The Side I Don’t Share
This is a mom on the verge.
A mom completely out of patience, and it’s nowhere near noon, on Halloween, in a pandemic…so the magic is up to me – a mom who does NOT have the energy needed to make today memorable.
I’ll somehow muster little sparks, because I always do, because I have to, because if I don’t, the darkness will swallow me whole.
I’m not allowed to say how freaking hard it is to be a mother to an autistic 4 year old. Because it’s up to me to paint this picture and pave this road for him, but I’m tired. I’m human.
I birthed him into our world with pretty much zero experience on autism.
People tell me I’m a great mom, I’m super mom, that I’m doing such a great job with him. They don’t see the meltdowns – because it’s unethical to share that side of autism. But because I don’t share that side, I’m also not sharing the other side of meltdowns.
The parent that’s lost and confused and scared and sad and frustrated and overwhelmed and under qualified and needing way more support than I have.
And then there’s my 8 year old, who sees it all, who saw me try to take deep breaths (and fail miserably) during our shit show of a morning, who watched me go into the front room to create some sort of safe distance from everything I just can’t handle at every moment of every day.
This 8 year old who struggles just as much as us with navigating the challenges his brother presents, that only knows a childhood of compromise and sacrifice and understanding, that has his own challenging behaviors that undoubtedly stem from the imbalance of attention and focus and energy between siblings.
This 8 year old grabbed my “positivitea” mug and delivered a sweet rose and mint “stress free” tea to my shaking hands, to sip with this frowning mouth, in hopes of salvaging this day that didn’t start off well at all, tainted by a yesterday that wore my heart down to its core.
My 4 year old struggles the most in all of this, and as a parent, all I want is to make it better.
So, I’m sitting here, letting these feelings spew out of me between each sip, praying to a higher power I refuse to name, that this will get easier.
Written by, Danielle Vinson
I’m a mom of two boys and two dogs, a wife to a veteran of the USMC and current Air Traffic Controller, and a creative visionary with a lifelong passion of the arts. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and have lived all up and down California, as well as two expansive, wonderful years in the Midwest – I now call Sacramento, California home, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be here. We moved here and hit the ground running in pursuit of my youngest son’s diagnosis, and we couldn’t have landed in a better area for an Autism family.
