Thoughts

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Actually, that's not true. I've been sleeping just fine, once I actually get to bed. But the getting to bed part has been difficult as of late. There has just been so much going on in my head that I am finding it hard to even wind down and relax enough to realize that I am tired. 

It's hard to explain. This whole thing with Tycho and early intervention has done a number on me, but not in the way you might expect. 

I'm not sad about him being behind. I mean I am, but not in a way that keeps me up at night. It is what it is and he is who he is and I'm okay with it and I have been okay with it for quite a while now. And even though parenting him might be harder than parenting the average two-year-old because of the difficulties in communication, that is frustrating, yes, but it doesn't weigh on me. 

Early intervention itself is scary, though. A whole world of unknown that I never imagined I would need to navigate. We never pictured ourselves as parents to a special needs child. I still don't really think of Tycho that way anyway, but I guess right now he kind of is, as his needs are greater than average right now. Looming over us is the enormity of the responsibility of being his advocate through all of this. Of making sure his is getting the extra he requires in a world that he won't automatically fit into. 

Who knows, really, at this point if this is temporary or if its something larger that will last us into his school years. But my one great hope here is that this delay is just a delay and not something bigger and that in a year or three you'd never know the difference and that we won't be dealing with IEPs in high school. 

Whatever it is, is of course fine. He is my son and nothing in the world can change that. But I feel so unprepared to be the kind of parent he needs right now, that he might need in the future. I knew that being a mother wasn't going to be easy, but I didn't know it was going to be this hard. 

*and then he interrupts my 1am blogpost with a faint wail of "mama" and when I go  into check on him he wordlessly hands me his blanket and crawls back into bed so I can tuck him in again and this is all too much and I cry.