Today is my son’s birthday. I often put pressure on myself to do traditional birthday things for him. My daughter enjoys her birthday. She loves being greeted with banners and balloons the moment she wakes up, so I decorate the house for her. There’s always a balloon tied to her seat at the dining room table and a favorite breakfast waiting for her. Later, there is a party with friends and family; cake with lots of candles; presents; singing; and tons of attention.
My son would hate a day like that. I know this, and yet I still feel compelled to go all out. It feels right to do things that way. However, over this autism journey my son and I are on, I’ve learned that it’s all about managing birthday expectations.
For one thing, he doesn’t eat cake. It’s a texture thing that even spending two months at an inpatient feeding clinic did not convince him to eat. For another, he eats the same thing for breakfast every morning. He also hates balloons and the birthday song. And, as much as it hurts my heart to admit this: he doesn’t have any real friends. He has other children that he interacts with sometimes, but he usually avoids other kids. He also rarely cares about gifts or toys.
So why do I feel obligated to put all that time and energy into something he won’t enjoy anyway?
It can’t be about what I want or expect.
As his mom, I want to make a fuss for him — I want to show him how much I love him, how much he means to me, and celebrate the day that he was born. I want to feel like I am giving the same amount of attention and love to him on his special day as I do to his sister on her birthday. I want to be fair.
However, there’s fair and then there’s appropriate. What my expectations tell me and what my son feels is appropriate on his birthday are completely different. Managing birthday expectations is challenging, but I am getting there. Letting go of what I think the celebration should be has freed me to think about ways to make his birthday into what he’d like: a small banner because he likes to read; pudding cups for the class sent in to school; cheesecake with a number shaped candle because he likes numbers. And his favorite dinner: pasta. It does not make me a bad parent for not making a fuss over him. It makes me a better parent to my son.
I have often been excited about gifts for him — a toy, a gadget, a book, something that ties in to his latest fixation. Then he either hands it back to me or simply ignores it. When that happens, I feel like a failure, as if I don’t even know my own child. For a while, he was obsessed with those light up star toys that project onto the ceiling or walls. For his birthday that year, I took him to the planetarium to see a kids’ show about the night sky. He hated it. Since I hadn’t gotten him anything else (I’d been so sure I got it right this time), I felt terrible.
I need to have patience.
Sometimes the rejection is only temporary. If I leave something out long enough, he may notice it and pick it up. After one successful Christmas, I learned to take him down the different aisles of a store to see if he gravitates toward something. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. I don’t push him anymore and that makes life better for both of us. He loves a few apps that require subscriptions and he’s also a Netflix junkie, so I usually tell people to pay for those things as gifts. It cuts down on the unwanted stuff in the house, and he’s a happy guy.
These things work sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. Every success feels like an incredible triumph, and I’ve learned not to take the failures so personally. It isn’t always easy, but that is OK. I’ll just keep trying.
Image under CC license.