Tuesday, September 18, 2018

5p- At Almost Twelve

Now, I know we’re not a typical family living with 5p- syndrome. I get that. I acknowledge how lucky we are.

But we continue to live with our version of it.

And it’s not always easy. I am very aware that it could be and is so much worse for a lot of other families out there but knowing others have it worse doesn’t necessarily make things easier for us. You know?

So here we are. She’ll be twelve in November. She’s in fifth grade. She’s so funny and sweet and smart and stubborn and sometimes frustrating.

At home she loves her tablet, she loves running and letting her dad swat her with a fly swatter. She would prefer it if we’d just still spoon feed her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I refuse, but some days, Tom feels like it’s just easier. Honestly, it’s laziness on both their parts. Liv doesn’t want to do the work of spooning food into her own mouth and Tom doesn’t want to do the work of fighting with her to spoon the food into her own mouth.

Some days, I’ll fight the fight, urging her over and over to just eat her food. Other days, I figure if she’s hungry enough she’ll eat. If she isn’t hungry enough, well, there’s always another meal in a few hours. The child is not going to starve to death.

At eleven years and ten months old, she’s almost 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs around 105 pounds. So yeah, not gigantic, but not to the point that missing one meal or hell, just part of one meal is going to lead to her being hospitalized due to starvation.

So that’s happening.

She’s sleep well these days, thank you Lord. I’m so very grateful for that because when my kids sleep well, I sleep well. At one point over the summer, she was waking me up consistently at least once, sometimes twice a night. I let this happen for about four nights before I had a little talk with her during the light of day. I reminded her that night time is for sleeping and if she wakes up and sees that it’s still dark, she should just roll over and go back to sleep. She should NOT wake me up because she’s lonely. I told her that if she was sick, as in throwing up or in a lot of pain, she could wake me up and tell me. But if she can’t find the book light or ball or turtle light she sleeps with, well, I am not getting out of bed to help her find one of those things. She can wait until morning.

After that talk, she hasn’t woken me up again. So I’m checking off the box beside, “Mature enough to understand that Mom needs her sleep more than Liv needs her book light.”

Each fall, right before school starts, we reteach her how to tie her shoes. She wears flip flops all summer and just doesn’t care enough about tying her shoes to remember the process. I mean, why should she when she’s got parents who will teach and teach and teach it to her and then, when she takes her sweet time doing each morning, will just tie the damn things herself?

There are a lot of things I know Liv is capable of but that she either doesn’t want to do or that we don’t bother making her. I know we’re doing her a disservice and I’m working on that.

At school…her teachers are amazing. She is in the mainstream class for science and social studies. She’s in a smaller class with an aide and a special education teacher for reading and math. She joins the other fifth graders for gym, technology, art, music and media center. She doesn’t seem to mind school but I don’t think she particularly enjoys it.

She doesn’t have what I would call friends. She knows everyone, everyone knows her. Everyone is kind but since she still doesn’t interact with her peers, she simply can’t make friends. Right now, it doesn’t seem to bother her. She seems to think her peers are weird and annoying. But honestly, if she’s lonely, how can I know unless she tells me? She’s not very good at naming her emotions, though we’ve used the movie Inside Out to help her figure out what she’s feeling.

The emotion she expresses most often is joy. And for that I’m grateful. I want her to know joy. I want her to know contentment and love and happiness. I want her to have friends, though, too. I want her to feel like she fits in. I worry about loneliness and feeling left out.

We spent time with my nephew who is ten and a cousin’s daughter (sort of like a niece, right?) who is nine. Olivia had a blast with them. Stella, the ‘niece’ is what her mom describes as weird too. She’s very intense, very mature for her age and so very serious. Jaxon is so very much a typical ten year old boy. He kind of bridged the gap between Olivia and Stella. They seemed to have a blast on Sunday afternoon. They all got so dirty and that actually made me happy because Olivia isn’t usually one to play outside in the dirt and neither is Stella. Those girls needed that boy to teach them how to play.

All of this is why we continue to push for Olivia to have as much time with her typical peers as possible. She watches them and I definitely think she’s learning from each interaction, even if she doesn’t appear to be doing so. She takes it all in and I hope she’s learning to read tone of voice, facial expressions, conversational give and take. She does all this with Jaxon but she’s been with that kid her entire life. I want her to learn to do it with others beyond her very small circle of family. These days, she will talk to me, Tom, Alyssa, my mom, my step dad and Jaxon. She’ll have actual conversations with all of us, give and take, telling stories, listening to us, asking questions, waiting for answers but for others? This doesn’t happen.

She will whisper to her teachers still. Her aide, a woman who has been working with Olivia for several years, has the most luck getting her to converse with her. But new people are tough for her. She does love to go to school and tell her aide, teachers and therapists stories about what happens at home, so…we have to be careful at home. Ha! Not that there’s a lot of craziness happening at home, I mean, we’re seriously boring people.

I think the older she gets the bigger the gap between her and her peers gets. I don’t really let it bother me that much, honestly. I mean, she’s my girl, I adore her (even when I’m exasperated by homework sagas, food issues, a puddle outside the bathtub, etc.) She’s so joyful and so much fun to watch and listen to. So she’s not your typical fifth grader, so what?

My mom notices, though. We go to football games together. Obviously not to watch the actual football game but to watch Alyssa in the marching band. While there, though, my mom will notice Liv’s classmates and how mature they are. These kids are running around, nowhere near their parents, helping with water for the football players, helping with littler kids, etc. And my mom sees what Olivia is not doing.

I don’t take Liv to these games because she’d hate it. She’d be insanely bored and would drive me nuts asking over and over when we were going to leave. She doesn’t want to run around with her peers, playing catch with a small football, watching the cheerleaders with the idea that she might someday be one of them. She doesn’t want to go just to see and be seen. She doesn’t care about that stuff and I’m okay with that.

I see Olivia for who she is. I try to celebrate her joy, he laughter, her very life. I can’t let myself fret over what she’s not doing. That’s not fair to her or to me. It will just steal the fun of everyday life with my littlest sweetheart. How is that fair to anyone?

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