Montreal Resources for Parents

After dealing with two kids with gastroenteritis ("stomach flu") and not able to send the baby to daycare because of it, Hubby and I didn't have much sleep, laundry was piled up, and we were still trying to work our jobs. It was too much!

So I went searching for resources. For families like us without extended family able to lend a hand, it can be rough. I went in search of emergency babysitting and in that search, I found a bunch of other resources that might help. I'm sharing what I found in case others find it useful:

La Maison Kangourou - I've mentioned them when they opened in 2011 and they're still going strong. They offer emergency respite at their three-floor home, 24/7. You can drop off a child (up to 12 years old) any time and know they will be safe. They can stay up to two weeks at a time. They also offer weekend respite for $40/child/day.

We Care Home Health Services - Provides health care in your home.

Bayshore Health Care - In-home health care available 24/7. They care for seniors, children, and do light house work (dishes, laundry, sweeping).

Information and Referral Center of Montreal - Not sure who to call or where to start? No clue what's available in the city? Call 211 and they do the searching for you. It's free!

Premiere Ressource - Do you need to vent about challenging parenting issues? Have a parenting question? Just need someone to listen? Premiere Ressource is free, anonymous, and staffed by psychologists and child specialists. You can call between 9am-9pm most days to speak to someone.

As usual, for any non-emergency health issues, you can always speak to a nurse by calling 811.

If you are in a state where you may harm yourself or your child, please call 911 or head to your nearest emergency room, police station or CLSC for immediate assistance. 

A Lack of Services

TRIGGER WARNING: descriptions of murder and filicide.

A couple are married for six years. Things are good at first, but the wife gets into an accident and has long term injuries that stop her from being able to work. She is still quite happy with her situation and does her best around the house. Still, they struggle a bit and even though the wife feels she is contributing in her own way, the husband starts to see her as a burden.

He tries to access local rehabilitation services, but there are long waiting lists. By the time they are offered, the wife doesn't want to go. She doesn't feel she needs them and is happy enough. She doesn't understand why her husband can't accept her as she is and is always trying to find new treatments to change her.

The husband is unable to force her or control her and becomes more and more annoyed with the situation. Rather than look for help or counselling for himself, he continues to try and change her. She is the one with the injury! She is the problem! He feels like all his money and time goes into caring for her and she does nothing to repay him.

He decides the best course of action is to kill her. She won't cooperate with what he wants and it's better to take her out of her misery. If he can't love her, surely no one else can!

So one night he suffocates her in her sleep. That was the nice thing to do. He is a little disturbed with himself, so he takes a bunch of pills, half-heartedly trying to kill himself. He ends up just throwing up and calling 911 to admit what he's done.

The news reports show happy pictures of the couple from before she was injured. They show recent pictures of her, injured, but with a broad smile, full of life. The reports paint the husband as an evil man, a sick man without compassion. Neighbours say they never expected such a callous thing to happen in their town. They knew the wife struggled, but she was a sweet woman nevertheless and everyone loved her smile. The citizens rally for justice for her. They want the husband to rot in jail. No mercy for him!
The husband is eventually tried and gets a life sentence.

The fictional story above is too often a reality for some families. The only difference is instead of a husband, it's a mother. Instead of a injured wife, it's an autistic child. And instead of citizens demanding justice, they feel sympathy. The apologise for the mother's actions. They make excuses for her behaviour and they ask why more services weren't offered to her to help her cope with her burden. They forget about the child - the innocent child - or paint them as needy, uncooperative, irredeemable. They spend an inordinate amount of time looking into the history and finding every moment the child may have become frustrated or lashed out. "Once he punched his mother," they say. "There was no fixing him." So what's a mother to do? Kill him, of course!

And services. If we only had more services then innocent, caring mothers would never have to kill their own offspring! Yes, SERVICES. If we had more of them - more places to hide our imperfect children away when we adults lack coping skills - then that would stop normal healthy mothers from killing their burdensome children.

All over the world, every day, people struggle. People fall on hard times. They lose their jobs, they lose their homes, they go to bed hungry. Sometimes their kids behave badly. Sometimes their children hurt them. Despite all that, they don't. commit. murder. 

In the rare times they do, we don't turn around and say, "well, geez, if only someone had given them a new car or an extra food stamp that day, then maybe they wouldn't have killed someone!"

"You certainly can't blame him for committing murder, I mean the guy had just received a bad review at work the day before! Where were the services to help him?"

You can accuse me of black and white thinking, I really don't care. You can accuse me of not having a child horrible enough for me to understand. Go ahead. I say a healthy person doesn't consider their child horrible. A healthy person doesn't solve problems with murder.

A healthy adult walks away and gets help for themselves. A healthy adult takes responsibility for their own actions. A healthy and loving parent gives the child someone else, for a time or permanently, so that the child has the opportunity to grow and be loved by others.

I want you to know there are always other options. I want you to know you can show up on my doorstep, any time, day or night, with your child and I will not ask any questions. I will take them in, and I know plenty of other good people who would, too. PLEASE don't hurt or kill your child. They deserve more than that. They deserve life, whether you believe so or not.

I'm A Mom, But I'm Not Like You

I'm writing this because I'm participating in a Flash Blog for Isabelle Stapleton - an Autistic child whose mother tried to kill her recently. I've written about it in my personal journal, with a lot more swearing, but I'll try to keep things rated PG-13 as much as possible here.

There is a lot of ridiculous justification going on regarding her mother, who was also a blogger. It seems a lot of other blogger moms somehow relate to her being "overwhelmed" - which is all speculation right now anyway since she hasn't spoken about it, as far as I know.

A lot of Autism Moms are crying for better/more services, which also is not the time or place for this. Last I checked, kids need food, clothing and love in order to grow. Most of the other stuff is bonus. They have a right to an education and they have a right to not be abused. You don't need tons of services to accomplish that. Lots of us, me included, have gotten by just fine without ever having a moment of ABA therapy - in fact, we may even progress best without it.
Suffering from a "lack of services" (whatever that really means) still doesn't give you license to murder.

There are plenty of special needs parents doing what they need to do every day without the thought of murder ever crossing their minds, services or not.

I can admit to being "overwhelmed" with life now and then. I tell my hubby I need a break and I do what I suspect most people do - go to bed. Some people may have an alcoholic drink to relax. Others might smoke a joint. Some might take a hot bath or grab a coffee, or do one the myriad of things SANE people do everyday that doesn't involve MURDER. I can get stressed out like the rest of them, but at no point does the thought to kill my child come into my mind!

Apparently, I've also been told that because I'm Autistic, I'm supposed to have sympathy for a murderer who apparently "snapped" and went insane. Because being a murderer is a mental health issue and obviously, Autistics are mental. Look, I'm aware ASD is in the DSM, but no where in the description does it list "homicidal tendencies." So no, sorry, but I don't relate to murderers in any way, shape or form.

Not only that, but people just "snapping" spontaneously happens very, very rarely. This mother may have had a pre-existing issue, such as depression, which she did not get help/treatment for. I can have sympathy for people with mental health issues. I have less sympathy for people who choose not to get treatment when their actions affect others. I have even less sympathy for close people around a sick person who also do nothing. You can't tell me there weren't any signs. The first sign should have been the horribly negative name for her blog. The second was the way she yelled at people providing her daughter services (I thought were supposed to be lacking?) when they didn't want to go along with the way she controlled every single aspect of her daughter's life. (Which I gleaned from the very small amount I've read of her horrible blog)

One person even suggested that maybe she just needed more "me time." Excuse me? "Me time"? How much "me time" do you possibly need? If you are just one short moment of "me time" away from killing your kid, you have serious issues! If you need that much "me time" to not kill your child, maybe having children wasn't a good idea! The fact that people can even SAY things like this and think it's ok, is just mind boggling! Hey, so next time I hear of a horrible murder or home intrusion, or heck, any crime, I'll just remember, gee, that guy must have just needed some "me time" and didn't get it. All those guys in prison right now? They just needed a little "me time!" That's the answer!
We don't need police to prevent crime, we all just need some "me time"!

Look, I have been clinically depressed. I have even been suicidal. But no matter how sick in the head I got, I always had a choice. I had a choice to keep living. I had a choice to call a friend. I had a choice to cart myself off to the emergency room. There are ALWAYS choices. 911 always answers the phone. You can't tell me there were no services.

You have to make a clear and conscious choice to drive someone out to a remote location and poison them slowly. That doesn't happen in two seconds. There were so many chances to make the right choice and she chose not to.

So I might be a mom, and I might have an Autistic child and I might even share the same first name, but I am NOT like her. I'm tired of people aligning with her in some sort of sick solidarity. I'm tired of all the excuses.