Hello. It's me again.

It's been a few years since I came here. I looked back at some of my old posts. God what a journey this has been. The freshness of all things Oliver and the glimpse into our experience slowly faded to daily life. New children came. Life changes came. Of course one doesn't "move on" but time didn't stop ticking and changes had to be processed and the inevitable evolution of our family has catapulted forward.

I went and made a new blog called "with naked feet" to document my calling and subsequent journey to becoming a Licensed Midwife and talk about things, life, outside Oliver. I really think in hindsight it all started here, this story, and I should have stayed here. But...there's bits and piece of my life in between the lifestyle that is Midwifery and my role as a mom and the story of Oliver. It's like I couldn't merge everything onto one blog. I'm not sure I still can. Many of my clients now read my Midwifery posts on yet another blog as well as birth stories and, well, just the magic life I have the honor to walk when I'm not at home. Family Tree Midwifery was born since I was last over here. It has it's own place I suppose although it's all still this jumble of me and this blubbering of words that mill in my brain until I let them loose on paper.

I made a blog "Allan Dahlquist" when my step dad was in a fatal motorcycle accident, right before Ollie turned one. He stayed on life support for a few days allowing everyone to say goodbye before my mother made the decision to pull the plug and let him go.

I don't know why all these things are important. Or why they are important now. I don't know why my brain wants to catch this blog up to my life right now. But I know better than to not listen when I have words that need to come.

Here they all are none the less.

Other things have happened.

I have moved several times for several reasons.

My husband went to jail in 2012 for domestic violence. He got out and got sober. Oh yeah. I went there. Taboo and all. Cause it's part of my life and its time.

I graduated Midwifery school and became legit. I've opened an office, closed an office, and now embrace offering all home visits. I worked with many people and still wait for the right person to form a work partnership and all the benefits that come with sharing the work that I love. I've longed for that. And then I worked solo and learned to be okay being alone. Then I learned to embrace it. And love it and enjoy it.

I've stopped talking to my mother in 2014 after years of personal therapy...ironically when learning, recovering, and moving forward from domestic violence, a lot of other sick relationship patterns become blaring and can't be ignored anymore. You can't work on one and not see them all. And I came to realize that her treatment of me was toxic and she was unwilling or more realistically unable to change. I needed boundaries to keep me and my children safe from further abuse and toxic treatment. I get confirmation often that this was the right choice for me, for them. I am grateful my children, especially my girls are shielded from the narcissistic behavior. Ironically, or maybe not, my oldest son has also estranged himself from the family after living with my mother for two years. He doesn't talk to or see his own father's side of the family either. He is living with a woman my own age, whom I never met and who has four kids of her own. I miss him. I keep my door open and love him from afar, exactly where he is, hoping one day he will choose to come home and reconnect. I'd love to meet his partner and her kids. So many people here miss and love him.

My brother stopped talking to me as well. I have a nephew I've never met. He's not okay with the choices I made in my relationship. He doesn't want to know, hear or learn about us. About me. About anything other than why didn't I leave and move two states away so my brother could fix my life. Why not make that choice? Ugh.

When Will went to jail it cracked open this ugly, nasty, evil door called domestic violence. And most the people in our lives made the choice to slap down quick advice and make judgment calls. His behavior had bugged them a long time and they saw an opportunity to vent it all out...on me...and offer unsolicited advice. I get it. We were messy and uncomfortable and it was just too much. I understand.

It was a very small number of people who instead chose to meet me in my place of despair and let me lead my own way out. But "out" didn't mean to walk away for me. And often times it doesn't in domestic violence. Out meant healthy boundaries, assuming control of my own life and first and foremost protecting myself and my kids. It meant independence. Which is different from separation, although it took both for a while. Funny how a lot of people fell away in that process. And ultimately, Will worked his....worked very hard to change. It's not complete. It probably never will be. But it's safe. And it's good. Will and I made the choice to stay together in spite of a history of domestic violence and we made that choice with a lot of support. I/we chose to not have a disposable relationship. We've chosen the hard road of fighting for us, daily. We have done extensive amounts of self care and relationship care and family care and I care not to list our every achievement here. I am no longer looking for validation or opinions. We are in our 17th year of this relationship. I will say, that I'm grateful beyond words that exist in my vocabulary for those around us who have chosen to see our changes. Who have chosen to love us, come around and support us, and who themselves made the choice to breathe into the awkwardness, hold space for what is hard and ask us often "how are you...really?" and then stick around for the answer. Even if it sucks. Those who helped me make a safety plan in our early days of recovery and who check in on us frequently. Those who can hug a victim, and an abuser, and their kids. Those who helped us redefine those awful terms into something beautiful, real, and loving. Those that have understood that domestic violence is more than "why doesn't she just leave him?" and all the blind mentality that comes with those thoughts. Those who stepped deeper into our home, our hearts, our minds and support our real life day to day recovery and healing from years of trauma. This is how one breaks the chain of domestic violence. Not by abandonment, isolation, and quick judgmental fixes. If you are in our lives, we are grateful for your support. And this, again, is probably a story for another time. Or two. Or more.

I made my blog "Familytreemidwiferycare.blogspot.com more recently. I have been practicing almost 6 years now. I have a few birth stories to tell. Tales of a being a Midwife. It's magical. It's fun. It's sneaky moonlit shenanigans.

I had another baby girl in 2015!  Gwyneth Emma Arwyn Payton was born via Urgent Cesarean Section....that's again, another story for another day. But here's a recent picture of this little love and her big sister Lilah!

I/we bought a house in 2016.

I have 6 kids, one dog and three cats.
Jacob, Bradley, Ryan, Oliver, Lilah, Gwyneth, Tutu, Morgana, Maya and Tonks. (and we do not plan on anymore human OR fur babies) and I wouldn't change a thing about any of them.

I'm madly in love with all things Harry Potter.

Last weekend we bought an RV. Our family needs time in nature to be a regular habit It is therapeutic.

And....

last week Oliver qualified for special ed.

Boom.

So.

Yeah.

There's that.
...

Let me kinda start over.

Here I am. It's me again. I have a lot to say about this kid. And a blog I thought was done because my kid dodged a bullet, he's normal, he's okay and life went on...

Well.
He's not.
I'm not.
Not today anyway.
And I need this blog back.
So here I am.

Ollie started 3rd grade this year. He is age 9. He'll be 10 on May 21 this year.

At first we just watched him. I celebrated leaving special support services from being in NICU. As he rolled, sat, crawled, walked and talked my confidence rose. Time ticked. My PTSD settled. I could see the pediatrician again without panic attacks. I could let him out of his sling to explore the world. I could walk into hospitals and know they weren't after me. I could support other women in hospital settings. I could attend births. I was doing okay. I could see little things about Ollie. Spinning. Never getting dizzy. Frustrated anger fits. Only scribbles on paper, never shapes, people, faces. But he was little. He was alive. He felt feelings. He played. He was loved and loved back and what else mattered?

But soon in our lives others began to see what we could see but couldn't express. First it was daycare/preschool teachers pointing out little things. Often I would ask what people thought to illicit feedback. Could they see it? Was I making this up? It was minor. I thought high functioning autism for a while. I could feel it. Deep in my soul this whisper that something wasn't right. Doubt about miracles. Questions about dodging bullets. Walking away unharmed....didn't seem like such a solid guarantee anymore.

Kindergarten. We all thought ya know, maybe he's a slow bloomer. I mean we are in Waldorf School. Everyone allows kids to come into their own, on their own time here. They are supported, encouraged, and space is held for them to reach an age when they have the best potential to learn a given topic. They take their time working up to concentrated education, they embrace nature, imagination, protected childhood, water down real life for now, give them time to be kids....but the whisper was growing into a voice. His birth story is repeated on intake forms, to teachers, staff and school nurse...and we push for early assessment. Not much to came of it except some little quirk where he can't get dizzy. He's not at the age of reading, writing, letters and math, so they can't assess a whole lot. I can't voice exactly my concerns. They aren't catching what this is during assessments. But his teacher sees it a little bit. I'm not totally crazy. But I'm sure not validated. He doesn't sleep right, he wanders in the wee hours and ends up in our bed. He doesn't handle frustration well. He can't remember which bottle is the shampoo in the shower. The clapping audience at the schools winter concert brings him to tears. after. every. single. song. Will and I look at each other in desperation. Next year he will be in the concert. On mothers day he makes me a card with a stick figure man on the front and I cry, because he can draw. He can draw!

Summer is hell. We bring home the schedule of kindergarten and do our best to keep it solid at home, knowing he thrives in the predictable environment. He doesn't sleep in on summer breaks. He creeps into our bed every night. We make his own nest on the floor and surrender. He continues to suck his thumb and other sensory stimulation activities to ground himself.

First grade. writing, reading, math, lots of imagination and time to be a kid. We plead with his teacher for advice. Sleep. Eating. Thumb sucking. School wears him out. He brings home a full lunchbox. We ask her to remind him to eat at lunch. He needs routine. Not thrives on routine. He needs it. He learns new things and keeps up for the most part. He tends to run a few months behind his peers but he catches up. Academically we aren't too worried. We give him extra help at home and encourage his efforts.

Second grade. He needs help. He needs help remembering anything out of our normal routine. He can't follow instructions. I give three sentence directions like "go in my room, go to my white nightstand by my side of the bed and open the drawer, get my pink ball of yarn and bring it here" ...I'm lucky if he makes it to my room. Many times he asks "what am I supposed to do?" after he has only walked a few feet away from me. He loves our new house that we are buying. He loves Lilah Rose Marie. They are closer than maybe any of the kids. They play so well. They fight so hard. He kicks her. She hugs him. He loves his baby sister Gwyneth. He scoops her up in huge hugs and protects her from the hazards of baby/toddler hood. Teacher reports concern over his lack of progress, his sucking thumb in class and completely zoning out while doing so. She grants him alone/zone out time and extra help with class work. His peers writing and work is developing and Ollie seems to be barely drifting into second grade skills. If he isn't interested in a topic, he won't even try. She wants to start 3rd grade with a meeting with principal for a SST (student success team) to offer him limited services and see if he will benefit from a little more intense help at school. We are happy to finally have some other hands to help. We are frustrated the help won't come until the start of 3rd grade. Another summer looms and we begin to buckle down on the structure and schedule he does best with.

We work hard over the summer on math concepts and tutoring with little to no progress. We even break the rules and purchase online tutoring programs. Lilah is in tears because she wants to do math on the computer too. She's starting first grade this year. We get her a separate account and watch her excel past his levels in a matter of days. She's working basic algebra 2 + x = 6 and he is struggling to add 2 + 4 = ? His peers are working times tables and adding and subtracting 3 digit numbers with carrying and borrowing. I'm worried. He still sleep in my room most nights.

We lay in my bed on the hot summer months under the air conditioning and we read and we talk and we love each other and we look at his scars. The heel on one foot covered in slashes from testing his blood sugar and other various labs. His pic line dot on his other ankle. "I'm a miracle" he says. "I almost died when I was born, but I didn't. I just didn't." I'm reminded to be thankful for every minute, not matter what it looks like. Because maybe he didn't dodge a bullet. Maybe he didn't walk away unscarred, unscathed, magically healed by prayer. But he is still a miracle. He wasn't supposed to even live. I don't know how you get more miracle than this kid.

Third grade. SST decides to offer intense tutoring for Oliver with specialists during school hours most days a week. Oliver loves meeting with his person. She works hard on his weakest area: math. She works paper, pencils, number lines, toothpicks, candy, cubes, poems about math, skits about math, stories about math, kinetic body movement routines about math. Nothing is sticking.

We consent to full blown IEP (special education) assessment. We question if he will actually pass. Will he get services that can help him? That can help us help him? Will we understand if this is just personality? What if he's assessed as normal? Should I be tested because I feel like I'm losing my mind? We have no answers. Just sign here, and wait. We are pretty good at that by now. And so we wait. We express frustration as the halfway mark of the school year comes and goes. He has frustration and anger and complications in home life. And we count down the days to the IEP assessment results and plan.

30 days later they call to schedule an initial IEP date of March 2nd. Does that mean he qualified? They just want to get it on the calendar when they can go over their results. No answers. I go back to counting the difficult days down on the calendar.

60 days. 60 days of assessing was concluded with reports from an occupational therapist, speech therapist, psychotherapist, and nurse who compiled his history and current physical status as well as reports from his specialist that's been working with him and his teacher.

I get to the meeting. Each person hands me a packet of paperwork with pages and pages of assessment tests all coded by letters and numbers. They tested everything from vision and hearing to how he holds his pencil, how he moves his body, how he hears words, how he speaks words, how his brain interprets words, and actions, and body language and I can't keep up with all the testing they did. I sat for two hours and listened to all these things and all the things they discovered about my son.

And then someone started verbally reviewing his birth injuries. Listing them off: no blood sugar, no breathing at birth, transfer to hospital, NICU, organs shut down to 25% function, heart deviated from mid line due to swelling, two brain bleeds, two blood transfusions, respiratory support, seizure activity....and there in that meeting the NICU engulfed me again for the first time in years. I grabbed a tissue and held it over my mouth and nose and suddenly I was holding his birth blankets up to my face and smelling them. I was standing alone in the ER and they had just taken him away and all I had was those blankets and I longed for him to be in my arms. And I stood there on the cold tile. Alone. With only his scent.

And I listened as one by one....

They qualified him.

Each of them.

All of them.

And all the years flashed by and brought me back into that room, sitting around the round wooden table full of specialists. All the whispers, All the fears. All the tears. All the dashed hopes and dreams. Someone heard me. Someone saw it too. Him. As he is. My baby.

We didn't get to finish because we ran out of time. We still need to talk about the plan part of his file. We don't have a diagnosis or name for every single thing Oliver has.

We do know, what makes the most sense is his IQ is lower than average. This explains a lot of his frustrations. He also has a condition called dyscalculia. It's similar to dyslexia but it's with math. There are many things that don't have definitions, just explanations, for example: he struggles with vague instructions, he struggles to "get the jest" of something. He needs clear instructions. So, if his teacher says to the class "if you're finished with your writing set your paper to the side of your desk" he will freeze up. We don't know if he's getting hung up on "if you're finished" maybe he doesn't realize she is addressing him as well as his classmates. Maybe he gets stuck on the "finished" part of her instructions...like he doesn't know if he is done because there's no solid instructions that mean your done, it's kind of a feeling-like if you felt you wrote enough about your topic then you're done. There were other issues such as motor skills (in much more detail than fine motor and gross motor) that he was anywhere from normal to 4 years delayed depending on what they were testing. Planning and Idea's was a weakness across the board, they think due to the low IQ. This also means he struggles with the basic "plan/idea" of asking for help when he needs it. Many times he just zones out, or stops following along, stops functioning because he got stuck and didn't know to ask for help.

They are excited to work with him and see how far they can challenge him. We are relieved to finally have some sort of understanding of what we have been able to see but not identify and have no tools to help him. I feel validated in what has been whispering to my heart for a long time. I'm so grateful for many years of just loving this kid unconditionally. I'm scared of what the future looks like. His Independence, which he should be able to have, could also mean his estrangement. Many lower IQ adults push their parents away at some point because they can when they reach adulthood. I pray he stays close. We have to teach him to ask for help. We want to teach him his family is his most valuable resource. We will be fighting against an IQ that doesn't grasp delayed gratification. And IQ where frustration can be violent. Right now he's still little. Soon he will be big.

I talked to dad and my mom 2.0 today. She gave me the most profound quote it made my eyes leak.

"Is it all gonna be good? Nope!
  Is it all gonna be bad? Nope!
  You guys are gonna land somewhere in the middle and that's okay.
  It's going to be okay."

I needed to hear that.

He came and laid his head on my lap today. We were sitting in our new RV in the driveway making glorious plans for future camping journeys. He laid his sweet little almost ten year old head on my chest, he popped his thumb in his mouth, his favorite book clutched in his other hand. I tucked my chin and inhaled the top of his head. I just smelled his scent in his messy brown hair. It smells just like those blankets all those years ago. Like my precious baby. I don't know what the future holds. It's not all trains and Enya and a beautiful time warp that exceeds this plane. It's kinda scary. It's a lot of sad right now. Just right now. I know there will forever be ups and downs. Today is a little down. And yet he's here. He's mine. I love him deeper than you can even fathom. And I will walk alongside him as long as I humanly can. And then I fully intend to keep walking in spirit. And my love for him will never grow old, it will never go away, it will never give up. That's all I can promise him. For it is all I have and all I am. I only hope it is enough.