And while we’re all doing these wacky turns around our lives with the children in them, the ones who need extra help, it comes back to bite oneself in the backside.

One of the things I absolutely harp on when I’m in my support groups is that parents need to find an outlet away from their children, lest they go crazy.

It’s just a matter of fact for all parents, frankly, and more so for the parents of a child with special needs.  We spend so much time having to be strong that we don’t ever give ourselves the time we need to build ourselves back up, and then we’re just setting ourselves up for failure when the world’s not tolerant of those problems.

As I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, my major outlet is curling – my season runs for about six months a year, and the other six… I kind of struggle.  Once upon a time, I was playing golf now and again in the mornings over the summer, but this year, between negotiating the camp schedules for two children and working out how to take a vacation, I just didn’t get out at all.

I did, however, start to exercise in the mornings, with instituting a daily walk from my house to Starbucks and back.  That kind of fell off the radar around the return to work after my sabbatical and the Monster’s new school year, and I vowed to get started again this week.  And then this morning… I realized it’s too dark at that hour for me to safely take the walk.  Even with a flasher or something – I suppose I could try it with a reflective vest, but the major issue is that it just doesn’t feel safe to me to be walking my route entirely in darkness.  Part of that is due to the fact that the Monster has to catch his bus around the corner at 7:30 – prior to this point, the bus picked him up in front of our house at 8:20, which gave me another hour – and therefore I have to be starting out at like… 5:30.   (Clearly, I have to find an alternative.)

Other than that, though, I’ve had nothing to build up a buffer of ‘downtime’ for the stress of dealing with the Monster’s Autism and my work stress.  Which means obviously, on days like today, when I’m on Daddy Duty and doing my job, and things are crashing down around my ears at work as a result, I’m slowly climbing the walls.

At least my curling starts again in a week or so.  Hopefully that’ll help.