Help Less
A mother is equipped naturally with the ability to nurture her child. It’s innate, borne of millions of years of evolution. Yet sometimes, the very instinct we are bestowed with to protect our most precious gift, turns out to be useless or even detrimental.
Welcome to Autismville, the land where down is up and left is right and they reserve the right to switch on a dime. Nothing’s a given, nothing is how it seems. Basically, whatever it is you think you know, you don’t.
I’m not trying to over-generalize here. I imagine to some degree this is the case with raising any child. There’s no user manual, no crash course in parenting. But there is a certain trajectory that typical children seem to take in their development. Certain “hard and fast” rules that you can tweak, boundless advice that you can choose to pull from (or not). Generations of “been there done that” to draw from.
When your child is different, those supports are limited. When you child has Autism those supports are rare. Not solely because of a lack of resources, but because the Spectrum is so incredibly broad that truly each behavior is different for each child – each situation lends itself to a different solution. A solution fraught with much trial and error, many tears and indecision and a whole lot of helplessness.
I don’t know why my son cries. He cannot tell me. Maybe he cries because he cannot tell me what he’s feeling. When I try to hold him or console him he pulls away. The desperateness I see in his eyes in those moments lends to a feeling of helplessness unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. A mother’s primary responsibility in life is to protect and comfort her child. My child wants neither from me, at least in the only way that I know how.
I long for my little boy to run into my arms and let me hold him – but instead he runs away – being alone is the only way that he can self-regulate. It’s the most basic of motherly tasks, a seemingly essential bonding point, that fits nowhere in my world.
Don’t get me wrong. I am bonded to my son, and I believe with all of my heart that he is bonded to me. It’s just that in those moments where everything within me is yearning to play “Mama Bear”, I have to take a step back and think about what it is that Peter needs, and the answer is almost unequivocally, space.
As I sat on the floor of his bedroom this evening, with him screaming for Bert, Ernie, Dora, binky, etc…the reality that they could do something that I couldn’t became increasingly clear. Still, I must believe that my silent presence, holding his hands in mine, provided him some sort of maternal comfort.
