Diving in again

Our family spent a lovely weekend on a church retreat, reveling in rare sunshine, good companionship, and minimal responsibilities.  The kids ran and biked around the camp, gloriously unsupervised.  Luke and a friend canoed to the end of a lake and ran two miles up a mountain.  I stared at the reflection of sunlight on water, rippling up the branches of a cedar tree, ate meals I neither planned nor prepared, and talked too much.  And my oldest child actually engaged with other children to some extent - with collateral damage limited to (as far as we know) a sandal kicked in a girl's face and a boy's eyebrow gashed with a canoe paddle.

Our son is frequently one of those children.  The kind that stand alone and do strange things, oblivious to how they appear.  The kind that get overly excited when something unexpected happens, then stay that way long after everybody else calms down.  The kind that impulsively leap into the moment, missing all social cues, underestimating their own strength, realizing too late that they've hurt somebody, broken something, or humiliated themselves.  These are the things people see when they interact with my son.  Too often, it's all that I see, as well.  I've spent a great deal of emotional energy agonizing over how Josiah is coming across to the world - reminding him over and over again to take his hands out of his pockets because he looks so weird moving them around in there; demanding a response to the unanswerable question of why, WHY he did what he did; engaging in emotional diatribes about how he's irresponsible and needs to think about other people, not just himself.  I try so hard, not just to protect Josiah from a world that will judge and hurt him (as I often do), but to protect the world from Josiah.

Josiah, being Josiah

What is much harder to see, and what I often forget to see, is the real Josiah.  The generous heart of a boy who has bought only one thing for himself in the past two years, giving the rest of his money away or spending it on other people.  The sensitive heart that makes him shudder and flinch when we read together about the horrors of slavery, war, or the Holocaust.  The heart that breaks, then hardens, every time he fails and evil motives are ascribed to him that just weren't there.

The before picture.  During the reception, Josiah
climbed on top of the getaway car to write on it
with lipstick, then smeared it all down the front
of this expensive, rented wool suit as he slid off.
We didn't get an after picture.

A year ago at this time, Josiah had experienced so much failure that he completely withdrew in social situations that didn't include his family.  During recess breaks on the days he went off to school, he would climb to the top of the play equipment or sit in the bamboo, quietly eating his snack.  When gymnastics practice ended, he would leave the gym and wait outside alone to escape having to be with the other boys.  When I asked him why, he said it was the only safe way to avoid doing something to embarass himself - a strategy that a psychologist later affirmed as well thought out and rational, albeit unhealthy.

The path we've taken over the course of the last year - the visits to our family practice physician and the psychologist she referred us to, the formal diagnosis of ADHD, and the difficult decision to begin medication - deserves its own blog post.  But I feel Josiah has begun an upward journey again - finding the courage to engage again with the world, taking the risk of joining in games and activities with other kids.  Yes, he did kick a sandal into a girl's face last weekend, the result of swinging his legs too vigorously in response to an under-the-table kicking game.  But he was sitting at a table with other children and not by himself.  And yes, he did hit a boy in the eyebrow (thankfully, not the eye) with a paddle, because he was switching it from one side of the canoe to the other with too much vigor.  But at least he was out in a canoe with other kids.

"You know, this is really good for Josiah," Luke reassured me, as we paddled our own canoe on a later expedition.  Josiah, his little sister, and another girl were arguing about how to extricate their canoe from the brush at the edge of the lake, and we were staying near enough to keep an eye on them, but far enough away to let them feel independent.  "It's only by interacting with kids like this that he'll learn what works and what doesn't," Luke continued, restraining me from interfering as Josiah loudly tried to persuade the other girls to ram their canoe through dense rushes on a quixotic quest to find an outlet to the lake.  Five minutes later, brave words forgotten, Luke yelled at Josiah to stop intentionally splashing water on his boatmates.  But then, they seemed to get things together.  They found a rhythm that worked for them, and they brought their canoe back to the dock quite competently, working together.

It was another small step in the right direction.

Diving in