Social Stressers

The Tiny Girl Stressful Chronicles:  
We had our parent teacher conferences yesterday to talk about how our children are doing in their respective classrooms.    They both got very positive reviews on basically all fronts.   They have things they’re each working on, but that will continue and is expected.  

We talked about my daughter and her ability to function with her significant vision loss at this time.   All of the teachers were amazed at how well she is managing, including still working on learning tasks, pushing herself to new skill levels and requesting more and more challenging work.    We were very pleased to hear how she was managing.

We talked about her stress reactions and they’re seeing the same thing in the classroom we’re seeing at home: putting her fingers in her mouth and making exaggerated facial expressions, making peeping or animal-like squeaking sounds and actions and shutting down completely, refusing to talk about the stressful thing.

I saw her today in a situation that made me sad.   Her best friend from the first year she was in school invited her and her brother over for a play date (well, the mother did.)  They separated my daughter and Jacob two years ago and during that time he and my son have become more friends.    Today my son and Jacob immediately started playing with toys while my daughter struggled to fit in.  

She tried to hug him aggressively, but he didn’t want prolonged physical interactions.   She brought toys over to him but her exaggerated facial expressions and non-verbal requests to play didn’t go over well when he was already engaged with her brother.    She couldn’t see the toys all over the floor and was trying to play with them together, but was having a lot of difficulty.    She did some drawing on a piece of paper for a while but after being rebuffed a few times she went around the corner and I found her singing to herself in a darkened garage entry hall.  When I asked her if she was okay she made the stress face and refused to talk to me.

She got frustrated and angry enough at one point that I had to pull her off Jacob and take her outside, where she hit me to get out her feelings.   She desperately wanted to play with her friend, but it just wasn’t working out today.

The mother is a very nice person, but there is a language and cultural barrier that made it difficult to discuss my daughter’s situation in front of her in “code” before she had to go to a meeting.   She said it must be awful and she would be losing her mind if it was her child.   I told her I felt like that some days but since she was on a healing path, we’re treating this like needing a wheelchair because you have a broken leg, knowing you won’t always need the wheelchair.

The Big Boy Update:  In the car today out of the blue my son said, “are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”  My daughter immediately replied, “I’m thinking about marshmallows.”   We never found out what my son was thinking about though.