Frustration Eating Me Alive! Part 1

A child on the school stage plays a wrong note.  Ha, triumph; this will teach you to steal my child’s limelight.  A second bad note, oh my God, that poor child!  How can I be such a monster?  She’s my child’s friend!

But I feel that my kids need to be seen.  They need their talent to be seen & nurtured quickly if they are ever going to have a chance.  The real world progressively triggers more & more anxiety & autistic symptoms, time is against them.  I feel if my kids don’t peak quickly they will be trapped forever in the same vortex of self-doubt & lack of motivation that the two oldest seem to be mired in.  The quagmire that my incredibly talented husband can’t get out of & that I’m using every iota of my strength to claw my way a little out of & mainly not to get sucked back.  I don’t share these thoughts with my children, what do I want to do throw them in to the vortex I hate.  Some parts of me think that this maybe a touch irrational & overprotective.  But frankly the evidence so far supports my worst fears.

Meanwhile I am still a visible audience member so I rub my face with my hand surreptitiously making sure my face is making the reassuring  ‘I love this entertainment’ look I always try to use whenever I am in an audience.  I spent a lot of time practising appropriate facial expressions at home & then checking how the position feels on my fingers so I can reproduce them in public.  With the exception of small children I can’t hear well, I don’t use my expressions deceptively.  I invested a lot of time in my teens studying facial expression & body language in an attempt to understand & keep up with my peers.  When I’m enjoying myself I generally look bland, bored or maybe sleepy, if I’m in an audience I look irritable & in pain, if I’m outside my house I look irritable & in pain.  So if I’m in the company of non-Autistic people I adjust my face to reflect my feelings or sometimes the feelings I feel that aren’t due to my being crazy.  I think my face should reflect my enjoyment at the entertainment in a way that can be understood by normal people.

Surprisingly I have never met anyone including my lazy kids who will study this technique, it’s annoying.

Back to kids’ concerts; I love performances by children.  At best they can be fantastic, like real entertainment but unexpected; at worst it can still be adorable watching their little mistakes and marveling at their recoveries.  There are 2 things that annoy me and ruin a show; bad sound & precociousness.  I find sitting through a performance I can’t hear irritates me so much it causes me pain and anxiety, there is something in the mixture of straining & not knowing what is happening around me that sets me completely on edge.  I also hate precociousness in children’s’ performances like the kids (characters) on “Full House”.  I feel really strongly about good parenting, part of that is discipline & respect I don’t like performances that seem to flout respect for authority.  But I don’t blame the performers for this; either it arises from a lack of discipline from their parents or scripting/directing, neither of which would be the fault of the child.  And neither is the sound system so in both these cases I try to keep my entertained expression in place if I can be seen by the performers.  Yes I do have all these insane convoluted thoughts on a regular basis.  Yes I do know I sound crazy.  I am completely comfortable being crazy but I will not ever willingly risk ruining even slightly someone else’s mood because of my craziness.

Part 2