an update

wow. a whole year and a half since i've written anything. well...better late than never, right?

a lot has happened since brooks's fourth birthday. for starters, he turned five, and lynnley is now sixteen months old. maybe one day i'll get around to posting some pics (you can see all the things we do on the daily on my Instagram, @laundryfordays). in the meantime, i'll do my best to fill you in. warning: this is gonna be a long one, or maybe multiple long ones. we shall see...

preschool started for brooks in August of last year. he's at an incredible school/church with the best teacher we could have asked for. she's patient, loves him, and was placed in his path, I am certain, by the Lord. around the time that preschool started, and a little bit before, actually, we started noticing some things about brooks that we hadn't noticed before. he was having movements that were becoming increasingly repetitive that he didn't seem to be aware of. our doctor confirmed that he was having tics, and that this was fairly common and not concerning. brooks has always has been a bit of a wild personality with a stubborn streak (no idea where that came from...), but we also started noticing increasing behavior issues and aggression for seemingly no reason. as these behaviors and tics increased, we began to watch our son change into someone we barely knew. we were terrified and at a loss for how to help him.

we saw several doctors, and all of them confirmed that brooks has Tourette Syndrome and OCD. i'm not going to lie... we were shocked. we do have some mental illness histories in our families, but not Tourette, so we weren't expecting that. lots of kids have tics, but don't have TS, so we just hadn't prepared ourselves for that possibility. TS is a genetic neurological disorder with no known cure. it tends to manifest itself as multiple tics, at least one of which is vocal (for brooks, this showed up as sniffing), that waxes and wanes over the person's lifetime. most kids are diagnosed around 5-9 years of age, with the worst symptoms typically showing up around middle school, and symptoms getting markedly better around the late teen/early adulthood years. some kids have very mild symptoms that are manageable. others have very severe symptoms that really affect their quality of life. about 80% of kids with TS also have related diagnoses of OCD, ADHD, ODD, and/or anxiety/depression.

for brooks, along with about 18 different tics, we were seeing the behavioral issues related to OCD (rigid thinking/inflexibility, intrusive and impulsive thoughts and actions, some ritualistic-type behaviors, and other common OCD symptoms). because several of his tics caused him discomfort, and the behavioral problems were affecting him socially, we elected to try medication. he currently is on two medicines, one for tics (which is working wonderfully well at this stage with almost no side effects), and one for his OCD (we are having varying degrees of success with this one). he's also started attending occupational therapy weekly, which not only helps him, but is also a resource to us for how to talk to him through his difficulties. we see neurology and child psychiatry and are constantly evaluating if/when therapies need to change or adjust based on his symptoms.

life right now is complicated. on one side, i feel so very blessed to have my two precious children. in fact, i hesitate to write this all down, because i don't ever want brooks to feel less than exactly who God made him to be. but i do want him to know that God is good, even when life is hard, and so i'm writing it down. but parenting is tough on a good day, and with all of this extra thrown in, on the other side i often feel very overwhelmed. I wouldn't trade this life for any other, but it's just hard sometimes. i feel so inadequate, so unable to help him sometimes. when he's in the middle of an emotional meltdown that is out of his control, begging me to help him, my momma heart just breaks into thousands of pieces at how completely not ok it all is and how little i can actually do to help him. these are the moments that keep me up at night. his fear, his anxiety, how others see him, how unable i am to help him... these moments that are completely out of my control cause me to buckle under in prayer and tears. and these moments are the ones that God is using to teach me. to be cont...