I've heard so many quotes about what it's like to be a parent. One of my favorites is this: "The decision to have a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." What the quote doesn't say is how painful it sometimes is to have that little heart hurting and knowing you can't fix it no matter how hard you try.
We've known pretty much since Noah was born that he had a difficult time with feelings, both physical and mental, and emotions. He was so easily overstimulated as a newborn that we really had to watch what we did with him. At six weeks old, his grandma held him and the smell of her perfume made him so upset that he cried for nearly two hours. I couldn't calm him down and I didn't know what was wrong. Finally, after having a bath, he calmed down completely, though I still didn't know what the problem had been. It wasn't until some time later when the same thing happened after his aunt held him while wearing a very noticeable amount of perfume. He even had a rough time if we rearranged his bedroom and moved his crib. Who knew a five month old baby could tell that his crib had been moved?
There were the night terrors when he was two, a bizarre attachment to the vacuum at three, the fear that the a/c vent in the hallway was going to suck him up into the duct when he was four, which, by the way, was what caused us to get him into counseling. Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I guess it's hard to diagnose more than that in a four year old. Kindergarten revealed more pieces of the puzzle. Teachers saw Noah in a setting outside of what he was comfortable with. They told me their concerns and I told them I worried about him because he seemed so much like my younger brother when it came to learning abilities, or disabilities I guess I should say. Normally, the schools won't perform the psychoeducational testing until a child is in third grade, but we found ourselves reading the final results and reports of these tests at the end of kindergarten.
I worried once during first grade when Noah said he was so sad that he wanted to die. Did a first-grader really know the meaning of dying? Could a seven year old act on something like that? Somehow the discussion came up while talking with friends about our kids at bunco one night. Nicole was a therapist, which I didn't know. She said it wasn't something to be taken too lightly no matter what the age, and offered to see Noah.
Between the school's diagnosis of learning disabilities and Nicole's diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome, it started to sink in, and I cried for days. But we got through it. Noah was still a smart, funny, sweet, and happy little boy. We went about our days, not thinking that these things would ever really affect our family life. We just focused on helping Noah feel secure and productive. And productive he was! Kindergarten was hard, and he started first grade with a beginning kindergarten reading level, also known as a 0. Towards the end of first grade, his teacher called home, from her classroom, during class, crying...literally, and telling me she couldn't wait until after school because she was so thrilled that she had just tested Noah's reading level and he was reading at a mid-second grade level.
He never slowed down when it came to reading. He was always above grade level. What got me was how he could read a word time and time again, but if asked to write it down, he spelled it wrong. Ahhh, so that's what the learning disability was. It's a processing disorder. Information goes it without a problem, but it comes out all jumbled up. It's all good, we thought; this could be fixed. Some of the most intelligent and successful people in the world have learning disabilities.
Then the behavior problems started. He was impulsive and destructive; he had no boundaries and began having what we came to know as meltdowns. Behavior modification charts didn't work. Not attaining the goal of going so many days without a meltdown caused an even worse meltdown. Nicole recommended a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist recommended, what else, medication. It's funny how friends look at you when you tell them you've decided in favor of medicating your child. My thing wasn't that I wanted a normal child, or a child who didn't cause problems, or anything like that. My thing was that I wanted my son to feel okay inside. I wanted him to feel happy, to feel good about himself, to enjoy his childhood and not to worry and have anxiety attacks. And since all this had been going on for nearly five years and I had been unable to help him achieve those goals I had for him, I figured it was worth a try. And then it's funny how close you feel to those friends, who thought you shouldn't medicate, when they end up having to medicate one of their own. I guess it happens to the best of us.
And there is where we began the journey with Noah through the world of mental illness. And we cried, and we smiled through the tears at our beautiful baby boy. And we got to the point that we didn't really think about it as mental illness. Or maybe we hadn't actually thought about it in that way at all yet because it seems that it's all just hitting us now. I guess I never really wanted to think, or have to say that my son had a mental illness. Not because I was ashamed of it, but because I didn't want people to think that I was exaggerating, or looking for sympathy, or anything like that. Heck, most days I think we hurt poor little Noah more by not making more of it than we do. We've still got a lot of learning to do when it comes to raising five little boys with the oldest one having mental illnesses. But the good news is that in the last month, so many doors have opened for us on this journey. A new school, a great psychologist, and lots more help is on its way...to help us on the journey with our little Pumpkin Pie, Baby Love...Noah Boy.
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