. As her attackers struggled to subdue her, the bang of the cabin door opening was a gunshot in the night. Cindy’s attackers froze giving her a clear view of the doorway. A man towered in the doorway, his shoulders blocked out the majority of the door, his head nearly touching the frame, but his bearded face clouded over as he looked down on them.

“Please!” Cindy yelled. “Help me.” The Hunters’ weight on her chest made it impossible to say more.

The man rushed to her aid with a roar.

“You’re home!” The Hunters squealed as they leapt off of her tired frame.

The family cocker spaniel no longer growled his feral rumble from the hunt but yipped around the children’s feet as they rushed into their father’s arms. Cindy collapsed back onto the pile of leaves she and the Hunters had raked up earlier that morning, her muscles aching with the strain of the day. She wanted to run into the safety of her husband’s arms as quickly as her children had, but she could barely move.

The crunch of heavy boots on the scattered leaves grew louder. After a few moments of silence her husband took her by the hand and helped Cindy to her feet. “Need a break?”

She shook her head, and then stopped. The pain wasn’t a part of the costume. “And miss out on Trick or Treating?”

He rolled his eyes at her. Hand in hand, they walked toward the cabin; the sounds of their children inside vibrated the walls.

Cindy sighed at the noise, stopped to look into the murky woods that outlined their home, and bit her lip. She had to do it. Standing on her tiptoes she kissed her husband’s scratchy beard.

“I forgot my shoe.” She ran toward the hedge border, calling over her shoulder, and said, “Every Cinderella must have her slipper.”

Her haunting laughter echoed through the forest as the darkness enveloped her into its quiet arms.

 Happy Halloween Everyone!!!!!!!

The Scary Thing About Being A Mom.....

As it is Halloween season I thought I'd talk about some of the scary aspects of being a mom (funny & not so funny):

Not Funny:

- Watching your child having a seizure after growing up with a brother with Grand Mal seizures. (Never want to go through that again)
- Seeing that your kids have no fear about everything they should be fearful of.
- Waking one day to see your son having gotten the knives out of the knife block and line them up one by one in a row next to his sleeping brother. (I'm not sure he intended to use them. He just likes to line them up).
- Worrying about what the future will be like for your children and if a day will come that, for your safety and theirs, that you will have to put them in a care facility. Or that they might never be able to be independent enough to move out.



Funny Scary:

- When you realize you're kids are stinkin' brilliant and you feel a few potatoes short of a pound.
- When you become an expert at locks because you're constantly trying to find one that your kids can't bypass.


I had a whole list earlier, but my mind went blank from keeping eyes on my children & their mischief ways. I guess that's kind of funny/scary too.


So what are some of the things that you find scary (funny or not so funny) about being a parent?

The Power of 3

No I am not referencing Doctor Who when I talk about the power of three.  I'm talking about two aspects of three:

1) When you have 3 children,
2) When any of them turn 3 years old.


Aspect #1:

After Frank and I had our second child the doctor wanted to convince me that I was done and that I should have my tubes tied. It was too dangerous. Each pregnancy took such a great toll on me and was life threatening to me and the baby. But I knew in my heart that there was one more.  I begged him to let us wait to have one more. He reluctantly agreed.

By the time our second child was 11 months old I went into the doctor and told him, "Yes, I want a third, but they HAVE to be further apart." He laughed. Our daughter Rose and our son Cyprus were only 22 months apart and I couldn't handle it (it was only years later that I learned they had special needs).  The doctor and I laid out a plan, he gave me the fertility meds and told me to go home and take a pregnancy test.  I did. It was positive. I cried. 

I still wanted that third baby no matter what, and YEAH I got pregnant without the fertility drugs, but (insert cuss words) I couldn't handle the two I had.  I was tired. I was frustrated. I was weary. The pregnancy was hard. SO HARD. And a month into it my husband lost his job through cutbacks. Rough rough times for our family. A month prior to delivery I ended up in the hospital with severe migraines, high blood pressure and pre-eclampsia. I was hospitalized for 4 days and sent home on strict bed rest. I was only 33 weeks.  And then my husband started work and had no time off and we had two toddlers at home. Enough said.

Anyway, through prayer and major support from friends and church members we made it and little Juniper was born. He and Cyprus were only 20 months apart.  I gladly allowed my doctor to tie my tubes (though its often been an internal battle since whether or not that was the right decision, I still couldn't risk it).

A few weeks later my husband and I crashed in bed after an exhausting day and he sighed. "We miscalculated."   When I asked him to clarify, he said, "The kids now outnumber the adults." 

That's where the first Power of 3 comes in. When you hit three kids, suddenly you no longer have enough hands (whether or not they are special needs). It takes a good year or two before you can find a natural rhythm as husband and wife to adjust to who keeps track of whom. There were some days I dreaded even stepping outside of my house, it was so bad.


Aspect #2

For some reason when all three of my kids hit 2 1/2 to 3 years of age they put on this armor of anxiety polished with a coat of desire for control and it is bad. It is so rough sometimes. They become bossy, stubborn (okay they have good examples of that from their parents to start with), and full of tantrums.  And if you DARE even think of stepping two feet of where they expect or want you to be they start screaming "MOMMY!!!! DON'T LEAVE ME!!!" loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear.

Talk about laying on the guilt.

I've really struggled these last few weeks dealing with this second aspect of threes for many reasons. Juniper is my last child to be 3. In fact in just over a week he'll be 4. And sometimes that's hard to deal with knowing that I will never have another child. I can't physically, mentally, emotionally or financially handle it right now. It just won't happen, no matter how much my heart hurts and longs for another daughter, in spite of all the difficulty.

But its also been hard because now I know what my children are going through. Thanks to working with amazing specialists I understand better what my kids see, why they think the way they do, what battles they are fighting internally. I get it.....logically.   But my soul is weary. We've had another extremely hard year. Harder by far than many in the past, even the year I was pregnant with Juniper. My body aches, my heart aches, my soul aches. And my little ones do not, cannot, understand. So as they scream "MOMMY DON"T LEAVE ME!!!!" I cry. Sometimes I yell. Sometimes I hide in my shower and let the water wash away the overwhelming weakness that I feel. 

How can I make my little ones understand that I'm only going upstairs to turn on the swamp cooler? Or I'm just going around the corner to flip a light switch. Or going to the store to by bread and milk and that they are still safe because Daddy or Grandma or whoever is still with them, without their world crashing down on them and the fear overwhelming all of us. How can I stop getting into arguments with a three year old who only hears what he wants to hear (and sometimes only what he can hear because his special needs have blocked everything else out)?

I'm never going to give up on my little ones. I still count them as my miracles each and every day. I'm still grateful to have them as part of my life and wouldn't give them up for anything.  But man the POWER OF THREE is hard.  And I look forward to when we move beyond the second aspect and my children will understand that me going upstairs to get a load of laundry does not mean that I no longer love them.  I long for the day when they trust that my love is there no matter what. The day that they realize that I will never give up on them. They day when they can let me go and know that I will always do whatever is in my power to come back (even if I'm only gone for 5 minutes). 

I love to watch my garden grow. These children are amazing. They are my heart. And one day they will know.

When They Tug At Your Heart

The other day I made a dinner that I knew that my children wouldn't eat.  They have sensory issues, but we're trying to learn to live within our means (a.k.a. not to pick up dinner anytime Mom just doesn't feel like cooking). 

My Rose took one look at that and said, "I'm not going to eat that. I know what you need to do, Mom. You need to make chicken nuggets."

I told her that we no longer had the money to just go out and buy chicken nuggets, that we needed to learn to eat what was in the house.

Rose jumped up from the table and said, "I have the solution."  She ran to her backpack and dug deep, tossing things onto the floor as she went, then came running back in the dining room and handed me an envelope. It was pink with a pig on it. She explained that she'd learned all about money today and that this was her piggy bank.

She gave me the bank and said, "Here Mommy, you can have my money so you can go buy chicken nuggets."

It was the sweetest thing ever. I pulled her into a hug and thanked her (trying hard not to cry)......but couldn't bring myself to tell her that the money wasn't really. I just couldn't. 

However, I still didn't buy chicken nuggets.

Public Service Announcemetn: DRINK WATER

It's hard to be a person, let alone a sane one.  Then you throw in things like jobs, marriage, kids, life, etc....and things get really hard (j/k--life itself is often hard all by itself).  Then you throw in the random things, oh say, like being a klutzy person like me....and you're really in trouble.

A few weeks ago I walked the race route for a local 5K that's happening this summer to raise money for cancer patients. I wanted to practice the race route several times prior to the race as its my first one ever. 2/3rds of the way into the route a crossed a bit of road that lets down onto an a non-sidewalk section of town . . . and rolled my ankle.  Being the stubborn person that I am I figured I'd already passed the street that led back to my car and I had less than a mile to go so I might as well finish walking the route.  Yeah, not the smartest decision I've made. 

I knew it wasn't broken but it was a pretty painful sprain. I had the chiropractor adjust the foot to help it heal more smoothly and had been wearing an ace bandage on and off for two weeks before the next incident happened.  Last week, I was carrying a load of laundry down the stairs (wearing my ACE bandage) and stepped on the edge of a stair instead of the middle and slipped rolling down the stairs, laundry basket tumbling, laundry flying through the air, and my ankle being pulled at a painfully awkward angle until something popped.  Definitely not one of my more graceful moments.

I screamed so loud that Juniper (my 3 year old) broke out of quiet time in his bedroom, hopped the safety gate, ran down the stairs, and sat down beside his sobbing mother, wrapped his arm around my shoulder and said, "Oh poor baby. What hurts."  I was laughing and crying at the same time. The pain was excruciating.

Well, the ankle wasn't broken, but due to the swelling and the amount of pain the nurse practitioner put me into what I call a Darth Vader boot (basically a removable walking cast) and told me to elevate and ice, ice and elevate.  

Have you ever tried to recover from an injury with kids in the house...HA!!!! Throw in the fact that my kids all have different special needs and I think I deserve a double-HA and a kick in the pants!  As I lay propped up on the living room couch with my leg in the air, remotes and phone at my side, a water bottle, and kids running amok (literally) I was doing my best to "recover".  But when my kids run amok that means whatever is mom's is theirs.

You may ask, "What does that have to do with the Public Service Announcement?"  Here you go....

If I had a water bottle, they would take it and run away and drink it, dump it out around the house, wear it, or hide it.  And being in the pain I was in, I wasn't too eager to get up to get a replacement bottle.  So I failed to drink my daily dose of water for four days straight. Then Saturday I didn't rest as often as I should and pushed my body past its weakened physical limitations.

By dinnertime I felt like crap. By bedtime I was shivering uncontrollably and had a migraine. By 11 pm I was waking my husband up, asking him to take me to the hospital. After a lovely visit in the ER it was determined I was severely dehydrated and had a bladder & kidney infection as well as a migraine to boot.

Did I mention that my awesome husband was scheduled to leave on a business trip, for a week, the very next day?  No, my bad.

If it weren't for so many amazing neighbors & friends helping with prayers, food, breaks from the kids, etc., I wouldn't make it out of this a live (and its only day three). 

So when I say DRINK WATER, I mean DRINK WATER.  Granted it would have been nice if I weren't accident prone in the first place, but things wouldn't have gotten nearly as bad if I had just taken the time and effort in my attempt to do everything else to stop and drink a glass of water.  If you want to take care of others, make sure you take care of yourself too.

This is the end of the public service announcement (this is your cue to go get yourself a glass of water). Have a great day!

Bubblesnot

There are days. . . oh man are there days. . . (whether or not your kids are special needs) when they just push you too far. Sometimes I make good choices and handle things surprisingly well considering. That's when I often get a little too cocky and say, "You got this thing."

Then there are days where you call for a "do-over".  I think that's today for me.

My kids sent me into SPD overload today and I didn't handle it well. My daughter was specifically doing negative things to get a reaction out of me (and honestly I know this is what kids just do because they are kids, but I just don't get it).  After Rose received her consequence I felt horrible because I went overboard in my reaction. That's when I have to take a moment to look inward and say, "Okay was that handled well or was that all wrong."  After a really long day of pushing buttons I know I could have handled the situation heaps better.

Once I was able to step back and calm down I went back into her room, sat down on the floor with her and we talked.  We talked about what happened, what was good, what needed improvement on both of our parts.  Then we came up with a code word -- Bubblesnot. When I'm helping her to do something that she knows she can do herself than she is supposed to say, "Hey Mom--Bubblesnot!"  That's when I know I need to step back and just let her do it so that she gets the practice and realize that she can be responsible.   Then again, if she is balking at doing something without my help when I know perfectly well that she can do it herself I am supposed to say, "Hey Rose--Bubblesnot!"  Then she'll know that I believe in her and that she can do it.

We both apologized to each other, sang a few songs, and then we both said prayers.

I know some people say I apologize to my kids too often, but there's something in my soul that makes me want my kids to know that I'm human too and that we're both learning as we go, but together we can accomplish anything. I also apologized in my prayers to God because I believe that she was his child first and that he entrusted her into my care. When I have a mommy fail moment I feel he deserves an apology too so he knows that I'm not giving up and that I do see her as a precious gift from him.  Hopefully, each step we take in the process will help us grow together and closer to heaven.  I want my kids to know that family does really matter and that everyone deserves being treated with respect, even children.