| In her book, A Special Mother: Getting Through the Early Days of a Child’s Diagnosis of Learning Disabilities and Related Disorders, LD activist and author Anne Ford devotes an entire chapter to several ways mothers of children with learning disabilities can take care of themselves. Here's an excerpt. |
How to Focus on your Needs
We must not fall into the trap of thinking that concern for ourselves somehow takes away or lessens our concern for our children. We mothers of children with LD have enough concern and worry to blanket the world. Surely, we can spare a little for ourselves!Sometimes the pressures build and have no outlet, but they cannot stay bottled up forever. They eventually come out, but in ways that are not productive and can actually harm our family. Some of the mothers I have talked to are overwhelmed. They can no longer cope with the uncertainty and frustrations brought about by a diagnosis of their child’s LD.
One mother I met, Marianne, certainly had experience with this. She has two sons, Peter and Andrew. The older one, Peter, was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD when he was ten years old. She told me the pressures of dealing with her son’s LD caused her to have what she called “a bit of a nervous breakdown.”
“You really have to work to keep balance in your life,” Marianne told me. “For me, that means not always focusing on my son. If I always focus on him, I can get myself into an obsessive state. It sounds corny but one of the things that helps me stay really balanced is watching The Dog Whisperer. The dog trainer on that show, Cesar Millan, is a bit of a psychologist, too, for both dogs and their owners. He always says you don’t get the dog you want; you get the dog you need. I think that philosophy spills over into other aspects of your life, because it’s all about energy. I try to bring his theory into human affairs. For example, he advises against escalating situations in which you try to match or surpass the other person’s anger or negative energy. It’s always about being calm and steady and projecting the same sort of energy you would like to receive from others. When you do, other people react to it. You can also try that with children or with anyone. For example, I used to get very angry. Someone would say something and I would say something back, or I’d try to top them. But now I just let it go, and that helps me stay balanced. It’s a process. I also have to walk every morning. I have to get exercise.”
Exercise is a key to many women’s ability to handle the stress of LD. Meditation is another. Mothers who would never dream of meditating or taking up yoga now swear by it as the antidote to the pressures brought on by LD. Others talk to a therapist. Some of you might click your tongue and say, “Meditation? Yoga? Therapy? I could never focus so much on myself!”
Think of it this way: by focusing on your own needs, you create the ability to focus much more strongly and effectively on everyone else’s needs. In the cause of ensuring your child is getting the best help possible, taking care of yourself should be considered as important and necessary as attending a school meeting or taking your child to a pediatrician. You cannot be helpful if you are continually overwhelmed by the million and one emotions that come flooding over us, especially in the early days of a child’s diagnosis.
When another of our Special Mothers, Helen, felt overwhelmed by her son’s diagnosis and lack of progress, she started seeing a therapist. “I was completely consumed by my son’s LD,” she said. “I couldn’t make decisions — none!”
“Decisions about your son?” I asked.
“I couldn’t make any decisions. Little, everyday decisions. And I was so preoccupied that I would go to bed at night, sleep for a couple of hours, and then wake up and be up all night worrying about things that did not need to be worried about.”
“Things to do with school?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Ridiculous things, like ‘Oh, I really need to get that bowl back from her.’ Completely insane things that did not need to be obsessed about at four a.m.! That kind of behavior is just not me. I never worried about things like that.”
“Why do you think you did it?” I asked.
“I felt so powerless about the things that were happening at the school. I felt such a lack of control that I was grasping at things that I could control. But then I would get up and go through the day and nothing was getting accomplished, so the cycle started all over again. Most of this happened when my son moved to a new school in first grade. In his kindergarten he’d been getting counseling and I felt he was moving toward something, but nothing was happening in the new school. I felt helpless. I was consumed by the fact that nothing was getting done and there was nothing I could do about it.”
“And your reaction was to obsess about things you might be able to control,” I said.
“Yes. Looking back on it now, I think that’s what it was. But at the time, I just thought I was losing my mind. I knew it was insane to act the way I was acting. It was completely irrational. I was up at night, all night, worrying about things that I normally couldn’t care less about. I was miserable, and at one point I thought I was miserable because of my marriage, though that wasn’t really the problem at all. I didn’t know what the problem was, but I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t live like that. I went to a therapist who introduced me to meditation, and I joined a meditation class. At first I thought, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’ That was just not me. But I decided to try it. I was amazed by how much it cleared my mind.”
“Is that when you realized it wasn’t your marriage?” I asked.
“Yes! And also, I had to remove myself from the negative thinking of others. A friend of mine was in the same boat I was, and we were living in this negative view of things. So I removed myself from her a little bit. I had to. I was consumed and surrounded by negative thinking, and I realized I had to snap out of it.”
“You really had to be proactive about it,” I said. “You had to step up and say, ‘I need to change something.’”
“Yes. I realized I needed to change something because I was miserable, and to some extent it was affecting my marriage because I was consumed with it. This is something that might be helpful to someone going through it now. When I found out about my son's dyslexia, I talked to a neighbor who also had a son with LD and she casually said, ‘You should be careful because these things can really affect a marriage.’ At the time I thought, ‘What is she talking about?’ I thought she was a little crazy, and I thought, ‘How could it possibly affect a marriage?’ But that little remark really helped me later on when I remembered what she said. It also helped that my husband saw the whole picture before I did. At first he was in denial about our son’s LD, but then he moved right into accepting it. He didn’t go through the middle part like I did. But he also had the luxury of putting it all on me. He would say, ‘All right, you figure out what’s best,’ and that was nice because he trusted me to do it.”
Marianne said, “I make the majority of the decisions, too. It’s not that my husband doesn’t want to be involved, but he works all day. I work all day, too, but I work from home. My husband trusts my judgment.”
“That is a huge thing, a positive thing,” Helen said. “At the same time, it can bring on a lot of stress. It makes you feel that, ultimately, you are responsible. And sometimes I think, ‘Oh, my God, what if I ruin him!?’”
I turned to Marianne and said, “Earlier you described what you went through as having a bit of a nervous breakdown. How did that happen and what did you experience?”
“I think it happened because I was newly married, my son Peter was my first child, and I wanted everything to be perfect. I burnt myself out. I tried so hard to be Martha Stewart. I was a stay-at-home mom, so I always made dinner at five o’clock and had the house looking perfect, spotless. All of Peter’s food was organic at home and all his baby food was homemade.”
“Oh, God help you,” Helen interjected with a laugh.
“I know!” Marianne said. “It wasn’t easy. I joined a Mommy and Me play group. I read every book I could find about early childhood. I started to watch other people’s children so I could compare. I tried to be perfect, and part of that was because I was fighting the secret thought that my child wasn’t perfect. So if I tried hard enough to be perfect, no one would know that he wasn’t. They would think that because I’m the mom who has all the playdates, and I’m the mom whose house is always clean, and I’m the mom who makes the dinners. As a result, I burnt myself out.”
“You couldn’t keep up the facade,” I said.
“No. And that’s exactly what it was, a facade. I was always angry with my husband. He was working two jobs because we were newly married, with a new house and a baby, and he was stressed—but I was mad at him because he didn’t understand and because he wasn’t home. But he was working two jobs! I couldn’t appreciate that, because I had this kid who wouldn’t stop crying. It perpetuated itself and finally I just couldn’t do it anymore. I just shut down.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Everything fell apart,” Marianne said. “The facade crumbled. I wouldn’t clean. I wouldn’t get out of bed.”
“Did it happen suddenly?”
“Yes. One day I woke up and I realized I didn’t want to get out of bed and do that anymore. I never felt like I wanted to hurt myself or hurt anybody—I just didn’t want to participate in my life. I opted out. I stayed in bed. The house fell apart. The laundry didn’t get done. My husband became frustrated and angry, and that was certainly understandable. That was my job. He couldn’t work two jobs and then cook and clean and take care of the kids. He got angrier and angrier.”
“Who took care of your son?” I asked.
“I did. But that was all I was doing. I was going through the motions. I was the perfect mom for two years, and then I had my second child, Andrew—and that’s when it really started to decline. Having the second baby was just the final straw. I realized I just couldn’t be this fake, perfect person. I’d thought if I tried hard enough, Peter would get better, but he just never did, and I thought, ‘Am I going to be like this forever?’ It was an overwhelming idea.”
I asked Marianne how she overcame it.
“I think you have to hit rock bottom,” she said. “It’s like anything else in your life. The moment you move toward change is usually the moment when you’ve decided it is just too painful to keep the status quo.”
“Did your husband help?”
“Yes, but there was a point when he couldn’t help, because he was angry, too, and he was hurt, too. And he was scared! He had two little children, and his wife wasn’t there mentally. He would say to me, ‘Listen, you have responsibilities. You have a job, and you can’t lay down on the job.’ Eventually I started on the path toward recovery, but it was a slow process. It was at this point in my life that I first decided to start focusing on what would make me happy as opposed to what made me unhappy. Therapy played a part, and I went back to work part-time. It sounds odd, but working outside the home was good for me. I didn’t feel like a failure in the professional world, and that sense of well-being carried over at home. I stopped being so self-critical and, with the support of my husband, things improved to the point where I could take on even more than I ever could have before.”
This Too Shall Pass
You have just heard from two women who tell harrowing tales of their lives spinning out of control. It’s important for you to know that today Helen and Marianne are accomplished professionals, reliable and level-headed, without a hint of what one of them called the “temporary insanity” that once brought them to their knees. The symptoms they describe — inability to get out of bed, trouble making decisions, losing interest in everyday activities — are classic symptoms of depression. If you feel any of these things, do not hesitate to ask for help. It does not matter how strong you are, or how even-keeled. LD can blindside you and lead you into places and beliefs and thought patterns you never imagined possible. Do not shrug your shoulders and sigh and resign yourself to this new debilitating way of life.Everyone in the LD world knows of at least one parent who obsesses about her child’s LD or the school or a particular teacher to the exclusion of all other topics of conversation. We can see how it gnaws at her. We hear the bitterness in her voice. We know instinctively that her behavior and obsessions cannot possibly be healthy for her family or her child. We imagine the teacher cringing when she sees this person’s face at the door, once again coming in to harangue and accuse. And most of all, we think, “Thank heavens I’m not like that.”
It’s good to be thankful, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself in a similar predicament someday. Sometimes we are not aware of it until later. Step back, get some balance in your life, ask yourself, “Am I handling this well? Am I handling it at all?” If you feel you are not, but see no way out of the obsessive spiral, make an appointment to speak with a professional. If you are reluctant to do that, talk to a friend or sympathetic family member (but it will do no good to approach a family member who has already told you that you’re overprotective and that your child is fine, you’re imagining things, etc.).
Don’t keep it to yourself. Find help.
You need it. You deserve it.
Purchase a copy of A Special Mother: Getting Through the Early Days of a Child's Diagnosis of Learning Disabilities and Related Disorders today!
About the authors:Anne Ford served as Chairman of the Board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) from 1989 to 2001. During her term as Chair, Mrs. Ford led the reorganization and broad expansion of NCLD, including establishing a presence in Washington, D.C., and organizing educational summits on learning disabilities in several regions of the United States. She was appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services Commission on Childhood Disabilities, as the representative for learning disabilities and was a member of the New York State Board of Regents Select Committee on Disabilities.John-Richard Thompson is an award-winning playwright and novelist. His play Indigo Rat, set in Berlin, Germany, during World War II, ran for a year in New York City and received a MAC Award from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs. His other plays include Rain House, Water Sheerie, Fruit Bat Safari Camp, and The Glass Bird. He currently lives in New York City. He is the co-author of A Special Mother.Excerpted from A Special Mother: Getting Through the Early Days of a Child's Diagnosis of Learning Disabilities and Related Disorders, by Anne Ford, with John-Richard Thompson. Copyright © 2010 by Anne Ford. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Newmarket Press, 18 East 48 Street, New York, NY 10017, www.newmarketpress.com.
