I wore my emotions on my sleeve from the time that I was a small child. My parents never had to question how I felt, they knew, in fact everyone knew. I could never wrap my mind around swallowing my emotions. My process deeply involved how to process my emotions without spraying them all over my reality when the environment wasn’t appropriate.
I sat calmly through the entire IEP meeting and engaged openly and freely with the amazing professionals who support my beautiful son through his learning process. At the end of the meeting I said that I wanted to discuss something that had happened months earlier and was still unsettled for me. Each individual put down their papers and pulled their chairs back up to the table. I had purposefully waited until the IEP was clearly outlined for next year's learning. I didn’t want anything that I had to say about the prior situation to impact the care that my son received but I also wasn’t about to swallow the situation without voicing my opinion of needed education and growth opportunities around the situation.
The situation started with a blatant violation of my son's IEP. I had reached out to the individual and initiated a conversation around the fact that she had violated his IEP, the intention was to simply bring it to her attention because I assumed that she overlooked it as she was a teacher of one of the specials and not his classroom teacher. She dug her heals in and defended her behavior rather than simply saying sorry and thank you for the awareness. She told me how her son also had autism and that I needed to work with him more at home. He has had astronomical gains in the past 2 years and while he still had beautiful growth opportunities she knew nothing about my home and how we engaged. She then put in writing that she had 450 students and couldn’t remember their IEPs and that she would try to be more sensitive to him and his limitations in the future. As we discussed the situation all of the anger that I felt came flooding back but it wasn’t appropriate to display the anger, so I swallowed it which allowed me to show up professionally and advocate for my child and create change for future children in the school system. My body stayed calm on the outside while internally every cell, every muscle, every part of me shook with anger. As the meeting ended the shaking got stronger as my need for composure faded and my body began to let down.
As we drove away from the school my body violently shook. No part of me tried to stop the shaking, I just allowed the energy to move through me, knowing that my body was doing it’s job beautifully. It was moving emotions that I had stuffed down so that I didn’t carry them around with me for the rest of the day. I closed my eyes, took my socks and shoes off to be in contact with the ground and softly whispered “I love you” to my body as it shook and moved energy.