“In the presence of one firmly established in non-violence, all hostilities cease.”
– The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Sutra II.35
Ahimsa is the first of the Yamas, the yogic discipline of compassion and non-violence, the tenet which calls for us to cause no harm to ourselves or other beings and challenges us to dwell in the absence of pain. I am afraid I am having trouble with that today. Today I am in need of grace, as I my feelings are less than pure toward all of you parents who received your childrens' grade cards this week and then posted to Facebook about how many A's your kid got.
And if the me 10 years ago heard the me today saying that I am made angry, jealous, and sad by your joy, I would really consider myself a complete jerkwad. An anti-intellectual. A giant bunch of sour grapes.
See, I was that kid, the "A" kid, when I was in school. Things came pretty easily for me. I conformed to rules as expected. I had minimal emotional outbursts. I did my homework, I studied for tests, and I loved to read. I liked to please my teachers. I raised my hand to answer lots of questions and I rarely ever missed school. I was a parent's dream.
So I find it really, really hard to understand my autistic child. I find it hard to understand why he finds school so emotionally tumultuous. I don't get it when he clams up with anxiety and refuses to act. I am perplexed when he cannot make simple choices about assignments, nonplussed when he has a meltdown over having to write a couple of sentences, and exasperated when he refuses to do work that I know he is fully capable of doing. And I am left angry, defeated, and damn near despondent when his report card comes home with the news that this quarter, because he basically sat in the corner of the classroom reading books and generally being avoidant, he has failed all but one subject. Or rather, his progress was "insufficient"--so he got all "I's," not "F's." Whew! That makes me feel better.
Let me come clean and tell you what the devil on my shoulder wants me to think when I see you post that little Janie got all A's, or little Dickie is at the top of his class. The little devil wants me to be rude and disparaging, and say that my kid is probably twice as smart as your kid, because my kid can break down words into their Latin roots and problem solve to understand new vocabulary, such as today when he figured out that a geosynchronous satellite will always stay over London, no matter what time of day it is, because it travels in time with (synch) with the earth (geo). It wants me to say that my kid has a notebook full of inventions he wants to create someday, and that his heroes are Einstein and Tesla, and that he knows that starfish have thousands of tiny feet and that the peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on the planet, diving at up to 260 mph to catch prey, and that he will kick your butt in Minecraft knowledge any day of the week.
But the angel on my other shoulder knows that I should be celebrating with you, just as when my child has victories, I would want you to celebrate with me. The angel tells me that someday, we will get beyond the need for headphones and sunglasses for sensory processing issues, he will learn to properly interpret social cues, he will learn to manage the anxiety that so often causes him to quit before he even begins, he will ride a bike without training wheels, and he might actually take, and finish, one of those stupid standardized tests so that the school district can have an accurate picture of his abilities for their stupid files. And the fact that he doesn't do any of those things now isn't anyone else's fault, and it is wrong of me to take out my frustrations about it on other people and their children. Their perfect children. Children who get A's and win dance competitions and make home runs and take first place in spelling contests.
And the angel tells me to be nice to myself, that I can't possibly do any more to help him than I am already doing, that it isn't my fault, and that I need to stop beating myself up over it. I need to start practicing ahimsa--not just toward you, but toward myself.
So please forgive me when I don't "like" your status update. It's not that I don't like your child's successes. It's that I can't stop seeing your child's successes as failures in my own.
