Make Confetti
The doctor walked in to update us and apologize for the wait, I quickly apologized that my kids where making a mess of the paper on the table and her response was “make it into confetti” if you have to. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the really great ‘when someone gives you lemons make lemonade’ analogy. Oh man I needed that chuckle. First off, can we all agree that there is nothing more annoying than the thin, super nosy, stift paper on a doctors table!? The only thing worse is trying to keep your kids from destroying it while you wait.
But worse than the ridiculous paper is navigating medical appointments with a neurodivergent child with a trauma history. Rationalizing each medical procedure that’s necessary with whether or not it will be trauma-inducing or triggering is agonizing. Just getting my kid in the elevator to the office is a struggle and then I wasn’t able to get him to simply stand on a scale to be weighed so you can imagine how the rest of an appointment goes, especially if a doctor has to physically touch him. We go to as little doctors appointments as humanly possible unless they are absolutely needed. A simple decision for most parents for a skin biopsy would be no big deal but for my kiddo it required 3 adults to hold him down while he cried, and screamed and squirmed. It’s exhausting and heart wrenching. It had to be done but going through my mind the whole time is “Am I doing more harm?” “Does my child not feel safe right now?” “Is this going to be a trigger for a rough night? Rough morning? Rough week?”
I say all of this, mostly because I just needed to put it somewhere but also to say to practitioners or even people in general, how you treat parents matters. Today was hard but it was made easier by a simple little “make it into confetti” comment from someone who could clearly see I was stressed and with those few little words I was able to let go of the worry that there was any expectation that my kids would ‘behave’ while we waited a half hour and just focus on being the mom my child needed in that moment and so I’m gonna hold on to that for moments in the future for sure