The Mom in the White Coat

So I’m leaving the grocery store heading to my mother-in-law’s for dinner.  My two NTs (neurotypical kids for you pre-Thinkers) and I were approaching our car when I noticed a striking woman in a white coat and her friend with two little ones parked perpendicular to us.  Despite the predictions of warmer weather, it’s still blustery here in the Chicago suburbs, so their hair was blowing every which way as they attempted to get their children into the car.

As we got closer, I realized the white-coated woman was not struggling against the weather, but rather, her toddler.  He screamed that familiar high-pitched scream that Thinkers know all too well. He scratched her face and made his body rigid. Every time her hands would go for the safety belt on the grocery cart he would slap them away.  She attempted a scooping motion that resembled a hug trying to dislodge him from his seat, but that just gave him more access to her beautiful auburn hair, which he was twisting and pulling — from the root.

He landed a bite on her cheek, an open slap to her forehead.  It reminded me of days past when I would be grateful Noah clamped his teeth around my flesh and held on with all his mandible had to offer.  At least then he wasn’t screaming. In public places the screaming seems to be the worst sort of torture.

“Whoa.”  My son Liam said, as I shuffled them into the car.

“Yup.  Just had his well-baby visit,” I thought out loud, tears quickly pooling in the corner of my eyes.

“Put on that violin song, Mom,”  he said, anxious to stop the feelings he was feeling, looking for a distraction. So much this little six-year-old knows about the world, wise far beyond his years.

“No problem, buddy!”  I responded, hoping that ignoring the situation would make it go away.  As if it ever had before.  So odd the way we humans cope.  “Here it is,” I said, as the sound of Tourie and Damien Escobar’s Thunder filled our car. Madeleine quickly fell into complaint, not a fan of the violin, and the normalcy of my own kids fighting over the musical selection kept me from panic.

The white-coated mom’s friend had her younger child ensconced in her baby seat, next to the hostile toddler’s Graco.  She looked at me, with anger, as if I was staring for all the same reasons pre-Thinkers do.

“Wow, got a handful there, lady,” were the words she must have imagined traveling across my forehead.

White-coat mom could not get her boy inside the car because he was clawing at her eyes and kicking her in the throat.   When she would bend, he would arch his back and hold on for dear life to the frame of the car. Finally, she found the strength to break his grip, but his rigid body returned as she attempted to get him seated.  Then I saw what all pre-Thinkers, not understanding what is happening in the body of that child and the mind of that mother, would consider child abuse.  While trying with all her might to get him to bend in the middle, he would launch himself forward with superhuman strength.  She pushed him in at the waist and his head slammed into the driver’s seat headrest. It looked nasty from any vantage point.

Of course, Thinkers know what happens next.   It just made him stronger.  That’s mito for you baby!  No shutoff, no concept of consequence, no boundaries, no limitations.  Kids new to mitochondrial dysfunction have two modes: cage fighter and sloth.

As I pulled away she still had not succeeded in getting him in the seat, and the friend had turned her attention toward her own child instead of me. Probably wondering, “How am I going to keep her safe the whole car ride home?”

Remember  the days when all you really needed from your girlfriend was to make sure you made it home safe if you had a little too much to drink and to tell you how your butt looked in white shorts?  Now you have to be sure she’ll go to the grocery store with you, because you are not safe with your toddler alone because your toddler can kick your ass.

America. Most medicated nation. Sickest children.

So, Rev, you’re saying these kids who can’t behave are sick?  I don’t know.  Sure sounds like an excuse for poor parenting.

I can tell ya this: While my child did indeed have the horrific boils and sores we so often see associated with countries lacking sanitation (they manifested when we began treating his organs for the viruses ravaging them) most children afflicted with today’s horrific chronic disease look perfectly healthy.  That’s because their brains, gastrointestinal tracts, and central nervous systems are on fire.  Inflamed.  Their metabolic processes, their methylation cycles, the very essence of their biochemical cellular make-up has been compromised in the worst way. They are autoimmune train wrecks.  This is the part where non-Thinkers get so angered they tend to spit on me as their contorted faces bust into my personal space, “You think I don’t know my own child?  Do you honestly think I do not know when my child is in pain? You think you know him better than me?”

To which, I of course respond, “We have been conditioned to ignore the pain, and in doing so we have allowed ourselves not to see it.  I held my child down for nine vaccines in one day. While he screamed a wretched scream with every injection, I held his squirming little baby body down — for more — and  comforted him while I did it.  Then I packed him into the car and promptly ignored every other sign that real pain was becoming a part of his everyday life:  the high fever that was followed by an eerie silence that lasted for 72 hours and then ended. He was never, ever silent again. The silence gave way to screams that still manifest to this day. His rheumy cheeks, the repeat sinus and ear infections, the eczema that consumed his abdomen and legs, the “toddler diarrhea”, the pica!   All explained away.  This is what we have been taught to do; listen to our doctors and explain away the symptoms that are BRIGHT, BOLD, NEON SIGNS to us that our children are environmentally ill.

And this is why we do it:

When we go along we abdicate responsibility.  It’s out of our hands. We know something is wrong but the doctor says it’s fine, and, even though we know it’s not, it makes for more harmonious living in society. We get to get on with life as it has always been. Of course, our children are now committed to lives as purple minions, but, lo and behold! They have a pill for that.  There is no proof it works, their conditions worsen over time as they become sicker and sicker, but . . . in all honesty.

For many,  it’s easier than having to THINK. “Life is hard enough” is the mantra I so often hear from people whose precious kiddos are quite literally jumping out of their skin.  Many of them are trying to escape their bodies.   It’s not fun living in a vessel where none of the systems work as they were designed to.  It’s hell being brilliant and not being able to communicate that brilliance to the world. Imagine you have been given a glorious gift.  The gift of you.  No one quite like you.  No one with the same opinions, the same perceptions or contributions. No one.  You are one of a kind.  A gift. And . . . You cannot share it  — with anyone  —  because someone gave you a label: a scarlet “A.”

You may hate or thank me now.  In truth, it matters not.   I speak for the children whose voices have been stolen.  I speak for my son Noah Patrick Goes, who will someday, very soon, speak for himself.

Sincerely,

~ The Rev

For more by the Rev, click here.