I don’t think I could exaggerate what a tough start it was to 2012 for Oscar. Watching New Years Eve fireworks from a Mona Vale Hospital bed was not on anyone’s agenda and the fact we were back there for 12 days in April/May was a curve ball that took both of us months to recover from.
Do you remember the April/May stay? It was really the beginning of my downfall into the abyss that is chronic depression and anxiety. I keep going back to those posts because now? A mere seven months later? I am not there anymore and indeed am so far from that place I need to keep checking it ever happened at all.
But this year has been challenging. Parenting a 14 year old with an intellectual disability is HARD. There’s anger and energy – physical, emotional – that needs to be channelled somewhere, SOMEHOW, but as to where and how is something every parent of a teenager with a disability wrestles with ever.single.day.
At Oscar’s School of Awesome presentation day last week the Principal spoke of exactly that. How once these kids hit high school you basically throw out all the strategies you used in early intervention and primary. It is still about communication and relating to others and all the rest but as a teenager? There is so much more at stake. Friendships come centre stage, how do you negotiate those relationships as well as all the hormones. There is violence and aggression. My GOD when Oscar loses it… the little guys are SCARED.
I mostly handle it badly. I mean, how do you treat someone like a teenager when they are essentially still a kid? How can I give him responsibility and rights and privileges when he can’t/won’t dry himself properly out of the shower. When every.single.night you have to oversee the going to bed routine or face a wet bed in the morning? When he can’t do up his school shorts or tie his laces?
I have had a lot of quiet despair this year about being Oscar’s mum. Knowing he’s at a school which comprehensively understands that makes it all a little easier.
Last weekend Oscar went to the Ignation Children’s Holiday Camp at Riverview. Four days, 30 kids with a physical or intellectual disability aged between 5 to 15. Free to families and sponsored by the Sony Foundation. Sometimes things come your way that restore your belief in the human condition to be nice to each other.
The most remarkable and heart-exploding part of all this is that students who have just finished Year 12 volunteer to be a part of it and are buddied with one of the kids for their entire stay. I’m presuming they’d already gone off and been carefree foolish teenagers on schoolies but I suspect these young adults are a bit of a special breed. Let’s say hello to Tom:
Tom just happened to be Head Boy at Riverview. He wants to be a doctor. Our HSC (school leaving results) came out today and he was in the honour’s list for five subjects. Yeah, Tom is probably going to be cure cancer, become Prime Minister and establish world peace. (Can you imagine being his parents. Dear GOD if they are not so proud of him their hearts explode daily… although I do wonder if he puts his dirty washing in the laundry and is, at least on occasion, a complete shit to his little brother.)
For four days he and Oscar hung out. They went on a ferry, which Oscar got to steer. They went to the aquarium, seemed to swim for about 10 hours a day, went for a ride on a Harley Davidson, dressed up as Batman for a disco and myriad other things. They made it to the nightly news:
Oscar came home with a scrapbook Tom had compiled for him which ended in a letter he wrote to us. Dude is SO going to be a doctor with THAT handwriting. This is a snippet:
I have discovered much about myself over the last few days and in Oscar I have seen the raw beauty of the human spirit.
From the roughest and most challenging of starts, 2012 came good.
Onward.
