Stopped Still Looking Up

Last week I was asked to picture our target audience at Little Wildflowers. It came to me quite quickly and it wasn’t a specific person I saw but a scenario. It was me, sitting in a rocking chair at 2am feeling helpless, lost and alone, scrolling through my phone for something that would make it all feel better. At the time I thought it was a diagnosis or a specialist I was looking for but now I think a group like ours was what I really needed. At the time I thought about how far we’ve come since those nights but this week I’ve realised that I am still that mum. We have done a lot of learning and discovering since then. We have solved some of our challenges, built an extensive toolbox to manage the ‘unsolveable’ ones and had a couple of big breakthroughs. However, we still have times where things aren’t right, when our Little Wildflower is ‘off’, his teacher questions what is up with him and his father and I throw our hands in the air because the world has gone and flipped on its head…again.

Yesterday we had a consultation via skype with a new practitioner for the first time in nearly a year. The last one we worked with helped us on a few levels and things have been settled for quite a while but with those challenges out of the picture we have been able to see others and it has become apparent that it is time to peel back another layer. The consult went well, the practitioner is the right one for us in this moment and we finished up with a treatment plan that makes sense to me and I’m really happy with. Despite all of that I went to bed last night and woke up this morning feeling flat. I could feel myself reverting back to ‘I need to get everything perfect now’ and ‘I’ve let him slip and that’s why we are here again’. While I recognised the thoughts enough to stop myself getting into a flap I still felt overwhelmed. After a terrible night sleep there were too many jobs ahead and not enough time or energy. I felt an overall sense of dread as I thought ‘here we go again, back on the rollercoaster’, ‘Will he refuse it all? Will it make a difference? Will we ever get there?’. It felt like we were starting all over again. It felt like I would never be able to get a handle on this. It felt like I just couldn’t cope with it. I sat with those feelings for most of the morning, I went back to bed feeling defeated and hard done by. I cried tears of frustration for a few minutes…and then I got up.

I got up and I reminded myself that those feelings are coming from an old story!!! I

told my mind that those thoughts don’t belong here anymore. ‘Here we go again’ becomes ‘here is another opportunity’ and ‘I can’t do this’ becomes ‘I wonder where this will take us’. I stopped myself thinking about what might have been if we had met this practitioner five or so years ago, about skipping all of the wild goose chasing and about getting there sooner because I know that this treatment plan would have made no sense to me five years ago. Would I have followed it if I didn’t believe in it or understand it? There are parts of it that my two year old would have flatly refused but at 6 he can understand that while it doesn’t taste delicious he is drinking it to help his body. This plan is perfect for where we are now and every plan before it has been necessary to get here. Maybe this one will address the underlying issue enough to heal his sensitivities, maybe there will be another layer or more after this one, I don’t know.

I do know that we will keep peeling them back as long as they keep presenting themselves because he’s our child and we want the best for him. While he is thriving at school in a way I could never have imagined it takes a huge toll on all of us to manage the balance. I am realistic about the fact that he won’t ‘manage’ the way I do when he’s out there on his own. I love the fact that this new treatment plan includes a component that he can use himself when he notices his nervous system reacting. Teaching him, as we go, to understand himself has always been a priority but I don’t want it to be so much for him to manage that he can’t cope with everyday life. The way his nervous system reacts and holds him hostage when we get the balance of all the possible inputs wrong is something I don’t want him to have to live with…so we keep going…so we are right with you in the thick of it again. We’ve come racing back down the roller coaster track and we are stopped still for a moment looking up at our next big climb.