Listening For Sustainability

My daughter, with Fetal Alcohol crippling emotional intelligence damage and Cerebral Palsy perpetual TerribleTwo "is too many, because Earth is all about ego-defiant me" has taught herself to attach her lips, and sometimes her wet licking tongue when she is feeling particularly needy and/or playful or maybe just hungry, to my male dominant capital forehead when she needs to feel noticed attached connected invested in better. This Saturday morning she commits the unpardonable sin of waking up before seven a.m. Eleven is closer to her business as usual. After bath and costuming, both accomplished with as little support from me, autonomously distracted, as possible, she goes to our kitchen to watch her favorite animated song and dance loops on It's All About You Tube. I am hanging out with my son, also with cerebral palsy, but unable to walk without balancing assistance and unable to talk in either direction, talk back or proclaim forth, which is more his sister's favorite skill set. After a few minutes of only slightly compromised peace this sunny summer Saturday morning, the daughter comes in to demand her support staff (me) prepare her royal breakfast (immediately). I invite her to self-serve. She says No! repeatedly while I remind her she is capable of going to the freezer, extracting one microwave pancake and sausage on a stick, wrapping it in one rectangle of paper towel, opening the microwave door, placing it on the rotating glass plate inside, closing the door, pushing 1, 0, 0, waiting for the ding, and removing her breakfast by holding the stick, waiting for it to cool, removing the paper towel, and devouring the pancake, then the sausage, as usual. She responds I want you to do it. I respond I want you to do it. "No, Help me!" "I am helping you!" "No! You do it; not me!" "Why?" "Because I"m watching my tablet." "And I'm trying to meditate and write!" "No! Help me!" So, I ask for a time out. We have been at this same impasse countless times. It's a ritual, obsessive and compulsively lose/lose. We are both not listening while we are also not meditating and watching and writing healthier song and dance stories. What's happening here? You know you can make your own breakfast. Is this about not wanting to be alone? Do you want me to show you how crazy I am about you? "Can I have a kiss?" And then we do the "my lips on your head" And "my head on your lips" ritual. I give her a back and shoulder massage while she has her therapeutic attachment breakfast. My daughter smiles, leaves the room without further demands, goes back to the freezer, pulls out a Blanketed Pig on a stick... I go back to writing about resilience and remediating potential lose/lose Earth climates and emotionally cooperative reparations. My son goes back to sleep, having had a good belly laugh at our curiously outspoken craziness, reminding me Curiosity is a more effective active left-hemisphere tool than working hard to feel right-hemisphere patience in the face of apparent weapons wielded by alien win/lose forces in an otherwise win/win potentiated interactive ego/eco-system. He sits up, groaning repeatedly, until I re-emerge aware He needs a diaper change, on this peaceful sunny summer Saturday morning riding still-revolving climates of Earth re-creating green-blue-red ultra-nonviolent win/win living systems of actively communicating co-enlightenment. Maybe we'll have lunch on the backyard deck under our barn red umbrella as the Thames River continues to flow downstream from northern stars toward southern sun sustained states.