This is story is continued from “God Is My Strength”. “http://weardenfamilynews.blogspot.com/2016/05/god-is-my-strength.html”.
Gabriel had just been born, and Michael was fired from his job at the call center.
There is a concept in video games known as draw distance or render distance. Put simply, it is the maximum distance you can see out in the fictitious land from one immobile place. Done well, it can convey the enormity of an open world; done poorly, it is like wearing bad glasses where the further out you go, the more blurry and distorted it becomes.
Metaphor within a metaphor, better get to my point.
The time after Gabe was born is a lot like poor rendering. I feel as I stand here in my clarity like everything from that time is shrouded in a thick fog, isolated events and moments fairly obscured. Part of it was because of baby brain--I was pregnant more often than I wasn’t in those couple of years, and my body was having trouble recalibrating to its new normal.
The biggest cause may have been the sleeplessness. Gabriel did not consistently sleep through the night until perhaps the last year, and even now I say ‘consistently’ with a significant amount of hesitancy. From birth until the age of three when he could receive nighttime medicine, most 24-hour periods he got a nonconsecutive two hours of rest.
Someone had to be up with him during that time. Michael worked full-time; I couldn’t because the cost of daycare was outside our means, and because I was still going to school part time. All days and most nights fell almost exclusively to me. That is not to say that Michael had it easy or that he was not contributing. It is just one of those things.
That is why I have had such a time writing this; why it has been two months. The next page in our saga was not the most difficult; steadily our lives were improving, things were getting better. We would look back and laugh at some of the parts that made us want to cry at the time. Some parts, like the dirty taco restaurant near our old apartment, we would remember almost fondly. Others, like the day we got evicted...we don’t really talk about those. We bundle them up in the smallest parcel possible and stuff them way in the back of the closet of our hearts where we don’t have to see or think about them anymore. This blog series has been our first revisit to many of those memories.
A reluctant return in some cases; there is quite a lot I'd rather forget, let the render fog just….wash away.
To know Gabriel now, you couldn't even imagine anything bad about him. He's so gorgeous, loving, affectionate. His beautiful brown are always deep in thought. He likes to cuddle up next to you and give sweet kisses, loves Veggie Tales and docilely flipping through the Bible.
I don't want to take that image from you; that is who he is. There is kind of this unspoken code that you don't talk about the worst bits. People start to think the worst of your child, of autistics in general. Wonder if they are a danger to be around or allow to be with your children. It makes daycares feel justified for turning away special needs kids as liabilities. Churches feel like it is appropriate to ask a family to worship someplace else.
Everyone I tell this little tidbit to (particularly Christians) are absolutely horrified by it, but that doesn't detract from the truth:
I do not know a single special needs family that has not been kicked out of a church.
The manner, the politeness, may vary, but every one I have encountered shares this common experience. I have a friend that took her child to Sunday School, one they'd be attending for years, to find a group of parents clustered around a notice posted inside the window like Martin Luther’s theses nailed to the door. It was a letter from the church with her name clearly at the top telling her they would no longer accept her child in bible class or the church-run daycare.
People who hear that balk, and insist that surely their church would NEVER do something so horrible. How is that a Christian attitude, they demand. For didn't Jesus say, “suffer the children unto me”??! That is simply and utterly outrageous!
….except that it's not. Should be, but that's not how it always works out. Having a neurodivergent or differently-abled child is one of the most cripplingly, devastatingly lonely journeys. You feel like the whole world has turned their back on you, this is something you have to face--and bear--alone.
You'll often hear me say how lucky I am to have Gabriel, and I still fully, emphatically mean it. I adore him. Plain and simple--I've loved him hopelessly since the day he was born and every day since.
I find myself trying to sugarcoat it. Pulling my language; don't want to scare you away, dear reader.
Then I ask myself...who softened the blow for me and Michael when we were 22 and 24 (respectively)? Who pulled punches to protect our innocence? We made it through; this story is one of triumph, not defeat. We were not especially blessed, uniquely qualified, or graced with particularly robust patience. Quite the contrary: ask anyone that knows me well and they'll tell you I'm a cantankerous, ill-tempered troll better suited to scaring children from under a bridge than rearing them.
I'm resilient though, and stubborn as they come. Michael, too. And we have a God that has not abandoned us or failed us for a second.
Gabriel as an infant had to be in motion. Benjamin as a baby was squirmy--he liked to roll in your arms like a manatee on crack, but Gabe was different. If his body stopped, he was gale-force squalling.
It was so pervasive in our lives that Emerald, at the tender age of two, developed anxiety and started showing signs of stress. Her parents day out program called us to in to have a sit down meeting. They were concerned because whenever the classroom got louder (which it is wont to do, full of toddlers), she would wring her hands, twist her shirt, and yank out her hair, babbling incoherently. If it got to be too much, she had a meltdown or ran away, behaviors generally frowned upon in daycare.
I internalized this, of course. Blamed myself for keeping our house too quiet, not exposing her to more at a younger age. We called for an Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) evaluation, where she qualified for speech and occupational therapies. ECI is a government-funded program being part of the school, so you can go ahead and judge me for being on that one as well. Medicaid reimbursed them for coming, which is weird that the government insurance was paying for a government program, but I'm not going to overanalyze it. Even if we weren't on Medicaid, ECI saw you--if you qualify for services, you get services.
Speech helped her gain language; OT taught her self-regulating, soothing techniques. For her brief stint as only child, she really was the perfect baby. Bright-eyed and intelligent, eager to please. She was so happy all of the time. The transition was difficult for her. She adored her baby brother, always wanted to hold him, play with him. It was a big adjustment, though. Always is.
For one thing, we were co-sleepers. We tried to do the crib thing, cry out, read all the books on getting her out of our bed, but honestly, I liked holding her. She was warm and squishy and smelled like milk and lavender and undiluted joy. It made me feel safe having her close-by in case there was an emergency, and it helped me bond with her when it didn't come as naturally to me as it should.
When Gaby was born, I had to be available to him for feeding. I had the night shift then. Emerald stayed in our bed, but I slept on the sofa near Gabe. Over the next several years, I tried to move back into my bed with my husband, but more often than not I was on that tomato red couch. It was where Gaby was, and Gaby needed round-the-clock care.
Writing it all out, things fall into place a bit better than they had at the time. I didn't know I still harbored feelings of guilt for Emerald’s anxious behavior until just now. I can also see how we arrived at the place where our family was divided neatly down the middle: Daddy and Emerald, Mommy and Gabe. Michael and Emerald had our bed in the back; Gabriel and I took the other end of the house. No reason for everyone to be up.
For hours most every night, I would walk the baby in circles: through the living room, across the dining room, into the kitchen, front hall, then back again. At the start of the night, I would sing. That's what you do for babies, right? You sing. Gaby hated my singing though, so after a while my voice would peter out until all you could hear was the rhythmic patting of my bare feet on the linoleum. If I stopped, my tiny son would start to cry again, so I kept going for as long as I could stand.
The swing didn't move fast enough for Gabe’s liking, the gentle gliding motion not neatly vigorous enough; when I needed to rest, I strapped him in and coaxed it along with my foot, nodding against the wall and jerking back awake until dawn.
In June 2009, Michael got a job selling cars at Scoggin Dickey. It was often thankless work, 10 hours of standing on scorching asphalt six days a week to sell cars to the rudest, most ill-informed consumers in existence. Everyone buys into the crooked, cheating car salesman so full-heartedly that it has almost become encoded in our DNA to mistrust them. The company treated him very well, though--as long as he was trying, they took care of us, sales or no sales. The paychecks were inconsistent amounts; we never knew how much we would have to work with until it came through on payday. We made do. It was no extravagant lifestyle, but we were surviving.
The demands of the job were taking a toll on Michael; it is exhausting work, and he was unaccustomed to the sheer force of hatred directed at him from perfect strangers. He periodically applied for other jobs all over town, but nothing else ever came of it.
He left at 7.30 to get into his office by 7.45. The kids and I would go out on the front porch and have picnic breakfast in the cool morning, watching people heading out. Emerald would color with sidewalk chalk or play with bubbles while I would gently push Gabe back and forth in the stroller. When it got too hot, we’d go inside. Emerald’s favorite movie at the time was “Meet the Robinsons”, so we would all three pile together in the recliner. Run time at 1 hour, 42 minutes, if I could get Gabe calmed enough to sit--or, if I was exceptionally lucky that day, asleep--I could get an hour or so nap, so long as I kept the chair rocking while I did it. It wasn't the ideal situation, but it worked.
The commute to the dealership wasn't far--ten minutes each way--but gas prices were so high that we tried to drive as little as possible. Despite the cost, Michael drove home for lunch most days. I couldn't make it an unbroken nine hours; if he was with a customer, it could be even later. He could have saved the money and take his lunch at work, but he trekked back and forth to offer relief to me.
Living it, I didn't realize anything was wrong. I knew I was tired, and that I actively dreading going to bed at night because night was the worst time. Children are all different though; probably just colic. A phase. He’ll grow out of it and things will get easier.
With reassurances like that, our days faded in and out much the same way for a year and a half.
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