My main impetus for restarting the blogging thing is that we’ve been dealing with some health issues for Tycho, and I have a lot of feels I need to put somewhere. I have a lot of feels about a lot of things and they will all surely find their way here, but right now this is the thing that kicked me into gear.

We’ve known there was something up for… a while. A long while. But teasing it apart is tricky. He had a lot of non-autism developmental delays (that we are mostly caught up on, now), so we assumed his lack of potty training was related. And he pooped everyday, always, so how were we supposed to know he was constipated?

But he was. To the point of developing a fecal impaction and encopresis. Once we finally figured out that this might be our problem everything started to make sense. Of course he is misbehaving/refusing to eat/complaining of mystery pains/randomly vomiting/impossible to potty train! Okay! Let’s fix it! We’re now guessing that this goes all the way back to when we fully weaned. At 20ish months. You know, over two years ago.

This is just wrecking me. My friends keep telling me to push away the mom guilt. I couldn’t have know! Don’t feel bad that you didn’t know sooner, you’re doing what you can, you’re getting help now. Yes, I know. And you know what, I’m not. This is emphatically NOT my fault. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty that I didn’t somehow magically intuit that my daily pooping child was constipated. I’m a great (okay, pretty good) mother. That’s fine.

But you know what’s not fine? Even if there was nothing I could be expected to have done, my kid, my baby, has been sick for years. YEARS. More than half his life. He probably doesn’t even remember what it feels like to not be in pain. No this is not my fault and I’m doing everything I can, but regardless of my role here that is just awful and I feel awful for him. And he was complaining about stomach aches and I thought he was full of shit (kind of correct…) and I’m his mother and I didn’t listen to him and how terrible must that be for him to have the one person that you’re supposed to be able to trust not believe you?

So, lot’s of feelings, there. But the good news is that we now know what’s going on and we have a plan and we’re going to fix it. I can’t say the process is fun… or easy, or quick, but it’s something and it’s going, and that’s good.