My first ever blog post; as far as I am concerned, a public diary. I feel slightly queasy thinking about the exposure. However, my need for clarity and some reassurance about the onerous, overwhelming experience of motherhood, coming from a dysfunctional family myself, with kids who are deviating from the norm, takes precedence over those qualms.
I think a short history of my time as a mother would be appropriate, but it might have to wait. The youngest of my 2 boys (we'll call him S) is a few months away from his 4th birthday. He's home sick from kinder this morning, so my time here is even more limited than usual. Sad to say, though, that his illness is timely, since last week I struggled to get him to his 2 short kinder sessions. I'm pretty sure I know why he didn't want to go; there have been numerous recent comments from him about this kid saying they didn't want to play with him, that one not liking him, another not wanting to go to his house ... When I come in at the end of the session, I often see him looking quite alone, muttering to himself in an angry monologue. This correlates with the child I know at home. I also know from his play with his older brother (we'll call him P) that actually, he won't really join in, share the play, risk not being in charge. I'm pretty sure he is dominating, and possibly frightening, other kids at kinder.
For several months he has been attending a clinic where an occupational therapist attends to his emotional regulation and his social skills. The sessions have been terrific. Much has improved, but things seem to have gone backwards recently. The therapist wants to come to kinder, which I think is great, and on telling the kinder staff, I discovered that they have had concerns about his behaviour for a few weeks too.
When I heard this, I shifted from concerned but proactive to being weighed down by a heavy, dark cloud of anxiety pressing down on me, and a tight, hard fist in my gut. Both very familiar from looking after my oldest child, who was diagnosed with autism just after his 2nd birthday (he is now 6). If I reeled off a list of S's characteristics, he'd be sounding a lot like another ASD case, but suffice to say for the moment that he clearly is not. If there is a name for his problems, it lies elsewhere, and I am certainly not looking for one (although the term "oppositional defiance disorder", at face value, makes a lot of sense to his parents). But I am sorry to confess that much of his angry, demanding behaviour has driven me to frustration and anger rather than sympathy. Let me qualify that by saying that I am his mother, I have not spent the years at war with him! But what I would regard as the commonplace techniques to soothe and redirect difficult behaviour have generally been ineffective, and my sense of competence, not to mention the satisfaction that I might feel from watching my children flourish, has been quite seriously eroded. And now, I feel like I might have more than a "high needs" son on my hands; I'm worried that the difficulties that we have experienced in one form or another since his birth might actually require something closer to the level of intervention and therapy that P has needed.
And on that note, I will take the plunge & commit this to the public eye!
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