Refrigerator Mom Part 2

Welcome back!

So in the last installment of Refrigerator Mom...

I finally got to a starting point in my life to begin building a relationship with my son. The only problem is that he was already 3 years old!

So how do you start a relationship with a 3 year old? Well, I was about to find out!

In the beginning, it was actually easier than I thought. My son was seemingly very independent. He would just sit for hours playing with one thing or another. He spoke very well and had a huge vocabulary for his age. So I really just had to go back to that part of my life when I had a dozen baby cousins to babysit. Sit down. Play a game. Sing a song. Easy, right?

Well, sort of. It's one thing to be a babysitter and quite another to be a mother. When you really get down to it, a mother deals with all the bad. Playing and following a schedule is not enough. You have to deal with the colds, the temper tantrums, the disciplinary stuff. All of it! That stuff was not so easy.

My son was/is very routine-oriented. I am also very routine-oriented. So we had that in common. Turns out that was all we had in common. The toys he played with, the shows he watched, the way he learned was completely different from my ideal of a typical boy. He was also starting to get very sickly and I had a hard time playing nurse.

It was like the closer I tried to get to him, the harder it was for me to push those last couple of inches. I got close enough, but any observer could see there was a wall. Luckily, I had a boyfriend who was extremely sensitive to my ordeal. He actually got attached to Cooper very early on. They seemed to have a lot of common interests, him being the consummate geek and fanboy. Cooper took to him almost immediately.

When he was 3, we decided to put him in daycare to expose him to other children. We had moved from a big family in New England to zero family in the Smoky Mountains. It started out pretty well. Of course, it helped that most of the daycare teachers were old church friends of my boyfriend whom he'd known his entire life. The teachers seemed very pleased with his advanced intelligence and his demeanor. But I did notice that he gravitated more toward the teachers than the other children. I found it understandable because he had no experience with kids his own age.

So we continued down this path, with me being a biological mother but emotional sister. My boyfriend continued to develop a stronger bond with Cooper however, so at least, I had something to go on.

Once he got to be closer to school-age, he started having problems with the other kids. He would come home and tell these stories about these horrible, monstrous children treating him so badly. He would get almost obsessive about it. Repeating the same story over and over and not letting it go. I had to talk to the teacher about it. She told me that the children in question were nice, normal kids who were doing normal kid stuff like picking on the short kid (who happened to be my son). It was Cooper who would react badly about it, screaming and even getting violent with the accused. That was when I started to think that maybe there was something, not wrong, but different about him.

I decided that maybe he was just bored. I was getting reports from his daycare saying how he would be disruptive during times when they were teaching something, along with more disciplinary cases. It seems as time went on, he wouldn't wait for a kid to pick on him before he would just react. So I decided that, him being 4 years old but almost 5, that he should start kindergarten early before he started really being a problem child. There's nothing like teaching a kid all kinds of new things to keep them from being bored and acting out. Right?

Find out in the next part of Refrigerator Mom...

Please share this and my previous posts so you can follow along on my journey!

Refrigerator Mom Part 1

So I heard about a theory called Refrigerator Moms a couple of weeks ago. The moment I heard the term and the context, I immediately applied it to myself in regards to my son.

My son is eight years old, in third grade, and emotionally disturbed. I personally hate the term "emotionally disturbed" because it implies that he has been through this great trauma that has left him a ball of crazy. But this is the only thing we have to go on until we get a more thorough diagnosis.

He has been displaying symptoms of Aspergers Syndrome along with Sensory Perception Disorder and OCD. He has always been this way but as he gets older, he fails to mature emotionally. Right now, he has the intelligence of a middle-schooler and the maturity of a toddler.

In researching Aspergers symptoms, I came across several articles about "refrigerator mothers". Basically, in the 1940's and 1950's, doctors blamed Aspergers (and Autism) on the fact that the children's mothers tended to be cold, distant, and unattentive to the children. This maternal behavior caused the child to fail to develop emotionally. The theory was thrown away in the late seventies with the discovery of genetic markers that indicated a more hereditary link to Aspergers. However, in a lot of Europe, the theory still stands as the cause of most Autism-related disorders.

So, after researching this theory, I started to break down my relationship with my son from birth until now...

When he was born, I was basically alone. I was also alone through my pregnancy. I lived away from my immediate family, friends and the father of my child. The father and I called it quits when I was still in my first trimester. I was unmarried and in still in my tour of duty in the military, which put a huge strain of my parents and my already unsteady relationship. But mostly I dealt with my pregnancy by myself.

When he was born, I did not feel that immediate connection that so many mothers feel towards their babies. I felt like we were two strangers. Right away, I felt that there was something wrong. I had always wanted to be a mother, always. And now, here I was and there were no feelings of wanting to protect, love and nurture my baby at all.

Over the next few months, I was a zombie. My son was a very difficult baby, never sleeping, not breastfeeding, not wanting touch or swaddling. I fell deeper into a place of numbness. I wanted to feel outright love for this child but felt nothing at all. I was finally diagnosed with post-pardum depression and put on medication. I came out a little when my baby started to develop a personality, but I still hadn't had that moment that defines a mother and her baby. That maternal instinct. I took care of him and taught him and even played with him but I never felt that undying love for him. I felt possession of him like you'd feel possession of your favorite shirt. You love it, but if it wasn't there anymore, you wouldn't cry about it. I also developed a crippling feeling of guilt over the whole situation. My feelings for my son, my parents having to fill in for me while I cried all the time, my relationship with his father, all of it made me feel so very guilty that it was really the only emotion I could feel most days.

So my life went this way for a while until I could get into the right headspace to really figure out what was going on with us. It wasn't until my son was about three years old before I could get myself healthy enough psychologically to see what needed to be fixed. In that time I had left the military, moved down south, got a job, started college and met my future husband. I was finally in the right place to start building a stable relationship with my son. The only problem was...I had no idea where to start...

Please stay tuned for Refrigerator Mom Part 2