Rescue me!

It hurts! Tightening/interlocking my locs hurts! Ribs, shoulders, the bones I use to sit…I want it over and done with but my day didn’t belong to me. The title was typed yesterday evening when my girl who had made me hurt myself badly by changing and dressing her in the morning, was still making me hurt myself in the evening by making me follow her to the garage and other places while I was trying to replace today’s burgers she’d found and eaten.😫

It’s 1am and I’m awake because a door leading outside suddenly swung open loudly and bashed against the wall, waking me. 😫

I want you to rescue me from my girl! When I try fill the pill boxes – her twin sister has also joined the pill box users now that the paed knows she can swallow tablets-she pulls my hand as I’m counting, opening the pill containers, and pulling tablets out the blister pack. It is frustrating. It means walking to where she’s pulling me to, extra standing and walking for longer than desired,and it hurts.🥹

But refusal will lead to a tantrum. She had a meltdown yesterday afternoon while her (their) aide was here. I felt so bad for him, he was hovering around so close to her and she was unable to regulate herself and nothing would calm her down. You could see his “How do we fix this?” nature coming out… Her rampage ended with a satisfying breaking of an unopened Purity baby food glass jar.😩

Rescue me from the insanity which is present daily and dysregulates every child.

Her twin and bigger sister also took me hostage in the evening! Wanted me to bake a cake. I obliged and got them to work with me so they feel like they were part of the process. It was nothing fancy. I ordered a gluten free cake mix pack because it’s cheaper than getting all the various ingredients separately. I looked forward to eating some. But a certain girl ate lots of it. And it wasn’t the six year old who had been begging me to buy a mix for them.🤦🏾‍♀️

The previous day, I’d wanted to tear my hair out! I need two avocados to make ice cream with. I had four in the fridge. They asked to have one and I agreed for them to have one. Next thing I knew, each had their own one and there was only one avocado left! But hey, they enjoyed working with their avocados and eating them!

My food thief talking about her autistic sister, “See!? It’s like she’s autistic. Wearing headphones…” Funny all the other stereotypes she doesn’t mention which also make her sister really seem autistic, like hand flapping. But it was cute because she found it cute that her baby sister felt she needed to wear them.

This photo below shows you another time I was captured by our roaming non speaker while busy! But to be fair, she had been miserable and we didn’t know why, so I took her and made her lie down on me and she took advantage of that. Going from sucking her thumb to manipulating the video all while not letting me get up. 😅

2:18am. I keep falling asleep and then something wakes me. That’s been the trend whether or not the children wake me in the night or not!

What I do also need rescuing from is her gifted sister who keeps asking for this and that every single day, many times a day. “She’s the smart one,” Amarissa says cheerfully after following her to my room as always. She finds it easy to say because she herself is creative. But regarding her brother about whom she asked, “What is Mickey’s strength?” I have no answer. Truth is, he is failing in every direction. Motor skills are stagnant. But I’ll see what his OT report says and see. But from what we see at home, he is not creative, not academic. Not able in a way that would see him in a specific direction in high school especilaly. Private special schools ask for his psych reports when I ask about space in their schools, and then keep silent when they’ve received them.

I need rescuing from stress and heartache.

I signed two of the children up for ‘schools for children with learning barriers’ through the government with the Paed despite the dad saying the schools aren’t good enough. Last I knew, waiting lists were two years long and that already is a long wait that just demoralises me. Then, last night I saw a post by a mother in my ‘district’ -we don’t have a special school in our district so we’d be sent to another- saying she’d been waiting for four years for her autistic son to be placed. He’s not coping in a mainstream school and is often called to go fetch her son by 9:00am. If even those already in the government system have waited this long, what hope is there for mine?

Rescue me from dejection. I was meant to have sent them all away two years ago already. I feel the pain when the day is done and I still have to plan lessons or find ways to try reinforce what the two aren’t understanding. Four more years of none of them going to school will kill me. I force myself to go plan based on their performance and how far they got during the day.

And so we come to me. Our non speaker has had bad days. Lots of screaming, crying, smashing of glass jars of food. I was never good at remembering my own medication as it is. Now with the increased anxiety and busy-ness, I go days without using my inhaler. My eldest has been in bed since Monday. Very, very unwell with bad fever, sore throat, abdominal pain and diarrhea. I’ve gone without using my nasal spray for too many days than I can even remember and now my sinuses are blocked. Forgot to put eye ointment in so my eyes are bad.

(It’s 1:33am the day after I started this post.) The headache, blocked nose, gritty eyes and need to brush my teeth can’t be ignored. I’ve just sprayed my nose and am hoping my throat is ‘just’ sore from the dryness and not from catching my boy’s bug. I had been going in an out with medication, liquids, honey etc and last night we just couldn’t handle his poor sister who had had a bad day anyway, so I called him to try.

Rescue me from neglecting myself.

And I will hope for your rescue from anything assailing you. 🙏🏾