Optismic

And to add to the insult, she is/I am the one writing this post.

(I figure if I’m paying for a blog, it needs the occasional post to keep it alive.)

Last night I attended a Mother-Son dinner put on at our church. The adult leaders of his group prepared soups, salad, and rolls for dinner. We arrived to a room of some boys and their moms., all dressed up nice. We had purposely worn “nice casual” because a step in the right direction is about all we could manage.

I struggle to learn from my not-so-brilliant moments. If I do something unwise as a mom, you can be nearly certain I will repeat it.

So skip over any surprise that I forgot to consider all of the requests, unspoken expectations, unwritten rules, and unusual stimuli that met us when we walked into that room.

I’m neurodiverse and neurospicy (ADHD and bipolar II, specifically), and even as the somewhat “grown-up” half of this duo, I was having a hard time adjusting to our setting: fluorescent lights, a giant whiteboard covered in notes, and place mats that clashed with the plastic table cover. Each visual insult screamed at me, “Which one of us is loudest?! Pick me, pick me!”

The unspoken expectations started with: you will accompany your mom from the car into the room, then turned to, you will stand for a photo with your mom, rounded out by, you will know where to sit and which chair to pull out for your mom.

If this were mini-golf, we never knew there was a hole one, we dodged hole two, and hole three was probably on par with your average teenage son.

This also happens to be how we play mini-golf except we spend a lot more time trying to find a ball lost in the thorn bushes.

Even then, we have grown accustomed to most of the social “rules” being about as consequential as watching children play mini-golf wrong. It’s just a game. If you want to get good at it, play by the rules. If you want to enjoy the game and move on, play it your way as long as you aren’t messing it up for someone else, and then tell your adult where you plan to wander off to next.

So if my son sat there in a crouched position, picking apart his roll and smooshing parts of it with his elbow, it was fine. I gave him a couple reminders about polite behavior and definitely encouraged him to eat, but I generally didn’t mind his ways. I wished I could take my shoes off and do the same thing.

Whether anyone else did or not, I wasn’t too worried. I think this group of young men is used to his quirks, and even if they don’t know how to draw him in, they at least don’t knock him down.

We then played a game that didn’t take into account his learning differences. In order to get a point, a young man needed to raise his hand and say which one of the moms gave a particular answer to a survey we had done earlier. When asked a question, my son needs extra processing time. It’s in his IEP, but I don’t think to tell anyone else that useful tip because when someone asks, “What can I do to make this a better experience for your son?”, I say, “If I knew, I would tell you.” I just don’t hold onto that kind of information very well. It’s like telling someone to flat-dry their sweater for best results when the rest of the house is on fire because, “Does it even matter?!”

Thus, the boys with great reaction time and extroverted personalities piled up points, and I, ever the optimist (haha), found a way to cheat. To alert my son when I was the mom in question, I tapped his foot. By these questionable means, he could accrue two points, a mama point and a papa point. They were left on the whiteboard all night, and when I saw them this morning, it looked like they hadn’t started a family. I happily erased all of the points.

The prize was a chocolate orange, which amounted to a slight source of disappointment. The other mom sitting at our table felt bad seeing him miss out and went for a couple chocolate oranges left from her bunko game the night before.

Then while the moms got their dessert, the boys sang, “Families Can Be Together Forever” while my son picked apart the green table cover, much to my delight. Though I did disguise it with some, “Oh, uh, let’s not rub it with your braces; it will ruin them,” just for good measure.

The final part of our evening involved a brief tribute, first sons to their moms, and then moms to their sons. I remember receiving a preview to the night’s program, but I had lost it before I could really grasp that this date night would end with public words of praise.

At this point, my son had demonstrated what a one-sided conversation looked like, using an impassioned voice that social pressures would have doused in a neurotypical kid. I had, despite my inclination to remain withdrawn, demonstrated how to have a two-sided, albeit unenthusiastic, conversation with the other mom at our table. Eventually, her son and mine spent some time on the same planet while I remained in orbit, wondering how he can go from a steady stream of that stuff to suddenly having a blank mind.

I soon found out. Until that moment when he needed me to prompt him to get up and say something, I had kept a fairly nonchalant exterior. I think I whispered to him, “Sense of humor” in the hope that mine would come back. He thanked me for being a good audience for his jokes and then flawlessly delivered a couple.

I do stand-up comedy, but I no longer felt humorous, and I definitely didn’t want to stand up. I realized the words streaming through my head could never land right in this room, but I did my best to say them anyway.

What my son heard was, “My son doesn’t make me look like a very good mom…” because that’s pretty much what I said. Then I rambled a bit before closing with, “I’m proud of him even if my list doesn’t look like any of yours.”

No one spoke. They didn’t need to. My son had gone from sitting like a cat in a chair by the window to rubbing his head on my arm, also like a cat. We clearly weren’t “let me count the ways” people.

The closing prayer signaled an end to the program. My emotions were registering on a seismograph somewhere, but I couldn’t tell which direction the jolt had come from. Was I angry? Jealous? Hurt? Did I want sympathy from everyone? Was there a dark place in me that wanted my son to regret all the “wrong” moves he had made that evening?

Like a grumpy robot, I sorted through this and that issue with my other kids who now wanted my attention. I repeatedly nodded to the person telling me an uplifting story. Then my son took my purse and went to unlock the car so he could get away from the noise and chaos.

I talked with him about it a little. He laughed and said, “It’s ok that you basically insulted me.” Then I talked with his younger sister while I said good night. And his older sister as we settled in for our last night of slumber party before my husband gets back into town.

I think I figured it out. I didn’t have a list of the ways I’m proud of him because I’ve only ever been exposed to lists that fit our evidence-based parenting, i.e., how well does your child achieve goals? In what areas does your child, compared to similar kids, excel? What concerns do you have about their development? And is it ok if we just refer to you as “mom” throughout this well child visit as if we are also your children? That’s a lot easier than learning your name:)

What I want someone to ask me, what I want a form to provide space for, what I hope I learn from my optimally autistic children is, “Have you wished to be where they are? Have you ever set aside your material-driven life and wondered at how meaningless most of it is? Have you allowed them to show you what life could be? And then have you wished with all your heart that everyone else could see it, too?”

Yes, all yes, and even though I’ll forget, still yes

Next time he randomly removes his shoes, I will too. Who knows but that the place on which we stand is holy ground?