Welcome to Fidgets and Fries. Somewhat free. Somewhat not. If you’d like to honor my writings with a monetary contribution, thank you. If you already have, thank you. Your support allows me to invest in my writing in a way I hadn’t thought possible as well as pay for my son’s communication lessons. And if you are still an unpaid subscriber, thank you. Cause in a world where everyone wants their eyes on their work, you still chose to put your gaze on mine. This newsletter rests at the intersection of the unserious ramblings of a woman full of buttered rice and dad jokes and the somewhat sophisticated stories and essays of someone who knows just enough “smart” words to sound super intelligent and insightful.
What will today’s newsletter be? Hmm…
Life has been keeping me rippin’ and runnin’ all over the place. What the hell is a nap, yo? I know there has been major talk of me updating y’all on Aidan’s Spelling progress and, I ain’t been doing that. So, consider this the update, cause it is.
Right now.
Let’s get to it.
So, Aidan has been consistently been taking Spelling Lessons from yours truly for about 7 weeks. This includes the time we were on tour, though in a limited capacity due to events and being on the road. My behind has struggled, I cried a little bit, and I think I pulled out a few hairs in frustration (not at him, but with being overwhelmed with all of the information and feel as though I still didn’t have the necessary amount of support required for me to help my son with this).
There’s so much involved with this. And I went into this knowing that. But for some reason you feel as though when you’re speaking with other Nonspeakers and their CRPs (communication and regulation partners) it feels like they didn’t have a hard time, and I know that they did. It’s just to see them so in sync with one another and telling me all the things that helped them, I walked away hella confident and then it was shattered when I actually started to work with my son and it didn’t go the way I was expecting it to.
Remember this is a journey. It will take some time. This is something that I have to remind myself of often.
Alright, so I told y’all I was going to document this journey so that y’all could follow along and probably do a bunch of what we are doing. I wanted to do this because I know how difficult it is to find support in this area. I first want to start with what prevents many of our families from taking the first step with our children when it comes to Spelling.
The Barriers
Those damn things that keep us frozen in place. Those pesky hurdles that exhaust us. The walls that keep us out. The ceilings that keep us down. All of it. Well, all of it for me, and I suspect a lot of it will be true for you too.
No. 1 Confidence.
I am one of the scholarship recipients for Communication for Education’s Online Training course designed to help those become effective communication partners for their clients, students, and in my case, children. One of the questions asked this past week was, “what brings down your confidence?” We were sent into breakout sessions to discuss then and then come up with solutions to help us bring our confidence back up. I am in a breakout session with one other parent. It’s the two of us. Her child is 19, mine is 16, so teenagers. I told her that the more I learn, the less confident I am.
And I meant that shit.
The more I learn about apraxia, motor movement, Spelling, being in conversation with Nonspeakers, etc. the more my confidence takes a dive. And I know you might be confused here. You might be thinking, “shouldn’t your confidence go up since you are becoming a more informed human?”
And it does, but I still take those hits and in the end, I think it’s all just breaking even. For now.
I take the shots to my confidence because I am learning all the ways in which I feel I have failed my son. And I know, you don’t know what you don’t know. You did all you could with the information you had at the time. I get it. Those are things I have said in the past, multiple times but still can’t shake the feelings I have here. Only that I have to see them through.
I have become more confused and that really depletes my confidence reserves. I think about apraxia and question all of the things I did because I assumed his behavior meant one thing, and I now know that a few things he was doing was not at all what he was wanting to do. I now question all of the things I have interpreted in his behavior. I question all the things I have done in response.
Confidence -20.
And all this is before you throw in the fact that I am just a parent trying to figure out something that people are being trained to do. I keep thinking I don’t know what I am doing and I don’t know how to do it. Over and over doubt will creep into my mind. I try to push it out, and I have had much success with doing so, but occasionally that mess will line up with its luggage, locate the spare key, and move back in.
What helps me is that I remember that Soma, the creator of Rapid Prompting Method was a parent, still is a parent. But she was a parent just as I was, looking for a way to help her son to communicate. And she did it. She created something that not only helped her son but helped so many others. A parent did that.
So, I can do this.
And you can do this too. We will stumble. We will fall. We will cuss. We will shout in frustration (not at our kiddos though). And then we will get back up.
I said that one of the ways I felt would bring our confidence up is to know that we are not alone in this. And not just knowing that we are not alone, we need to be in community with one another consistently. So, I am in this class with others, learning to be a CRP, and there are discussion groups and we meet weekly to discuss class material, but I feel as though we need more. This group for new families on this journey. Something specifically for the parenting side of this path. There are Facebook groups for this.
I am honestly over Facebook when it comes to matters like these. Love them for other things, don’t like them for this. I am thinking about creating a monthly or twice monthly Zoom (or Google Meet) chats with families who are in the early stages of this journey. Just as we are. I am hoping to bring on some Nonspeakers and their CRPs occasionally to see if they would offer some guidance and advice as well. Or even just take some notes from them beforehand and discuss it at these meetings. This is something I just thought of while writing so if you are interested in this, let me know in the comments.
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