Aches and pains

In this rain, my knees and wrists hurt. I injured my knee a long time ago in a car accident and the rain makes it twinge and ache. Just like my wrists, which I crack when I'm nervous or bored and have done since I was a kid, that now rebel on wet days, demanding to be wrapped in warm compresses and given ibuprofen. Old pains made sharp again. Old habits rubbing me raw today.

Some days, rainy days like today, this is what it's like to have kids. All my old insecurities, all the failures I feared so much and felt so much as a kid suddenly rear their ugly heads again. And, yes, I'm older and I've learned my way around them. I've got confidence and a much harder shell. I could take them on. Except I can't. They're not my battles anymore, not in the same way. I have to stand there feeling frustrated and helpless and guilty while people I love, little people I love more than anything, fumble and fight them all by themselves.

I worry about my kids a lot. I admit it. I watch them on the playground and worry. I worry about Leo, who is always talking to himself. I worry about Aidan, who follows the other kids around, wanting to be a part of the game but never quite knowing how. I worry and I feel it, that sense of loneliness and separation, like it was yesterday. Like I'm still out on a playground, talking to trees or putting on acts for other kids, being silly, crazy, because I'm not sure how to be myself.

My kids are disorganized, like me. They lose their homework and their library books. just like I did. It's causing Aidan no end of grief with his teacher this year because he doesn't go over his work, because he's always in a rush to get his ideas out and he can't slow down and be clear and concise, because he can't sit still, because he's capable of brilliant work but he just isn't (according to his teacher) living up to his potential. Because he's gifted and he's hard to deal with. His marks are dropping and he's starting to dislike school. He's gifted and he's lonely and his peers don't really get him and he feel ostracized sometimes and like the one thing that he used to be good at, school, he can't succeed at anymore. I remember that feeling. Feeling it again, so helplessly, is making me crazy.

And Leo, well, Leo is just starting down his road. And I don't want to paint him into a corner, not even here, in a blog. I'm pretending that it isn't indicative of anything when he comes home from j.k. sighing that the other kids don't listen to him, that they don't like his ideas, the way he tells them things, stories, the way he reads the words that the senior kindergarten kids are reading. It doesn't mean a thing.

I understand my role. I've arranged for the third parent teacher interview. I've called the school's head of special education. I'm learning how to advocate and fight for Aidan, every year, with every new teacher. But as much as I advocate, as much effort as I put in to helping the teachers, the special ed department, the principal, to understand what it's like to be gifted and what the challenges are (because there are many), I still can't help them. They're my kids and I can't help them feel like they're the same as the kids around them, like they're understood and liked for the very things that make them different. I just hope they find people. Please let them find people who understand them, who make them feel like it's okay to be them. I think about it all the time. It aches in me. Even when it isn't raining.