(Photo by Megan Morse Photography)
“Am I equipped for this?” It is not an unreasonable question. Being a parent means wearing many hats and knowing how to face many unexpected challenges. Preparation means you act with intention, with information, and with a degree of expectation. A prideful parent may never admit asking him or herself this question. But right now, pride is something that I throw out the window, going down a highway that I still get lost on from time to time. I can’t get it out of my car fast enough.
(Photo by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company)
There is a species of bird, the Gray Jay (recently renamed the Canada Jay), that survive in the deepest winters of the North every year (basically, it’s always aware that “winter is coming”). I recently read about one, a female, with four babies in her nest. On one particularly cold and wet day, she spread her wings and tail out to cover the hatchlings in the nest like an extraordinary, tiny umbrella of warmth and promise.
She also uses sticky saliva to glue food to branches above snowfall lines to help store food items for longer periods during winter. They are clever, fearless birds, and the mothers are equipped to keep their young alive through the coldest and rainiest winters. Even the new Jay moms figure it out; how to keep their young alive in the toughest circumstances.
Self-Doubt
But back to the question, “Am I really equipped for this?” I wish I knew how many parents ask themselves this question. I wish I knew how many people raise children and survive things they never talk about, but I know that the answer is many. The answer is most likely, everyone. Recently, a few changes have modified the way I look at my life, my relationship with God, myself as a mother, and my patience with myself over things that I have no experience with or fail to understand right away.
Sensory-processing awareness is a new acquaintance of mine. As parents, we know when things are just unique to a child and when they seem indicative of a larger, more complex issue.
And it is into this tumultuous, yet tranquil, ocean of personal truth that I am about to dive, so bear with me. Some people know my journey with sensory awareness with my daughter, but many do not. It’s a conversation that I’m not afraid to have because I probably know the least about it at this point. But I’m learning. And I am trying to learn more and not feel so alone in understanding it.
Sensory-Processing Awareness
It can be a lonely journey, but as confused and in the dark as I feel about it, my 4-year-old daughter feels it much more emphatically. She feels everything more, and it confuses her in much larger ways. She’s only had four years to figure out what her world is supposed to look like, and she’s still figuring that out. Aren’t we all, though? The world is big, confusing, sometimes scary, and constantly changing. People and behaviors are unpredictable. Tendencies and preferences can change. Ideological constructs can shatter and be reborn. Personal constitutions can stay delicate or grow stronger. Everything changes. People can even surprise themselves.
My daughter started having trouble with foods as an 8-month-old. I have trouble with the word “delay” because aside from the stigma that we, as a culture, tend to unnecessarily place on that word, developmentally, I never saw her miss anything major, though she did completely skip the stage of putting anything in her mouth while teething. She’s sharp. She’s curious. She picks everything up so quickly.
As a new mom, it is hard to admit that something may not be falling in its natural line with your child. That’s a hard line to assume about though, isn’t it? Children are so different, and they set forth on their own, very specific, paths.
The Food Failures
But food has been an issue since the beginning. Let me just say it this way:
One of the hardest things in the world is to watch your child reject something that is needed to survive, every single day, like food.
There was a lot of difficulty with solid foods for her. A lot of gagging or vomiting, even as a baby. This led to a restrictive toddler diet, one that primarily consisted of bananas, grapes, blueberries, graham crackers, cookies, or Pop-Tarts. No meats, no cheeses, no breads, no vegetables. She seemed okay with cereal for about 2 months, but after getting choked up on a grape skin one day and a piece of cereal another day, she has never touched either of those foods again. She eventually gave up any fruit with a skin and bananas as well.
Knowing Your Child Despite Public Opinion
Initially, everyone treated the issue like maybe it was related to a tongue-tie, but feeding therapy for that issue, specifically, did more harm than good. She had a bad experience, threw up again, and shut down to the entire process completely. Eventually, her diet became more restrictive, which is hard, but as she got older, it became more obvious that food was not the only restriction she was setting for herself about the world around her.
Certain clothing textures, hem placement, buttons, her ears, loud noises, climbing up or down, balancing, and of course, new foods, all became a problem. Emotional self-control was an issue where tantrums would happen over something seemingly small to me, but it would feel huge to her and last for nearly an hour at times.
She drew a hard line in the sand between herself and certain activities, objects, foods, or sounds. And after a few months, she would seem fine with climbing certain stairs or that dress with those two evil buttons, only for a new fixation to surface.
The truth is, I never see it coming. It can be about a crease in her hair from her ponytail, her sleeve touching a certain part of her arm, a food touching a different food, too much food on her plate that overwhelms her, a routine that gets broken in some way, or an assertion of independence. She doesn’t always want help, and I have to stop helping so much. I have to listen to my instincts that tell me to be her mom and make things easy for her because she feels so much, so intensely, and I have to mute that voice. I have to tell myself that she has to figure some things out for herself so that she can make the decision about them that they are okay and not scary. It allows her to experience that process for herself and to eliminate the anxiety or fear she develops and associates to that particular situation or activity. I have to stop listening to everyone else—the people who do not know my child and want to tell me how I’m doing this wrong, or that I worry too much, or that she just sounds picky and let it go.
I have to let her try and be her own person and make decisions about what works and what does not work for her world today. Tomorrow, that world may look entirely different. But today, this is what she has decided she needs, and I have to learn to hear that.
I have to learn to listen to what she is not specifically saying and interpret triggers that I never knew existed. At the same time, I have to understand those triggers and if they are too much, eliminate them so she isn’t overstimulated or overanxious to an overwhelming degree. I also have to let her be a child, because she still is one. It’s a difficult place to recognize where that line exists.
After a few months of unsuccessful feeding therapy, I took her back to the doctor for a weight check because she was not gaining much at all. I poured out the new developments, the behaviors, the food rejections, the new triggers that seemed excessive to me; everything that I thought should be discussed, I poured it all out on her exam table with an exhausted heart and flailing hope. She looked at me intently and listened from her candy-apple red office chair, and then she said it.
The Diagnosis
“I think we’ve been looking at this entire situation with too narrow of a scope. I don’t think this is about feeding, specifically.
I think we should look at sensory-processing evaluations.”
It is almost sad how little of a clue I had about what she was saying. “Look at what?” A million defining things raced through my mind. Is something wrong with her? What does this mean? Did I do something to inhibit her process or create this heightened awareness she has?
She referred us to a center that specializes in working with children to desensitize certain elements of their environment and help integrate those textures and foods for more successful progress. I thought about the feeding therapy and how awful it went. When the center called me to schedule her evaluation, I told them no, at first, to getting right on the schedule. I wanted to talk to someone about what exactly this all meant, what they would do, and how these sessions would go. They had the director call me back.
What happened next was incredible. She called me and answered so many of my questions, and then started asking me questions about my daughter. “Does she prefer solid and more soft/solid textures? Does she prefer to eat at the table when no one else is eating so to eliminate any pressure? Does she seem apprehensive about certain playground equipment? Does she get visibly upset when you make a drastic change and then have a hard time controlling her emotions?”
It was the strangest thing. It almost seemed like she had met my daughter and knew her, personally. Yes. How did you even know any of this? That was so specific. She explained to me what heightened awareness looked like and then what developmental delays looked like. She explained a pyramid of sensory-processing steps, of tactile and vestibular attention, occupational and speech/feeding therapy, of how they work not to pressure kids or push them too hard because once children shut down, they won’t be able to reach them anymore.
I thanked her, hung up the phone, and started crying. A 30-minute phone call with a perfect stranger made me cry, because finally, someone knew what was happening and why it was happening, and what to do about it. Finally, all of those prayers and answers I couldn’t find on my own were on the other end of this phone call. And for four years of my daughter’s life, I have tried to figure it out and nothing had worked.
Today, and Every Day, It’s a Process
But now, we have both come a long way. I’m still learning but I’m not quite so lost. She still has a restrictive diet, but her sense of exploration with less fear and her emotional control have really progressed in such beautiful ways. I embrace it and appreciate it even more when she has those magical moments of figuring something out for herself and finding excitement over learning something new. She still works with an occupational/feeding therapist and she’s incredible. She started out rejecting so many things out of fear, and now, she is so brave and resilient.
I still have blindsiding days where nothing I try works or I think I have eliminated a trigger of some kind and a new one forms. The only way I learn about that is her reaction. Sometimes, I expect a reaction and nothing happens. She surprises me a lot. Apprehension may never completely go away for her, but it doesn’t keep her from trying or functioning how she needs to, and I admire her for that. I admire her for having a perspective that I don’t understand and situating it inside of her world. I admire her for finding beauty and emotional response in places I don’t, but maybe should.
In a women’s ministry meeting the other day, they mentioned how people love to talk about God’s love and His promises, but they always have a hard time talking about the process—the parts that ache getting to what matters. The purpose of this outpour of honesty was not to mention a Cinderella bow-tie-ending story or a possible behavioral cure, but to share that the process, while sometimes heart-breaking, can be especially beautiful. I’m 31-years-old and my 4-year-old teaches me so much about myself and about life. She doesn’t even know how much.
For years, I had questioned myself, if I was overthinking it all, if everyone telling me to let it go because she’s just a picky or particular child was right, if I was doing the right thing by focusing on it the way I had, if subjecting her to feeding therapy was the right decision or if it made it worse. I questioned God for how powerless I felt and how He presented a situation to me that I didn’t understand and couldn’t fix for this little girl. And I’m her mother. If I don’t have the right answer for my own child, who would?
But after that phone call, I cried. I knew we were moving in the right direction, that we found the right place, that I was right not to just ignore my maternal instincts. God knew it the entire time. Every time that I cried to Him, that I doubted myself, that I felt alone or lost, that I felt I was failing her as a mother for not understanding more, He knew it. He also knew we had to experience those trials along the way to show us both what was happening so we could know how to address it.
God showed me what being a Gray Jay mom of a little bird really means. It means that as a parent, He has equipped me to know her needs, to trust my maternal instincts, to keep her afloat in the nest, to help her thrive, and to show her when and how to fly on her own. He knew that I would be the right mom for her and that I would figure out what I needed to, and He knew that she was the perfect daughter for me. He showed me that it’s okay not to have every answer or any control of a situation, to have faith instead, and He taught me how to be patient with myself over the mysteries that come with uncertainty. He has equipped me for where He brought me. I pray that you parents with heavy hearts over your own nest find comfort in His promises as well.
Praise God for understanding the things that we do not, for preparing us, and for revealing them to us at just the right time.
Blue Withens 