It's Crumbly

Many days, I find myself trying to mentally rearrange the building blocks of my life in order to attempt to fix the stress of raising this child with autism.  Surely I can’t be the only mom that does this. 

There’s the work block, the house block, the children block, the school block, the extended family block, the hired help block, the medical block. 

I move them around in various configurations, hoping that I’ll land on the one that is the answer to my question.

How can I make my family functional again? More… normal?

I stack them, in my mind, in various ways to try to solve the puzzle, but each one has its own challenges and obstacles, its own stresses and demands, its own cost.

It’s like Equilibiro, a young children’s game that my typical son enjoyed.  You follow the pattern with the blocks, and when you match it exactly, you win!  As an adult, it’s easy peasy (when you have all the pieces, that is). A block here, a block there, move this one that way and-boom-you’re good to go.

The problem is that the one block that I would like to move, the autism block, is the one that I can’t seem to budge.  It is, by any definition of the cliché, the metaphorical stumbling block.

And no matter how I arrange those blocks, no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get around it.  That autism block is always there, at my feet, tripping me up and pushing me around and dictating where all the other blocks fall.

It would be nice if that autism block supported us, gave my family purpose, and would anchor us.  Instead, it seems like it’s always crumbling and letting us down.

It’s a crumbling block, I guess.