OMG, What a Slacker Mom!

Come on, we’ve all been seared by it. The evil eye from some officious grandma in the supermarket who knows better than we do about our kids. Even if our kids are “typical” and just having a bad day.

Take the frustration, anger, and shame you feel when your “normal” four year old has a meltdown in front of the Family Size Cocoa Puffs shelf and some know-it-all tells you how to fix your little problem. Then amplify it by roughly 8 bazillion decibels and pray the dingy floors of Stop and Shop will open up and swallow you whole. Or better yet that they will devour the know-it-all, with toothsome relish.

That’s what those of us whose kids are not what is thought of as typical face on a regular basis. Trust me, dealing with a thirteen year old’s emotional outburst in the aisles of the sporting goods store you knew you shouldn’t have agreed to visit is not much fun--for you or the thirteen year old, who will feel sad and ashamed afterward, because it only confirms his knowledge that he is “weird.”

(As an aside, most children who act out in highly atypical ways probably can’t help it. Nor can their caregivers necessarily prevent it--even if said children have been receiving therapeutic treatment for years and years.)

So here, in the interest of parents of disabled children everywhere (but especially those of us whose children and teens suffer from psycho-emotional dysregulation), are six assumptions you should never make about the parent whose kid makes YOUR kid look like an angel. (Aren’t you lucky we exist, though?)

1. What a crappy parent--obviously wouldn't know a limit if it smacked her upside the head. Time for some tough love, baby!

2. Look at the way that guy's coddling his child. It’s clear who wears the pants in THAT family.

3. Typical. Mom’s on the phone while kid is wreaking havoc in public. Probably setting up a pedicure for tomorrow.

4. Oh, ho! Your teen is losing it and you’re TEXTING? Damn, what ever happened to good old “family values.” (Bring back the Cleavers, I say!)

5. This child clearly needs help. Why haven’t his parents done something about these behavioral issues?

6. This kid is disrupting all the well-behaved kids’ fun (or learning, or whatever). Doesn’t her mom understand how selfish it is to bring a child like that to the playground?

I think these thoughtless comments speak for themselves. But because I have insisted on claiming the last word since early childhood (my mother can confirm this, should you need confirmation), I am going to add a few thoughts before signing off.

First, please don’t think I am accusing everyone whose kids are “normal” of insensitive behavior. (Although, as I think I stated in an earlier post, if yours are TOTALLY normal you might want to have them checked out, in case they are cyborgs or something.

Some of you normal parents rock. So do some of you quirky parents with typical kids. And so on and so forth, in every possible combination and permutation.

Hey, I’m okay, you’re okay. It’s all good, right?

So then: some of you get it. But some of you make assumptions like the ones above and don’t even realize you’re doing it.

We know you don’t mean any harm (well, some of you don’t). But damn, does that moral judgment of yours hurt. Because disability is not a moral flaw. And if you think it’s hard to parent toddlers or teenagers, imagine what it’s like for us!

The final 75 of my way-too-many last words are these: when you see me and my kid and he seems to be falling apart, the person I’m talking to on my cell phone might just be his therapist. The texting? Actually, I am googling “what to do when your teenager has a panic attack in the produce aisle.” Or typing out “S.O.S!!!” to my poor husband Lars--who has seen far too many of those texts hit the fan while he’s on deadline at work.