I have a hard time staying at the table after I'm done eating dinner. For one thing I just have difficulties lingering, and when I do, I tend to overeat. Micah is the slowest eater in the world. It can take him an hour to eat half a plate of food. In the last few days I have taken to getting up from the table and sitting down to play the piano, which is right next to our dining room table. I always start with a song that the kids love "Humoresque" by Antonin Dvorak. The kids finish dinner while I play, and Aaron does the dishes. I can't tell you how much this little shift has changed our family dinners, which used to be noisy, chaotic, restless, and often angry.
Tonight after I was done eating, Micah asked: Mom, can you play the piano for us again? They all finished eating and doing the dishes while I played. Ezra got out one of my vocal scores, and pretended to be the conductor, as did Micah, who tends to follow Ezra's lead. The Micah started picking through opera scores, asking me to let him hear what it sounds like.
This may not seem like much to the outside world, but to me it meant a lot. Music has been part of my life since I can remember, lying under my dad's grand piano as a toddler listening to him play. I got training as a musician and as an opera singer, and always wanted to sing professionally, and for a brief while I got to do just that. However with Ezra's autism and Micah's noise sensitivity neither of them supported any music or loud sounds at all. Any attempt to listen to, play music, or sing was met with screams and protests. So having my kids enjoy, learn, and even request music and songs just makes me happy.
Sometimes it feels really good to just do what I want to do, not what I think I should do.
Up until now I thought as a good mom I should make yummy dinners, sit together with my family, do the dishes to give my husband a break after a long day's work, spend every waking moment my kids are at home listening to my kids to show them I care, find out what they are thinking and how they are doing. The result of doing what I thought I should be doing was that I was stressed out every time dinner rolled around, because although I'm a pretty good cook, my strengths is improvising and making meals out of random ingredients. Menu planning and following a recipe is just a nightmare for me, as is sitting at the table watching my kids eat/complain about the food and talk for hours. So instead of constantly trying to do what I'm not good at (and beating myself up about failing at it every single day), I asked my mom, who lives with us to make a meal plan, and cook dinners, since we all started doing the same diet (Dr.Fuhrman diet). She is pensioned and doesn't have much to do all day, so she enjoys cooking our meals, and now she actually even sits with us, instead of drinking a lowly smoothie in her room. Aaron doesn't mind doing the dishes, because after a day of crunching numbers and gathering data, it's relaxing for him to see a tangible result for his effort. The kids have me off their back about eating with good manners, and the music seems to calm them down now. Instead of arguing they hum along. Why did it take me so long to discover that it's OK to just do things differently, the way they work for me? Up until now I always thought that in order to become a better person one had to iron out ones weaknesses, and work on them constantly. Listening to Dr.Hallowell's book on people with ADD I learned, that for people with ADD that is not an effective approach, and I think that applies to others as well. His advice is (paraphrased) "Stop trying to improve what you are bad at, and start doing things that you are good at." It's very refreshing and very effective for me.
