In Her Motherhood Era
I open my eyes, slowly, sort of one-at-a-time style, just a peek. They stay closed, just breathe mama 1…2…3… slow breath in, slow breath out 3…2…1…now, open-look at how beautiful your life is. Wyatt is 8 now and our life is so different. You made it through the dark time that at one point you thought you might not survive. It seems like just as suddenly as I was thrown into darkness, light suddenly shone down, a beacon of hope, a life raft appeared. Looking back on previous years, I hardly recognize our life from then to now.
Everett and Wyatt are 8 years old now and in 3rd grade. We have settled into our beautiful home in Maine tucked away in the woods with five acres to roam, ride and run on. We have nine hens and a very beautiful rooster, our dog, Luca, and our fierce cat, Smalls, who has 6 toes on every paw. I work at my kids' school in another wonderful yet small community near our home. We are surrounded by a large network of family and friends, the boys have more aunties, uncles and cousins than they know what to do with. Wyatt can and does speak now! He and Everett bicker more like typical brothers, Wyatt runs and tackles Everett on the couch and calls to him, “sucker!”. They are laughing and Everett is trying to get the upper hand on his brother. This is what has been missing in our family for years. The house was too quiet in the wrong ways for too long. Wyatt stops chasing his brother long enough to tell me that he wants a Ford truck for his 20th birthday adding that he wants it to have bucket seats, specifically. Every day he makes me promise to take him to the Ford dealership on that particular birthday, and I reassure him that I will. When your son has spoken zero words until they are 6, there is a lot to catch up on.
Even when Wyatt was non-verbal, he always had things he wanted to say but physically could not. I once saw Temple Granden speak - she is a famous autistic college professor and author, who spent a lot of her life educating others about autism. She described the time in her life when she was non-verbal, as being physically tongue tied but that she wanted to speak and had things to say. Fast forward to today where I often find myself cornered by Wyatt excitedly telling me a five minute story in vivid detail, thinking to myself, whoa, this is cool! I sometimes wonder, how long has he actually wanted me to tell me that story? Now that we have the words, our focus has shifted to communicating effectively and appropriately. Is this an appropriate conversation? Is it the appropriate time? Have we finished saying it? Are we leaving enough personal space between you and the person you are talking to? These are the things that I have to specifically teach my son. In general, Wyatt is great with being appropriate; unless you are pregnant or have a newborn because then he will tell you how much he loves your big baby body (gasp!). Fortunately, it’s too cute for most women to be upset about. Although, there was that one time in Arie that Wyatt successfully kidnapped a tiny infant in a stroller. He proudly showed me what he found, while I silently but outwardly panicked and frantically started looking for the mother. She wasn’t far behind him, trust me; that one wasn’t so easy to explain to him or her! In the end Wyatt did understand that he cannot take babies that are not related to us, sheesh! This parenting thing is tough! I digress.
These days he loves playing dress up, although if you ask him it is not dress up, he is an astronaut, a police officer and a business man. I enjoy watching him explore different personalities. He loves music and all the instruments that make it. We went through a long trumpet phase, a saxophone phase, as well as a flute, keyboard, guitar, clarinet and a trombone phase. Wyatt has always been deeply passionate about his interests, and we have been fortunate to be surrounded by supportive friends, family, and even kind strangers. Over the years, many have nurtured this passion by contributing to his growing collections and by sharing old instruments, stories, photos, and videos. Some have even generously offered their own instruments and memorabilia to him to keep. This is the village that everyone talks about. We found one of those here. Teachers, friends, other children, cousins, strangers, postal workers, therapists, military and emergency personnel, we have been shown such kindness. We have been lucky and have only seen the ugly sides of people on the most rare occasion. Knowing Wyatt will make you a better human, that is for certain. Wyatt is unapologetically himself and his positivity, excitement and bravery is contagious. I am fairly positive I have never met anyone happier than him, maybe ever.
We travel now, we camp, we attend concerts, we dine at restaurants. This is bliss. This is the light that we are basking in after the years of dark that came before. For the first few years of my boys' lives, we didn’t leave the house much at all. I am here to tell you mama, dry your eyes, because it is all going to be okay. Those days of so much uncertainty are over and behind us. What was it like, you ask? Well, let me tell you.
We drove in complete silence for years in the car. Music was always bothersome to Wyatt, honestly any sound that he wasn't in control of was a problem for him on most days. Today things are very different in my car, both Wyatt and Everett shouting out names of songs for me to play, a queue started for the ones still to play. Often, they shout to “turn it up louder!” I live for it. Wyatt did the work, we just facilitated the relationships and created the environments he needed in order for him to thrive. We spent many years trying to control all the stimulus around Wyatt so that he could just be. Anxiety ruled him, still does at times but it's so much more manageable.
The best way to picture what Wyatt used to be like is to imagine a child who feels overwhelmed by everything he could not control, frozen in a dysregulated state at all times. Crying, whining and shrieking was his communication. When Wyatt was about 6, before he started to speak there was a time that I had to consider that he may never have a voice that lived outside of his body. I began to do research on enrolling in American Sign Language classes so that I could become fluent in a language that I could share with my son. The thought was so daunting, intrusive and unwanted, because of course what I really wanted was to hear my son's voice. At the time I still had never heard him say “I love you, mom” I was so desperate for it. It felt so unfair. I will admit that I was stuck in it’s-not-fair land. It wasn’t fair that I had twins, it wasn’t fair that I had a child with special needs and couldn't even listen to music in the car. It wasn’t fair that everyone else's child could say “I love you, Mom” and mine couldn't. It wasn't fair that Wyatt didn't like water, or playgrounds, or sounds, or sun or sleeping, or stores, or playing, or shoes, or car rides, or darkness, or light. It felt like the only way to survive was to freeze in time, and focus on controlling every outside piece of stimuli in our environment. I had to create a world that muted all the sensory overload that created chaos within my child until he was ready to be immersed in it with us.
It was especially unfair that my husband had the privilege of a job to go to every day. That was how I thought about it at the time, it was a privilege to leave the house without the children in my eyes. I had to unexpectedly quit my job years ago when I found out we were having twins. He had a job where he got to exist in the outside world with other adults and those adults, they had conversations about things other than children and autism and development and milestones. He could make the phone calls he needed to and go pee-alone, among so many other perks! I got screwed in this situation being the mom, I wanted to be the dad now. I'm not proud that this was my mantra for a long time. When everything is hard, and I mean everything-it starts to suck the life out of you and everyone around you, finding the positive becomes a lot harder. After years of working closely with therapists and specialists to focus on curating our entire lives to create a space that is safe for my children, I had become unrecognizable to myself. I was angry, I was so lost and defeated, I was so broken in a way that no one could see or help to repair. My light had dimmed to a dull glow. While the other moms I knew were working on crafts, or going to story time at the library or bonding with playful games of peek-a-boo with their toddlers, I was brushing my child's skin to help regulate his body to know where it was in space. I was driving him to one of his many specialists to work on another skill that we had a deficit in. I was filling out more paperwork about all the missed milestones and confronting a ‘failure to thrive’ label that had been placed on my son. The exhaustion, depression, hopelessness and general hardship of the whole thing felt as if it had settled in my bones over time. My nervous system was so broken I was living in a constant state of fight or flight as a new normal. This time in my life changed me, forever. I am not the same person I was going into motherhood.
I realized I needed an outlet. I started taking some exercise classes when the boys would go to pre-k for a couple hours, then I started hitting the local school track. I used to love running. I broke several records with my relay team in school back in the day. I could whip around the track in 56 seconds back then. The year my boys went off to kindergarten I decided to sign up for a marathon. It was my year of revival. My year of pouring back into my empty cup, and I choose to run lots and lots and lots of miles. I haven't stopped running, It's a part of me now. It's my calm, my fight, my processing, my joy, my anxiety relief and my peace all at once. Running became about picking myself back up and finding me again. It was about finding my resilience and committing to myself.
Those of you who have met Wyatt in the past couple of years probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. That's because from the age of 6 or so on, Wyatt changed. Everything suddenly started to click for him. A few words came, and then a few more and then a lot more came and it just kept going. His words unlocked a whole world for all of us, but especially him. Since then Wyatt has been re-evaluated for his autism. When he originally received his diagnosis, he was diagnosed at a severe level 3 which means that Wyatt would require a lot of outside support to get through his entire life, making an independent existence difficult and not likely. After so much hard work from Wyatt, when we had our re-evaluation last year, he received a new diagnosis of a level 1 which is an incredible feat! His independence is soaring higher every day. We have some of the most incredible people in his life and we are just doing our best to figure it all out as it comes these days. For now, we bask in the success of being able to live a full and wonderful life, wherever it may take us.
