If you can’t Find a Solution, Change the Rules

My Dan has sleep issues. It has gotten better, but he still occasionally wakes at 3 AM craving food, sensory play or just wanting to be next to me.

At one point in time I was EXTREMELY sleep deprived. Not just one night, not a couple of months, but two years worth or more of sleep deprivation. I am never going to get those years back and my wrinkled, saggy eyes are paying big time for it. So, at that time,  I got to do things that might seem unconventional to some. Let me explain…

It was hard to find a solution to Daniel’s sleep issues. He didn’t respond to anything for a long time. Young mothers are always taught this rule: when the baby sleeps, you sleep. However, when Dan’s waking hours consumed me, his sleeping hours had to feed my soul. I was/am an artist mom and I need to create! So what this meant for me was that while he napped, I wrote, sewed, or screen-printed. This got hard to sustain long term, though, and I eventually crashed with him during his nap, but you know what I mean. I had to change the sleeping rule to fit who I was.

Same thing happened with his birthday a couple years ago. Dan had been waking up everyday two weeks prior to his birthday that year. I had previously told the teacher that I would come and celebrate in the classroom like I have been doing years past. The night before his birthday, Daniel finally gave me a full nights sleep. It was his birthday but I got the gift! It was the first time that I had felt alert and ready to work on my blog, my website, my sewing projects. I was still planning on going to the classroom but with much hesitation. I didn’t want to give up this valuable time! I felt I was giving up my day of productivity to go into the classroom for 45 minutes all because it is something I do every single year. The teacher ended up e-mailing me and said that she was not going in that day because she did not feel well. This gave me permission to call out too! So I called the school and told them I wasn’t going to celebrate Dan’s birthday in school, but at home instead. I did feel guilty and thought “how horrible everyone will think that I am for not bringing in a cake to school.” I went on beating myself up when I thought; what people don’t see is that I have been patiently up with my child for two weeks straight, loving him, singing to him, rocking him, hugging him, hoping that any minute now, he will dose off to lala land. During this time I did not beat him nor yell at him. God sees that, I see that, my family sees that. I deserve a productive day to myself where I am alert and ready to work. This has to be enough for a rule change.

So sometimes there are rules that simply do not apply to you and who you are. Now, I don’t mean rules concerning moral behavior or that you are exempt from the law. By all means, follow those rules! But sometimes the rules typically given to moms (of neuro-typical or special-needs children alike) do not make sense to your particular situation.

This is a lesson I continue to learn.

*Much of this post was written six years ago and modified recently.

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Remember Who You Were On This Special-Needs Motherhood Journey

I am currently working on a book on self-care, a series of lessons I have learned (and continue to learn) on my special-needs motherhood journey. I’ll be offering some of them here, on this blog. Feel free to let me know your thoughts here, or on my Facebook/Instagram pages.   Here’s the first one…

Remember Who you Were

Any type of motherhood, special needs or typical, causes women to feel like they’re losing themselves. It’s the perennial question of balance that women face between identity (work) and family. The constant work of caring, and ultimately being responsible for another human being, leads us to question, and then adjust our identity to this new life. This takes on a whole different meaning when you have special needs children. The care can be daunting. I feel like I am still adjusting, my GPS constantly on recalculating … I once wondered if I even wanted children at all and what I got was children that required more care than I would ever imagine.

What helped me in daunting and overwhelming moments was to remember who I was. My circumstances had changed drastically but I was still me at the core and I needed to reaffirm that. In the midst of such drastic change, I needed consistency.

I went to things that reminded me of myself, pre-kids. I got out my old cassettes of Sting, my all time favorite musician, and started listening again. I also started reading his autobiography and it really helped me to reconnect with Nellie pre-kids. It also reminded me of the time I went to see him in concert with my friend Maxine back in the 90s.

After my oldest was diagnosed, I went back to museum work. I needed a semblance of normal life again. I was coming to terms with the diagnosis and needed to tap into the part of me that was untouched by it. My life before the diagnosis… museum work. Other opportunities that fed into the pre-kids Nellie also began to surge. I taught a class on Puerto Rican art and lectured on Latin American art in various libraries in the New York Public Library system. All of this helped me reconnect with what I still continue to love: art and art history. I felt like my old self again and this fed my soul and helped me be a better mother to my oldest.

After Dan was diagnosed, I went further back and started screen printing and sewing again, passions from high school and college. I even opened my own shop online and started selling my screen-printed and reconstructed clothing. This further solidified my identity and in turn helped me be a better, more at peace, happy mom. I was drawing from my past and taking inventory of the things that made me really happy.

In the midst of the loss I was feeling, this reconnection to my old self, offered me joy.

What can you tap into from your “old self”, your “pre-kids self”, that can positively ignite you as you live in your present circumstances?

How Dan Incarnates Me as I Tend to His Body

How to Put on a Shirt

This constant tending to my son’s body can be overwhelming and draining.

The other day I came home from a curatorial walkthrough at one of the museums I work with. The art and the curator were absolutely fascinating. I work in cultural spaces where I consistently having conversations about art and ideas, my intellect quite engaged… and then I come home to this…to this repetition, the constant training of putting on a shirt, or the brushing of the teeth. Still, at 11 years old, I’m still teaching Dan how to wipe his butt! I would imagine that my life will be a continuous series of teaching Dan how to tend to his body.

I have been reading Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren. In chapter 2 she talks about the body and says:

“We Christians believe in a God who, by becoming human, embraced human embodiment in fullness, right down to the toenails. Because of Christ’s embodiment, the ways we care for our bodies are not meaningless necessities that keep us well enough to do the real work of worship and discipleship. Instead, these small tasks of caring for our bodies, as quotidian as they are, act as an embodied confession that our Creator, who mysteriously became flesh, has made our bodies well and deserves worship in and through our very cells, muscles, tissues, and teeth.”

Truth be told, I rather look for ways that God is made evident in the museum though art, to uncover amazing “God in the gallery” moments. But God is also seeing fit to challenge me to find these awe inspiring God-moments in these daily, seemingly base, ordinary tasks of tending to my son’s body.

This is why Christianity is so appealing to me, because it posits a God that is incarnational. I like the fact that I can worship a God that came as a human body and knows exactly what it is to feel what we feel. Don’t get me wrong, I love the divine and the lofty, I get lost in the concepts and I crave intellectual stimulation and conversation. I need that in my life! But I also need to empathize , I need to feel and understand other people’s pain. Dan does this for me. He incarnates me, he makes me less snobby, more human and relatable. And when I can connect with someone over a vulnerability, that precise moment is instantaneously transformed into a divine one.

So I’ll continue to care for Dan’s body in hopes that he will eventually care for it himself. I don’t know how independent he will be but I do know that God is forming me into a caring human being through this special needs motherhood experience.