I am sitting in the park, watching a wasp eat the melted remains of my son’s ice cream, and realising that we now have many things to choose from.
Aerial gymnastics. Art. Pottery. Jewellery making. Swimming. Canoeing.
The list is growing.
Yesterday, I watched my children get into a canoe without me. They were nervous, but they did it. They paddled down the river with a group of other home-educated children.
They looked back to wave. One held her friend’s hand tight. The other’s shoulders were a little hunched, unsure but ready to try.
But they did not look back at me uncertain. It was a wave that said I’m going to do this, see you on the other side. Not a wave that said I’m drowning, come and save me.
A year ago, that would have been unthinkable.
We’re finally healed.
Are we ever fully healed? Probably not. But perhaps healed enough that the scars are no longer so visible.
We left flexi-schooling when the children were six, I think, and began home educating. Redundancy meant I finally took the leap into self-employment, which gave me the flexibility to work around them.
I wish I had done it sooner.
Now, at eleven, I can finally see the children they were before beginning to emerge again from beneath the multiple layers of trauma caused by school, Covid, hospitals and homelessness.
Perhaps we would have seen this sooner if there had not been so many layers, one after another.
But two and a half years ago, we finally got a home.
We got space. Stability. A chance to breathe and settle.
School changed my children.
That is not the same as saying it was the school’s fault. It was a beautiful little rural school, with tiny classes and lovely teachers who genuinely cared. But they had to work within a system, and that system is only designed to fit certain types of brains and bodies.
It did not fit theirs.
My confident, fearless, adventure-loving children became anxious and withdrawn. Their differences became much more visible, and they became diagnosable as autistic and ADHD.
But I also want to be honest about the wider picture.
Before school, we had already lived through a year of back-to-back medical emergencies for both children. Then came Covid and a year of shielding. I cannot honestly say that school alone caused what followed.
I suspect school, even flexi-school, was never going to be a perfect fit. But to go from shielding straight into a school environment was never going to be an easy beginning.
For years, leaving the house became incredibly difficult.
Getting dressed could take all day, and by the time we were ready, the place they had wanted to go already felt impossible before we had even stepped outside.
Slowly, that gave way to being able to manage some trips, but not without meltdowns, careful planning and a great deal of support.
Then we lost our home.
A year of instability meant that when we finally found somewhere safe and permanent, nobody wanted to leave it.
The camping trips and adventures we had fought so hard to regain disappeared again. Hibernating at home felt safer.
For a long time, there were only a very small number of trusted places and groups.
Two, to be precise.
Swimming and art.
For more than a year, that was enough. Anything more tipped their nervous systems into overload, and recovery could take days. Sometimes weeks.
And then, this year, something began to return.
Slowly.
The slowness mattered.
Pottery was added. Private lessons with someone they trusted.
Three things now.
Then more days with best friends. A new friend. Trips to the wildlife park.
My adventure-loving children are coming back.
It took an enormous amount of safety and patience to coax that part of them back into the world.
Their nervous systems may be forever changed. We still have to pace. Some days are still too much. Almost everything still requires support and scaffolding.
But they got into that canoe.
While I was writing this, the wasp drowned. I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, it was floating in what was left of the ice cream.
I scooped it out, thinking it was dead, and left it on the table.
Then one antenna moved.
Slowly, it began to crawl. It cleaned the ice cream from itself and scuttled away.
Not ready to fly yet.
But alive. Recovering.
Perhaps that is what healing sometimes looks like. Not untouched by what happened. Not immediately able to fly. But safe enough, given enough time, for small signs of life to begin returning.
Surviving to