Tag: parenting

The Macro and The Micro

There is a difference between the macro and the micro. The macro is the big picture. It’s the view of our life from the outside. It’s filled with generalizations. The micro is our life on the inside. It’s the day to day, minute by minute decisions and occurrences that are missed when you only see the big picture.

The macro is the view from our social media feed. It’s the images of Hawaii and hockey games, Globetrotters, and Florida. It’s the smiles and the perception of a normal family living a normal life.

The micro is the structure and planning that goes into every day that allows those experiences to happen. It’s the fallout after a game when he is too tired to regulate his behavior, or the next day when he is so tired that his routine is off and we have to start over from scratch.

The macro is seeing him leave the house with a backpack on his back heading to school. It’s math, and reading, and recess and lunch. It’s a science project or a school play.

The micro is how difficult school is for him and how he only goes for a few hours a week. It’s seeing the extra hours he puts in every day doing schoolwork and how hard he has to work trying to keep up with his peers. It’s falling behind socially and trying to make up for it in other ways. It’s 504 and IEP meetings, and lawyers to navigate a system that was not designed to support his needs.

The macro is a good job with the cool job title and working for a huge corporation. It’s the view from the tower.

The micro is the stress of a difficult job and wanting to succeed there while so much is happening at home. It’s traveling for work and being thousands of miles away, worried that I will be needed. It’s the pressure to constantly perform to keep it all together and an inability to turn it off. It’s the strain that puts on relationships. It’s the fear of it all tumbling down and losing it all.

The macro is the family living in the city, hip and trendy in a condo in the sky.

The micro is why. It’s living in the city to be closer to the hospital and the endless appointments. It’s needing to be closer to a public school that has to take him, whether they can support his needs or not. It’s removing as much maintenance from our lives so that we can fill the moments between appointments with joy instead of chores.

The macro is a kind, generous, happy kid that makes the world around him smile.

The micro is the lonely, sad, tired kid that struggles every day. It’s the kid that takes medicine three times a day that causes depression and behavior issues. It’s the kid that doesn’t have many friends and struggles to learn how to interact with the ones he does have. It’s three years on an impossible diet. It’s having things that he loves taken away because they were meant for a different life. It’s trying to figure out what is meant for this life.

The world around us is filled with these different perspectives. It’s a choice to see the world from above or to get down on our hands and knees to inspect what lies below the surface. Macro is the aggregate. Micro is the individual. Which one you see depends on where you are and which lens you choose to use to see the world.

Neverland

Early in the morning, my son had a seizure. As his body tensed and contorted, his lungs expelled air through his vocal chords. The sound it made traveled between the open door of our rooms and woke me up.

I pulled off my covers and made my way into his room. He had sat up, but he was already making his way back on to his pillow. Standing at the head of his bed, I reached my hand through the slats and stroked the top of his head. I whispered to him that he was going to be okay and that he should go back to sleep. He eventually did, so I returned to bed.

I checked the clock. There might have been enough time for me to fall back to sleep, but it was also close to the time that I needed to wake up. While I pondered what to do, I stared at the screen of our monitor. My son was asleep, with a blanket draped over him and his two fingers that he still sucks in his mouth.

My restless, exhausted brain started to drift. Someday, I thought, he’s going to grow up. Instead of the sound of a child, I will hear the deeper sound of a young man echoing through the hall. I shuddered at the eventuality and gave up on the idea of going back to sleep.

I started to think about what else was going to change but stopped myself. I see the boy on the monitor and can’t think of him being anything else. If I knew where Neverland was, I would take him there so that he would never have to grow up.

In Neverland, he could stay the boy who sleeps in our bed when he is sad or afraid. The boy who sits on my lap when he needs to be held. The boy who looks at the world with wonder and compassion. The boy who doesn’t feel the pressure of the adult world. The boy we can shield from how ugly that world can be.

I want to keep him at this age because it’s only going to get harder for him. He’s going to start questioning his value and his worth. His gentle soul and open, hopeful, dreaming nature will be tested, as will his belief in magic and possibility. I don’t want him to ever doubt that he can fly because the moment he does, he will cease to be able to do it.

I know that instead of wishing for him to not grow up, my responsibility is in preparing him for the world. Instead of trying to keep him young forever, my job is to help him grow in a way that encourages the magic inside him. Instead of losing it, it will be what helps him believe that he will always be able to fly. But I thought we would have more time before the real world penetrated our existence. Maybe I thought it would never happen.

When Peter invites Wendy to forget everything and join him to live in Neverland and to never grow up, Wendy answers “Never is an awfully long time.”

I stared at the monitor and thought that “never” was not nearly long enough.

Being Seen and Unseen

My son is becoming more aware of how he feels. He’s becoming more aware of how other people see him. He’s making that connection and noticing that he’s different from other kids.

A few weeks ago, he met with his neuropsychologist and she asked him about school. He told her that he wanted the kids to look at him. He wanted to be seen. My heart broke for him. This is the age when kids start to develop friendships that go beyond an activity or beyond school. And he felt invisible.

It’s been hard for him to make those connections. In part, it’s because second grade has been tough on him mentally and physically. There have been days where he has been too tired to make it to school or stay for the full day. It’s hard to build friendships when you aren’t there. It’s harder to insert yourself into relationships that have already been established.

But there are emotional challenges that make it hard, too. He does feel different from his classmates and he doesn’t quite know how to interact with them. He doesn’t always see the line between funny and inappropriate. Even if he did, he has a hard time regulating those actions.

He is also socially behind the other kids because he was so sick and spent a lot of his time with us or in the hospital. He wasn’t going on play dates. He didn’t go to a lot of birthday parties. He didn’t have those opportunities to learn how to interact with his peers. It’s like trying to compete in a race when all the other participants had a head start. None of them are going to slow down to let you catch up, and they’re too far ahead for you to even know where the course is.

The result is that he doesn’t feel like he has a place there, or that anyone cares that he is there. School must be a very lonely place for him, but we keep pushing him to go, thinking it will get better.

Now, we’re seeing those feelings come in to play outside of school now, too. The other day, we were at the pool with friends and another group came in that included kids from my son’s class. My son got quiet and covered himself with his towel. He whispered that he only wanted to be seen at school.

At first, I thought it was because there was a history with one of the kids from that group. But I also wondered if my son was trying to separate school from the outside world. It was as if he didn’t want the feelings from school to bleed into his safe, private world at home.

I want my son to have friends, and to feel special and important. I don’t want him to feel like an outcast. Sometimes, that desire for him to fit in causes me to overreact when he is trying to be funny but crosses a line. Instead of gently guiding him to a different behavior, I say things in a way that I worry make him feel shame. Not intentionally, and not with any words that are meant to convey that message. But my frustration with the world comes out sounding like I’m frustrated with him.

It’s one thing to have the kids at school reacting the way they do. It’s another to have his parents response the same way. My son is walking around and having everyone tell him what he is doing is wrong. We aren’t seeing him or, if we are, we’re telling him it’s wrong. I’d want to run and hide, too.

I can’t control the rest of the world or how it responds to him. I can teach him the best I can how to live in it. To get him the support and services that he needs. To do what I can to structure his life the best way we know how with where he is today, knowing that will change. To help him develop a strong sense of self, but to be aware and present enough to know when that fails him. Because trying to force everything and not being aware of where he is will do more damage than the world can do to him.

But I can be more aware of how I am responding to my son and the situation. I can control my own actions and respond with loving kindness to where my son is at any moment. The last thing I want to do is to take away the one safe place that he has. I want his home to be a place where he is seen, truly seen, for who he is.

And I want him to know that who he is is amazing.