The View From Kalamazoo

The University of Auckland
Centre for Medieval and Early Modern European Studies
10th Annual Conference
10 – 11 April 2010

Miracles, Medicine and Magic: Explaining the Natural, the Unnatural and the Supernatural in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

Keynote Speakers: Alexandra Barrett (English, Waikato), Karen Jillings (History, Massey)

Papers are invited from all disciplines on any topic that is broadly covered by the conference theme. Post-graduate students are especially encouraged to submit a paper. Please send a brief abstract for a twenty-minute paper (100-200 words) by Friday 26th February 2010 together with any AV requirements. Proposals should be sent to the Conference Committee c/o Michelle Smith: medievalscot at xtra dot co dot nz

The new Olay Regenerist Anti-Aging Eye Roller … can’t imagine what was on their mind during design.

Well, I’ve heard it said it keeps you young — but if you’re sticking your Pocket Rocket in your eye you’re doing it wrong!

Four years ago I was asked to join seven other bloggers–parents of kids with a variety of disabilities–to blog in an organized fashion on their behalf. Educate. Advocate. Each year since I’ve continued the practice, albeit solo. This year I’ve been joined, again, by a coordinated group (a list to which I will be adding their URLs as they post):

Another Damned Medievalist
Cis Masque
Clairvoyant
SabreBabe
Sonoran_Mamma
Tamela J
Tudorpot

(eta: this is an excellent comment)

__________________________________________________________

Parenting children with disabilities is challenging on a number of levels. In the case of my family, the disabilities are (initially) invisible–mental, emotional–but no less present. I addressed some of those challenges (and the specifics of our situation) last year.

This year I want to introduce you to one of our challenges that you might not initially consider an issue: in addition to our daughter we also have a son. He is neurotypical.

Time did a piece on this awhile back (Autistic Kids: the Sibling Problem) and although Emma is PDD-NOS (atypical Autism) with other issues, the article does cover some of what we have seen.

But not everything.

Colin is a very, very bright seven-year-old. He reads everything he can get his hands on, manages video game strategy better than many adults, and picks up vocabulary like a sponge. He’s also immature for his age, not well socialized with his peers, and has anger-management issues that clearly result from the situation at home. Immaturity isn’t unusual in boys his age—although in many ways he is more mature than his sister, so it’s difficult to know where normal range ends and modeling his sibling’s behavior begins. A tendency to be awkward socially comes naturally, whether he takes after his father or I—neither of us were social butterflies. But how quick he is to anger, how what seems like a normal level of frustration will send him off-kilter, is a side effect of his environment.

It’s not easy living with Emma.

It’s not easy when you’re an adult who understands the context of her behavior and has maturity and experience to draw from when dealing with some of her most extreme outbursts. For a child it must be like living in constantly-shifting reality where the rules and outcomes are never expressed and randomly enforced… where expectations for him and for his sister need to be tailored to the child and the situation, even if we do actively try to maintain some semblance of consistency. He is as constantly under stress as his father and I, but he doesn’t have the skills to cope with it. Even so, he does his best.

As do we.

When he was an infant I had her help me as much as possible, to offer her opportunities for bonding (she loves babies, whether dolls or real). As he got older (and independent!) their relationship began changing. She runs hot and cold, and her random moods and reactions were often directed at him. She tends towards verbal and physical outbursts when her meds aren’t in her system, so the early mornings and day’s ends were particularly traumatic. And it’s only gotten worse as he’s modeled her behavior back to her and as he’s achieved levels of skill that she can’t reach, herself. Despite our breaking up countless arguments/battles, no amount of talking to her changes her behavior, and no amount of talking to him can truly make him understand that Emma going from I love you to I hate you in a matter of five minutes without any outward provocation is just Emma and not him. It’s anxiety-inducing to live with a time-bomb, and it’s depressing to be constantly belittled, insulted, and harassed (I know, because I’m a main target for her abuse, too).

So now we attempt to keep them separated.

I wake him in the morning after Em has left the house for the bus, so he doesn’t have to deal with the shrieking harpy she is when she first wakes up. When they were both in elementary school and riding the same bus, this was impossible… and it resulted in a lot of calls home last year, because starting the day off with verbal abuse and (no other way to describe it) crazy directed at you set him up for a very bad day at school.

She now takes the bus home instead of to the sitter’s house, so he doesn’t have her random moods interrupting his quiet homework time. In the evening we encourage him to engage in activities that don’t involve them playing together (since that just results in screaming arguments), like reading or playing strategy games on the computer. We spend money on devices and computers so they can entertain themselves without actions and reactions resulting in more hurt feelings and rages. We give him constant positive feedback on the areas that most vex him, we take his interests into account and try to give him as normal (what is normal, anyway?) and fulfilling and fun and educational a childhood as possible. We hope for balance. We take one or the other with us on errands so they can have alone time with both parents—so we can run the errands in something approaching peace—and I’ve taken them, individually, to visit my parents.

It’s not ideal.

But it’s never been, and it never will be: It’s our life, we do our best.

And that’s now.

Tomorrow, many tomorrows from now, my youngest child will be responsible for my oldest child. Because we do not know if she will ever live independently as an adult, nor how we’ll be defining ‘independent’. Because we won’t always be there… and yes, by that I do refer to my eventual death. So not only might my son have to help care for his father and I at the end of our lives, his sister’s welfare will become his responsibility. This will be a heavy conversation to have when he turns 18 or when he graduates from college… and when he thinks he’s found the one, whomever that is must, too, know what the future will hold.

But that’s not now.

Now is quite enough, to be frank.

And now mostly what I hear around my house is, “it’s not fair!”

No, it’s not.

And it never will be.

Today I ended up in conversation with a couple of the grad students about when I first started attending the Congress, as an undergrad (1990).

They called me an old fart. o_O

I regaled them with Back In The Day tales that included that of a thrice-dammed full-sized traction trebuchet I was conscripted to help assemble and demonstrate, and the infamous dance, as it had been (held in a cafeteria, open bar, Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball).

And I told them of the first time I had attended the dance… it was 1992, a few months before Nine Inch Nails’ Broken came out.

This is important.

You see, I walked into that dimly-lit cafeteria (but the academics inside were already well-lit, I assure you) to see two nuns (Remember, these are medievalists—there are members of many of the orders present every year… in fact, there are staff members who persist in the idea that we’re a Renaissance Festival because they see monks walking around. Rly. Srsly.) on the outskirts of the dance floor (such as it was) dancing—you know, the classic stand-and-sway while moving the arms in a vaguely robot-fashion kind of dancing—to NIN’s Sin.

I turned around and walked out of that cafeteria.

Despite how very much I needed that open bar at that moment (you can imagine how my brain and soul cried for blessed oblivion), I just couldn’t take one more step forward.

I was so very happy when Broken was released—I hadn’t been able to listen to PHM (since that moment in May when my brain broke) without going into blink-blink-shudder-AAAaaaagh every time that song came on.

So I leave you with the cognitively dissonant image of nuns doing the white-people-boogie to the voice of Trent Reznor.

You’re welcome.

Since I mentioned the engagement in this post on social media, I would be remiss to not share this bit of happy news:

Trent Reznor married Mariqueen Maandig this past Saturday—October 17, 2009. Congratulations to them both, and may they enjoy many, many happy years together.

(Photo courtesy of Pink is the New Blog)

And I must admit I’ve been suffering from an acute case of nostalgia: yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of Nine Inch Nails’ first studio album, Pretty Hate Machine. Nearly that long ago I attended a Jesus and Mary Chain concert in Detroit… for which NIN was the opening band.

Am I really that old? Er… yeah. The smartass who sends me black balloons next year is getting his can kicked.

A story:
Seventeen years ago I was on an intranet board at my university arguing with an infuriatingly contentious, egotistical pain in the ass.
Who, a month later, asked me out.
And we were incompatible, totally different, utterly ridiculous.
So, of course, two weeks after that first date he asked me to move in.
And two weeks later asked me to marry.
My beloved pain in the ass and I celebrated our sixteenth wedding anniversary this past June.

Why am I posting this? When I looked through his CD collection there was one—one!—title in common with mine: Pretty Hate Machine.

I considered it a good sign.

So thank you, Trent Reznor.

And congratulations, too, on twenty years of success—looking forward to what the next twenty hold!

There is a discussion in a community on Facebook that medievalists/attendees of the International Congress on Medieval Studies might find interesting. Or not – in which case there’s always scrabble.

COMITATUS: A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES, published annually under the auspices of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, invites the submission of articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of medieval and Renaissance studies. We prefer submissions in the form of e-mail attachments in Windows format; paper submissions are also accepted. Please include an e-mail address.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 41 (2010): 1 FEBRUARY 2010.

The editorial board will make its final selections by early May 2010.

Please send submissions to sullivan@humnet.ucla.edu, or to Dr. Blair Sullivan, Publications Director, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 302 Royce Hall, Box 951485, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1485.

Session Organizer paperwork for the International Congress on Medieval Studies is due Oct. 1.

Get on it!

Four years ago I was asked to join seven other bloggers–parents of kids with a variety of disabilities–to blog in an organized fashion on their behalf.

Every year since then I’ve continued the practice, although solo.

This year I have decided to organize another parents Blog For Kids With Disabilities day (this time in October, due to a variety of unfortunate logistical kerfuffles) to spread awareness, offer advice or support for other parents, and to advocate.

The topic would be yours to decide upon (parenting, education, medical struggles – if you have stories that directly relate to the current health care reform debate that you’ve already related to your representatives, I have no doubt other parents and interested readers would like to hear them), we’d just coordinate the date of posting and include links to each others’ blogs.

I know former/potential bloggers who are concerned that they will not have a full-blown blog set up by that time, and I am happy to post your essays here, if logistics require–the more voices the better!

Please let me know if you’re interested in participating.

My archives:

September 28, 2008
September 20, 2007
(2006 post got et, I think. I’m looking for a back-up copy)
September 14,19, and 26, 2005