Sometimes I think the title of my memoir could be “Disasters in Parenting.” Last week I took my 13-year-old to the orthodontist. We were running late. He has top braces and was scheduled to get bottom braces put on. I didn’t remember what the appointment was for specifically, but when the tech said that was the plan it made sense. My child was not prepared for this. He needs to understand all the steps of an outing before we leave the house. He needs practice and patience. He needs to have his “no” respected. He needs longer processing time than most. He needs to ask questions. He needs to understand the explanation. I’ll spare you the details, but we were at that appointment for almost an hour, and we left without bottom braces.
The circus in my head included my professional brain, developing an in-service for every orthodontist and dentist office on neuro-affirming clinical practice and the importance of sensory-regulation before and during invasive interventions for autistic individuals. Also present was Mama Bear, ready to defend my child from being forced to submit to anything against his will, as well as Sorry-about-my-disruptive-offspring mom cringing at the restrained looks from staff and other patients. I was exhausted. I felt like a failure.
If you are a parent, you know this feeling. Whether it’s a vacation, family event, social outing, sports match, or trying to run errands, sometimes the plan falls apart, no matter how painstaking it may have been to make. It’s easy to want to avoid this feeling, but impossible to actually avoid if you are engaged with the growth of another human.
I want to reassure my kids that failure is just a part of learning, that trying new things is such an important skill, and no one is going to be perfect at anything, especially on the first try. This makes me realize I have to model this. We are all living each day, each phase in development, for the first time. I am learning how to not hide my mistakes, defend my wrong answers, or justify why something didn’t go how I said it would. I am learning how to stay soft with myself to show my kids what it can look like. I need them to learn to extend themselves some self-compassion.
Self-compassion was a surprising finding in research on resilience and recovery conducted by Dr. Kristen Neff in the past two decades. Defined generally as meeting our own suffering, failure, and imperfection with warmth, understanding, and kindness, self-compassion is like having empathy for ourselves, the same way we would for a good friend who is struggling. This can be challenging for anyone navigating a neurotypical world using the tools of a neurodivergent brain. It’s easy to internalize the messages all around about what our experience should look like. Developing self-compassion takes years for most people, more like a practice than a destination.
In the meantime, while I’m on my journey toward mastering self-compassion enough to teach it to my family, I have a strategy that has been helping me right-size my expectations and pivot more easily, because something unexpected WILL happen. I narrow the focus, and I lower the bar. It’s become a kind of mantra I learned in a coaching group, and it applies across anything I want to do, most recently in my backyard.
I imagined digging up the abandoned and weed-filled raised bed garden, sifting the soil and mixing in compost on a big tarp in the yard, adding peat moss and perlite for balancing moisture and drainage, refilling the 8’ x 3’ space with a perfect soil blend and planting vegetables. I had my shopping list for the garden center, and I kept the calendar free on a beautiful Saturday. Due to forces beyond anyone’s control, my husband was not available that morning, and I was on my own to carry out the project with help from my children for any specific, discrete task with easy-to-explain steps.
“Narrow the focus, lower the bar,” I chanted silently, wondering what I was going to do with the free seedlings on my porch that needed to get planted asap. I narrowed the focus: nothing is critical except getting those zucchinis and tomatoes planted and watered so they don’t die. I lowered the bar: what if we left the raised bed alone and re-used those big hanging plastic pots that I get for Mother’s Day, still full of dirt and dead flowers, that have been accumulating the past four years next to the garage?
What I ended up with is a kind of feral container garden, pots nestled right into patches of weeds or next to the fence if they like to climb. I feel proud of what I did, and I’m counting it as a win, even if I don’t harvest a single thing.
Even though we rescheduled the orthodontist appointment, we took home some important lessons, as well as the mouth-spreading tool for my son to practice holding in his mouth in a safe environment. We’ll call that the practice run, rather than a disaster, and we’ll keep going, together.
Article by : Sarah Monahan, Director of SLP & OT Services
