Unslept and Unswept

and flexing my Marvel-less mothering muscles.

I’ve tumbled into today with an uneasy and disquieting feeling in my stomach and a tight, pinching snap between my eyes. It would be misplaced for me to attribute these sensations to anything off the bat although I immediately had a good sense as to why I was feeling so very much this morning. Better to do due diligence, move towards the morning’s initial and unavoidable domestic dross tasks and reflect a while on what was coming up and through.

I nudged myself straight off into a cold shower and shook my arms high above my head, stamping my feet and rolling my shoulders to limber up and clear. That invigorated things. Then I gave the dog a giant belly rub, perched on the bed edge, as the icy, cold droplets began to dry on my body. I dressed hastily with clothes from the heap that lay on the floor bedside and made off downstairs to brew a strong coffee.     

Everything about this morning has felt worrisome and wrong and has been so from the minute I woke up. Correct that, today has felt wrong from the moment I went to bed, for it was already the morning by then, two hours before sunrise to be precise, at 04:53 am, when I dropped the book from my hand and on to the empty space of the bed beside me.

It’s little wonder then that there’s not much flow or ease about my unswept mind. Funny, I typed unslept just there and it autocorrected to unswept which kind of describes the state of things in my head quite accurately, as it happens. Like the kitchen floor in this busy household after the tread and wear of an entire day. With grit and grot, dander from the dog in white, wispy clumps, crumbs from the table and all of it irritating underfoot to my bare toes; I hate that sensation of dirt on the floor.  My unswept and unslept mind feels just as irritating to inhabit today.

This is day one of eight weeks without college for my son Jake, my exuberant eighteen year old with SEN. It’s a huge cliff drop of an event for him, a huge cliff drop for me also. He’s stoic but all his planned socialisation drops to zero, the rhythm of his week falls away to almost nothing. Like the Marvel superheroes in his beloved films who disappear into a haze of tragic pixelation, the summer occasions for him to mix with his friends pixelate into diary dust.  College ends and the stale summer heat of disconnection reigns.  His weekly youth club, high point of his hump day, that stops too for a summer break. With somewhat tragicomic timing.

I’m certain I’m feeling the isolation of these eight weeks looming large today.  That’s a big part of the heaviness in the air. July and August have become a block of time where I have to amp up the parenting, crank up the mothering motor and yet feel financially in a chokehold, unable to schedule much in the way of pricey outings at all, weighed down by the responsibility to keep him thriving, healthy in mind and body for yet more hours in the day than usual. One huge positive is that the house this summer will be full of his older siblings and their partners. They’ll provide wonderful companionship for him and make the experience much less isolating for me.  Not today though; today it’s just him and me and that’s hitting me hard.

Joy & Anger, he made these today and I’ve been swimming in both

He is good company and we will all have fun together in between the work and worries about it here this summer. We’ve already shared a desk for an hour today; he making these colourful characters - Anger & Joy - from Inside Out II which he saw recently, me editing photographs from a client event alongside him.  I granted him access to my music and he promptly played Yungblud’s cover of the Kiss classic hit I Was Made for Lovin’ You which is the theme from The Fall Guy movie; he is a big Ryan Gosling and Kiss fan. He played the track on repeat for sixty, large, long and energising minutes. Nothing by half he does.

It does require of me a lot in terms of supervision and patience to cajole him into making good and healthy choices, maintaining good habits and forging a reasonable daily routine. This can take Thor levels of persuasion on my part. I’m flexing my Marvel-less mothering muscles in earnest to get him out on some version of a walk later to move himself.  Usually, once the coaxing is complete and we’re actually in motion, he will bolt off and with an Usain-like ferocity about his pace, singing and re-enacting lines from films. Leaving me lengths behind and walking alone.

Sit-down protests on walks were commonplace   

 

I’ve been here before, on day one of the summer holidays and in charge of a household social calendar for four small humans. I do recognise this as an old feeling of slight overwhelm. Perhaps this is what I’m responding to, only old memories of how much energy these months will demand.  And whilst the older three are fledged and flying, and I can see how digging deep, being ever resourceful and determined, I did manage to achieve some sovereignty of the mid-summering months in years gone by, I’m nonetheless exhausted here at the offing.

Turning tiresome chores like shopping unloads into free and *free* play became a well-flexed muscle. Toilet roll tower building and the human chain T-roll toss was a regular event.

This year feels different though. It’s a new kind of a feeling. He is officially now no longer a child; at eighteen he is an adult and in writing this I feel set apart.  The absence of relative independence proportional to his non-ND peers is felt keenly at certain junctures and this moment is one of those.  

Part of this heaviness I feel today is that this is his first summer as an adult and it’s a very significant bridging period of sorts. I’ve a challenge ahead to ensure he is granted funding to access a residential college place he has been accepted for.  I’m recognising that this is my mental load today.  I have a huge need to ring fence these next three years of his growth, to forge some semblance of a circle of certainty around them.  I sense that Anger is the very sensation I need to feel in order to push forward and claim the Joy for him that this college experience will bring.

Nationally, the number of adults with a learning disability in paid work stands currently at 5.1% and in only a few counties is this figure negligibly higher.  There is much that needs to change in terms of employment opportunities for the LD community and with an election this week, I know this will be influencing my voting choice.

For now, I’m noticing the goosebumps on my arms raising as I turn the fear and frustration into fuel in preparation for this summer and for its fight.  I will connect with the ferocity within my heart and fan these flames to further ignite in me the energy to secure for him what he needs.