the second post

I'm still on my emotional low from yesterday. Yesterday... effing frustrating. No, more than frustrating. It caused both my husband and I to feel like the worst people in the world, like the worst parents who ever walked the earth, like total failures. Everything we did was wrong. And every effect we were looking for was also wrong. I could have really appreciated a wise mom's insight yesterday. I'll talk more about what happened later...

I go through these phases where I get onto a bunch of autism/ADHD/child behavior/parenting forums to see what other parents are dealing with. I scour, search, read others' stories and dilemmas, read all the well intentioned advice... I overwhelm myself trying to search for the ones that relate to my own problems. I often read a story and think to my self I'll have to remember about that if it ever comes up. But here are all of us, parents or guardians, trying to find the answers to how to be a parent to a kid who needs special attention. It gets blinding at times that I don't even know if the things my kids do are normal for a "normal" kid. Both my oldests are ASD and they're even different from each other, so I never know what's typical, normal, to be expected. My youngest is barely a toddler and so far displays no ASD behavior; I'm relieved. He's been a blessing to us and is like our refuge, if that makes sense.

I can't even tell you all the feelings and thoughts that go through my head when things get "bad". I mean, this is my outlet so I will tell you, but I'm just glad that I'm not alone in my thinking because it's pretty shitty to even say out loud. But like I said, unless you know what life is like with kids on the spectrum, then you don't know anything. But there are times when I've often said to myself that having kids with my husband resulted in a genetic failure. Well, he's thought the same thing - like maybe we were a bad match, like maybe by being selfish and having kids we only made life hard for them (and us). Don't get me wrong, we have plenty of UPS and times where we are absolutely proud of our little ones, but this blog is my outlet, my emotional dumping grounds when it comes to life when you're raising kids who are ASD. It's the ugly side/truth about life with ASD. People don't get the hardships involved, don't understand. I can't tell you how many of my family members still don't understand what we go through and have to deal with, or rather what the kids go through and have to deal with. Again, I'll talk more about that later....

So what happened yesterday? We've been dealing with the usual things that elementary school age kids put parents through: strong will, "not listening", defiance, talking back. But our oldest  has this issue of NOT doing anything we tell him without us SCREAMING at him. We seriously have to repeat our instruction a bunch of times before we finally yell, at which point he kind of gets the point. He was diagnosed PDD-NOS, which is a mild autism. One of his issues (I believe) is definitely he inability to realize when we're angry. And yet he knows when I'm yelling at him that I'm angry. But I don't understand WHY the fuck I have to yell in order for him to finally take me seriously. He also has these anxiety problems with the toilet that are stressing our family out. Ah, there's a lot to cover and I don't have the energy to do it all this in this post.

... to be continued again...