Change Is Looming

Dear Addie,

Well, here we are, it’s officially fall and I’m pretty sure we’ve finally mastered our school/activity/therapy chaos – I mean routine. In years past, this mastery would leave me breathing a sigh of relief at the control we’ve had over our lives, but in a new turn of events, I somehow feel panicked and stressed about what’s to come. Not exactly reaping the rewards of our accomplishments much, but I’m also not shocked due to the predictably unpredictable-ness of just about everything we do.

Allow me to explain.

You see Ad, you’re a big fifth grader now! God willing, this will be your last year at the school we’ve grown to love & trust. With this milestone comes some anxiety of loving and trusting what comes next. Anxiety I’m sure that is shared among many on the journey when inevitable change is looming. Where’s that crystal ball when we need it?!

Addie, I promise I’m not trying to be dramatic, but with a child like yourself that struggles communicating, trusting a new group with you, my heart, that doesn’t communicate like most is daunting and actually scary. How do I know what has happed at school? How do I know if you are being bullied? I’ve seen so many awful stories of autistic children being treated so unfairly or dare I say inhumanely in schools it leaves me with a permanent pit of worry in my stomach. You try as a parent to say “that would never happen at our school…” but the reality is we “hope” it would never happen at our school. So, what do we do?

Truth Ad, I hear about kids that get asked how school was, and give these generic one-word responses like “fine” or “OK.” In full disclosure, your brother and sister love to talk (and loudly at that), so we’ve never experienced this type of conversation or lack thereof. With you, it’s almost always an echolalic reply of just repeating whatever I’m saying or occasionally we’ll hear something that sounds every ounce of random to the conversation we’re trying to produce like something your teacher (or goodness it literally could be you just overhearing any other teacher in the school) said to another student. “(insert name of student who is not you) sit down.” Leaving us only knowing that of your whole school day (insert name of student not being you) was perhaps naughty that day and needed to sit down. So where do we go from here? How do I find calm to this inevitable change looming? The answer - therapy. Particularly speech therapy.

Now one might be shocked to know that we weren’t currently enrolled in speech at this point in our lives. We’ve had it in the past and you get it at school, but it just wasn’t dare I say easy for us to plop into our schedule with our party of 5 outside of school. Pediatric therapy, in general, is super hard to find availability in (I have never been on so many waitlists as I have for therapy) and it was either really far from our home, making it almost impossible to make feasible, you needed to go 4-5 times a week leaving room for no other therapy (or family time for that matter) or you needed to be pulled from school during the day making it a choice between education or therapy. Now that is only a smidge of the challenges preventing us from speech at this point in our lives and some may read that and think the answer is simple to what they would do, but the reality is you’re not an only child and there are only 24 hours in a day. So, we do the best we can with what’s in front of us.

Recently an opportunity came up from one of those infamous lists we had been waiting on and as luck would have it – it was very close to our home, and they could get you in with an evening appointment. If that didn’t feel like I put it all out into the universe and got a reply I don’t know what would! This is what we needed! What my heart needed to move forward with change. With all the language you have, it was time for some extra dedication to working on the art of conversations via expressive, receptive, and pragmatic skills. Ah yes, once again skills I thought I’d never know so much about in my lifetime. You never stop learning Ad, you literally never stop learning.

With a few sessions under our belt now, we still have a ways to go, but we are seeing progress moving in the right direction, baby steps, but forward. And for the record you are taking this therapy being “our home away from home” almost literally – with the facility being a renovated house turned speech center, you walk in, kick your shoes off, and lay down on the waiting room couch like you own the joint. I’m honestly shocked you haven’t asked the receptionist to “Make a pizza!” yet.

Addie, I’m super proud of just how much progress you have made in just about all aspects of your life. We have no crystal ball or knowing what lies ahead, so all we can do is just keep working hard to try and prepare. We got this.

Love you.

Mom