A Puzzlement

 Another 3 am epiphany....

Lately, I have been obsessed with sudoku.  We have books of it we have gotten for elder, and since he's not solving them, I am, obsessively.  My daily crossword is not the challenge I need it to be, I guess.

On the face of it, it seems a huge waste of time. There are certainly many other things I could and should be doing.  Dig a little deeper, and you understand the way my brain works. While I am actively working a puzzle (apparently, the knottier, the better), I have a myriad of backend processes going. My latest internal hegira has been going backward in time and trying to figure out the whys and hows of my thinking and feeling. At first blush, it seems incredibly selfish and self-serving, but at 3 am, the why of this journey had become crystal clear.

Elder.

I've been lamenting for months about stuck. I've been reading this state as any parent might--laziness, lack of motivation, inertia...you get the idea.

It finally hit me that it's not *just* autism, and it's not *just* trauma--it's also anxiety.  Fear of rejection. Fear of the unknown. All the fears, if I'm honest.

When is self-regulation not self-regulation?  When it's fear. Masked. 

That would be younger. 

So it's no surprise that unbraiding all my shit, as inconvenient as it may be to some, is largely in service to helping my guys understand what they are dealing with and how to deal with it. So, no apologies, I gotta do what I gotta do....

The boys are counting on me.