This has been a week from Hades and the end of it didn't even yield any fiery meteors or dark horsemen to take us all away like the Mayans had been warning us. So I ate that half of a bag of M&M's yesterday thinking that it wouldn't matter. It does today.
Life for us is usually hectic - something going on at least 3-4 times a week. But this week, it wasn't even about therapy appointments since everybody is heading off for holiday vacay; it was about all the crap that can crop up all at once. In addition to everything else that is scheduled.
My car, which I despise more than a bag of carrots and marshmallows, is turning against me more than it ever has before. It had to be taken to the Toyota dealer to get the engine control module looked at since I had been getting recall notices on it for the last three years and just now reached a point where I finally needed to have it looked at. It took having my Corolla shutting down completely on me in the middle of the busy Wal-Mart parking lot intersection for me to wake up and smell the burning of my engine and take it in to be looked at. They looked at it indeed, and concluded that eight million things were wrong with it. Some of the highlights included a transmission flush, something about a belt, and a rat's nest in the cabin filter. Yeah, you read that right. It all came out to an estimate of $1500. So we basically took it to the guys who usually work on my car. And it ended up not costing that much money.
Then, we had Butters' well visit check up. He is four pounds underweight. Talk about feeling like the worst parent in the universe. What? How can that be? He eats very well. The general consensus seems to be that because he is SO ACTIVE, he has to consume more fat calories. Okay, clearly the hospital gave us the wrong baby.
Our pediatrician told us not to worry too much about it, but to begin putting a pat of butter in at least one of his containers of solid food. We are also introducing more variety in the way of solid foods such as toast and pasta. Of course, he prefers to eat the butter itself which he manages to do by swiping that fast little hand over the piece of toast before I can cut it into pieces. He loves to eat anyway, so adding more foods to his diet, especially more fatty ones, is right up his alley.
He is also going through stages when he pulls his hearing aids out a lot. Some days, he never pulls them out, other days, he pulls them out when he is getting tired, and then there are those days when he looks at you, plucks both of them out and grins and it takes me having to basically wrestle with him on the floor to get them back in because he views it as a game.
Yesterday was the culmination of a long overdue meltdown. For both of us. After I got him down for a nap, I went outside in the 40 degree chill with the -40 wind and checked the mailbox. My mom sent my birthday card with a pewter charm that read, "Always color outside the lines." This refers to an incident I had when I was five and my kindergarten teacher pointed out my picture of an animal that I colored "the wrong color," and "colored all outside of the lines." to the entire class. I then proceeded to weep like a five year old instead of the soon to be 38 year old that I am supposed to be. I pulled myself together, and then thought about finding the old bat and shoving a badly colored picture up, well, you get the point. The point is, my mom knows how stressed out I have been about trying to do what's best for Butters for the last ten months. She was trying to tell me that there is no rule book. Not for him, and really, not in life. What is it about the wisdom of mothers?
I have been trying to do what all the therapists tell you to do and I feel like most of the time I am not doing something right. In trying to do everything by the book, I lost my non-conformist self. I realized that I needed to go back to my philosophy of trying different things, different strategies - not just with Butters, but for everything. I listen to all suggestions by therapists, etc. I even follow through. But in the end, I have to listen to my gut, and I have to take Butters' cues. I also have to take in what the world is throwing at me and listen to what my head is telling me to do. Every now and then I have to color outside of the lines in order to do what's right for Butters. He is going to grow up doing the same as well. In this world, growing up is just plain hard. It isn't the world most of us wanted our kids to grow up in. I guess that's why it's more important than ever to provide the best experiences possible, and to teach them to self-advocate - whether they have hearing loss or not.
I am stepping down from my box, now. I needed to get all of this out of my cluttered brain. I could elaborate further, especially considering how unnerving the events at Connecticut have been, but I just don't know how to start or end with that. Nobody has any answers, and what's worse, I don't think anybody ever will.
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