And sometimes it is a beauty contest

 This morning has me contemplating all the things.

Mostly elder right now, and there’s a lot that falls into his bucket.  He’s trending toward full time hours, but is stuck. Again. Baseball is his obsession du jour, and like every other obsession he’s ever had, he cranks it to 11. But baseball isn’t his biggest problem.  I could argue that parenting him is.

He’s having the usual needing’ to differentiate ‘ from us, and everyone is having boundary issues. I’m of the camp that he needs to figure some of his own shit out and dad still wants to direct, and elder would just rather tell us what he wants and we need to figure out how to make it happen.

Here I dig in my heels.

Growth is uncomfortable AF. You need to do some painful things and put yourself in hard places, but it’s necessary. I know; I’ve done it, still doing it, and every day I need to ground myself in the things I love to push outward and onward.

This is what he needs to learn to do.

Hopefully he figures it out before we’re gone.

Bound up in this stuckness is his self-worth.  He noted to me the other day while we were talking about his brother’s movie obsession “G got to pick his classes [in high school]. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted.”

I’ve sat with this quite a bit. While it’s not strictly speaking true, as he did give us some input, he also took the path of least resistance—if someone told him it was a good idea, he signed off so he could get back to whatever he was thinking about.

His brother never signed off on squat. He has always figured out his own stuff. The more dad and I pushed an agenda, the more autistic he looked. He looks tons more capable steering his own boat.

Elder uses his agency differently, and has been disappointed to learn that the world won’t cut him a break based on his dx. He’s been angling for student or employee of the month for the last 7 years or so and still speaks bitterly about the fact that it never happened for him while he was at the VoTech.

I still hear about the ‘lazy good looking guy’ who beat him out his first year and the bitterness about getting passed over his second at the VoTech. And not for nothing, the folks who spoke so well for him there wish him well, but wouldn’t hire him.

It says a lot about people’s expectations of him, in general.

I KNOW he can. I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who does.

We need to let him figure it out. He already knows life can be a beauty contest; he’s got to figure out his own way to reckon with it.