Here’s to a Very Autistic Xmas & an ADHD New Year
It’s okay to spend $39 at Office Depot on a giant cardboard gingerbread house if it helps you SURVIVE.
As the Quakers say, hold me in the light, friends, for this is both my favorite and least favorite time of the year (maybe for you too?). I love the idea of the winter holidays — the cookies, family togetherness, the movies and music. But the reality of our holidays tend to be like the movie Die Hard (which pretends to be but really isn’t a Christmas movie): lots of rage, frequent explosions, and a main character (me) who winds up weary and battered by the end.
You see, I’ve only recently learned that you can’t be a neurodivergent family and expect a normative holiday — that’s fallacy number one, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s taken me this long (and a very good autistic therapist) to figure that out.
Let me explain. Cookies (and sugar in general) make our ND kids go CrAzY, and yet I’ve always made dozens and filled stockings with impossible levels of candy.
When will I learn to limit the holiday sugar? Clearly didn’t last year…
No joke, currently one of my kids is literally screaming/crying on the floor right now: “I WANT HOT COCOA, NOW!!!!!!” just because they briefly went outside and it was technically cold 🤷♀️.
Forced family togetherness over the extended break ends up more like being locked in a really bad escape room that never ends and everyone is crying all the time. One kid universally loses their mind at all major celebrations (including birthdays) because for whatever reason (doesn’t matter), their anxiety is through the roof, and their highly dysregulated, fight-or-flight nervous system takes charge. No one here likes Christmas music but me (what is wrong with them???), the younger two melt down every single day because their friends are with family or out of town, and I end up assembling the holiday Lego set by myself watching Elf alone with a glass of wine while everyone else is marginally pacified by their own non-holiday screens on different levels of the house.
Oo! But because I wrote that, one of them joined me TODAY for the first time. Win!
I do love Christmas parties, but confession: — and you’re not supposed to admit this sort of thing out loud according to societal norms (but we don’t abide by those) — we actually haven’t been invited to a single one since moving to the East Coast (the pandemic, the new location, the dearth of friends who throw parties…). I know it’s nothing personal! It’s not like our friends are secretly having parties without us, I’m just way (way) more party-minded than literally everyone I know (sigh). Last year, I was eager enough to throw our own, and it was actually a resounding success, but I just don’t have it in me this season. I am wiped. And if I’m being honest (which I unfortunately almost always am), even though friends and acquaintances have been asking when we’re going to throw another epic party, I’m taking a break from that in general, because I’m listening to my family’s needs, and they need to not have parties here right now. Plus, it’s exhausting (and expensive) to always be the host, and sometimes it’s great to have a little outside cheer if you’re usually the one who manufactures it (doubly so, because moms “make Christmas happen” in most households — according to reality and Sleepless in Seattle).
Don’t even get me started about the massive presents hangover once everything has been opened on Christmas Day. Make no mistake, neurodivergent kids do not experience this in the way neuro-normative kids do — you can’t compare horror stories with an autistic family of five! 😂
The quiet one reads while the others sob in their rooms because it’s way too much — and it’s over.
The younger kids become so overwhelmed from the combination of intense anticipation and sudden let-down that they often throw (and sometimes break) their presents — then scream about it for hours — out of rage and despair at having no more presents (and the quiet one hides in their room for the rest of the day with noise-canceling headphones). 😬 It’s like you’ve made this magical thing for them, and then they stab you in both eyes with a pencil, repeatedly, for the rest of winter break.
So maybe, don’t do that??? 😱 I know. Imagine! I really need to take my own advice.
Dear readers, if your kids are anything like mine, you must do these three things: 1) plan in advance for the overwhelm and let-down meltdowns, 2) prepare them for it directly by discussing the plans, and 3) massively lower your expectations: not of your children, but of your own ideal experience. This may be the hardest part, I know. We’ve been force-fed this “happy holidays” narrative since, I don’t know — capitalism? — and it’s really hard to shake. But think of it this way: it’s not a “holiday season,” it's just two weeks in December. You can get through two weeks in December the same way you get through every other week of the year: scale back from what you think you should be doing, be attuned to all the sensory needs (there are so many), pick maybe your favorite 10% of holiday traditions (or 5, or just 1 — whatever they can handle) and do those really well. We ditched our fantasy of driving two hours round-trip to cut our own tree and instead stopped off at a random lot in the middle of downtown DC and grabbed the first two trees we saw (while one kid sat in the car, refusing to participate). And it was fine! And we decorated them to the hilt — not with the kids, just us (and mostly just me, while my husband helpfully cooked dinner!). And it was fiiiiiiiiiine. Better than fine: no one cried!
Rather than forcing family activities, this year I just did stuff for myself, like trying out wreath-making! Also: no one cried.
It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. I cannot abide self-pity in myself or others, so I’ve nudged myself to attend holiday events in the community alone this year (while husband got another spouse-free holiday party at work 😡, stupid pandemic changes). We’ve limited holiday outings for kids to basically one a weekend, and only ones that directly appeal to their interests, like the planes and trains event at the local aviation museum for the younger two, and an orchestra concert of video game music for the older one.
The events I wish we could attend but I know they’ll hate — The Nutcracker, caroling, the German Christmas market in Baltimore, the Messiah sing-along in DC — I’ve accepted that I’ll either have to skip them or arrange to go with a friend. Similarly, my husband and I would love to go skiing with the kids, but in reality, one of them can’t last ten minutes in the snow, no matter how perfectly bundled, and frigid outings with that one 100% always end very quickly in sobbing fits. So despite desperately wanting to introduce the kids to skiing, we’re going to Florida to see family over the new year, even though warm holidays are like an abomination to me. But here’s the thing: I’m not remotely stressed about that choice; it will be an objectively better time, even though it’s not physically where I want to go geographically. There will be family there, helpful family, adult family, adult conversation. Which, as you know, is rare and priceless.
You can skip the huge Christmas dinner & have something easy and special on the Winter Solstice, when there’s way less pressure. I give you permission to have bread, cheese, grapes, and salami for dinner. The candles and greenery do all the work! Everyone was happy & no one cried.
So here’s what I’m going to do for you: I release you from having a “normal” holiday season. You can have the kids eat Christmas dinner an hour earlier than adults. You don’t even have to make the kids come to dinner if it’s going to cause a meltdown, just let them play with the model trainset while you have a peaceful dinner, and maybe invite everyone to the table for dessert. You don’t even have to have a formal dinner with extended family! You don’t! Meet up the next day for something low-key, low-stress, and don’t make them “perform” opening presents in front of others. Why? Because it’s the only thing that makes sense in your universe. I’m giving you permission to break all the holiday “rules” — like nearly all normative rules, they’re arbitrary and often problematic. If your family objects, tell them Hannukah/ Festivus/ Christmas/New Year’s are literally torture for your children, because it’s true.
Find the little things. Make the little things. And forget about all that other crap.
Cheers, y’all 🙂, & Yippee-ki-yay (if that’s your thing)
Though last year was probably the last for a while of getting everyone to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas with me, I look forward to five years from now when they’ll be begging to watch it for nostalgia reasons. (Also, the 5yo watched it with me anyway 🎄🤗)