Pug

When Lauren was three months old, my Mom walked into the back room to discover Lauren lying motionless in my arms while I cried my heart out.  My poor mother went white.  I had been feeding her.  I always fed her in the back room because mealtime was not a good time for Lauren.  She would eat and then her little body would start to tense up with discomfort and she would scream.  She had terrible reflux.  It was so bad that she could actually make herself sit up from pain when she was only a few weeks old.  I never felt safe with her sleeping anywhere but on my chest at an angle.  The doctor told me it would help to add a small amount of cereal to bottled breast milk (he said breast milk would also be easier on her tummy) so she could keep more down.  This meant I had to pump.  Helen at 19 months found the whole cycle very cow like and fascinating.  Mom on the couch with the human milking contraption, one hand holding the suction cup to the bosom, squeezing milk into a tube that traveled into a bottle held between my thigh and seat cushion.  The other hand was busy feeding Lauren who I had balanced on my lap between the hose and fascinated Helen.   It helped, but eating for her was still difficult.

The day Mom walked in was the first time I could remember her eating and falling peacefully to sleep.  I had forgotten what it was like to have a baby who could eat and be happy.  I was crying for this peace she had been missing out on.

I had blocked this from my memory until yesterday when I sat alone at the dining room table with Lauren while she read to me from her “Pug” reader.  Lauren’s reaction to school is a lot like her reaction to eating as a baby.  She has to do it but it is always, always a struggle.  For 3 years I have been like a rat in a maze, looking for the cheese that will help her but I always hit a dead end.

Several years ago, before I had kids, back when I was stupid, I had an acquaintance who had the most amazing little girl.  I adored this child.  I didn’t think John and I could have children and this girl captured my heart and honestly gave me hope.  Her parents were a few years older than John and I.  They hadn’t thought they could have a child either, then….whala, here she was.   Maybe she was two or three when they started to realize something was going on with her.  Something where her brain wasn’t connecting properly with some of her muscles, she was going to need a lot of help to get them to communicate.  Her Mom was explaining this to us when I popped out with the most ridiculous statement ever.  I announced that basically she was perfect, smart, and beautiful, this would be something that would only make her a stronger person because she had a small adversity to overcome in her youth.   I will forever be impressed with this woman for not strangling me at that moment, or calling me on being a moron.  I don’t know that I would be so nice.  The woman was incredibly talented and had a fabulous business she had to give up to help her daughter overcome this “small adversity”.

What I did not realize from the “I don’t have a child, I want one, I think yours is perfect” perspective was that once you have a child everything changes.  It isn’t that you want them to be perfect; it is that you want them to not feel different.  You want them to be accepted and the one thing we all know from childhood is that a child who walks with a crutch is different.  A child who can’t read anything at the end of first grade is different.

So, sitting at the table yesterday reading Pug with Lauren has been a three year journey through a maze of autism tests, memory tests, iq tests, tutors, special ARD meetings, speech teachers and finally a test for ADD.  A test for ADD which turns out to have been pretty conclusive.  I do not think it is the only issue and the doctor informed me that any medication would give a 25% to 45% enhancement in focus.  That of course doesn’t sound very good to me but I am a person who can focus if I really have to.  I have no idea how much 25% helps someone who is distracted by lace on a table runner and the pictures of a house matching each other on every page of a 75 page reader.  I really don’t know what it is like to process the world through this lens, but as a Mom, I want to help Lauren in any way possible.

With my breath held, I gave Lauren 3cc’s of a medicine to help her focus before school yesterday and sent her off hoping that the 10,000 side effects I had read about would not happen.  I sent several notes to her teacher, ready to hop in the car and head to the emergency room.  As it turns out, she made it through the day, rode the bus home with her sister and walked home from school the same little 7 year old I had kissed before she left.  She was still telling me about free time Friday, she still wanted to have left over Easter candy, she still went outside to swing on the swing.  The only difference was that for the first time ever, we sat down to practice reading and she read every. single. story. in her reader.  We normally struggle to get through one.  Then, she said, “hey, lets have a peak at the next story to see what happens”.  Cross my heart that is what she said.  I sat at the table crying on the inside because that is what we parents do when a struggle is made easier for our children.