Where are Gypsies when you need them?

There are moments when I am just tired of it all. Sometimes everything is difficult. Even stuff that should be easy is hard. It wears you down. I don't claim an exclusive franchise to this state of exhaustion but the unique combination of my child and my personality perhaps increases the frequency of its occurrence. During these moments of extremis, I want to temporarily (or not) abdicate my parental burdens.

It becomes easy to despair. To succumb to the doubts and the worries and lose all sense of perspective and frankly I know that I am being unreasonable and non-productive in in the moment but I indulge in these dramatics. Hours or days later something forces you to confront the possibility that you would not be there to raise your child and its scary. This falls into the category of the bleeding obvious but it was a good thing for me to affirm. I don't want to miss out on my daughter's childhood. Embracing the will to live and rear my young! I feel better already.

Perhaps if you said no to her

you can really get a lot of great parenting advice absolutely free if you go to Wal-Mart with small children.

Let's Get Down to Bitchness

I did my part with the PSAs and giving a smidgen of biography in the previous posts. Now its time for this blog to start paying dividends in the form of a spleen venting.

Eleanor is experiencing a wonderful toileting regression wherein she does not want to defecate on the toilet but instead has numerous small bowel movement type accidents through out the day. We are on week three or four of this behavior and it is driving me up the wall. She has been toilet trained for over a year and although bowel activity has been a recurring issue it was always moving in the right direction. Until (ominously) now. I am completely frustrated and sick of dealing her.

Wow! Seeing my whiny and mewling complaints in print is harder than I thought it would be. I am little bit ashamed at my own pettiness and I am sure you feel secure in judging me to be a big whiner -- I dare you to put up with this particular behavior for a while and let me know how you're doing.

As a mommy, its hard to live up to my own standards and expectations and I feel like a complete heel when I fall short in my efforts with my children. I am especially guilty of exhausting my patience and losing my loving-mommy-with-calming-voice-cool, after the 28th pair of soiled underwear, and degenerating to snappy-mommy. Of course, snappy-mommy makes this type of situation worse (she is surprisingly effective when toys need to be picked up) and I end up hating myself for being unable to deal with my own emotions and frustrations in a mature and productive manner.

Diagnosis Du Jour

Now I bet you are thinking, Isn't Autism like the trendiest possible developmental delay diagnosis? Doesn't every celebrity have at least one child with Autism? Can you swing a dead cat at Barnes & Noble without knocking over a stack of glossy books on how everything you needed to know you learned from a child with Autism? Didn't/doesn't Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Bill Gates have Autism? I bet you think I'm just a bandwagon fan.

I may just be projecting my feelings onto you.

I was very hesitant to accept this diagnosis and not just because its not a very nice diagnosis. I too was aware of the rapid increase in Autism diagnoses of the seeming Autism epidemic. What could be the real significance of this diagnosis if so many children with such widely varying disabilities were being given the same label? I have come to believe that Autism is over diagnosed, that the definition of Autism has been broadened over time, that children who would have been called retarded 20 years ago are more appropriately diagnosed with Autism today and that my daughter has Autism.

I may not have the latest Marc Jacobs tote but isn't a crazy pre-schooler the ultimate accessory?

Mision Statement

I created this blog because I am giving my mother stress. I cannot continue to siphon my troubles onto the person who gave me life. The cloud can handle my angst a little better. There is more room for diffusion. No one needs to read this and if they do they will likely think I am small, egocentric, immature, vain and impatient. (As a class clown and sarcasm as defensive shield type, I am accustomed to claiming my own insults before anyone else can.) I just need the catharsis.

You might think that the whole concept of a blog is simultaneously so yesterday and so self aggrandizing. Who doesn't have stress? Why am I so special? Well, granted I'm not but I'm not coping so well with having a child with Autism and this is cheaper than therapy.

I have a four year old daughter, Eleanor, who was diagnosed with Autism at age three. Eleanor is not like most four year old girls and is not all that much like most other children with Autism. She is a unique snowflake!

For starters, she is a girl and Autism diagnoses are overwhelmingly made to male children. She is not typical for being not typical but she has more in common with the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) crowd than any other. She is verbal but in a primitive scripted way. She has limited social skills. She has a hard time understanding directions or following along with a group. She has phobias and hang-ups -- milk, ponytails and socks just to name a few. Her strengths are visual and spacial skills. She is echoic - she repeats what you say. She is autodidactic (self teaching). She depends heavily on modeled behavior and visual prompts as it can be hard for her to understand purely auditory instruction. She is a sweet person and she has no concept of malice or dishonesty. She is uninterested in interacting with strangers but bonds closely with those that spend significant time with her.

She is my delight and despair.