Overwhelm

I’m sitting here in a hotel room with fireworks going off wondering why I can’t sleep when I’m exhausted and haven’t slept in days, months really and barely holding it together and thought now is the time to actually start writing this shit down and getting it out of my head.

 I haven’t been diagnosed, but my mind races, I don’t sleep because of it, I worry about the most stupid and the most complex of things and realistically I do the best I can with the tools I have.

My son, 15, almost 16, has been dx with ADHD since he was 8, we just had an appointment with CAMHS in which the psychologist said it sounds much more like ASD, well blow me down, REALLY??? Haven’t I been saying and thinking that since day dot!!!

The last 18 months have been hard, actually f## it, the last 18 years have been hard but the last 18 months even more so, with the anger and the violence and the breaking things and the constant worry and the sleepless nights and the checking on him constantly to make sure that he is actually sleeping and not hanging from the rafters.

He is chronically overwhelmed and there is no one that will listen and will understand what that really means.  Yes there are meds, yes there are appointments with people like CAMHS and the GP and a bunch of other people but they don’t see the tears at 3am because someone doesn’t want to be his friend anymore or is bullying him on social media, they can’t help the stupid decisions he makes because he is trying to protect his sister from making even worse tragic stupid dangerous decisions because he is the kindest most empathic kid in the world, they don’t hear the names he calls me in the morning just so that I can try and get him out of bed to get him to school 32% of the year.

Neurodiversity is so much more that just a diagnoses, not just for a kid but for the parent, the caregiver, the grandparent, the siblings, and when you come against brick walls everywhere you turn and you have a child who is so chronically overwhelmed, who is triggered by the simplest of things (at the moment in our house it is the washing, if his clothes are not washed and dried in the order he likes them and to his requirements and without interruption from other clothes – he washes his own things – the world hears about it and the walls of the house do too), who will not take meds because they make him “feel like a zombie” and “he just wants to feel like himself but he doesn’t remember who he is” what do you do??

As the psychologist said in our meeting, obviously there are not meds for ASD, so we need to look into solution-based therapy and I just about yelled back at her, “what the hell do you think I have been doing for 15 years??’ what is the solution when the solutions don’t work.

Ohhhhh don’t get me wrong there are lots of things that have worked well and obviously being a coach and working with teens there are lots of solution-based therapy options that do work but if you have a disengaged, severely overwhelmed, drug affected, violent, self-harming, ADHD, ASD, PTSD, unmedicated, depressed teen which solution do you work on first???

My main one now is keeping him alive.

Now that the fireworks have dulled down to a dim roar in the distance, I hope that he and my daughter are enjoying their New Years with friends and as my mother would say “making good choices”, and maybe now that this is out of my head, I can sleep……….