A Good Car Cry
I’ve got a lot of insecurities. Some come from being a mom of a special needs kid. And some of them come from my own personal issues that I’ve carried around long before I had kids. I like to think that most of my insecurities come from being a special needs mom. This week proved me wrong. This week was a Sarah Beck-no autism attached-insecurities kind of week.
I’ll let you in on a secret. Maybe it’s not really a secret–maybe a lot of you who know me know this already–but I like to think I’m really good at keeping this secret: I am a very disorganized person and I hate it.
I have to work really hard at keeping my life together (I’m always pinning organizational tips on Pinterest or taking notes how others do it). It’s a struggle I’ve had for as long as I can remember. I remember my mom and dad showing me how to use a daily planner, I remember using the entire dining room table as my homework dump site (my sister and I also had our own office-sized desks for homework, and my personal desk was always a disaster zone too). I was terrible at time management (I’ve always been a procrastinator). I know this drove my parents absolutely crazy.
I’m not a slob though. I’m obsessive when it comes to cleanliness and hygiene–I can’t stand a dirty kitchen, bathroom, or dirty floors–but paper and ideas and time? Those are my weaknesses. It’s an all out battle with myself to reign those things in. Whoever thought it was a good idea of putting me in charge of managing multiple schedules and lives? I am not an organized person! Raising other humans and keeping them alive and emotionally well is hard enough.
Which is why I found myself crying that hard cry in the car at 9:05 Thursday morning. Poor J, he just sat in the passenger’s side with a really concerned look on his face and said, “what did I do wrong?” Which made me feel even worse, because every hard car cry he’s seen from me (especially in those toddler years) he associates with him.
“No,” I explained. “It’s not you.” And then I had to explain to him why we missed his doctor’s appointment: I was 100% convinced the appointment was for 9:00–in fact, I emailed J’s teacher about it as soon as I hung up the phone with scheduling. Except it really wasn’t at 9:00, it was at 8:00, just like I had put it down in my phone. The doctor refused to see us and the nurse told us to “just come back tomorrow.”
I almost cried right there, but I held it in until the car. I was mad (at myself, and at the nurse and receptionist). I was exhausted (I’ve been battling a head cold for the last 2 weeks and my brain’s been really foggy). And I was annoyed. But most of all, I felt my disorganization cover had been blown. My rational mind knows that the nurses could have cared less about my screw up and dismissed my unenthusiastic response to rescheduling as soon as I walked out the door but I felt like the whole world knew my disorganization secret and I was being judged for it.
“Just come back tomorrow.” She said it like it was no big deal and a natural consequence for my negligence. But she had no idea I was beyond overwhelmed. To me that was a very big deal.
J has five doctor appointments in two weeks. Thursday’s mix up makes that total now to six.
Appointment 1: Monday: a trip to Sanford accessories to check J’s orthotics. My mom instincts were right. His current orthotics are not doing their job. Which requires a visit to a specialist. After playing phone tag with nurses, I found out that J needs to see his pediatrician first for a referral to make sure insurance doesn’t come back and haunt me with a ginormous bill (and I can’t afford hours on the phone battling the insurance company). So I made an appointment to get him in on Thursday, because we all know it takes forever to see a specialist and I needed to get on that ASAP.
Appointment 2: Wednesday: regular appointment with the psychiatrist
Appointment 3 & 4: Visual Processing evaluations, originally scheduled for Monday and Wednesday morning this week (we’ve been waiting 2 months for these appointments). A family emergency came up for the therapist, and so both appointments were pushed to new times next week.
Appointment 5: Pediatric referral appointment for orthotics. Missed because there are so many appointments and activities to keep track of.
Appointment 6: Pediatric appointment today. Because I missed Thursday’s appointment.
So I cried–bawled my eyes out for five minutes–before I drove J back to school. I cried because I’ve been in and out of J’s high school the last few weeks to pull him out or drop him off after other appointments or track meets. I cried because I hate that he’s been missing so much school recently. I cried because I haven’t had a regular schedule for the last few weeks because of all of this kind of crazy and I have a submission deadline on the 15th. I cried because I’m fighting tooth and nail to try to keep everything straight. I cried because I’ve already shuffled my schedule around for two doctor’s cancellations and made accommodations in my schedule for it. I cried because the pediatric office couldn’t do the same thing for me or just make some sort of compromise. It takes 3 seconds to look at J’s feet and see that his ankles are collapsing inward. Make the dang referral, and I will come back in 2 weeks when school is out and we will do that dang well child visit. I’ll even pay that stupid $30 copay twice.
That’s on top of the other things going on–the track meets (one hour later I would check my email to find that W’s track meet had been last-minute switched to another school), the orchestra concerts, the choir concerts, the HOMEWORK. For someone who really struggles to be organized, this was just freaking demoralizing.
I’m not sure what I expected from the pediatrician’s office. I 100% screwed up, I came at the wrong time. But the dismissive, “You came at the wrong time, just come back tomorrow” comment? UGH!
Maybe a little compassion? Maybe you can’t accommodate me, but you can show a little empathy. “Shoot that sucks, I hope the rest of your day works out for you. I know what it’s like to have to rearrange your schedule like that, especially when you’re managing multiple lives including your own.”
That would have been nice. That’s the one thing this whole autism experience has taught me–you have no idea what other people are going through, and there’s probably a reason why they’re cranky/overwhelmed/frustrated etc.
Heck, there’s probably a good reason why they mixed up the appointment time in the first place.
Anyways, my disorganizational defensiveness still exists. I feel like an inadequate mom in so many ways. But I’ll take this experience and try to remember to be a little more compassionate when someone else feels like they’re going a little crazy.
