There's a feeling I get sometimes as a mother. I don't know how to describe it except to call it peaceful pleasure. There's this small stillness and joy that comes when I look at pictures of my children. Sometimes, I feel it when I am watching them without them knowing it. I'm not a creeper, I swear. But you know what I mean. It's like if I'm volunteering at their school and I see them line up with their class after recess, but they haven't seen me yet.
There's just this calm content of watching your child, knowing they're yours, feeling the deep love that only parents can understand.
But raising a child with an attachment disorder makes this hard.
My son has this distrust built in him, stemming from early trauma. It's sad. It's understandable. But it's hard to be his mom sometimes.
I want to have these happy feelings when I walk up the stairs and see family pictures, but it's not always how it is.
But rather than focus on that today, I am really happy to report that my son was fairly annoying in the car this morning. That's not the happy part. That's the normal part. He talks incessantly and ignores social cues often. He can tell me the guidelines for car conversation (keep voices down, talk about something that at least 1 other person is also interested in), but he often doesn't follow them. I have to remind him a lot that we're all trapped inside a small box with him and it's not fair to others to be forced to listen to his shenanigans. At home, I try to let him have his silly time and his loud times because others can leave the room if they're not feeling it. But in the car, it's not okay. The car is a place to practice respecting each other's boundaries.
But here's the fun part... the part that made me happy:
Brian was explaining a picture to me and giving me way too much detail, but my response was amusement. I took pleasure, rather than annoyance, in his idiosyncrasies.
We've had a good start to the school year, which has been nice. I was very worried over the two weeks leading up to school. He was being a punk, honestly, for most of those days. I was experiencing elevated heart rates, stomach pains, the works. It was miserable. I wondered how long I will be able to live like this.
So, perhaps we only have a week or so of reprieve until school becomes hard again. But I'll take what I can at this point.
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