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| This is a picture of how E.P. showed up for his assessment yesterday. |
The feeling that I am "raising a different species" permeated our 36 hour off island adventure.
It really helped me stay flexible and engaged with the borderland of "special needs" meeting "cultural expectation". What if my kid(s) are "special needs"? (So far both could be labeled with "sensory seeking" on the sensory processing spectrum and from yesterday it is very clear that E.P. is going to have a few other labels, which ones - I think I may be surprised by.)
What if what they have is indeed adaptive? That happens. For real. Humans evolve (they always have) and the fittest survive.
So far, what is happening internally for my children pushes them to regulate best with frequent free play in the wild/nature. What that is doing is creating the exact "love" for the natural world that environmentalists are suggesting we must cultivate in coming generations for us (and other species) to survive and heal/save the planet. Their instincts also push them to stay together as a family pack more than the cultural "norm" (some of the questions the psychologist asked made me realize how much E.P. instinctually fears life outside our pack - more so than other children his age.) I cannot deny that the needs of these children, since I've been given the privilege to be able to listen and respond to those needs, are creating different beings. Ones that stand out when I get them in public.
Here's what I noticed this trip off island:
E.P. gave a gift to every person he met - and inadvertently awakened gift-economy and sharing urges in people:
Just one example (he gives gifts ALL the time to almost everyone he spends time with, seriously, and he is a TRUE gift giver in the sense that he gives the very thing that is MOST important to him at that moment). He worked super diligently on a rainbow and pot of gold picture all morning in the hotel and then gave it to the guy that worked the front desk upon check out. The guy, so touched, offered for the kids to reach in to his (refined sugar and artificially colored ;-) halloween trick or treat basket (they are ready early at the hotel apparently). They looked at him like he was magic incarnate at that moment. Total joy and wonder.
My favorite moment of the entire trip was when after 4 hours of intensive testing that pushed E.P. into his most extreme behaviors, E.P. was desperately searching through his backpack as I was rushing him out the door (I was giving into the social training of respecting the psychologists time and the next patient waiting). He gave me his angry snarl that i know means "back off!" and kept looking until he produced a second pair of vampire teeth and ran over to the psychologist and said,
"Here, these are for you, they've only been worn once."
The psychologist received them with a sincere "Thank you! Now I am all ready for Halloween," and E.P. left the potentially completely bizarre childhood memory of being mentally poked and prodded with a smile that authentically says, "I feel connected and good." The kid is AMAZING.
E.P. experiences the environment as a third party present in all of his daily life:
We brought our own reusable cutlery (thanks to an Aunt Alice gift) and camping plates to the free hotel breakfast bar. E.P. hates styrofoam. This could be easily checked off as "just" a sensory thing - yet he will tell you how styrofoam is the WORST product in the world because it doesn't fully break down EVER yet breaks down small enough to harm and plague sea animals. Yet even with special sustainable tableware the automatic make-your-own-waffle machine had no appeal to him at all. It was like he saw the sea of beige non-living food and just turned off. The boy who can never stop eating wanted no breakfast. Unfortunately his "turning away/off" from the food looks like him "turning on". He tried to engage what was presented and just kept banging into frustration after frustration. Spilling, knocking over, claiming things weren't perfect enough….until, "ding! ding! ding!" I clued in…WE DON'T BELONG HERE. And, really, who does? NOTHING we were given in that room was aligned with "life". It was dead, nutrition-less food with a backdrop of morning news. And I would have eaten it if my son's behavior hadn't given me a stomach ache. Literally.
Yes, he has sensory issues. And yes, they are in line with saving the health of ourselves and the planet.
I find that amazing.
About 10 years ago my work with women in recovery started down a path that leads to the wild. My Red Tent on Rose Avenue happened. Then I needed my own Red Tent for pregnancy, childbirth, and early-childhood mothering…and I didn't have one. I consoled myself by creating plans for it in the future - so I would be able to offer to other women what I didn't have and desperately needed. One of the first things I began on was the children's curriculum that would be naturally nestled within the red tent. It is and will continue to be my most pressing and current work because I think it is even more needed than a red tent. Our children's futures are still malleable when it comes to our collective environmental fate…but not for long. (Alarm bells are ringing loud and clear but we've normalized them or drowned them out or entertained them away.) Life on the island is slow and quiet enough to rest the senses so that upon re-entry into the mainland and mainstream you hear the sirens LOUD AND CLEAR. Their fate is starting to set but if we put our all into it we can still affect the necessary changes…Today I am reveling in what I've been warming up to all along: this idea that I was GIFTED a naturally wild boy (tears in my eyes) to help me become who I am supposed to be in this second half of my life.
My questionnaires at the assessment had extensive questions about E.P.'s birth and pregnancy - and it made me realize HOW wild, natural, and "perfect" it all was…and it made me realize what I knew immediately after his birth. I was birthed into a new being "Mother of E.P." the same moment E.P. was born. I remember specifically, calmly, trying to discern if I was on a birthing bed or my death bed when I was ready to begin pushing him out - and I was 100% unafraid - just open at that moment. Everyday mothering E.P. is reliving his birthday - but unprotected by the natural hormones of labor I often go to fear rather than curiosity. Today I am choosing for curiosity. I am choosing to believe in nature's laws rather than the culture's and see my son (and daughter) as gifts to a planet that desperately needs them exactly as they were made. Today I am choosing to REALLY mean it when I say my children are my truest teachers. I am excited for what we are meant to do together and all the change and hope that is still possible for the planet.
