Can't Leave Summer Behind Fast Enough

I was going to write a post all about how parenting sucks.  I was also going to write a post about trying to find food to feed picky eaters.  I'll still probably do both soon.  I know that parenting a kid with ADD isn't as bad as parenting a kid with autism, or a kid that has down syndrome, but you know what?  It's really hard.  This summer has completely 100% kicked my ass.  I'm not saying that nothing good has come out of it, because that isn't true, but I hope never to repeat a summer like this one again. 

I've learned some lessons this summer:

• If you're poor, you need to save up to send your kid to summer camp a year in advance.  That means I need to start a fund now.  Summer camp is essential to my summer sanity.  My kid doesn't like it, but this summer was torture and because I work several hours a day and then I have to run errands and cook and supposedly clean I don't supervise his activities.  That means he has spent an entire summer playing video games and watching movies.

• Feeding my child isn't likely to get any easier any time soon.  Nor will it become less expensive.  There is so much waste due to his rapidly changing tastes and things not tasting right and crackers going stale and trying new foods that don't cut it.  I keep hoping it's going to get easier but it's not.  Companies of packaged food, which my kid depends on for survival, keep sneaking in more and more High Fructose Corn Syrup into their products.  It isn't enough to read a label of a product once.   You have to read the labels every time you buy them.  So I need to get over it.

• Martial arts was the best thing that happened this summer.  Though it isn't going to change my kid into a regular person, it is helping all of us expend some energy and get out some aggressions.  I think this may build into an excellent tool.

• When I'm feeling really low I don't feel like cooking.  Which sucks.

• Next early spring I need to work out a drip system for my whole garden so that watering it won't be such a chore.  I say this every year but I would deal better with the summer if I finally just did it.  This, of course, will only happen if I start saving money for it now.

• I can read lots of books again- just like the old days when I used to read a book every other day of my life...provided I only read books I've already read that I know I will like and that will put me in a good place emotionally. 

• Having borrowed other people's children for many sleepovers this summer and having to deal with negotiations between bickering boys constantly, I can say with confidence that having more than one kid is NOT a boon to my life.  I am glad I get to send the other kids home when they get to be too much.  Good god!  Kids can be so annoying.

Those were all very random things I learned.  Another great thing that happened this summer is that I met up with an old mutual friend of a friend and totally bonded because Max and her 6 year old girl were carved from the same volcano of hell as each other and this woman knows exactly EXACTLY what I go through parenting my boy and I cannot begin to tell you what balm it is to me to be able to get complete comprehension from another parent.  Oh yeah, the extreme picky eating?  Check.  The complete meltdowns when socks bunch up or the seam can be felt in the shoe?  Check.  Freakish necessity for routines to be exactly the same every single day every single time?  Check.  The challenge of keeping friends?  Check.  The constant worried mind?  Check.  Oh yes, she goes through everything I do.  It is such a relief.  Am I allowed to say that again?  So I'm going to keep in contact with her now because I think we can both use some moral support while trying to kindly raise our completely different, challenging, and brilliant kids.

But folks, I'm tired.  I have ten more years to see my kid to relative maturity and I don't see how I'm going to make it.  Especially with only tonic and lime to get me through most of the week.

I was going to write about how parenting makes me feel like this moth trapped in the beer bottle.  However, I have had time to reflect a little bit and I'm going to just keep on moving forward.  I have Max.  Max has me.  My parenting will not destroy my child.  I think, actually, I'm pretty good at parenting my special needs kid but I just don't always have the energy to do what I need to do.  Things slip sideways for quite a while before we get them standing up again.  All I can do is my best and if that means my kid spent his whole summer watching movies and playing video games...lucky him!