Tiny Strides.

My seven year old is neurodivergent.

She's been diagnosed with the same thing I'd have been diagnosed with back in the day if people were really paying attention.

I slipped through all the cracks despite being in a "special reading class." I was told I was dumb. Not just by kids.

Authority figures screamed at me to pay attention, which at that point, I couldn't pay attention to anything but my guts twisting inside me in a cowered fear that no person could ever actually learn from.

They told my parents I'd never be more than a C student, which if you've read Imperfectly Sane, you know my mom was super reactive toward me about. She wanted me...perfect.

A+, not an A.

No one told me I was sensitive and it was a strength we needed to curtail in a flow that didn't butt up against the worlds current.

No one told me my "stupidity" was just a different way of thinking.

What my mother described it to me often as was..."you're smarter than your father and I put together but you're too stupid to use it."

Hmmmmm....

Graduated with a 4.0 in a licensure track Master's Degree but honestly didn't read a book until I got to college. That's a lie. I read one about astral projection in sixth grade called Twins, but I'm 97% sure my mother read it to me, it's just that I liked it enough to actually pay attention, so I "felt" like I'd read it.

Watching my daughters mind at work, really brings up a lot for me because it's exactly like mine.

She IS trying, but her nervous system blows out from the effort. She'll have a flow and the second she gets tripped up...she face-plants emotionally which takes hours of recovery. It's insanely frustrating and time consuming.

I know the mirror of my life is showing me that the same frustration I feel...she feels, but she's six, and learning how to sit with or/and expression emotions like that by modeling. And I'm 37 and honestly just want to scream "Do your fucking work God damn it!" and I know she feels it despite my patience. I model just the same, in hopes she meets me in the middle.

I know she's trying and that her crying is a symptom of that fact, not an avoidance of it.

This morning she read almost two whole sentences, and then she got stuck on a word that was easier than a lot of the ones she just read.

I'd direct, letter by letter, sounding them out. Then she was pissed and jumpy. That's when I know I'm on the bridge of two of her sides.

I told her to look at the letter....she freaked out insisting that she couldn't. Again, I said "look with me," and...fist in mouth, puddle of tears in 0 seconds, she laid in a child's pose on her chair. It was over.

Which...is insanely frustrating for me because I see her struggle, and I also see her giving up, and we're on a mission that I'm dedicating my life and hours of my day to, and she's using her emotions to "get out" of facing "the struggle".

The struggle is real. Fucking annoying. Progress takes practice. The WORST!

My my, this feels so near to my own sensitive heart.

It would appear that her melt downs are an avoidance tactic, like her continuous requests to eat, or change her clothes, or take a break when we homeschool. It's easy to look at it as a parent in that way. The restraint of old programming taking over and unleashing all over her is a full time job.

But I remember exactly what it was like to be that kid. Who was having an emotional experience because that's what was happening, not because I had an agenda to fuck up someones day. If I could've controlled it, I would've. Duh. It's what ALL of my energy was consumed with while they were forcing me to..."learn."

I'd cry all the time. Everything in my body always hurt and I couldn't not feel it. No one connected with me, and I didn't know how to bridge that gap despite my best efforts, and I just cried...all the time. My teachers hated it. My parents hated it. Everyone hated it.

And I cried usually not out of "sadness," I was always too curious of a kid for sadness, but out of pure frustration that I legitimately didn't get what they were asking of me. I didn't think like them.

I didn't NOT want to get it, I spent my whole life having to work way harder to "get it" than the average person, and now I walk in two worlds instead of one.

I stand at the bridge of my daughter who lives in a world I know, from a place tethered to another world in which I seek to guide her to, not so that she knows "this" one but so that she knows both.

It's so easy to want to give up. Sometimes it even feels necessary.

Which is exactly how she feels.

That's what she does. And I want her to sit up and face life knowing I see her and I'm seeing what she's seeing and we can look at it and piece it all together, together but...

She collapses, just like I've spent 97% of my own life doing because she thinks somethings so wrong with her that it's necessary to show her cards in a display of passivity to her own weakness, rather then step in one inch further, taking a chance on reading just one more letter.

Letter by letter, meeting it rather than fearing it.

So today has been extra hard in this way, but wanna know why...

not because it happened, but because it hasn't happened in so long.

This used to happen multiple times a day, and now...I feel set back by it only because I thought we were in such a smooth sailing place. I thought we'd finally got it, whatever "it" is, right.

So she freaks out, and I think to myself, "Tiny Strides Stacy. Tiny Strides."

She wizzed through her work in the beginning of the day. Best academic performance I've seen out of her yet. Then...she hit a wall.

Guess what we got out of it...

THE BEST ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE WE'VE SEEN YET.

But it was overshadowed by my desire to "force it." To make her keep going beyond her own threshold like was constantly done to me.

So, if your day implodes, and you realize, the reason you're so disappointed in the implosion is because you haven't had an implosion like this in a really long time, it means you’re doing something right, not that somethings wrong. It means, you made it all these days, and then, you reached your threshold.

The evidence of that means your threshold for progress has expanded, and THAT...means you're on the "right" path.

My little girl tried to muster out between sobs, "I don't know what's wrong with me today..." I could tell her body felt nervous about how to approach me. I grabbed her face and looked her in the eye and said, "there's nothing wrong with you. You're all right honey, look how far you've come."

I'm not sure she believes me but I am sure that our morning though frustrating and insane making was an opportunity to look at how far we've come, not how backwards we've gone from it.

Maybe the same is true in some way for you.

Tiny strides are strides nonetheless.