It Could Be Worse

A couple weeks ago when Carter and I went to the Library, I picked up a book called, "It Could Be Worse".  I just thought it looked cute, and we can all always use the reminder to try to see the positive in a situation.  Throughout the book, two sailors go on a crazy adventure where things endlessly go wrong.  One sailor always complains, and the other always reminds him that things could be worse.  Their ship capsizes and they get rained on, pooped on by birds, bothered by mermaids and pirates, pulled under by anemones, and swallowed by a whale, but the one guy always finds the bright side--like when the whale's belly stunk like fish, he was happy he liked tuna!  Eventually the day is saved, and all is well.  The book popped into my head again the other day as I sat at therapy waiting for Carter to come back out.  I think I've mentioned this before, but sitting in that waiting room gives me tremendous perspective on our situation.

Ever since Jacob was little and started being "difficult", I would often ask myself "Why me?"  Why couldn't I just have the easy-going, sweet kid who listened and obeyed?  Why did I end up with the kid who battled us on nearly everything?  Was it too much to ask for a kid who didn't create an hour-long standoff over an article of clothing?  Why couldn't anything with this kid just be easy?  He's had a lot of health issues, too, which I'm sure never helped matters and themselves contributed to the victim mentality I had.  Selfishly, I wanted to be a good mom and have my kid seamlessly fit in with the other kids (and me to fit in with other parents), but none of that is easy when you have the problem child.  Parenting has almost always felt hard, and all of the rewarding moments parents gush about on social media have been few and far between for me.  I've evolved into a hardened, often grumpy shell of myself that I usually don't like very much, due to the endless onslaught of frustration and exhaustion.  I got a reprieve when Carter was born and ended up being the sweetest, happiest kid for the first 4-5 years of his life, which seemingly confirmed I wasn't a terrible parent, but then that got hard, too.  As I said a couple posts ago, things are easing up a bit now, and I feel like it's given me some perspective on where we've been and where we are now.

I read back my old blog posts and feel the sting of how hard some of those years were.  And yet, part of me looks at the early behavior stuff and feels a little foolish, because that was just the tip of the iceberg.  A lot of it was typical high energy kid stuff, I think, but I know deep down that it still felt incredibly hard at the time, and I didn't see a lot of other parents struggling in the same way.  Parenthood starting around 18 months until right now has not been what I envisioned the first time I saw that pregnancy test, aside from the inevitable eternal worrying.  I never saw myself with two ADHD kids, making weekly trips to the therapist and picking up a legalized narcotic at the pharmacy every month.  I feel like it's been a long uphill battle with so many challenges I never imagined.  Do others have it worse?  Absolutely.  But I also wouldn't wish our experience on anyone else.  It's been the hardest thing I've ever done.  As memes like to remind us sometimes, it's not a contest--just because someone has it worse than your "hard", that doesn't mean it's still not "hard".  

Eight years ago when everything really came crashing down was pretty much the worst of it, if my emotional state is the measure.  I was on the verge of crying for months.  I think dealing with that kind of stress response long-term changed me, because I feel like the stress was just as high in subsequent years as the battles between the kids got worse and Jacob's defiant behavior continued to leave us at a loss, but that verge-of-tears feeling went away.  I just got used to struggling through it all.  

Nowadays in my house, I feel like I do about a 60-65 degree day in the spring.  Did you ever walk outside on a pleasant day, come back inside and have someone ask you how it was outside, only to realize you never really noticed the temperature because it wasn't an extreme that your body reacted to?  Like, after a long winter, any sort of warmth feels so good, but I've had moments where I realized the temperature didn't click in my brain either way because the weather was just sort of...exactly as it should be.  Not too hot, not too cold, just pleasant.  That's the best way I can describe things at the house (most of the time) now.  I don't notice the lack of fighting as much as I should because that's how things are supposed to be.  Or, similarly, I often have a hard time remembering to praise the kids for good behavior (which is something you're encouraged to do when you have challenging kids who don't get praised a lot) because when they do what they're asked or do something positive, it feels like that's just how it should be.  I think my brain is so happy to have the break from the chaos that it just floats along without bothering to recognize what has occurred to make it that way.  

All throughout these tough times, I've always known that things could be worse.  I'd look through lists of symptoms for behavior disorders and realize that Jacob's symptoms were there, but usually on the tamer side of what they could have been.  We didn't have holes in our walls or a kid who actually carried out violent threats.  I'd read the survey questions for the behavioral specialists or at Jacob's annual brain study and see things that blew my mind--like questions asking if my preteen leaves home without asking or has used drugs.  At those moments I would realize that there are people who answer "yes" to those questions, and it made our situation seem incredibly minor.  Sometimes I wonder if we just made much ado about nothing and they just humored us at therapy all these years.  But no, I know we had a lot of struggles, and I know other people we knew didn't have them to that degree.  Regardless, we needed help.

But sitting in that therapy waiting room always brings about more perspective than usual because you see real people dealing with things that are infinitely harder than anything we experience.  You see profoundly disabled kids in wheelchairs, unable to speak or even make eye contact.  You see kids that scream for no reason or are clearly intellectually challenged.  You see kids who wear winter boots in the middle of summer or have nervous tics--like the one the other day who couldn't keep his hands out of his pants as he walked, despite polite requests and offers of rewards from his therapist.  There are kids with everything from autism and brain damage to ones like my kids with basic behavioral challenges, where you'd otherwise never know something was wrong.  The range is sobering as we all gather in that one waiting room.  The one day I went into the bathroom and noticed that the changing table was ginormous, at which point it hit me that there are caregivers that need to bring grown children into that room to change their diapers because their disabilities left them without control of their bodily functions.  It broke my heart to think how hard it has to be for those parents--both the physical and mental struggle of having a kid who physically grows but mentally never makes it out of the toddler stage that we all know is so draining--and that's without the emotional reality of knowing your child will likely never reach the potential you always dreamed of for them.  I see these parents--average-looking people whose lives were turned upside-down by their child's condition, who never expected it and never had a choice, but just plug along because they have to.  I see these sweet therapists who have endless patience for what some of these kids dole out, come back to the lobby and always have the most positive report for the parents.  It's pretty amazing to watch, and it always makes me grateful for the relative simplicity of our problems.

So, as I sit there, no matter how discouraged I might be from whatever is going on--kids or otherwise--it's a stark reminder that things could always be so much worse.  It could be another type of doctor, a terminal diagnosis, or any number of the other disorders we see there.  We could have wanderers, learning disabilities, or impossibly defiant kids who express their "no" in violent ways.  We don't have any of that.  We have two tough kids who happen to not get along, and some days it's as much as we can handle--but more and more I feel like we're finally just dealing with typical problems, thanks in part to the medication that has worked wonders for both kids.  The medication in and of itself could have been a huge debacle, and twice it's worked with little to no side effects, which is almost unheard of.  For as unlucky as I've felt for all these years, it's becoming more apparent that we're actually pretty fortunate in a lot of ways.  It's funny, because for so long it felt like we were the only ones with problems, but as more friends had kids, and as their kids got older and their marriages evolved, it became clearer that almost everyone had some sort of issue somewhere along the way.  And in most cases I realized I probably wouldn't trade places.  Better the devil you know, I guess.

Some days it's easier to be grateful, some days it's harder.  We're not perfect and we still have bad days, but to finally see progress emerge so quickly after some of the worst of it seems downright miraculous.  We've weathered some tough storms, for sure--and for all we know we're just in the eye of the storm, not past it--but getting out of the worst of it for a bit has been a relief.  It makes it so much easier to realize how much we've survived, and more importantly how much worse it could have been.  God has certainly carried us through, because looking back there are moments I'm not sure how we did it otherwise.  "It could be worse" seems like a pretty simple and silly thing to say sometimes--particularly when things are truly hard--but it's a good reminder that there's always something to be thankful for.