Snap Snap

I didn't shed a tear on the first day of Pre-K. I was dry eyed as he got on the bus for kindergarten. No tissues needed for first grade or second grade either.

But I try to put his set of Snap Snap books into a bag destined for Hub's cousin's son and the floodgates open.

You see, I was relieved to be able to send  T to school. The memories I have of his first years here are mostly of conflict. Both he and I lost out on his early childhood. He was one.angry.boy. We had few positive interactions. Life was a constant battle. He'd wake up sunny and happy. Hubs and I would take bets on how long it would last. Generally less than two minutes. And why should he have been happy? Being here with us in this family was not his choice. 

But I just could not handle the constant-ness of our battles. Nothing was ever right. He fought me at every chance over everything. Him spending eight hours at school and daycare gave me the time I needed to be able to be a halfway decent parent to him during the rest of our waking hours.

And quite frankly, it's not much better now. It's better, but there's still a lot of conflict and resistance and sabotage. I look forward so much to taking him to do things that I know he'll love and he finds a way to sabotage it, because liking a family outing means getting his ticket punched as part of this family, and he does not want to be part of this family. 

That's my daily reality. Being a Mom is not at all what I had hoped for  -- I did not realize I would be parenting a child who does not want me to be his mother. We struggle through because we have to. I try everything I hear about to try to make this work for us, but at the end of the day, we are his Plan B. Actually we are his Plan He Didn't Want and Doesn't Want, and I can't change that. Maybe someday he will change that on his own, but there's a good chance that it will never happen. 

Even the soccer games that he loves so much and that I post happy reports about on Facebook -- it is a rare day we make it from the field back into the car without a major grumpy episode. If we are proud of him, he's getting his ticket punched as part of the family. 

But the books. The alligator with the big teeth who just wants to be friends, but keeps snapping his jaws and scaring everyone. There's a plastic alligator head at the top of the book with a mechanism that makes a snapping noise when you pull down on the lever. There's also a book for a T-Rex  and one for a pelican and another for a toucan. And when we read those books together and got to the "snap snap" words, that was T's cue to pull down on the lever and make it snap twice. And he loved it.

Reading is one of my few memories of happy times. Even if he went into it fighting and kicking, by the end he was calm and happy. To this day, one way I have of calming him when his brain has gone to dysregulated and beyond is to read to him. He'll storm off to pick his books, and start out pouting as I read, but by the end, he's a happy kid. And we don't get happy kid that often.

So, my apologies to Hubs's cousin, but I just can't give you these books. Because I have so little to remember happy times by, and I just can't give them up. I know they're "too baby" for my chapter-book reading T, but now I need them.