Tag: honesty

Having… THE TALK

sparklesrelic

There’s those big important talks we need to have with our kids. The birds and the bees, death, anti-racism….. neurodiversity.

I’ve always been a strong advocate of telling your children their diagnoses. It is a part of them. It is a sense of understanding. It is an explanation for how they see and experience the world it is not a negative to be hidden away. It is not ‘just’ a label. (I’m looking at you, Boomer parents).

In fact. My counsellor asked me today: how would a diagnosis have changed your childhood? Dude. That’s so hard. BUT, if my parents just told me. If they just said “hey, you are this thing they call “autistic”. It means you process everything a bit different”. Then. At least I wouldn’t have felt like an alien. At least I wouldn’t have felt unknown, unseen, like a fake…. At least I would have known their was a legit reason typical society didn’t work for me.

If I knew I was Autistic, maybe my teenage depression wouldn’t have run so deep.

If I knew I was Autistic, maybe I wouldn’t have struggled with weight loss as a way to gain a sense of control over life.

If I knew I was Autistic, maybe I could have given the nurses a heads up that I totally shut down in pain, and they would have believed I was in labour.

If I knew I was Autistic, maybe I could have sought out coping mechanisms instead of being thrown into the depths of infant-induced sensory overload.

So. I do not yet know how my own children’s brains work. I feel they are much more typical than mine. But, I also feel like 14 months into Covid regulations that they are potentially having any Autistic social tendencies forced upon them. Mommy’s brain however…

The girls and myself were all in the washroom. I just wanted to have my 5 minutes of face wash self-care. They were extra hyped up today. One shouted in glee and tried to slam the door. (If your auditory senses are anything like mine, you know how much a washroom reverberates noise. Uhg). I felt my anxiety spiking. And it was only 7am.

“Mommy has to tell you something important. Brains work in different ways. Daddy’s brain is something called ‘neurotypical’. That’s a big word to mean he feels comfortable with most of the world. He is great with people. He hears and feels things at a calm level.

Mommy’s brain is Autistic. That means it works differently. One way is that mommy has super senses. My ears and my eyes and my nose and my touch all work really really well. So I can see things other people can’t. And I can hear things across the house. And I feel things really big. Sometimes this is like a superpower! I can find little bits of glass or hear when you wake up. Sometimes there’s so much happening, my senses go AHHHHHHHH! and I need a quick break.

Now. I do not know how your or your sister’s brains work yet. They might be like Daddy’s or they might be like Mommy’s. Or, they might even be a little bit like both of us. Either way, it’s pretty cool.”

Who knows how much the 4.5 year old took in of that. But, she stayed surprisingly attentive. I’m sure a week or so down the road she’ll spew out some tidbit about mommy’s superpower eyes helping find missing lego pieces. That’s how I’ll know she actually listened.

Until then. I’ll brainstorm other differences to tell her about. Or over analyze where she may fall on the spectrum of all abilities. And keep telling her, “cause Mommy’s Autistic, that’s why”, whenever she asks me, “but WHY?!”

Grief.

sparklesrelic

I meant to start this blog by writing daily. We’ll get to time management another day…

We had a friend pass. No, not covid. But Covid sure didn’t make anything easier.

But grief… You’d think by now in life, one would have gained more understanding of how to cope, how to feel and share the emotions, how to comfort loved ones… I have very nasty words for whoever first “declared” that autism = lessen, dampened, lack of emotions. No. I feel it all. I feel it all at once. I feel my pain, his last moments, my husband’s sorrow, my friends’ fears, his family’s emptiness, the world’s now missing light. Sometimes it gets to be so much that I can only stare. I don’t see anything external or hear anything. I’m too busy reading through all my thoughts and checking and re-checking everything that can be done.

We’ve all heard the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance… Can we feel all of them at once?

As with everything in the world. Parenting puts such a spin on it. How do you tell your child about a death in their world? How do you help them understand when they are so little? How do you support them when you do not yet know how to support yourself?

Well, here’s my best attempt at this- one of the hardest parenting problems. And not at all where I thought I would be starting in this journey:

Show Your Emotions

Emotions are not something to hide or shame or be embarrassed by. Emotions will not scar your children. In fact, just the opposite is true. Share your emotions to teach them that emotions are natural and okay. Expressing one’s emotions means that you can create connections with others. It means that you can be your real self. We need to model this for our children.

So, we cry in front of them. We tell them how we feel and we tell them why. “Daddy is sad because he died”. We are sad right now. It is a hard time for us right now. We will not be sad forever, because we will keep him in our heart.

Mine are too little for me to tell their full comprehension of all these big, complicated emotions and feelings. But, I know they hear me. I know they hear my try to be there for them. I know because my daughter cuddled me the next morning after that last conversation and told me I was in her heart.

Be Honest

Tell the truth and tell the whole truth. We tell the kids what happened at their age-appropriate level. Hiding the information from them, like hiding your feelings from them will only lead to confusion and possible fear. And you know they can tell when you are out of whack. Let’s show our children the respect they deserve by not pretending everything is hunky-dory when it is so very much not.

My 2 year old knows Mommy and Daddy are feeling sad right now. She knows a loved one has died. I am sure that those words do not mean much to her yet. I am sure she is young enough that she will not remember this time.. or him.. He will just be Mommy and Daddy’s memory. A spot at our family dinners that we tell her used to be filled with him.

My 4 year old knows we are sad because of a death. She kinda gets death because, well, every SINGLE Disney movie has dead parents. She is worried about seeing his daughter, as she knows we only see her with him. She is scared to lose her friend. She comes in and out of understanding of not seeing him again. She know that we will do what we can to see her friend again.

Answer Their Questions

There are probably going to be a lot. It is good to answer what you can. Why… Where… What… When.. Let them know that there is room for questions and their wonderings. Let them have the time and space to process. They may have a thought then. It may be the next time they see your tears. It may be next month, I don’t know.

And- it is OKAY to say “I don’t know”. It goes hand in hand with being honest and sharing your emotions- parents/caregivers do not need to be superheroes. I’m not sure about you, but I DEFINITELY do not have all the answers! I might learn more as time goes and be able to share more, but for now I tell my little girl that I am not sure. That I know pieces. That I will tell her what I can.

Make Their World Less Scary

Again, this all combines together. When our children are left without the answers or the full answers they need, they create their own truth. If I left it at “he was sick”, what would her mind create in this current pandemic world? What would she combine with her knowledge of “sick” and of Disney parents being dead and Mommy being in the mid of allergy season? God, it’s terrifying to think of what she might imagine of what might become her reality.

So I tell her all the details of how it is different. I let my mind go wild and racing down paths of all the possible and all the impossible. This is probably one of the major benefits of how my mind works. I can see it all in a matter of moments. So I see what she might see and I can do my best to head her off before she has a chance to go careening down those paths herself.

  • No, he didn’t have “the sickness”.
  • No, mommy and daddy aren’t going to get sick that way.
  • Yes, everyone else is safe right now.
  • Yes, your friend still has her mommy.
  • Yes, we are all still together.
  • Yes, we are sad now.
  • No, we will not be sad forever.
  • We might not see him again, but we’ll have him in our family forever, and that’s special.