I don’t remember how the meltdown started or why. Like all nightmares, they seem to have no beginning and feel like they will never end. I think it had something to do with the shopping cart. Wanting to be in it, or not be in it, or me grabbing the “wrong” one. My other two children were already strapped in. (Shout out to Target for those large family boats that fit three kids per cart.) Or maybe I was wearing my toddler, I don’t know. All I know is my four-year-old son was pulling on me and crying in the inconsolable way he does when he’s been pushed past his point of being able to cope with the situation. This is every day for me raising a child with a sensory processing disorder. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember all of the details of this particular Target run. What I do remember is this: an older gentleman walking passed us stopped for a moment. He leaned down slightly, looked directly at my kid and said, “Is someone being bad?”
“He’s not being bad.” I quipped back loudly enough for my son to hear, “He’s just having a hard time right now.”
The man raised his hand as if to mime an insincere apology and walked away. The rest of our Target run must have went as usual because I don’t remember it. We probably spent $100 on stuff I had no intention of buying when I entered and ended up at the in-store Starbucks drinking a well-earned coffee watching my kids inhale their Lunchables and veggies straws.
But as mundane as that day was, I haven’t gotten that unsolicited comment out of my head. Did this stranger somehow think he was being helpful? That a quick rebuke from an old man would somehow soothe the savage beast that is my preschooler? Did he mean to embarrass him into calming down? Or embarrass me? I can only imagine what he thought of me and my response. I imagine it included words like ‘millennial’, ‘spoiled’ and ‘snowflake.’ Well, guess what? I AM a millennial and my kids are FAR from spoiled, and Tyler Durden did the snowflake rant better than the baby boomers.
But those aren’t the reason I got offended. I’m not someone who believes all children are good until we teach them to be bad. One of my kid’s favorite pastimes is biting people who make him angry, and he has never seen my husband or I model that particular problem-solving technique. The fact is that kids are selfish. They are capable of both good and bad like all humans. But you do not get to walk over to me and my family uninvited and magnanimously assess that my son is ‘being bad.’ You have no context of who we are. You don’t know what the situation unfolding at that moment is. You don’t know me and you don’t know my son.
Raising a child with sensory processing issues is exhausting. He pushes me to the edge almost daily. He dangles me over the cliff of my wit’s end on a regular basis, and once he reaches his melting point there is pretty much nothing you can do about it besides ride the wave. He is also funny, smart, affectionate, loving and kind. Are his behaviors challenging? Absolutely. I don’t enjoy it. But here’s the secret: neither does he. “Challenging behavior occurs when the demands being placed upon a child outstrip the skills he has to respond adaptively to those demands.” My son isn’t crying on the Dollar Spot floor because it’s fun for him. He’s crying because he doesn’t have the skills to cope with what feels like a very big, very real, shopping cart problem. He would much rather be getting on to the Lunchable and coffee part of the day too. But he can’t. He’s being tossed around in an untamed ocean of emotions he can’t explain. That’s exactly why I make it a point not to say he’s being bad, and won’t stand idly by while strangers hurl their judgments at him either. Some days it can be super frustrating, but on our worst days, I make sure to give him extra big squeezy hugs and tell him how much I love him. He brings me joy. We are on the same team and we both just want to get to that Starbucks at the end of the Target run.
