Yesterday’s sensory support was being at the playground with my son. Using our hands, being tactile...We found an interesting bucket seat that I think you sit in it and someone spins you around in. I knew he wouldn’t be keen on that, but I knew he would be keen on filling it with bark. So I show d him by picking up handfuls and dropping the bark in slowly as if it were a cascading waterfall. He understood and started to copy me, fully enjoying himself ✨✨✨When I was a child, my mum was not joyful. She was quite the opposite actually. She didn’t participate in life with us, she was afraid to be seen in the world as herself, afraid to be embarrassed. So she sat on the sidelines, she didn’t cheer (and what team was I in anyway, I wasn’t!), she just...didn’t.
My journey of recovering from CPTSD has bought me to a place of healing so that I could have a child of my own. It’s a struggle to be with him sometimes, and when I say, with, I mean, be present and not embarrassed by my own self...just the same way she was. We allow our son to live authentically autistic, as that’s who he was born to be. Showing him that his mum is not afraid to be in a public park, filling a seat with bark and not worrying if we are ‘doing the wrong thing’. Showing him that fun is just fun, and playgrounds don’t need to have rules (as some parents think they do). I’m showing up for him, and I will continue to do so his whole life, he’s more important than how I feel.
Image description: a small child stands over a red bowl at a park and the bowl has some bark in it.
