Opening Hearts Building Strong Minds

A few months ago, I sat in the kitchen eating my dinner. My daughter was on the couch watching a program on her computer when, unexpectedly, she started crying. Her father had just walked in from work and seeing her upset gently approached her and asked what the matter was. This is where things got fun. I had noticed her pulling away from him lately when he would try to comfort her, preferring to speak to me, and sometimes just wanting to be left alone. This was one such time. After much questioning I could see his frustration building and yet I continued to calmly finish my dinner. I am not sure what my motivation was in simply letting this scenario play out instead of intervening in a situation I was more familiar with, but alas I let it happen. Sometimes you need to throw people into the deep end.

He made the colossal mistake of asking her if she was upset. I watched as this poor, poor soul standing 6ft tall still holding his lunch pail after a hard days work was suddenly exposed to an onslaught of preteen angst. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius would have been impressed as my pint-sized daughter unleashed a storm of, “Upset! Upset! Upset!” as she ran from the room. Dumbfounded, he turned to me, color draining from his face and fear in his eyes asking, “What did I do?! What’s wrong with her?!” This would be the first of many, many, regularly scheduled outbursts from my child, often unexpected, until I learned the pattern which was akin to completing a solid white jigsaw puzzle.

Ah, the joys of puberty! The flowers may be in bloom but the storm rages on. I foolishly believed all the articles and books I read indicating that this would be a rather smooth sail due to her disability. “Girls with Down Syndrome are easier! Girls with disabilities do not really have as hard a time as their typical counterparts.” The lies could go on, but I had spent the first 9 years of her life believing in the pipedream. I had prepared myself for this day and naturally had it ALL figured out. I mean, what mother doesn’t?

I must admit that it all took me by surprise. It wasn’t until a trip to her pediatrician when I mentioned that we were experiencing some behaviors not typical of her usual repertoire of emotions. Her doctor, who I love and has been with her since she was days old, looked at me like I had grown a third eye. “My dear,” she says in her soft Hindu accent, “she’s experiencing puberty!” I looked at HER as if she had just grown a third eye. I could hear the staccato of, “But, but, but, but,” coming from my mouth as the room began to grow brighter as the lies I had believed wafted away like smoke from an erupting volcano. The light was suddenly on and the realization that the bullet I had thought I dodged was very much a heatseeking missel. My daughter was in puberty. My cakewalk was more like a pie in the face.

So, the games begin. How did I not see it coming? I looked back over the last few months and recalled all the behaviors I had explained away. The backtalk which had become more present was obviously a byproduct of her ADHD and simply being sassy. Sassy is good, right? We want our children to be strong and assertive, right? The term ‘strong willed’ has been thrown around a lot by teachers when describing my daughter. I honestly thought this was just her personality!

The backtalk soon evolved into a flat-out refusal to do something asked of her. When my Autumn puts her foot down, she is usually immovable. Next came the tears over the most minute things. Something as simple as explaining why we were saying not to do something or asking her to wait a few minutes for something etc. could provoke a 5–10-minute crying session where she would be inconsolable. These are the worst! A newly acquired habit when she is upset is to sit, most silently, and use every swear word in her repertoire just out of earshot. This one I let go because honestly, I get it. I am not without my own moments where sitting in mostly silence and swearing can be somewhat of a cathartic experience. It is a ‘choose your battles’ kind of moment.

Just when I thought I was done with tracking female issues I find myself with a new open calendar trying to anticipate the difficult days ahead. They wrote no book on the hardships one would face explaining to their neurodivergent female child the changes she would experience during this turbulent transition. They certainly wrote no manual for the postmenopausal mother who erroneously believed she was going to get a free pass when it came to this. So, for now, I try and keep a journal of her mood changes and keep the oh so comfortable conversation flowing, (no pun intended) about her body and mood changes as she becomes a young lady. Keep me in your thoughts, seriously. And say a quick prayer for the man who believed that the floor was finally free of eggshells only to find himself in the chicken coop once more.