A Labor of Love

 

Real talk. Parenting a special needs kid is tiring. It is a labor of love, to be sure. And there is a lot of love. But there is also a lot of labor. 

Any parent, perhaps particularly adoptive ones and where special needs are involved, must sublimate what is natural, comfortable, and easy, in order to do what is necessary. It’s a high bar, especially when juggling other kids, a hard job, and one’s own life challenges. 

Let me provide a small and mundane but telling example. I would not consider myself an absolute neat freak. But I skew heavily towards wanting things to be tidy and minimalist. When Asher is away for sleepaway camp during the summer, I can clean house, literally and figuratively. Even better, once cleaned, things stay clean. Toys put away stay put away. Rooms, once swept and vacuumed, feel neat. 

Very few people enjoy the cleaning itself. Many people enjoy the consequence of cleaning. I am one of them. (Truth be told, in small doses, I do also enjoy the cleaning itself.) 

Asher is a bit of a tornado when he is home. Tornados require massive clean-up, which is hard enough to summon the time and energy for but at least yield a return to equilibrium. But imagine not one tornado to clean up from but a constant cycle of daily tornadoes. At a certain point, you give up cleaning up because what’s the point if you’re going to need to clean up the very next day. 

To be sure, part of parenting Asher is teaching him how to not be a tornado. And he and we can do better in that regard. But, in another sense, he is not likely ever going to not be some level of tornado. Which means we have to either decide to constantly clean up messes or live with the messes. Both scenarios weigh heavily on me. 

The path forward is probably a little bit of both. Sometimes we have to suck it up and get to cleaning when what we want to do is veg. And sometimes we have to accept a level of mess because there are bigger battles to fight. It is truly a labor of love. A lot of love. And a lot of labor.