I used to be in the newspaper business.
Not really, but that’s fun to say. Early in the pandemic, I was aching for connection. Not because I was suddenly stuck in lockdown, but because I had been feeling empty for such a very long time, and now everyone was sharing their feelings of loneliness and anxiety and hunger for touch. Now there was a space in the zeitgeist for people like me — a little emo, a little earnest, and someone who often felt there was a wall or pane of glass between me and the rest of the world.
I decided to start a newspaper, to give myself a letterpress printing project, something to do, and to make it all about human connection. This would be a newspaper of stories of YOU - 10 word stories, submitted by anyone. It turns out that people want to share their story, and they want the intimacy that is created by seeing your words on a page, and seeing it alongside others that are going through something similar.
So for each issue I would put out a prompt, and collect 10 word stories in response to that prompt.
I ended the paper last year, but I still miss that — the ability to collect a shared bit of humanity and hold it in my hand gently, literally, as I set type by hand for each story.
I’m thinking about those prompts and those stories as I think about where we are now. It feels like the zeitgeist has most definitely moved on. And I’m feeling more alone for it, despite the world opening back up, despite the new normal we’re continuously creating.
I feel alone, I think, because I’ve let go of a lot of things about that old life, but struggled to imagine something new, to build something new, and so I’m stuck in between letting go and moving on.
I’ve let go of my notions of parenthood and family. You have to, parenting a child who is PDA autistic. PDA stands for “Pathological Demand Avoidance”, but that doesn’t really capture what my kiddo experiences. My child has a nervous system disability, where they are almost always at or about to be at their threshold of tolerance. In other words, she’s always either IN or very close to her fight-or-flight response all day, every day. And the thing that triggers her fight-or-flight response is a perceived loss of autonomy. The neurotypical world presents constant written and unwritten rules that a child is expected to comply with — sleeping on their own, getting dressed themselves, picking up after themselves, going to school and following all the spoken and unspoken rules there, etc. My daughter can’t do any of those things, due to her disability.
So I’ve had to let go - of my personal plans and goals (someone must be home with her at all times), of my expectations that I am in control of my children and my home and can plan vacations and send them to summer camp and celebrate family traditions. All of that goes out the window with a PDA child to accommodate a nervous system that is wired to feel threatened by all of that.
“That sounds impossible!” you might say, and it is, until it isn’t. It’s a radically different way of raising a child and structuring your life. And it’s impossible until you let go of those expectations and beliefs and embrace radical acceptance.
When I accept her for exactly how she is and stop trying to “fix” her, a transformation happens. I spent years screaming, both out loud and in my head, about expectations like following rules, going to school, and listening to your parents are immutable facts of life and trying to convince my daughter of their truth. She was having none of it. She believed that she knew better, didn’t care if she broke the rules or didn’t listen, and didn’t care that “everyone else” does things like go to school or leave their parents alone for a fucking second.
The more I tried to change her, the more I screamed, and the worse I felt. I felt like a failure. I felt like every day was an insane tightrope to walk to cajole and disguise demands to make them less threatening to her. I felt so much anger towards her, for being impossible, for not listening when she was clearly capable of doing so. I felt guilt and shame about not participating in the things that most parents take for granted — music lessons or soccer or swimming — because my child would refuse.
I felt this horrible SHOULD hanging over my head. You SHOULD leave the house on this beautiful day and go on a family outing. You SHOULD make a thousand phone calls — to the next therapist, the next occupational therapist, the next school option, about new meds, about this supplement I read about in a Facebook group. You SHOULD want to play with your kids. You SHOULD be happy. You SHOULD.
So I let it go.
I say that, but I haven’t really. Every day I wake up and need to remind myself: let it go. It’s okay, you can remake your world. I’ve forgiven myself for the SHOULDs, but I haven’t figured out yet how to build a path that is happy and healthy for everyone that I am responsible for — for myself, for my PDA kiddo, for her little sister. We all have different, and competing, needs. It’s a lot to navigate.
Some things are harder to let go of.
I still miss the intensity and the intimacy of the connections forged through my newspaper project. I think that I’ve never felt more alive, more connected, more truly myself than when I was building these connections. I think of my hands, and how they touched, like when I placed a stamp on the newspaper to mail it to friends and strangers, how I wrote their names by hand. I want to hold on.
I don’t want my life to be a narrow window; I don’t want to exist solely to function as an external nervous system to co-regulate with my kiddo. So how do I build something new?
Because I miss the stories and the connections, if you’ve read this far, please leave a comment and give me your 10 word (or less) answer to the question:
Letting Go is Hard to Do.
I look for something else to hold onto.
Feet against grass, eyes shut, I forget the endless list.