Life is not a sack race

The twins are going to be nine years old in November. In about six weeks. They've in the third grade now. My last blog post about them was four years ago.

Let me tell you new parents about the glory of public school. After two (or three, or more) years of shelling out thousands of dollars every year for preschool education, where your little angels learn about their colors and their shapes and when to eat lunch and when to play outside and how to use the big kid potties, you eventually reach this excellent age. The Kindergarten Age! At that point, you've really done something as a parent, your tax dollars finally have a a real, tangible, direct benefit to you. You get to drop your kids off with the government for like 7 hours, and you don't have to pay (extra) for it. Goddamn, those first few weeks of kindergarten were really breathtakingly wonderful. Now that a few years have passed, I feel like we're becoming complacent for the excellence of our government babysitters.

Public school also brings the community together. Through our kids involvement in the local public school, we've made wonderful friends who we only met because we happened to have kids born at about the same time. The other day, the wife and I were having a conversation with one of these friends. We were discussing a recent event with our cats involving the death of a mouse that ended up getting a lot of traction on Facebook. It reminded me of the events captured from this blog post written in 2010.

That blog post was seven years ago.

When the twins were babies, there was a saying the wife and I would use to placate ourselves when things got crazy. There were two, really. The first one was "pass the wine." But the other one was "the days are long, but the years are short." We didn't believe that at the time. Or at least we didn't understand it.

After sending our friend that link above, I got to re-reading the blog entires I wrote in those late nights in 2008 onwards. Things I totally forgot about came rushing back. Memories of the challenges, and the joys, and the hopes for the future all punched me right in the chest over and over again. I didn't know then what I still don't know now. But I do know more now then I knew then.

I know now that my son will not be interested in sports. At least not for a while, if ever at all. We tried it, soccer, T-Ball, that kind of thing. It didn't go well. He just wasn't engaged at all, more so than the normal issue of five year old kids playing sports. Shortly after starting kindergarten, we receive the news that he is on the autism spectrum. Autism is a tricksy little bitch. There are people with autism who exhibit clear, outward expressions of autistic behavior. Things that children recognize and can accommodate. And then theres the other side of that spectrum. Kids who appear mostly like other kids. But they don't participate with other kids. Loud environments create problems for them. They can't focus on discrete tasks. Relationships are hard, and making friends or being a part of a team are just not part of what they do. That's our boy, and for the last three years, that's been the minefield in which we've been walking. It was easier in first grade than it is in the third grade. He's getting old enough now to realize that he's not quite like the other boys, and that creates good days and bad days.

I also know who he is and who he is becoming. He is curious and caring, even if he can't always express that in ways that people understand. He likes to crack jokes and chase his sister and her friends around the house. He loves our cats and dogs. He is excellent with Legos, which I know is a super stereotypical thing for spectrum kids, but it's also true and it's awesome to watch him assemble his little structures from the instructions. He's become fascinated with whatever the hell "Five Nights at Freddy's" is. More recently, it's been something called "The Grossery Gang," which seems like a new version of Garbage Pail Kids. I wasn't allowed to have Garbage Pail Kids when I was a kid, so I'm kind of being a dick about him having any of this Grossery Gang stuff as some kind of passive aggressive clapback to my parents. I'm reading this over again and I know that I'm becoming my parents. I have negative thoughts about this.

Anyway, the boy and I talk a lot. Most of the time about the Grossery Gang or whatever. But sometimes he blows me away with these really thought out ideas about where we come from, about where we are. About the universe and the scope of life. It's a neat look into what's going on in his head. We usually walk to school, and that's a nice time for him and me. Sometimes we hold hands. I do this with his sister too, from time to time. I'm realizing though, as they get taller, bigger and older that the days of holding hands while we walk to school are coming to a close. Not this year, maybe not next year, but one day I'll look up and another seven years will have passed and they'll be driving themselves to school.

Our baby girl isn't such a baby anymore. She's in the millionth percentile for height for her age, which makes it really easy to find her in crowds. That will become awkward for her soon enough, but for now it's pretty cool. She's discovered reading. Which means she reads all the damn time. Breakfast, she's reading. After school, she's reading. She's sent friends away from the house because she wanted to read. I realize how this sounds, "Oh Parental Unit, you're so burdened by your kid who reads (rolls eyes so hard)." I get that, but it becomes anti-social because she'll do that to the exclusion of participating in normal things. It's nice though, I'd much rather her anti-social behavior be something like reading than painting our floors or cooking meth or something. 

The girl is about the most caring person I can think of. She gets it from her mother. We're trying to actually encourage her to think about herself more often, because her urge to meet everybody else's needs creates problems for her. We had a garage sale about five months ago, she ran a lemonade stand. At the end of the day, she had about 30 dollars. A handful of friends came by to "help" during the day, collectively they were there for about an hour. She distributed 29 of the 30 dollars to the friends who "helped" and only kept a dollar for herself. (By the way, if the parents of those friends are reading this, your kid did not drive that distribution, please don't think I'm suggesting she was taken advantage of). This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

The girl is also a super goober. She also gets that from her mother. She'll do something clumsy or silly and just laugh it off. She's great. But she can also be loud and bossy. And she thinks she knows damn everything when she gets mad. She gets that from her father. Recently, she and her brother get to yelling at each other, like brothers and sisters do, and it'll lead to some really self-righteous comedy gold. For example:

Boy: "I'm going to kick you right in the uterus"

Girl: "You are so dumb! UTERUS IS A PLANET!"

Raising geniuses over here. I had to spellcheck genius. So there's that. #genetics. She does this thing that I'm only writing about so I don't forget about it seven years from now in case she stops doing it next week. When you kiss her head or something, she'll "wipe it off" and put it "in her heart." It might sound a little weird, like Jason Kidd blowing kisses before free throws. But it's not super creepy like it was for Jason Kidd, who is a grown-ass man. It's like the sweetest thing ever and I hope she never stops doing it. But I know that one day she will.

We're a long way removed from the days of her father accidentally getting poop in her hair.

Twins. One boy and one girl. They're going to be nine years old in six weeks. Some challenges, some successes. I've learned so much from them, and I don't think they're ever going to really know it. I've learned what patience means. I've learned how having a sad child you can't console is the most helpless feeling in the world. I've learned that my parents sacrificed more than I ever knew, because it's not like I was the easiest kid in the world to raise.

I've also learned that I miss a lot of the things that I never thought I'd ever miss. I miss crawling, I miss them butchering words while trying to learn how to talk. I even miss the late night cries (sometimes). I miss feeding them. Those times are gone now. But the future holds so much. Sure, a lot of it involves a five year window where they'll both hate us with the fire of a million suns, but we'll get through that too.

All parents have challenges with their kids. It's easy to feel sorry for other parents who are in more challenging situations, and it's also easy to feel sorry for yourself when the challenges you face make it harder for your kid(s) to be "like the other kids." It turns out that parenting is really hard. A good friend of mine looked at me the other day, and said, "it's not a sack race. There aren't winners and losers." Best words I've heard in a long time. Nobody gets out alive, we're all trying our hardest to do the best with what we've got. It's been quite a journey and I think we're still just getting started.

The days are long. The years are short.