Lately I have been feeling like a hypocrite. I have my team of amazing volunteers who come to my house to be loving and focused with Sarah, but I, myself, have been having a hard time feeling loving towards her. We have small nice moments, but my overall impression is of frustration, sternness, and yelling at each other. I know that we have these phases and that this too will shift, but I feel impatient for it to change and frustrated with myself for not being able to change things on my end sooner. I think sometimes it is not just Sarah’s whining and yelling that I am mad at. I think I am also mad at her for her condition. For her delay. For her challenges. So instead of feeling compassion when she has a hard time with transitions, I feel anger.
I remind myself that the only heartbreak in Sarah having special needs is if I don’t do things with my life that I want to do, such as reading fun books or going to Zumba, or going out to eat with friends. I know I have reaped many blessings from her being who and how she is. One of those blessings seems to be finding my wall of resistance and anger and continuing to explore it. But I want to already be at the miracle end of this process where everyone wants to hear about our amazing story of thriving so much that if you met Sarah without knowing her past you would never guess at it. Are we there yet??
We had an absolutely wonderful team meeting this morning. We talked about how to help practice some aspects of ballet class in the SR room to help Sarah when she gets to the actual ballet class. I know I was super impressed with the first ballet class. For the second class I think I raised my expectations exponentially and felt frustrated with Sarah’s door distraction and with her running away screaming when class was over. In our meeting this morning we also talked about how I could ask the teacher if we have some room to stay a little later instead of trying to leave with everyone else. Maybe just waiting a few minutes would mean Sarah would leave more calmly or I would at least feel less self-conscious if she screamed.
In general, I want sit with Carl and revisit some of our rules to see if there are some we can let go of or relax so that Sarah doesn’t get so many “no” responses during the day and maybe I can more easily stay looser in myself. Some things may be a compulsion for Sarah simply because of the restrictions. She always wants to go into the basement and she especially wanted to go there when we recently had company. We let her go down a little bit but it was always a struggle to get her back upstairs. After the company left I decided to just let the girls play in the basement for a while without an end point. They both then came out of the basement on their own. There is a bit of a mess of toys in one area, which is not ideal, but maybe it is acceptable in exchange for more peace.
My friend E. and her family were our visitors and it was really lovely having them here. E. and her sister G. and I have been friends since I was 4 (E was 3 and G was 5). At one point, Amy, Sarah, and one of E’s daughters were playing together on my bed. I felt like I was seeing the past selves of E, G, and I. I feel so thankful for that friendship not just for the friendship but also for the model it provided of two sisters being friends with one other kid. I feel totally comfortable with the idea that Amy and Sarah could share a friend and that maybe they will have trio friendships just as I did. I’m sure trio best friends are common, but I’m not sure how often two of those three are sisters. I would guess that is less common.
In other news, Sarah is asking “where” questions with more fluidity and ease. One morning she asked me, “Where’s Dad?” I responded that he was downstairs. She said, “bye” and headed downstairs. That may seem like a very typical moment but it is one of those huge deals because it hasn’t really happened before.
Despite my frequent state of blah-frustrated-grr-dom, I have still been aware of how amazing Sarah’s language and reading progress continue to be. Even if I am running a very imperfect program and am a very imperfect mom, we have still made amazing progress since we started SR 3 1/2 years ago. Sarah can talk. She can look at people when talking to them or listening to them. She plays imaginatively. She is potty trained. She eats healthily, even if we are still working towards more balance. She is learning to read and write. She is maybe learning some math. So even if we do nothing more, we have already come an amazing distance.
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