In our church, like every other group in existence, there are some aspirational stereotypes  for achieving personal excellence. If you are unfamiliar with our cultural orthodoxy for women, allow me to introduce you to our modern near-mythical maven. Please do not criticize her for trying to be all of these things, she’s under enough pressure already and is just trying to be the best version of herself she can possibly be.  🙂 

She is a spiritual giant who reads scriptures daily, then cooks and cleans for any ailing member of the congregation. She’s college educated and can hold down a job if need be, but prefers to be a stay-at-home mom who prepares all of her kiddo’s school lunches, helps them each with their homework, and takes them all to multiple activities weekly. She’s skillful in the kitchen and shows love for her friends by occasionally showering them with baked treats. She is self-reliant, while also taking good care of her health and appearance. She sews and/or quilts, she crafts, plays an instrument, sings in the choir, learned how to lead music, cans her own food storage, and cheerfully fulfills all of her volunteer positions within the church. She also does genealogy and volunteers in the community outside the church. As if that weren’t impressive enough, she has personally decorated and cleaned her home so impeccably it could be photographed any day of the week for Better Homes and Gardens.

You’ve seen the picture above: clearly, Better Homes and Gardens we here at the Quiet Crisis Next Door are not. Nor can we be, and my point in relating some of the cultural aspirations for women in our church isn’t to deride any of those goals as unworthy, though I do think it can be psychologically unhealthy to attempt excellence in all of them at one time. I also feel strongly that no one should ever be judged for either being unable to do those things or for choosing different life goals. 

I have provided this illustration only so that those of you unfamiliar with our cultural norms can be aware of what they are, as they were a source of emotional dissonance in my life that made it painful for me initially to adjust to some of the realities of parenting a kiddo with certain challenges.  While backgrounds and social norms can vary a great deal, I am not alone in the struggles I had in adjusting to our new reality. In particular, pressures for maintaining an aesthetically pleasing home of some kind exist for families of different religious (even areligious) and cultural backgrounds.

Perhaps you’ve managed to look past the mess in that initial pic and notice the wooden bench, which we are currently using as our couch. We deemed this to be most likely to survive the force of nature that is our son, though most of our family flat out hates how uncomfortable it is. Before he broke two of the legs on the predecessor to this bench, he ripped up part of the bonded leather. In his defense, the initial hole was cat created, but he has impulse control issues and kept picking at the lifted up part until it got bigger and bigger.

A couple of weeks ago I replaced our kitchen table…Tony had chewed off the ends and bitten off parts of the laminate surfacing over a year ago. And this week, I purchased a new secretary desk for myself from Target because our little man (who is going through another growth spurt and currently weighs about 68 pounds) sat on the drop down writing surface and broke it. Thankfully he wasn’t hurt.

Truth be told, there’s a long (very long) list of destroyed furnishings. There was an end table Andy purchased me that was intricately carved…smashed to kindling after Tony picked it up and threw it when he was 2. My air purifiers met the same fate. This was a tricky issue…during this phase of Tony’s life, lifting heavier things helped calm him down, and it took us a while to help him understand our weighted balls were the appropriate thing to use when he needed to do this.

In fact, we have an assortment of sensory related therapy products laying around that are seemingly incongruous with an immaculately decorated house to help him regulate and provide acceptable replacement activities for his more destructive urges. And, at one point I had embraced my inner tacky so thoroughly I put these fabulously gauche sequin encrusted totes in our shelves for our little man to play with as part of a sensory integration strategy. Bandit started clawing at them though, so they had to go and were replaced with metal tins.

I’ve had to learn the incredibly useful skill of repairing drywall because our sweet Tony struggles to grade the force of his muscles when opening doors (doorstops had to be removed because he was ripping them out and chewing on them). Our little man has chewed on some of my paintings, he’s marked up the beautiful coffee table I painted 8 years ago by jumping on it and laying popsicles down (the very same table shown above buried under a mountain of books he dumped out), and he’s damaged some of my dolls and figurines with either throwing them or accidentally knocking them down.

Once upon a time, it really mattered to me to try and create a home that my guests could feel comfortable in. Though, to be honest, decorating and homemaking do not come naturally to me in the least. And in the beginning, I would feel pretty sorry for myself when something got damaged or destroyed because I was attached to the items and I worried about the impact on the comfort of my guests. I went through a period of feeling horribly inadequate because I was living in a constant whirlwind of mess-making potential that I could barely keep up with much less beautify. My rug is perennially stained, my walls are constantly marked with baked Cheetos goop fingerprints, our Arcadia doors continually smeared with Greek yogurt I am forever wiping down. And the painting with poop phase our son went through…that’s a problem for another post.

There are some things I am unable to attend to regularly, and because they don’t involve anything gross or unsanitary (like landscaping), are frequently pushed off until I am brushing up against the limits of what is tolerated by our HOA. I have been doing the best that I can…but I am not mythical. I can’t manage anything in our landscaping safely with Tony in the yard, and he has to have someone with him at all times. There’s just not enough of me to go around, and I am stretched very thin as it is.

My beautiful friend G.R. noticed the barely scraping by state of my yard during a particularly trying time recently and showed up unannounced with the missionaries to trim things. I was and remain deeply grateful. She also helped me replace some plants that were killed off when someone in our neighborhood decided to shut off our drip system during the hot summer months, killing off several plants. My good friend Gena also offered to help out…an offer we will no longer need as we have finally paid off enough of the Air Conditioner we had to replace last summer that we can start to pay someone for cutting the bushes sometimes.

Most of the time though, I’m dealing with things on my own. Offers to help with these types of problems are rare, and to be honest, I don’t solicit them unless I am past the point of desperation. I feel badly about taking anybody away from their own busy lives and circumstances.

In an effort to not be as emotionally destroyed as some of our furniture by all of this, I had to let go of everyone’s expectations for the appearance of my home. And I had to come to a place where I could look at everything here and see that it was just stuff, and I really didn’t need most of it. Before I arrived at this destination of acceptance, I was hesitant about letting anybody who wasn’t a member of our son’s therapy team through the front door unless I knew them so well I was assured of their love and acceptance.

Families of individuals deemed lower functioning can be reluctant to invite others into their home…and I want you to understand these are some of the types of things that can be behind that. I want you to put your arms around them when you meet if they express concern and tell them what I always tell people who are worried about their homes when I visit: “I have a fabulous superpower, it’s called Clean-O-Vision, and I magically see clean wherever I go!” And I might add, fabulous decor and perfectly sculptured landscaping too 😉 Because when I visit, I’m not showing up to see a house…I’m there to be a friend. And sometimes, my friends and acquaintances can’t be mythical either…even if they don’t have a kiddo destroying furnishings faster than they can afford to replace them.