Resilience and Adversity

Yesterday my son's equine therapy was canceled because his therapist was sick. For the past month my daughter has gone to her grandparents' house while I take C to therapy. It's a nice routine. I get to participate in C's therapy and give him my undivided attention, and B gets to play and spend time at her grandparents. Apparently they make the best pasta in the world.

Yesterday, C was offered the chance to play at his grandparents' too. He was slightly hesitant but agreed to go when I promised to bring over his RC Stunt Car. And I got to go grocery shopping alone. Woot! I browsed the fancy cheese section and spent my time looking at the daffodil bunches.

The kids went over to my parents' house around 1:45 (early release Thursday), and I returned home from grocery shopping at around 4pm. I turned on my new camera and shifted between taking photos of daffodils and looking up how to say hello in Abenaki (I'd like to learn more about the people who lived in my town several hundred years ago, and the Native American Tribes that still live here. Btw, hello is Kwai.). I received a text at 4:05pm from my dad: "We're bringing the kids home now." I acknowledged the text. Two minutes later, a second message: "C won't leave, screaming. Can you come get him, please." I was out the door in under sixty seconds and at my parents' house in probably three minutes.

I evaluated the situation. B was crying on the lawn. Apparently she and C had a fight, the normal kind where she bosses him around, he yells at her, she gives him a stink face, and then things devolve. Fairly normal for 6- and 8-year-old siblings. I got B settled into the truck and playing a game on my phone. Inside the house, C was sobbing. He did not run away, he did not hit anyone (although he did knock down B's magna-tile tower), and he was able to articulate what happened through his tears. He said he was a bad boy, I told him he wasn't and that all siblings fight. Not like this, he said. No, way worse, I replied. He looked skeptical. I told him his high school track buddies were out practicing on our street, and in a minute he stood up and walked himself out to the truck. He cried a tiny bit more and said he didn't deserve screen time, but then we set off for home and the storm blew over. Before I left my mom just looked at me with a puzzled, deeply concerned face and said, "I just don't know what happened. He was fine one minute and not the next."

My fear is that my son will be categorized by the people around him as "difficult." I don't want him receiving subliminal messages that his emotions are scary or not normal.

The bright side is that, for the most part, I was unfazed, B was unfazed, and C was unfazed, and we continued with our day. We worked through it. I felt a little more exhausted last night, but otherwise was ok. I had an unexpected but beautiful moment when B & C went over to greet their track buddies after we got home. A random parent, pulling in to the school parking lot to pick up her son from track, rolled down the window of her minivan to say hello. I thanked her for raising such a kind child, and she told me that she deeply appreciated the note I wrote to their track team last year. I started to tear up. Here is someone whose name I don't even know, saying kind, supportive words. Based on their school's webpage, I highly doubt that the Ven Diagram of our religious and political beliefs overlap at all. But she is kind, and her son is kind, and it was such a welcoming exchange.

Takeaway: The work C has done and that we have done as a family seems to be doing the trick. We are gradually become more grounded, more resilient, and more flexible. And I really don't care about anything else.