UGH!!!!! No matter what I can’t protect them from everything. So, for both of my children I get a ton of push back around my “rules.” I say it that way cause truly I am a pushover who is honestly trying my fucking best. So, my son is almost a teenager and decided that after 7 failed attempts he really wanted to go to in person for middle school. I said OK let’s try it out. Within the first month I was ready to sue the school district. I have yet to find a school district that actually has the resources for children with disabilities. But he begged me not to, so I advocated my ass off and he stayed. We are now halfway through the year. I backed off and let him be him. I have spent 99% of my thought process on making life as accessible for him as I possibly can. Now he wanted to do it as much on his own as he could. I thought for a moment and realized that life experiences are really what shape us as humans. Good and bad. As a mother of course I worry about the bad, but life is not something that can be controlled.
So that brings us to today. My son made his first friend. They facetime each other play online games together and he was so excited that I believe he is starting to feel like a typical kid. I have waited so long for him to feel this feeling. As a mother I just want my child to feel connection, and friendship, and to beable to find joy in life. Now take yourself back to middle school if you can. I know that was the time frame when a lot of EVERYTHING happened. Now for any kid it’s a very unknown time and between peer pressure, puberty, and now in 2026 SOCIAL MEDIA!! You could not pay me to be a child again.
Well, I’m going to say this. What was supposed to be among the firsts that they were having it all got shattered by an attempted overnight. The overnight got cut short and old trauma has been brought up! For his privacy I’m not going into details. But I want to scream as loud as I possibly can because for the first time my child felt like a kid and in the blink of an eye it all gets taken away. Or does it? It’s been 24 hours and yesterday we all stayed close and chilled all day. But today is another day and I am unsure how to move forward because I want to follow his lead. That’s exactly what I am going to do is follow his lead. As a mother I feel so helpless because what I tried to keep from happening in his life has happened and things I wish he would never have to experience he has and will have to. Pain is inevitable, life experiences happen and I believe they forever form us into who we are today. Good and bad! So as I’m typing this in a Starbucks surrounded by others living their life and knowing that everyone in here has their own life experiences. I’m going to try and focus on the positive. My child did everything he could to get help, he didn’t cave to peer pressure. My child knew he had someone who would be there for him no matter what without hesitation. So, I know that I can’t control their worlds, but I can make sure they know that no matter what I will always be here. That life is going to be really fucking hard sometimes but they are capable of making it through anything. We honestly live in a pretty shitty world! If I wrote this yesterday, I feel like I would have come from more of a victim standpoint. But our trauma does not have to be what defines us. It’s how we overcome it that does.