Love, Life and 50 First Dates.

So the latest ASD development in me and my 5 year old's life is that he no longer sleeps his meager 10-11 hours a day. Now he sleeps 8-9 hours a day, and he doesn't go to sleep until 10 or 11pm. This is a tough adjustment for me as, even when childless, I was always ready for sleep by 9:30pm. For the last year or so, he's gone to sleep between 7-8pm, leaving me an hour or so for personal time and unwinding before bed. I don't get that anymore.

I've decided to cope with this 8pm-11pm time lag in his bedroom, waiting for sleep, by reading.

This weekend I was pleasantly surprised to find an entire change of perspective from an unexpected source: Wildflower by Drew Barrymore.

Drew was talking about her movie magic with Adam Sandler, and specifically referencing the movie 50 First Dates, which I love. If you haven't seen it, its rom-com about a marine biologist who falls in love with a girl who was in a car accident, causing her to lose her memory every time she goes to sleep, effectively re-setting her brain back to the morning of the day she had her accident. The theme of the movie that Drew references in her Wildflower book, is that you have to fall in love each and every day with your life that you have. (Honestly, I'm not sure I noticed that theme in the movie; it was purely entertainment for me).

But reading Drew talk about falling in love with the life that you have (and she had a lot of negatives going on too), I started to think about that question for myself. And I think I am in love with the life that I have -- I really can't imagine life without my profoundly autistic and adorable son -- but I let myself get so overwhelmed and flustered that I don't have ability to realize and/or experience the love half the time. Not unlike those of us who love the surf, but its like I'm always caught in the barrel of the wave, I can't tell which way is up, and it makes me forget that I love the surf, because it always ends up becoming about survival. And that lets fear in. And fear steals the love if you let the fear reign.

And yet simply realizing that I AM in love with the life that I have, re-energized me from an 8 week slump of extreme exhaustion and overwhelm (ok, I also got a rare 10 hours of sleep the night before, so that might be part of it too). So how do I get back to being in love with the life that I have, everyday?

My thoughts returned to the resolution of the 50 First Dates movie (spoiler alert). Lucy's (Drew's character) new husband and family help her life to move forward from that one day where her memory starts from every day, by making her a video tape. Now every morning when Lucy wakes in her bedroom there is a video tape, and it shows her that she had a car accident, footage of her recovery and her current memory problem. Then it goes on to show that she met and fell in love with this awesome guy (Adam Sandler's character) and they got married, and had a kid who is now 4 or 5 years old, and while it looks just like her bedroom before the accident, it turns out they're actually on a research vessel in Alaska with their daughter. And Lucy cries in amazement as she watches these incredible events of her life unfold in front of her over a few minutes. At the end of the tape she is invited to join her family (including her dad) up on the deck for coffee and everyday she meets her husband and daughter for the first time and absolutely knows she is hopelessly in love with them.

(Lucy meets her daughter for the first time that day)

Ok. Its fiction. But I started to think about what if I awoke every day (not woken by the pitter patter of little feet running to jump on me and steal my blankets, but just naturally woke) to find a video tape of my life. What would be on it? Like Lucy watching footage of her recovery from her accident, I would recoil from the pain of my marriage and divorce, but be overwhelmed by the miraculous birth of my son, hurt again by his autism diagnosis, but overjoyed at our day to day life. And even though the marriage and divorce were more painful than I could bear, they made me who I am today, and I am happier, content, and more satisfied with my life now than I have ever been. Ironically, that all came from making a 'bad decision' instead of being fearful of making a bad decision as I had previously been. (Live in love, not fear).  Yes, a lot of it is really hard, and there are many many tears, but the awesome stuff is SO AWESOME. And there are great moments of cuddles and tickles, the moments I always dreamed of having, I now have. Even today I have spent much of the day just watching my son in amazement; he fascinates me.

So when I realized that I AM IN LOVE WITH MY LIFE, that brought back the glimmer that 8 sleepless and virulent weeks had sapped out of me... and it didn't hurt that my little man happily entertained himself on YouTube all afternoon either.

Love. Not fear.

Day 30: Sleep (The journey toward healing)

Several weeks ago I was chatting with a friend of mine who is also a mental health therapist. This person told me about when they had to take a medical leave because they had so many clients that were suicidal, that they couldn't keep their own head above water. The advice this person gave me is that, "when you do get a chance to rest, you need to go really hard at it. All that stuff that you teach your clients... you need to do all of that and do it intensely."

So this week was the third week of my vacation, and the first week where I haven't been away somewhere, and still had childcare for my non-verbal ASD child. I haven't been able to turn off completely because I still have to be a mom to my special needs child. I still have to take him to his autism intervention appointments 3 times a week. But I have been attacking nutrition, physical restoration, and rest with everything I have. (kind of an oxymoron: attacking rest).

The rest has, by far, been the most challenging. My adrenalin surges are my biggest problem as my adrenalin has been keeping me going for so very long (like being in newborn mommy mode for over 5 years... with a non-cooperative newborn). Yesterday was the perfect example of that. My surging adrenalin (same as a panic attack) kept me up until 11pm. Why was it surging? Because almost every time I have been ready to go to sleep in the last 5 years, I wasn't able to because there was still something critical to be done, or an emergency to tend to, so adrenalin helped me keep going. Now it thinks it needs to kick in every time I get tired because that's what its been doing for me for so long. (And since I am tired most of the time, the adrenalin surges most of the time).

...so I couldn't sleep until after 11pm due to adrenalin. I finally fell asleep sometime before midnight. Then my ASD son had a typical bout of night waking from 1am - 4am, and I had to be up with him to prevent him from kicking the walls or floors and disturbing our neighbours. It also turned out he needed some intense sensory input, so I also had to bear-hug him, squeeze him, kiss him, and give him leg compressions, which are sort of like massage. I'm still super grateful I have an ASD kid that loves being hugged and kissed. And its my favorite thing to do as his mom. But when I've only had an hour of sleep, and I've been squeezing/kissing for an hour, it wears on a person.

Somewhere around 4am I finally got to sleep. Then up at 7am to get my son to his autism intervention appointment for 9.

We were back home around lunch, the babysitter came over, and I headed straight for bed, and fell into a very deep sleep for two hours. When I woke I felt like I was coming out of a coma. Most days adrenalin wakes me. Not today. And wow, was it ever hard to come back to consciousness and functionality. It took me a long time to figure out what day and time it was. I was convinced I had slept for a couple of days.

When I was at family camp last week I got in a 1 hour nap one day there, as well. Both that day and today I feel like I can grasp a small handful of the person I really am again, beyond mommy-robot mode. And that is a giant leap forward in my journey toward healing.