Long time coming

It has been a long time since I’ve written a post. I would think of writing and it would be “summer is hard” Hmm… What else could I add to that? And though I had many answers, none of them were enlightening or specific to my point of view. Kids are fighting. Being at home with my kids all day everyday is annoying. I can’t provide my asd son the routine he wants and needs. Blah blah blah. I’m sure everyone feels this way. But now I realize why it all felt so hard. I put myself on hold. I told myself ‘you know these hobbies that keep you sane and connected to who you are? I’m not going to do them at all for 2 months’ and boom I went into survival mode. When emotions and desires came up for me, I’d take an Ativan to calm myself down and put that on hold. When the day to day tasks got too overwhelming for me, I’d skip them and play a mindless game on my phone. I told myself I was doing this for the sake of my children, to take care of them over the summer. But what happened was I started to resent them and their needs and was almost always mean or short with them. I actually became a worse mom when I put myself aside. So I’m trying to remedy that: taking yoga, meeting up with friends, sewing for myself, listening to my body. All that while still battling the anxiety anddepression that plagued me over the summer, like a bad hangover.

Another reason why I haven’t written in awhile is because calling my blog an ASD blog, I’ve written myself into a bit of a corner. I will think of topics to write about all the time then stop myself because they aren’t directly linked to ASD. But here’s the thing: there is not one part of my life that is not affected by having a son with ASD. It affects the way i plan my days, whether or not I say yes to something. I am constantly thinking about how to make our family life more manageable. I wake up wondering whether I’ll have to cancel all our plans because of a huge tantrum, which takes days for me to recover from. We only plan one thing a day to make sure E doesn’t get overwhelmed. We have to divide and conquer more than many families to make sure M gets to do her own activities and doesn’t have her whole life interrupted by E’s needs. All plans must be held loosely. All this is going on in the background of trying to live our everyday lives of laundry and dishes and school and work and church. So really I could write about anything and it would relate to ASD because there’s no part of life that it doesn’t touch.