Out with the old...

...in with the new!  This is the usual sentiment of most New Year’s beginnings and as I watch the social media light up with resolutions and goals for 2015, I find myself taking one last look back at the year I just left behind before I move on.  It was a year of great change:  great heartache and great joy.  Sometimes the two went hand-in-hand as with many things in life the hardest times are glittered with supreme joys, too.  I saw many victories that perhaps I wouldn’t have seen otherwise…With one such victory, I saw that even with such profound life changes that all of the hard work I had done to help my sons to deal with those incongruent moments that forever divert the course of our lives was paying off. 

          For those that do not know, change and autism are not synonymous with one another.  No one particularly likes change, but change for a child or person with autism can sometimes shake their foundations so much so that they regress or act out in very drastic ways.  From the moment that I found out the boys’ diagnoses it had been suggested that I keep a strict and tight routine to help them…I often felt like this just didn’t make any sense at all.  What good would that do them in the event that something major was to ever happen?  So, I started a regime of what I like to call ‘controlled chaos.’  What I mean by this is that from the beginning, I used to like to throw little monkey wrenches into their routines.  

Why?  Because for anyone the only way to deal with change is to just deal with it.

          Maybe I was a rebel or maybe just because I knew my sons better than any specialist or educator could, but I knew that such a rigid routine wouldn’t be able to teach them the coping skills that they needed to function in a world where change is the only certainty.  Such a routine would never help them deal with the eventuality of change in their futures.  How could it?

            As I said before:  Life is change.  It is always evolving and moving in directions that we don’t often choose for it to go.  Does this mean I am a genius?  No it does not.  It means I took what I knew about life, knew about my sons, and what I felt was a common sense solution to the issue of change and applied to my parenting.  I am not going to lie; I went many sleepless nights, endured many meltdowns, and sometimes even endured a little physical abuse from two very little boys that were trying to make sense out the confusion that they felt…but something else started happening too.  I saw them begin to change and to accept the little spurts of disruption just a little bit better with every passing eventuality.  Of course I spent time focusing on emotions and how they could be feeling about their situation; I used various coping mechanisms such as counting backwards from ten and even timeouts.  (Contrary to popular belief, timeouts are not always a discipline, but a means to help someone regain control of themselves…my sons sometimes put themselves in timeout when they feel stressed out).

          It was grueling and sometimes frustrating work built from love and a desire to see my boys have less pain as they got older.  The truth be told, in the end…the only thing that I felt was ‘easier’ did not have anything to do with Seamus and Aiden.  It likely would have made my life easier.  I guess I never really did appreciate anything that was easy.

          As I look back on it all, I could never have realized that the changes in our lives would have lead to where we are now for sure, but I realize that if I hadn’t put all of the groundwork in that what is happening now may have been much, much worse.  When this all transpired at first a year ago, I had a moment where I thought, “Are my sweet boys going to make it through this?”  But in the last half of the year things have begun to return to the way it was before and the boys are finding happiness with the situation.  In fact, as I have often stated…they have a better relationship with their father now than they did before.

          So with that I wish you all a Happy New Year and although I typically do not make New Year’s Resolutions I will say that it is my perpetual goal to continuously try to do what is right for my two favorite boys on the planet!!