At the Threshold

Tomorrow, Neil and I are going to tour a local adult foster home that is a potential home for him in seven months. Now that he’s 18 and approved for adult services, he’s eligible. How did we get to this point?

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There is a part of me that is elated, I am sorry to admit. I have been his primary parent for 14 years, and a co-parent for four.  And I don’t have much left in me to give. I have been to every single draining IEP meeting for 15 years. Not just the annual ones – they happened more often than that for him. Add to that all the extra meetings and conferences with teachers, principals, therapists, and specialists. All the emails and phone calls. God help me. The phone calls – that there was a behavioral problem and I needed to leave work and pick him up. So.Many.Times. The doctor appointments. The blood tests. The changing of medications. The seizures, the horrible seizures and my resulting PTSD. The MRIs and EEGs. The picking up of prescriptions and their not being ready and my time being wasted. The forgetting to take his medication and me having to drive to his school to get it to him. The bullying. The bullshit of dealing with the teachers and school district about the bullying. Having to homeschool him because the school district suggested he be bused to a different school district. And moving farther back, there were the years of bolting in grocery stores, restrooms, parking lots, restaurants, almost any public place. The extreme sound sensitivity. The screaming. The echolalia. The explaining/apologizing for his inappropriate behavior. The fear of the future.

But I am also relieved about the prospect of him moving out because the past two years, since his epilepsy started, he has been very difficult to live with. By that I mean, as I mentioned in my last post, that he has become aggressive. He has also been verbally abusive to me. He has yelled at me and frequently says incredibly disrespectful things. I realize that a large part of that could have been due to his undiagnosed, untreated bipolar, which we are still jockeying meds to manage. But I am near the end of my proverbial rope. I am holding on – trying to – for seven more months until he graduates from high school with his modified diploma. I feel that I owe him that – staying home with me until then. He has worked as hard as he could to graduate with his peers. That’s all he ever wanted – what he said to me when he was 10 years old (and again at 12) – I just want to be like everyone else.

And it pains me to see all the differences. It pains me to think that, after everything we’ve been through, placing him in an adult foster home is the best I can do for him. He’ll still be able to take GED classes at the local community college. But I’m not elated about that. I’m also not elated that I’m having to “think of the future,” as my mother pointed out. “What would we do if something happened to you?” To be honest, unlike most special needs parents, I don’t think about that. I’m not sure if it’s because, as a long-term single parent, something has already happened to me: I’m a burned out shell of myself. I’ve had to do more than double duty for too long, and the thought of some other entity taking over soon is the only thing keeping me going. Or, the fact that I don’t worry about what would happen in my absence might also be because of a different something, something that parents of children with epilepsy try not to think about but that keeps us awake at night – seizures can cause the person to stop breathing. I may outlive my child.

Regardless, we are at the threshold of the future I previously feared. We are here – transition is now. In childbirth, as many of us know, transition is the period of labor that comes right before pushing. It’s the most intense part of the process and the contractions are the strongest. And the pangs I am experiencing now, before the last push in June, are incredibly strong.  I want to do right by him, because I love him fiercely, as much as I ever did, but his behavior is making me think I will not miss him! I know, it’s supposed to happen that way. Some birds need a little nudge out of the nest. But somehow this feels different. Probably because he’s such a different bird.   

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I tried so hard to ensure the best possible future for him. Understandably, I was crushed when what I thought he needed didn’t happen. But during this time of transition, I am realizing that what I thought he needed for a successful future might have been mere wishful thinking on my part. Even before he could talk, I have always thought that Neil would succeed on his own terms. Sometimes, I just need to remind myself of that.