It Will Get Better
This post has been published all over the place - first on the SPD Foundation's blog, then on Mamapedia, and now it is available in my new book, Sensational Journeys.
I am coming back to it today, because as life has it's ups and downs, in every single way (not just with our kids, but with ourselves), it seems that a gentle reminder is always valuable.
It Will Get Better
Before I ever got a diagnosis of any sort for my son Gabriel, I think everyone I knew had told me some version of the line, “It will get better”. I knew they all meant well, but I wasn’t dealing with your run-of-the-mill toddler tantrums with Gabe. Not even close. My son had meltdowns. Big, long, scary and excruciatingly loud, meltdowns. Gabe would cry for hours on end, for no apparent reason and crashed into walls for fun; this wasn’t typical development in my book, and I couldn’t understand why people were so quick to dismiss it with any of the old standbys (“He’s just a boy” or “He’ll grow out of it” or the non-committal, “It will get better”). How could people think that it would just get better? I wanted to believe them, I really wanted to, but I had lived with the ‘out of sync’ behavior for years, with no sign of it letting up, so I wasn’t convinced that my son would just magically ‘get better’ one day.
When Gabriel’s diagnosis came in at age 4 as Sensory Processing Disorder, I was so relieved that I finally knew what was going on, that I steamed forward – full speed – through OT and implementing a sensory diet at home and school without so much as taking a breath. If that was what my son needed then that was what I would do for him. After all, this is what would finally make things ‘get better’, right?
But you know what? It wasn’t easy and it didn’t just ‘get better’ as quickly as I was hoping. I was tired of being told by family, friends and therapists that things would ‘get better’. Did these people really understand what I went through every single day? Did they understand how upset my son was over the smallest things? How hard school was for him? How hard having play dates was? How difficult it appeared for him to enjoy the simplest pleasures of being a child? If things were really going to get better, could they PLEASE hurry?
Read more »
I am coming back to it today, because as life has it's ups and downs, in every single way (not just with our kids, but with ourselves), it seems that a gentle reminder is always valuable.
It Will Get Better
Before I ever got a diagnosis of any sort for my son Gabriel, I think everyone I knew had told me some version of the line, “It will get better”. I knew they all meant well, but I wasn’t dealing with your run-of-the-mill toddler tantrums with Gabe. Not even close. My son had meltdowns. Big, long, scary and excruciatingly loud, meltdowns. Gabe would cry for hours on end, for no apparent reason and crashed into walls for fun; this wasn’t typical development in my book, and I couldn’t understand why people were so quick to dismiss it with any of the old standbys (“He’s just a boy” or “He’ll grow out of it” or the non-committal, “It will get better”). How could people think that it would just get better? I wanted to believe them, I really wanted to, but I had lived with the ‘out of sync’ behavior for years, with no sign of it letting up, so I wasn’t convinced that my son would just magically ‘get better’ one day.
When Gabriel’s diagnosis came in at age 4 as Sensory Processing Disorder, I was so relieved that I finally knew what was going on, that I steamed forward – full speed – through OT and implementing a sensory diet at home and school without so much as taking a breath. If that was what my son needed then that was what I would do for him. After all, this is what would finally make things ‘get better’, right?
But you know what? It wasn’t easy and it didn’t just ‘get better’ as quickly as I was hoping. I was tired of being told by family, friends and therapists that things would ‘get better’. Did these people really understand what I went through every single day? Did they understand how upset my son was over the smallest things? How hard school was for him? How hard having play dates was? How difficult it appeared for him to enjoy the simplest pleasures of being a child? If things were really going to get better, could they PLEASE hurry?
Read more »
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