Unanswerable question

[pepperidge]

To add to my answer, if I could waive a magic wand and eliminate their mental illness and brain damage, would I? You bet. I suspect if you asked parents of kids with physical handicaps whether they would do the same, they would say yes. Does that mean we don't love our kids if we would want to eliminate some of their suffering?

 

[crazymama30]

Pepper, I think it means we DO love our kids if we want to stop their suffering, emotionally or physically. My difficult child can be the funniest, sweetest kiddo in the world. That is what I try to focus on, what I remember and create memories with.

 

[Malika]

Now here's a very tough thought, directed at myself as much as anyone else: do we want to stop their suffering for their sake or for ours? Or for both?

 

[buddy]

Malika, I will be totally honest....I would want the suffering to stop for both of us. BUT mainly for him. I could stop the suffering in some ways for me if I wanted to, that is, I know if I said I can't do this there are many out there who would say, yeah he need to be locked up. Those who only see him in the bad times. I have never once felt that. He has a good quality of life when he is doing well, and every single day there is something good. If it ever changed I would look at it again, but for now, he is making gains. I am strongly holding on to this summer and seeing how good it can be. My choice now is whether I can do this traditional school thing since it adds so much stress to his life. It is a big discussion piece AWAY from school. (they will never know, because how I will pull it off yet I dont know...but am working on that with the lawyer). I picture some combination of horseback riding therapy year round, there is a guy who does therapy dogs, there are "home school" community ed classes like pottery that he would LOVE and has done some of at my expense.... and maybe some direct teaching with a homebound teacher for kids with autism that the district already has hired so since I now know that... heeeeheeee heeee... maybe we can do something there. I really want him to finish 8th though because it is important to him. But not if things keep going this way. I know a mom in the district next to us who got the school to PAY her to teach difficult child at home for years! since I am a teacher (she was not) I am going to ask her how she worded that and see if I can do some of the hours taking him places/mileage etc.

I would for sure like the borrow the magic wand please, yes I would take it all away from him....had one of those "its not fair" moments when at the school library and kids were passing through between classes talking which team they were on...(breaking dawn) and I thought, I really wish something like that, with all the teasing and silliness they were showing.... I wish that was what his day was like.

 

[Malika]

Wow, that all sounds really great, Buddy. Horse riding and pottery - beats that school stress that you keep having to undergo, both of you... I really hope you can find a way to realise that.
One thing I wondered... if you would all indulge me further... is whether the people who answered that they would not change the way things are, even with all the difficulties, have a spiritual faith...

 

[Steely]

Malika -I had a very strong faith up until Matt was around 8. Truthfully, it was watching him struggle day in and day out, and me praying day in and day out for 8 years that started to extinguish my faith. I had already prayed half my life away for X, with no resolve - and then to do it with Matt - I just broke. I decided that although I still had a faith of some sort - it was now TBD. I still clung a bit to prayer changing everything - but it was more a coping tool I had learned, like meditation. I had to completely re-structure my entire concept of religion, and it is still a WIP. However I did give up the hope that "God" was going to change him, and/or heal him - from that point forward it just was what it was.

 

[Malika]

Thanks for sharing Steely
Faith means different things to different people. I don't personally mean by it a sense of a "personal God" that I would pray to or believe in (or cease believing in). But I just have a sense that perhaps feeling that we are not the creators and final arbiters of life leads to a certain welcoming of what comes to us, "good" or "bad". A certain insight that the problem is not so much in the difficulty but in our attitude towards it. But then... these things are all WIP, as you said.

 

[flutterby]

I have spiritual faith, but when it comes to difficult child it's just biology. I guess I don't think about it as welcoming the good or the bad, it just is. I have faith that things will get better...that she will develop more skills and become more independent. I have to or I wouldn't get through the day.

 

[Steely]

I woke up thinking about this today Malika....And I remembered something very important.

I have always felt I was *meant* to be Matt's Mom, because I feel very certain that most other parent's would not have the patience, hope, or insight into him that I do. That might sound pompous, but hope it is not. It is just that he is truly a very, very difficult person. Even my parent's could not handle him. So when I looked around and saw all the other "soccer moms" and their lack of emotional wisdom, I realized I really was one of the few that I knew that could face dealing with his drama day in and day out. I believe that had he grown up with some other parents that lacked true emotional insight, his dad for example, that he would have grown up a delinquent, in jail, and destitute. That piece is very important to me in my concept of raising him - that I helped him at least grow towards the light, and not towards darkness by my unconditional love.

 

[flutterby]

I started to say in my earlier post that if I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn't have had a second child. That probably sounds cold, heartless, and absolutely horrible. I don't wish that she had never been born, but if I had had a crystal ball I wouldn't have done it. I am also currently struggling with extreme stress and depression, and a kid whose anxiety is incapacitating and who relies on me and me alone as her *everything*. Ask me again in a couple of months when my emotional state is better, and my answer might be different.

That said, like Steely I feel like difficult child was born to the right person. If she had been born to my mom, for example, it would have been a disaster. I get her and not many people do. You expect that, of course, as she is MY child, but I get her in a way that takes mental health professionals who have been in practice longer than I've been alive a very long time to get.

 

[Malika]

I felt very moved by your posts, Steely and Flutterby. There aren't any honey-coated cliches around this - it's all wonderful, it's all okay. But I do believe.. in the heart of me... that life, however exhausting, difficult, unsatisfactory and challenging - painful - is better than no life. Than a life in which there are no problems, no suffering. And for me I feel that J has come to me as much for me as for him... he forces me to grow, to face myself, to face life when often I want to run away... I don't have a sense of "God" exactly but I do believe that god is life, and how things are just however they are, and that meeting situations with love and compassion moves things, heals things, makes things possible, creates a little warmth and light within us. That goodness exists and is a real force and that we all respond to that and want that, in our heart. That, in the end, only compassion makes sense as a vision of the world. But it is not easy...

 

[buddy]

This is all pretty deep, but it is interesting how raising a difficult child child really pushes us into this mode of analyzing and rethinking and hoping, despairing, hoping again... faith, loss of faith, questioning.... You are all right. It is not good or bad. It just is. I feel the same as you do with Matt and J and I am sure many here feel this. I have often said that people make babies but God makes families. I do not mean that making the baby and the genetic connection is not important, It is for me with my parents and it is for anyone.... I just mean I think children are placed in our lives for a reason. Even when it is truly hard. But where I get tripped up is with kids who end up destroyed or destroyed and destroyers and it is because their parents/guardians did something awful to them. I can't wrap my head around a plan for that.... so in the end I probably use my faith as a tool too, to help cope with what I can't imagine could really be the way an all loving all knowing God could want things to be. I understand free will, so that is why I do still have faith, it is not of God's making. But I will never understand how suffering can go on.

I dont mean this as a debate of if there is a God or not, just sharing my struggles and that I think it is very much related to raising Q.