By guest writer Ian Taylor.
You never know how much love that can pour from your heart for your son. Sometimes it is even unimaginable how you can fall in love with your son even while he is still inside of you growing as a foetus. You know within you that you would die for your son, you know that there is nothing in the world that you would not do for them. You know even before you have them that they are the centre of your universe.
The first time you finally hold your son in your arms, you feel something that you may have never felt for anyone else in the world. That new, tender and squishy face is going to be the centre of your universe, and everything else will gravitate towards him. You know love with them. It pours freely from your whole being and soul. You do not want to imagine a world without him. You cannot help it; you cannot tone it down. I tried, but it did not work.
There is this satisfaction I get when my son doesn’t want anyone to hold except me. I interpret it as his way of loving me right back. The need to follow me everywhere and to do everything with me even bonded us some more. I do not let him out of my sight. However, this intense feeling you have for your son will be tested over and over. Life will find ways to check your resolve. It is as though the universe does not believe that you love your son enough, so it will find a way to keep testing you.
My son did not like going to school even as a toddler. Most little children are excited to go to preschool and meet other children. They are happy to in a new environment, but this was hardly the case for my son. He got more stubborn with time and refused to do any schoolwork at all. He was resistant. This resistance towards school and everything that concerns it had him disrespecting his teachers, fighting and just being a naughty person. It was frustrating to be his mother and have those endless complaints. Every time someone mentioned his name, I stiffened wondering what he had done.
It was hard to accept my son’s behaviour. It was hard to just take him all in with the way he was. I was hurt, and even though I knew I loved him so much, I just couldn’t bring myself to a place where I could understand him and be there for him quickly. I always wanted to believe that the love I had my son was bigger than what other parents felt for their sons. I missed the fact that most parents have a different way of showing it. Parents love their children in different ways, but I learned that it could be difficult as a parent to love your child when they are not making it easy for you to love them.
When your son strays from your values and the goals that you have for them, when they begin to behave in ways that make it challenging to be with them and when they are just not easy to reason with, your love for them is tested, the love you have for your child may not always be enough. You may have to accept them first before you can love them properly. Yes, there is a difference between love and acceptance.
Children know when you are struggling with accepting them. My son perceived my disappointment in his behaviour even though I genuinely believed I masked it well. He could tell, and it created a rift between us. I used to be his go-to person, the one person he could find solace in, and my disappointment in him took that away as well. He avoided me, and it made it even more difficult for the both of us. I always wondered how he could not see that I wanted only the best for him. I was worried about how he did not see the bigger picture.
The thing about not accepting my son was that if I wanted to find solutions to his problems first before I could accept him. I remember booking appointments with psychiatrists just to help me understand why my boy hated learning and why he was such an angry person. Psychiatrists never run out of diagnosis. There were different labels at different times and by various specialists. There were medications afterwards which were supposed to help him manage his moods and in turn regulate his behaviour. I had finally accepted that something was wrong with my son even before I accepted him.
Children are susceptible even though they are not the most vocal people about it. My son was unhappy to be seen as someone that was not well or normal. It was frustrating for him to feel like a sick, unwanted and broken person. You can almost guess that he did not get better. If anything, he got worse actually.
As his mother, I was exhausted with very few options to explore. I just wanted the one person I loved the most in the world to make it easy for me to show that I love him. It was overwhelming, and I began to lash out and force him to school. I did not care what the outcome could be. I knew what was best for him, and it had to be done. But we both could not go on like that. There was a need for a change and if my son was incapable of change then perhaps, I needed to change.
I paused for a moment and came out of my own head in an attempt to understand my son. I began to ask myself questions that would yield results. I began to realise that I was forcing my son to be like every other child before I could become proud of him. I had genuinely had to look inwards and look at how peculiar my son is to understand his needs and be there for him.
The psychiatrists were not wrong with their diagnosis. I was wrong in my approach. My son struggled with ADHD. This meant that he was different, and his mind functioned differently from his peers. He could be very imaginative and creative when you were patient with him. He knew he was not like other children, and that feeling of being odd worsened his behaviour. He felt unwanted. He felt like a failure, and he lashed out. He was not oblivious of my feelings, but what was he going to do? He did not know how to fix himself, and I was not helping either. So, he struggled.
Most parents who have dealt with children that struggle with ADHD understand that it is difficult for the children. They struggle to be like other children and fail as many times over. They begin to see themselves as broken people, people that need to be fixed.
Most times, as parents, we only want to talk about problems that we can relate to. We only want to help our children with the things that we have experienced and have some knowledge about, and anything outside that scope is not worthy of our empathy. We struggle to love and accept our children when their suffering does not look like ours. We even begin to believe that our children are freaks or weird. We become disappointed and ashamed of them. They suffer because we have labelled them for being different. Even worse is that they do not stop trying to fix themselves so that we can love them again.
I was faced with my reality, and I had to find a way to navigate through it. I had to make peace with the fact that my son may never be the way I wanted him to be, I had to understand that my son needed my love and my acceptance more than anything else in the world. I was going to accept that my son was not like his peers and his mates. I was going to accept that he needed me in a way that his peers did not need their parents. I accepted that I was going to be there for him. I accepted the work that was cut out for me.
He hated his drugs and asked me if he could stop taking them and I agreed. There were no visible changes because of the prescriptions anyway, so it was pointless. He felt happy that he was in charge of his own life to some extent and did not need a drug to tell him how to be.
The next thing that let some light into his life was when a particular teacher in school that he had always tried to push away but still found a way to try to help him showed him the consequences of his actions. She talked to him patiently about how unique, smart and creative he could be and offered to help him. It all began to work. He began to feel accepted again at home and at school. He became less and less angry. He made friends too. Even though he did not magically become the best student, there was a frog-leap improvement.
My son is the centre of my universe. He is everything to me, and I would not trade him for anything or anyone else, but I experience a phase in our lives that taught me the biggest lesson in the world. I learned that it is easy to love and accept your child when they are babies and depend on you for everything. It is easy to love them when they have not become their own person. My love for my son rested on the pillar of acceptance, and it was shaken when he was not what and who I exactly wanted him to be.
