Survival Mode meets Decision Time

"So you're in survival mode." The minute my friend said it last weekend, it clicked. We were, in fact, in survival mode. Our goal was to make it through each day and week until the school year ended or something miraculous happened, like my health improving or C.J.'s issues suddenly disappearing.

Hearing it, however, also made it hit home that, while survival mode was not great for the adults in the house, it was completely unacceptable for C.J. He has a very few months to make some pretty significant gains in his social skills so that he is better prepared to head into kindergarten. Survival mode was not going to help him. He might not lose ground, but he certainly wasn't going to gain any. The classroom that hadn't worked for him for the last 5 months was not suddenly going to become perfect. His teachers had already worked hard to put in place supports for him and formalizing everything in an IEP was not going to make them work any better than they already had.

There were, in fact, options. I could quit my job, which would be good for my health but bad for our bank account and also not so great for C.J. He needs to be around other kids and bringing him home from school would not help with his social skills since it would only further isolate him. We could send him to a different school, but we'd exhausted all the local options and the school my mom had found near her sounded great but meant sending him away for a part of each week, not a choice any parent wants to make.

So we straddled the fence, accepting no progress out of fear of making the wrong choice. We were trapped where many parents are, in the land of indecision. No option is perfect so you become unable to choose one, waiting for something better to appear. In the meantime, your lack of decision becomes a decision in itself.

What to do? Make a choice and have a back-up plan if it doesn't work. Nothing is permanent and two steps forward followed by one step backwards is still better than no steps at all.

Our choice? On Monday, C.J. and I head to my mom's so we can both see the school that sounds so great. If we agree it is and believe that he can make progress there that he can't elsewhere, he'll stay up there for a few days and try it out. If that goes well, he'll say goodbye to his friends at Hope on Friday next week and start for good up there the following Monday. When school ends in May, so will his vagabond life and we'll have (fingers-crossed) found a good place for him here for the fall.

All this will be surrounded by lots of conversations about how we found this perfect school just for him and that is the only reason he is not going to be with us all the time for the next three months. If at any time it does not seem to be working for him, we revisit our options. Perhaps my leaving work will become a necessity, either to keep him at home or to be able to go up to Meme's with him.

Is this the perfect solution? Absolutely not. Will it break my heart a little every week? Definitely. Does it make me a bad parent? I hope not. Unfortunately, that is something that only C.J. and his therapist will be able to determine when he is 30. I do know that I want my child to do more than survive. I want him to thrive.