When Normal is a Stranger

I had a long talk with Maya's school teacher yesterday.  He called to ask me how things are going at home with Maya these days.  After a very rough start to the school year, things have calmed down, Maya seems less stressed and out of her element than a month before.

In all honesty though, she is more defiant than she usually is.

We talked a lot about it, I shared the things I am observing at home, that Maya wants much more control over her routine, she has always been a child that needs to do things in her own time, but now things like bathing, eating, sleeping and getting dressed are now things that she wants to dictate the who, what, where, when.  And most of the time what she is dictating is whether.

Her teacher told me they are noticing the same things at school and we talked a long time about whether this was "new" behavior.

I said again, that she has never been a kid that flows through a routine without hitting bumps, but what seems different is that while the bumps used to be more about her fears of the unknown or her difficulty moving from one activity to another, they now seem to be much more about her simply just not wanting to do what is asked of her.

A thought occurred to me then.  Perhaps she is just starting to be an obnoxious teenager earlier?  What if what we are seeing is not related to autism or special needs, but simply my little girl is growing up?  Maybe, although it is early, she is going through what every kid goes through.

Normal?  We left normal behind 6 years ago. What's normal?

The idea was kind of revolutionary.  I am so used to the world of special needs, that so much of what goes on with Maya, so many of her challenges are related to autism  or to her physical and cognitive delays, that the thought of her just going through something normal, is the furthest idea from my mind.

Normal often lives in another galaxy and to be honest, I feel a little like a visitor in a foreign land without a passport, who can't read or speak the language.

Maya is going through puberty even though she is just shy of her 10th birthday.  Her body is swirling with hormones, while at the same time, mentally, in most things she is around the level of a 7 year old.  So despite what is going on physically and emotionally her whole world revolves around stuffed animals, stickers, and she still very much likes to watch Disney Junior and not whatever-tween-show-is-in-right-now.

Still, although I try to understand what is going on inside my daughter, it must be even tougher for her to make sense of it.  Actually she is not even trying to make sense of it, she is just living *in* it, it's just happening to her.  She still acts very much like a small child and enjoys the activities and life of a small child, but yet she is becoming a woman, and not just physically, but emotionally.  It must be really confusing for her.

The hardest part of it is that Maya has a tough time relaying information to us.  She knows her feelings but she has a hard time naming them.  She is typically autistic in that what she understands best are things which are visual, in plain language, simply put.  None of those attributes are even close to puberty.

These discussions have to take place at just the right place and time and then it is the conversational equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle.  She gives you a piece or two and you have to gather all the pieces from 47 talks and try and find the edges and build inward and not until you have a good half of the pieces together, can you see what the actual picture is, and even then, there are always missing pieces, so you are never quite sure if you are missing something important.

That's life as the parent of a child on the autistic spectrum though.  It's our reality.

Can you understand why normal is throwing me for a loop?  I am sitting at my card table with my  puzzle trying to fit pieces together.  I am not prepared for normal.

I've accepted autism, I wonder if I can accept normal?  I am in all honesty, not sure I like normal.  There's not much to do about normal except grit your teeth and suffer through it.

And Maya's 10, what if this normal puberty stuff lasts until she is 16?

Where's the vodka?

Puberty Proud

I was just going through all my blog posts and came across this one that I posted nearly a year ago.  A year ago I was panicking that Maya was kind of starting puberty.  I have not posted too much on this topic, not because I don't have a lot to say, but this is a topic where it is hard to find that balance between sharing my story and violating her privacy.  It's a hard line to draw and sometimes, especially now, I wish I would have started blogging more anonymously, making up a nickname for Maya like Rainbow Catcher or Marshmallow.  Then again, I suck at nicknames.  No.

Still, I have been reluctant to post details of how we are dealing with Maya's puberty, at 9 years old, although I did post this.  I admit, it's tough when talking about puberty to find the right balance between being open and protecting Maya's privacy.  I have tried to keep my postings about how I am dealing with the situation and how it effects me rather than her and I have been scarce on actual details.

Until now.

Here she is nearly a year onward from that original post and she has gone from starting puberty to having C-cups.  And while dressing her at the moment is a challenge and I still obsess about the irony of having a 10 year old child with autism, developmentally behind, who still inhabits the world of stuffed animals, pretend games and stories and Thomas the Train,  while at the same time having to make sure that the t-shirt she is wearing doesn't show cleavage or make her look like a 9 year old Lolita, she is handling the transition like a trooper.

One thing I have noticed is that the changes she is going through make her differences more pronounced to the outside world. We seem to get more stares when people see my beautiful daughter, who at-a-glance looks much older than her age, clutching stuffed animals and moving clumsily with the occasional arm flap and who is the only child with breasts climbing on the slide at McDonalds play land.

But that's really about me.  I am the one who is self-conscious about it.  Maya is her happy, usual self.
She is, however,  outgrowing clothes faster than the speed of light.  We're already out of kid sizes and her feet are only 2 sizes smaller than mine.  Wearing a bra is now a necessity of life and we had to try several before we could find some that are comfortable but offer her the right support and she never fussed about it.  For a kid that has a hard time with sudden changes, she has just rolled with this and been an absolute star.

With all these physical changes, I of course have been talking to her a lot about her body and asking her frequently if anyone has been teasing her and stressing the importance of her telling us if anyone makes fun of her or makes her feel bad or says anything about her body.  I have also had the other talk with her, about being private with her body and not letting anyone see her naked and how important it is for her to tell us if anyone touches her in a way that makes her feel anxious or bad and we've stressed how no one should ever touch her private parts or ask to see her naked.

On Friday Maya's teacher texted me telling me that during gym class she offered to help Maya with lacing up her shoes and casually walked into the changing room to do it and Maya, who was dressed at the time scolded her for coming in, telling her, I am changing clothes in here and my mommy said no one is allowed to see me naked, next time, wait for me to come out.

And just this evening Maya and I were talking and I asked her if any of the kids at school were teasing her about her body?  No, mommy, they are my friends.

So, while my girl is going through a lot of changes, she definitely seems to be handling it.

Like a champion.

Guest Spots

I am delighted to announce that the Jewish parenting site Kveller has given me the privilege of being a guest blogger on Raising Kvell.  Here is the link to my very first piece.

And, lest we forget, here is my latest piece on The Times of Israel.

The Agony and the Irony

I've been in denial about something for a while.

I think Maya may be starting to go through puberty.  I don't want to go into too much detail (as I am already pushing against the privacy boundary by writing this) but over the last year there have been the telltale signs of her body readying itself for womanhood.

It hurt to type that.  Physically.

I've done all the reading about it and although she is a little early compared to her peers, many sites that cover this topic report that pre-pubescence typically starts between 8-11 years of age and is considered normal.  Plus, nowadays many girls reach puberty a lot sooner than their mothers and grandmothers, historically the best predictor of when a girl would reach puberty, but nowadays it is much more unpredictable, personally I think environmental factors like chemicals, drugs and hormones present in our foods helps speed up a girl's biological clock.

If I want to be truly honest, I started noticing very small changes last year so that's the amount of time I've been in denial about what is going on.  Throughout the year I have noticed her body continuing to change.  Her body is no longer indistinguishable from a boy's.  Actually at a birthday party a couple of weeks ago a friend told me that a few of her friends asked how old Maya was and couldn't believe she was 9 because she already was developing.

I am pretty sure that every parent of a daughter goes through a little mourning period when they can no longer deny that their little girl is growing up and beginning the journey of becoming a woman.

My little girl, however still has the attitude of a 6 year old but is starting on the journey of becoming a woman.

It's definitely scary.

Maya still can't eat without getting food in her hair.  Hygiene is just not her strong suit.  She does pretty okay with keeping her hands and face clean nowadays but I still have to remind her when she is distracted.  I still wash her hair for her and if I didn't remind her to brush her teeth, it would probably never happen (okay, that's most kids).  I can't imagine adding menstruation to the mix and not only explaining the changes happening in her body but the whole practical aspect of how she has to deal with it, how she has to learn her cycles and be prepared.

All the books, even the ones dealing with autism and puberty say the most important thing to do is to talk with your child about puberty and the changes happening.  I get that preparing Maya is way better than not preparing her but my daughter is caught in a world largely of her own imagination, of Thomas the Train and her dolls and her stuffed animals.  A good percentage of the the time when I talk to her, she runs away or retreats back into her own pretend world, a world that she understands and can cope with easier than the real world, where she has to try and cope without her senses being on overload.  The pretend world is her way to keep her senses in control.

I am pretty sure Thomas the Train doesn't have an episode where Percy or one of Thomas' other friends gets their period.

What do you do when your child is developing into a woman but her head and her heart are still very much a little girl? The irony is not lost on me that here is a girl who developmentally and emotionally is well behind her peers but her body is developing way ahead of her peers.

It's almost like her body is trying to overcompensate for everything else.

But I know that no matter how hard it is, I have to find a way to talk about these things with Maya, to try and explain .  My mother never explained anything to me, I got my period at 13 and my mother showed me where she kept the sanitary napkins and that was pretty much it.  I didn't understand until a couple years later what menstruation meant,  that what was happening to my body was it's preparation for womanhood, for the possibility of bearing children.  No one told me that.  I figured it out all on my own one day when my dad went to the University of Pittsburgh for some meetings and he took me with him.  I spent several hours in the nearby Carnegie Library and came across the book Our Bodies, Ourselves.

I won't let it be like that for Maya, but I also don't want to give her more information than she can handle.  So far from what I've read, I've not found any approach to this that I think will work for Maya, that she can understand what is happening to her body and why, in a way which she will both understand and which will not frighten her.

I have my work cut out for me.