What Love Is

I don't like Valentine's Day.  Once New Year's passes, all the minor holidays are just sprinkles of sugar on the rest of the year for me...but Valentine's Day has always bothered me.  I guess because I felt that if you loved someone, you should show it every day, and why do we need a special day to do that? But thinking of it, and seeing that people actually do celebrate it started me thinking about love in general, and how the holiday started in the first place.

There are two or three versions of the story regarding St. Valentine.  One that he performed marriages in secret for young Roman soldiers who were supposed to stay single as they went into battle.  When Emperor Claudius discovered this, he ordered Valentine killed.  Another version has him in prison, falling in love with the jailkeeper's daughter, and handing her a final love note signed, "From your Valentine".  Still a third involves the modification of the pagan holiday Lupercalia, in which a goat and a dog were sacrificed at a cave said to be the birthplace of Romulus and Remus.  Pagan priests would then strip the hide from the goat, dip it in blood, and go throughout town gently slapping women with it.  Gross, right?  The women welcomed it.  It was said to bring fertility. The women would then put their names in a jar, and bachelors would draw a name.  They would be paired with that woman for a year, which encouraged marriage.  (see http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day for the full article regarding Valentine's Day.)

However it started, it's clear that the candy hearts and stuffed animals mean something to someone.  But love itself...what is that?  What does that mean?  It can mean so many things to so many different people.  This is what it has come to mean to me:

Love is friendship.  Friendship with your spouse and your children, and the respect that should come with friendship.  The fun and trust that comes with friendship.

Love is tolerance.  Recognizing that your significant other is not perfect, and neither are you, and being patient when they aren't at their best.

Love is forgiveness.  Realizing that people are going to make mistakes...that's what life is about, and loving them enough to forgive them for those mistakes and help them move on.

Love is time.  Making time for the people in your life, even when work and school and chores become a pressing chorus in your head...all of that will still be there.  People don't last forever.

Love is beneath the surface.  When your wife has been throwing up all day and hasn't showered in two, or your husband has worked really late and comes home tired and sweaty...if you can still look at them in that state and appreciate them and feel affection, that is love.

Love is acceptance.  You and your significant other are not always going to want to do the same things or go the same places.  One of you might want to spend some time with friends.  One of you may be the kind of person that needs time alone to focus and center.  And that is okay.  You shouldn't be in each other's pocket all the time.  You're married, not joined at the hip.

Love is validating.  Letting the other person know that their feelings are recognized, and that even if you don't agree with them, you are listening..that is love.

Love is touching.  What person doesn't love to be touched or held or kissed or hugged?  For some people, this is essential.

Love is encouragement.  The person you love may have dreams and goals.  Sometimes those may be different from yours, or from what you think they should be doing.  That's okay.  If you love them, don't burst their bubble. Encourage them.

Love is reassurance.  Yes, I am here.  Yes, I love you and always will. Yes, you are important to me.  Simple words that go a long way, that should be said often.

Love is gray hair.  It's watching your loved one's face change and body change and hair fall out or turn gray and it not mattering at all, because to you, they still look the same.

Love is meaningful conversation.  Beyond, how was your day?  It's,  What do you think of this?  What do you think I should do?  Did you hear about this? This is so funny, listen!

Love is sacrifice.  Always.  Putting the other person above yourself, their wants, their needs, making them important in your life...that is love.

Why It Matters

Over the past two weeks, Logan has been able to attend his Sunday school class at church and also participate in Cub Scouts.  These are things that for years I wished and hoped that he could do, and it just never seemed to work out.  Either he was not capable of sustaining a calm for that long, or it just wasn't the right time.

A dear friend of mine and her husband became Logan's Sunday School teachers.  She messaged me one day to let me know and I was overjoyed.  She has read my blog from its inception, and knew exactly what she was going to be dealing with.  She and her husband made Logan's first day of class fun and memorable, and he wants to go back.

Last Wednesday, Logan begged to go to Cub Scouts.  I was sure that I would have to bring him home again as soon as we got there, but this time was different.  The couple that was there understand autism very well, and they said, "We'll make it work".  Logan has to try extra-hard in a social setting not to stim or get out of control.  When he wants something badly enough, he will make every effort to control himself.  This is what I have seen him do for the last two Wednesdays.  He has had a positive experience there each time and wants to return.

Why does all of this matter?  It's just a couple of little things, you might say.  I am so grateful to these four people.  So I will tell you why it matters:

1) It matters because Logan knows that he's different and wants, like everyone else, to be included.
2) It matters because for years, literally years, I have struggled with taking kids to and from church, working out who will watch Logan, what we will do with Logan if he can't stay at church, and what will happen with him on Wednesday nights if his father doesn't get home from work on time.  It has been years that my husband has rushed home on Wednesdays, tired and exhausted, just so he can take care of our son.  It has been years of never, EVER, being able to attend a class at church with my husband, because one of us is always needed at home.
3) It matters because the more people who get to know Logan, the more people will understand what autism is and what it isn't.
4) It matters because the more kids that deal with Logan, the more kids will understand that some people are different and that's okay.
5) It matters because serving others is one of the highest forms of love you can show someone.
6) It matters because it makes a lot of stress in our lives disappear.

I would like to publicly thank these four amazing people, and people everywhere, who take the time to help out families who need it, and who see the benefit and the extreme need for including children who would otherwise be overlooked.  You make the world a better place, each day.

The Thing We Feared

Above you will see a picture of Harry Houdini, a Hungarian magician known for his daring escape attempts that few can replicate to this day.  He is often referred to as an "escape artist", and many illusionists strive to follow in his footsteps by wrapping themselves in chains, being buried alive, or exposing themselves to any number of life-threatening situations.

I've put his picture up because many autistic children are often referred to as "escape artists".  For some parents, keeping their autistic child safe can be a feat of nightmarish proportions.  Many of these children wander off, leaving the house or mom or dad's side suddenly.  One boy ran away from his mother in a grocery store.  She frantically spent over and hour looking for him, involving other shoppers and store personnel in the search.  They found him wedged behind some packages of toilet paper on a lower shelf, hiding.  Another child was not so lucky.  She left her backyard and wandered out into some land owned by her family.  She drowned in a stock pond.

It's frightening and no one wants to think about it.  But if you have such a child, you must  think about it.  Over the past several weeks I have noticed a disturbing trend in my own son...not listening as well, or seeming to not hear me at all.  A few days ago he climbed over the back fence.  Today he went into the front yard and ran down the road.

It seems we have a budding escape artist on our hands.  It's not something I had thought to deal with again.  In his younger years, he would do the same things...then he seemed to develop an inhibition about being too far from home.  Now it seems, as he is getting older, that that inhibition is slowly developing into a desire for freedom.

What can a parent do, who has a child like this?  We still have special locks on all of our windows.  We can buy door chimes from a home improvement store that ring when a door is opened or closed.  We can attach a GPS locator to our son's clothing, or have him wear an ID bracelet.  None of this foolproof.  If my son decides to take off his clothes, or take off his bracelet, what then?

The only other thing we can do is educate him, over and over and over and over again, about the dangers of straying away from home.  Beyond that, worry will lead to excessive stress.  Eventually, you learn to deal with each new challenge as it comes and stop anticipating the ones that may never arrive.

Little Victories

Every Wednesday night I take my son and daughter to church to participate in planned activities for the evening.  For my daughter it's usually some sort of craft or food or something, for my son it's Boy Scouts or a combined activity in which the young men and young women both participate, such as volleyball.  There is also a Cub Scout troop that meets at our church on Wednesdays. Logan is nine.  He is old enough to be in Cub Scouts.

Logan knows that he is different.  That is something that a lot of people don't realize.  He knows that he's different, and he is painfully aware of and sensitive to being left out of anything.  In the past I have tried to take him to Cub Scouts with little success.  We would arrive at the church and he would either want to hang out in the janitor's closet and look at the vacuum cleaners, or run around and be disruptive.  This would necessitate a quick trip home to drop him back off with his dad, which would also trigger a temper tantrum.  In short, it was more trouble than it was worth.

This last Wednesday we got ready to go and Logan said, "I want to come."  I told him no, explained that he couldn't and why he couldn't but he became more and more upset.  He got upset to the point that he was crying and exclaiming plaintively, "I want to come!  I want to come!"  In other words, "Don't leave me behind.  I want to be like everyone else."

It broke my heart and I couldn't say no.

So Logan put on a Cub Scout shirt and we went.  I fully anticipated having to bring him home again that evening, but that didn't happen.

The Cub Scout leaders turned out to be a sweet couple that had raised a child on the spectrum.  Their son, a really cool, sweet guy, just earned his Eagle Scout. I tentatively peered into the doorway and they ushered Logan in, shooed me away and said, "It will be fine.  We'll make it work."

That night, Logan stayed.  He participated in all the activities.  He earned five or six beads and was voted Scout of the day.  Things that any normal nine year old can do, but for him was unprecedented.  It was amazing and at the same time, shaming.  I should have tried harder to include him. I sometimes feel like there is so much about my son that I still don't know, and he surprises me all the time.  He wasn't ready before.  But that night, he was.

That night I called my mother and told her all about what had happened.  I cautioned her.  "I'm not getting my hopes up; next time he may not want to go at all." And she said something so simple and so profound,

"We have to celebrate the little victories when they come."

A truth to carry with you, into the spectrum and throughout life itself.

The Year of the Pirate

Well, I can't say I'm sad that 2013 is over.  What a difficult year.  My husband and I both, on separate occasions, contracted  unrelated, life threatening infections.  It took him a year to recover.  Mine was less serious, although it caused part of my face to blow up like a balloon.  Two trips to the ER and one scar later, I was fine.  I don't even mind that scar so much...it's on my chin and now I can become a pirate.

This year was difficult in so many other ways.  Family moved away, lost jobs, found jobs.  Friends left, suddenly and unexpectedly and painfully. Relationships changed.  It was a year of goodbyes and a year of pain and a year of a lot of uncertainty.  So of course, I welcomed the new year with open arms.

The thing I like most about the New Year is that it's full of possibility.  I have so many plans for this year that I get excited just thinking about it. I have two semesters of college to think about and look forward to, and a lot of other things in the works.

The other thing about plans  is that you can make them all you want to, but there is never any certainty that they will work out or that things will go the way you want.  Probably one of the most difficult lessons I learned in 2013 was that I cannot control everything.  It's a no-brainer. No one can control everything. Even in life-in your own, personal life-there are variables that are outside of your reach.  Things, or probably more accurately, people, will pull the rug out from under you, drop you on your ass and leave your head spinning.  Things that you never in a million years thought would happen, will happen.  And then you can waste a whole lot of time crying and worrying over what happened, and why did you make a/b/c decision that led to that particular scenario, and you can spend hours pulling it apart, wondering what went wrong and what you could have done differently.  You can try, until you are exhausted physically and emotionally, to succeed at something, fix something, apologize for something, and still, the best you can do may not be good enough in the end. And I'm here to tell you:

Let it go.

I spent the better part of 2013 making these mistakes:  looking at different situations, blaming myself for things outside of my control, apologizing for things that I had no business apologizing for.  And you know what?  It was a huge waste of time! It was a waste of time because a) I wasn't the only person involved in a/b/c scenarios b) I couldn't go backwards and undo whatever I did, or re-do things that I thought weren't good enough,  so why worry about it now?  and c)some situations really are outside of your control, like serious illness or the choices that someone else makes.

This year, your time can be best spent caring for and loving the people who honest to gosh love you and would never desert you.  Your time can be best spent improving yourself, either through learning something new or taking care of yourself.  Your time can be best spent creating a level of spirituality for yourself that you haven't reached yet.  For whatever that means to you...drawing closer to God, staying on the eightfold path, or simply creating peace in your life where none existed before.  And your time can be best spent serving others..whether they deserve it or not...this is one of the best ways to learn more about yourself and draw your focus outward instead of inward.

I wish all of my readers a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2014!