No Jane Austen

Someone recently wrote to me, asking if I'm working on anything right now (thank you, you-know-who-you-are!). I have kind of dropped off of the face of the writing-earth since January. Last time I checked in with the writing side of the world, I was researching a new project. Little did you know, I was not getting very far in any of my writing projects, because my twin girls had just turned three. Three is the age at which the majority of children who are diagnosed with anything on the autism spectrum usually get "found out," for lack of a better term. Well, after three years of not meeting certain milestones and being just shy of "normal," we sought some help.

That's when our family was introduced to Sensory Processing Disorder.

Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) is not the most famous neurological funkiness in the world, so unless you or someone you love has it, you probably haven't heard of it. It's been called Sensory Integration Disorder/Dysfunction, if that helps. In a nutshell, you can think of SPD as autism's clumsy, chatty cousin. People with SPD usually can communicate quite effectively--at least enough to get by (as for our kids, they began talking at 6 months)--far moreso than the average person with autism. However, some of the behaviors are the same, namely the self-stimulating or stimulation-avoidant behaviors: rocking, humming, having to touch everything/avoiding touching anything, extremely picky eating, a desperate need for routine, fear of new experiences... I could go on and on. These behaviors are indicative of a neurological system that can't quite make sense of what the nerve endings are telling the brain. For instance, my kids can't eat cereal without humming: they're trying to soothe themselves against the "danger" signal the brain is getting from the sound of the cereal crunching.

The average person can't tell by looking at a person with SPD that something's not quite right with his/her brain. In fact, the tendency of a child with SPD to avoid typical childhood play (dress up in clothes with weird textures, jumping & running, playing tag) just tends to get that child labeled as, well, bratty. Or lazy. Or clueless. Or just plain weird. It's hard to understand why a normal-seeming kid wouldn't want to dive into a noisy group of other same-age children and grab an appealing toy. But it's even harder for that kid to jump in there when the brain hears the noise, senses the movement, and sees the toy but can't make enough sense of it all to tell the body to move through the hububb safely.

If your brain were always telling you that you're in danger, you'd be screamy and whiny all day, too.

What causes SPD? Nobody knows exactly. I'm willing to put a twenty on epigenetics, because there is a strong genetic tendency but that's all it is: a tendency. Kids who were institutionalized (like in an orphanage) tend to have SPD as well, regardless of genetic history. Multiples (like our twins) are at higher risk, but I've not seen any research as to whether that's due to premature birth (ours were sooo very, uncomfortably term) or some other factor, like cramped womb conditions. As for us, we have photographic evidence that SPD may go back in our family all the way to the proverbial boat. My great-great grandfather, in the family portrait upon landing in New York, has "lazy eye." So did both of my kids. Lazy eye happens when the brain can't make sense of the two images being beamed at it from the eyes, so it "shuts off" the weaker eye. Sounds like a likely marker for SPD to me.

What can be done to help a child with SPD? Therapy. Lots of it. The earlier, the better. My kids get OT and PT, and we've enrolled them in therapeutic activities, like ballet and karate. They have made great strides already, and every time they finally taste some sort of success, that drives them to work harder. The older one couldn't even stand on one foot two months ago. Now she roundkicks training pads out of the air. The younger one couldn't jump with two feet. Now she chasees across the dance floor with a smile and a bounce in her step.

We were also strongly advised to put them in preschool, to give them more experience navigating noisy, chaotic groups of their age-peers. They did not, however, qualify for free preschool, because they are so far ahead of the game, cognitively speaking. This could send me off on a tirade about the lack of gifted education in our country, that no wonder we don't score well against other countries when we're putting our limited educational budget towards making everybody the same, not giving kids resources to meet their own highest potential, whatever that potential that may be. It could send me off on a tirade, but it won't. What it will do is make me admit that my writing has taken a backseat (more like a trailer) to helping my kids get what they need. In case you didn't know, writing isn't the most lucrative profession in the world. Therefore I had to take a desk job to pay for preschool-times-two.

I'm seeing Jane Austen's point, when she wrote to her niece and told her not to get married, because her creative efforts will get sucked away by her children. I see her point, but I'm not Jane Austen. I may not have time to write right now, but I am being given much about which to write some day. For instance, my kids' self-stimming noisemaking has freed up my mind for a project where I'll have to write a few languages. They're also helping me get more active, playing tag and hopscotch and run-around-the-house when otherwise I'd be butt-down in front of a computer screen.

I don't know what the future may bring, writing-wise. I don't know when I'll finish my next book. Heck, I don't know when I'll finish a short story or article again. Nobody will suffer if I don't, though, so that's okay. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to juggle the family schedule.

I started writing once before. I have hope I can start again.