It's Still Within "Normal", Right?

Abby was always in trouble. I started getting phone calls regarding her behavior at 4 months old. "She won't stop crying"; "She won't take a nap"; "She toilet papered my dog"... The seed of phone-dread anxiety was planted, one that would eventually balloon into an unmanageable foreboding monstrosity. Anyone who has raised a troublemaker knows precisely what I'm talking about. I literally programmed the number of my daughter's school in my phone to read "It's OK", to remind me to breathe, take it easy. It didn't work.

It's the small things parents of non-challenging children take for granted, what I took for granted with my first child. What so many of us would do to be able to "hang our hat" when we drop our children off at a day care, school or program and to not have to worry the entire time, both desperate and terrified to get an update. What a luxury it must be to pull up at pick up time, free of dread for the worst. I quietly sign her out, avoiding eye contact and holding my breath, in hopes no one would "need to talk about something that happened today."

There are benefits to these circumstances. I enjoy the good days in a way most parents experience only on very special occasions. What one parent would consider an average day as mundane, I would consider extraordinary. I appreciate the uneventful. I've always said that one cannot enjoy the sun on their back until they have walked enough days in the shade. That is what happy-Abby is to me, the sun on my skin.

"I think it might be time to consider a psych evaluation."

Alas, I live with the gut punching phone-dread whenever my phone rings. I'll never forget that fateful day that started with a phone call and lead us to the start line of our journey. We sat in a tiny office, on tiny chairs, assembled around a laminate topped table, adorned with cute little plastic bins in the center for paints, markers and pencils. I was Alice in Wonderland in art class after eating the "Big" cake. It was excruciatingly symbolic to an elephant in the room. There were four of them, looking at me with this unbearable mix of judgment and pity. "I think it might be time to consider a psych evaluation."

Can any of you out there relate to that moment when "she's still within the normal range of misbehavior, right?" finally turns to smoke in your grasp? That was my moment. I cried. Hard. They all sat there and watched me with both hesitation and intrigue of how one would take such a blow. So you know what I did next? I got her a psych evaluation - psych eval, they like to call it. But you know what I did first? I realized it isn't that easy. In fact, it's a bit of a nightmare, but that is a whole 'nother blog post.

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