Should I give up

[BusynMember]

DDD, I love "Welcome to Holland." Here it is:

[h=2]WELCOME TO HOLLAND[/h] by
Emily Perl Kingsley.
c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

 

[DDD]

Thanks MWM...that's exactly it! by the way after almost fifty years, lol, sometimes I still daydream about Italy. Hugs DDD

 

[BusynMember]

DDD, it's excellent!

 

[Malika]

Well, yes, Italy and Holland... Holland is very flat (but nice windmills)
I think really I'm talking about a certain sort of letting go... about beginning to glimpse that actually I can't control J or make him into something he is never going to be. Of course I'm going to keep on insisting on the please and thank you and making sure that he follows a minimum of socially aware behaviour (some of which he does for himself anyway... in a sense I see him as a child quite handicapped by whatever is going on in his brain, his outbursts and selfishness are not really who "he" is - he woke me up this morning, for example, by bringing me my dressing gown, saying he thought I might be cold...) but really I can't stop a lot of how he manifests in the world. I can only try to put good influences in his way and hope they stick to some extent. I have to do my bit, obviously, but in a sense I have to let go of the outcome. Which is how things always are really.

 

[DammitJanet]

I think you are talking about two different things.

You can certainly give in on the small stuff. Who cares if he is Little Lord Fauntleroy? If he wants to dress in a brown shirt with polka dot pants, thats just fine. If he wants to have long hair, who cares. You can not sweat the small stuff. You have to sweat the big stuff. You have to keep his safety a priority. He cant just take off by himself without you knowing where he is. I think that would be an issue. I would assume you need to be able to at least have an idea where to find him. I would also think stranger danger is an issue there as well. Maybe not...dont know. I would think he would have to behave in school and do what he needs to do there. Some other things you can simply start learning with time. I would think that slowly over time he is going to have to learn to not be so aggressive with people or he is going to lose friends. Tyranny is not going to be accepted as he gets older. It may be cute now but in a 10 or 12 year old it wont be. And as a wise person once asked my parents...if you cant handle her at 6, how do you expect to handle her at 16? Truer words couldnt have been spoken.

 

[BusynMember]

Janet, I agree with you 100%. My oldest daughter, who abused drugs, horrified me with her neverending different colored hair (she dyed it red, white and blue for July 4th one year and it was colored differently every week) and she had a pierced face that she had paid for but that I didn't approve of. The drugs were the priority then. I couldn't even force her to do well in school or even go. But I tried.

Figured she'd outgrow the strange fashion statements and uber-rebellion and she has mellowed A LOT. She only has one piercing left because she's not allowed to have piercings at work. Her hair is always her natural color now...lol. But it's really hard to try to get a difficult child to be a conformist, unless THEY decide to be one.

Safety in my opinion is definitely the #1 issue.

Malika, I never WANTED my kids to be conformists though. I don't think it's a good trait...to be just like all the other robots. JMO

 

[TerryJ2]

Malika, I agree with-Janet, and want to reiterate that you are not "giving up." Your subject heading scared me, but when I read the note, I realized you were actually doing something healthy. He is his own person, and there is a grieving process we all go through when we realize that our kids are not going to be the children we thought they were ... but they are still our children and we still owe them our best parenting skills, which include safety, food, clothing and shelter. If we can afford it, special education, psychological counseling and medicine is right up there, too.
You are not giving up. You are learning.
I love the story of how he woke you up and offered your dressing gown!

 

[HaoZi]

"Conventional" is a social concept to begin with, and what is conventional parenting for one society would out of the norm for another. In a way you could say that cd.com has its own style of "conventional parenting" which most of the world calls "differently parenting" or "creative parenting."