Why is he so different?

It was a sunny summer afternoon and I had my 11 (Ava), 5 (Eleanor) and 2 (Ezra) year old in the car with me. It had been a particularly difficult weekend and today was no different. Ezra has impuls/e control issues (don't we all?) and his therapist's response is that he just has a mission to hit Eleanor (5); whether that's pulling her hair, throwing stuff at her or hurting her. I told them I simply don't accept and I need answers on how to make it stop.

It's the weirdest feeling to try to protect one child while trying to understand and have compassion and understanding for whatever this is with Ezra. It's terrifying and infuriating and I will never accept "There's nothing we can do".

So, we're driving down the road and Ezra is obsessively repeating the colors of the rainbow in a humdrum tone "red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violent. again. red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violent. again."

And from the car seat next to him Eleanor says "mom, why is Ezra so different?"

Instantly I felt that familiar burning in my eyes, the tears started to well up. how do I explain this without making him sound like he's in critical condition or like all hope is lost. So here's what I went with.

Ezra is different than you, you're absolutely correct. Ezra has superpowers. He gets to see the world so much brighter than we do, but it's also so much louder than we hear things. Ezra can hear things we can't hear, and he experiences things we don't get to. But that also means that things for Ezra can be very overwhelming and he gets angry or more sad or more upset or even happier than we experience things, so we just have to be careful and mindful and when we see that Ezra is starting to have a hard time, we have to honor and respect that. We also have to honor and respect his boundaries just like we're teaching him to honor and respect boundaries. And when it's too loud, we give him his headphones. When it's too bright, he has his sunglasses. When he needs to do heavy work so he can feel calm, we put on his weighted vest or big squeezes. It's never okay for him to hurt you, I dont know why he screams so loud it hurts our hears, I dont know what's going on in his head, but Ezra is an amazing puzzle that we get to figure out. He is brilliant and smart and kind a lot of the time, now we have to figure out the rest.

She sat in her car seat and I watched her little mind working from the rearview mirror. Processing...processing... "I love Ezra's world mom!" pause. "But I still dont like that he screams and pulls my hair".

Same kid, same.

Nothing about this diagnosis has been glamorous or easy. Figuring out the world of Ezra is like opening up a door to a world unknown. I dont know anything, literally nothing about what his brain is doing. The more I uncover, the more I explore his universe, the more that I find he is full of light and magic and things that I may never understand.

Right now, he is playing with a single crumb like it is the more spectacular toy that he has ever seen. One crumb from one muffin that he probably ate last week that the broom didn't find the 17 times I swept. But somewhere in that crumb is magic.

Hopefully we can all find the magic and wonder and brilliance in the world of others and experience just one aspect of the magic that is their world through the lenses of their being. I just continue to beckon, to pray, to ask the universe for more grace and more patience day after day after day to be the mom that Ezra - and my other children need.