What is normal, anyway?
It was back to real life today as the holiday is over and everyone is well. I wasn't feeling overly excited about the prospect of going back to my rather full regular schedule. We did an abbreviated version of school this morning to ease all of ourselves into it. Tomorrow we'll try to manage the whole thing. Riding lessons and horse classes filled the afternoon, and I have a meal plan and a grocery list ready for tomorrow. I keep telling myself I can do all this because I admit to having vague feelings of panic about it all after so many weeks off. I kind of liked having significantly less on my schedule. A lot.
Probably everything would feel a lot easier if R. was functioning well. We are on over a week of complete disregulation. Thankfully the medicine we have makes a difference at night, though she has been waking up with nightmares every single morning between 5 and 6 am. Just enough before the alarm to make it a little difficult to go back to sleep. During the day, it is as if she is living in a perpetual PTSD flashback. No seizures, but her fear is compounded by a constant anticipation of one coming. She has not been dealt a very nice deck of cards.
We have been doing a lot of calming measures... deep breathing, talking about what she is actually seeing and hearing around her, lots of snuggling together. It helps a little bit, but the second we stop being her outside regulatory brain, she cannot maintain it herself. So our choices are either J. or I need to be with her, with J. working and me teaching lessons outside, this can be tricky. If we are not sitting with her, then she starts to stagger around the house making a whining moaning noise, trying to create the level of chaos outside of her that she feels on the inside. We have worked very hard with everyone to move away and not engage when she is doing this, but everyone has their limits and it often becomes necessary to step in again. By the end of the day, everyone is a wee bit tired of being so gosh darn calm and non-reactive. I may be forced to clear my schedule more if she is going to be in this phase for more than a week or so. As soon as the psychiatrist can see people in person again (darn, Covid), we will be in her office.
Here's something to keep in mind, though. Life goes on around all of this. It had to. The other children and adults living in the house also deserve normalcy... or at least what passes for normal around here. Last night J., H., D., and I played a Ticket to Ride expansion game because we had promised H. we would play with her (Ticket to Ride is her favorite game at the moment). We lit our first Advent candle tonight (we were all kind of done in by our full day yesterday, plus we still hadn't located the Advent wreath), and sang around the piano as is our tradition. We had tea time and read our book. We had dinner together. Normal life that had some great moments in it. The great moments just had a slight whiny-moan-y sound track in the background. We seem to have the good and the bad, the hard and the joyful constantly juxtaposed.
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Here is the link to the recorded Q&A from yesterday for anyone who couldn't make it.
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