Image credit: Photo by boxercab on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Last Monday I walked through the grocery store feeling like a weight was crushing my chest, a tight lump in my throat the only thing between me and tears. And part of me wanted to self-indulgently sit there on the linoleum floor under the flicker fluorescent lights and cry, much the same way that I'll both fear and crave the relief of vomiting during a wave of nausea. For the second time this year, a babysitter had dumped us because she found my son Austen's autistic behavior too difficult to handle.

The grocery store I was in wasn't the one closest to my home. It was an additional twenty minutes further away, because the one closest to my house was all out of strawberry Yoplait, one of the three foods Austen will eat (and not just eat reliably, but eat at all). I'd had a clerk check the stockroom and then check with the store in the next town before making the drive to the store in which I now clutched my cart wanting to cry.

It had been the sitter's first attempt at watching the kids, and I'd been satisfied that everything went just fine.  She had experience working with autistic children in the past, and both children seemed to take to her from the start.  There seemed to have been a few rough patches, but it didn't strike me that the kids or the sitter had a particularly difficult night and the sitter, even at the end of the evening, seemed interested in learning more about how to work with Austen.  But this morning I'd been informed that she did not want to come back because the job was too difficult.

Too difficult?  Is that what my life is?  Here I was having driven an extra twenty minutes each way to the grocery store because my son's eating issues are so severe, and I have a babysitter who has worked with autistic children before seeming to say to me (through her actions) that my son is worse than any of them.  Am I in another one of those situations, like living with an addict, where we start to think that everyone secretly drives raging drunk or tries to pick up prostitutes or does drugs with their kids because that's all we see, where the bizarre and unacceptable become normal?

I remembered the babysitter asking about whether Austen's behavior was better at school than at home and wondering, "Was she saying it was my fault?  Did she think if I'd worked harder, if I were smarter, if I were more skilled, if I set up a different structure, if I were stricter, if I trained him better, everything would be different?  (I'll work harder, I'll do better, please love me!)  Does she think I'm a bad mom?  But the beloved sitter she was replacing used to tell me what great work I was doing and how blessed our family was..."

And I actually started to tally the sitters up: "Two quit this year, but three started and love us.  One stayed on from last year (the one who had just moved, whose eyes would glow with enthusiasm when she talked about our family) and in past years no one had ever quit; they got pregnant or moved or started school... But maybe things are getting worse?  Oh, this isn't helping!  Am I in denial?  Is my life crazy or just life?  Am I bad or am I good or am I... (damn!) looking to other people to tell me what is real and whether I'm doing the right thing for my son."

It didn't help that tightness in my chest or that longing for tears to dissipate to know that I was looking to other people (rather than myself and my God) for definition and approval.  I still desperately wanted to know what I couldn't know: that I was doing the "right" things, that my son would be ok in the way I (not God) wanted him to be ok, that he'd be able to get along in the world on his own someday.  But it did help me to see that, wherever I am on my journey as a parent, the answer is not going to come from taking a tally of what babysitters think of my family, but in feeling confident in myself and my higher power.