autism

27 October 2014

Saturday Moment: Halloween Prep in Sodor Brings Some Surprises

IMG_0018He’s on a roll with drawings and decorating, and today the trains need Halloween prep. I never fail to marvel at the focus and precision he brings to these projects, which are totally his idea. Add to that he has positioned himself right in the middle of our own project of reorganizing part of the basement – we are working near and around him, going back and forth, calling to each other and generally making a racket. He is unperturbed. Add to this list of potential antecedents my request that he move part of his train set temporarily so that I can clean out and move a cabinet that holds various frames, craft supplies, toys and videos. I don’t really want him to see the things I intend to give away, but have already decided that I won’t give away anything he wants me to keep. We have finally learned to pick our battles.

IMG_0016I can tell he doesn’t want to move the train tracks out of my way, and I am prepared for him to declare that I am an Onion lady who is too full of organizing.  I wait a while to let the request sink in and focus on something else. Then he materializes in front of me, holding a box of videos: “I’m too old for these.” They are Richard Scarry ABC and counting videos. They are my favorites. But I take them and set them aside with the other “give away” things.

Then he appears with another box of videos, classic Disney this time. “We have all of these on DVD, which is more efficient.” Then I realize that, rather than move the tracks or allow me to navigate around them (which I couldn’t – I’m such a klutz I would definitely step on them) he is carefully removing everything from the cabinet himself.

IMG_0017So while he was constructing Halloween decorations for his trains, he was also making decisions about growing up, and managing change and doing it all beautifully, meticulously, and offering up explanations along the way. A task that would have been frought with emotion and behavior management (and that in younger years I would probably have attempted in the middle of the night or while he was somewhere else) had evolved so peacefully I almost didn’t notice – until I realized that he was having an easier time parting with things than I was (you don’t want that 12-foot train puzzle that you put together a thousand times, really?).

Not so long ago I wondered if he would ever grow out of some things and I concluded at the time that it didn’t hurt to wait. It’s not always true that all things come to those who wait, but on this day it is. As I was reminded by him more than once this week, “Patience is a virtue, Mom.” True, that.

1 April 2014

Try This on For Size: April is Autism Understanding Month

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Hugs stave off the winter chill during a bittersweet goodbye. See you in springtime.

 

First they called April Autism Awareness Month (many still do). I knew I was all too aware. Now they called it Autism Acceptance Month. I know I accept it well enough. But I’m still trying to understand a lot of things about Autism: why it’s such a wide spectrum and whether all of it is autism or just a conglomeration of neurological diagnoses that need be to be sorted out. I also accept is that it will take forever to understand. So that’s the work I am doing this month: trying to develop a better understanding of the things about Autism that still need work, in contexts large and small. I want to think out loud about the issues and questions that society ought to know so that families living with autism are not pitied, ignored or marginalized while we figure out where the many types of people on the spectrum fit, what their gifts are, and how they need help.

IMG_7953April is a good month for developing understanding – and patience. For those of us in climates where winter has us in a death grip, April is the time that we long for the warmth of summer and totally overreact to the emergence of any sign of spring (watching the snow and ice recede, camera in hand, looking for crocuses). April brings Easter (usually) and other rites of spring that signal optimism about the future. April reminds us, gently, painstakingly, that we have more capacity for joy than we thought after a winter in which our capacity for everything joyful has been sorely tested. April is hope. Let’s start with that thought.

7 January 2014

Shelter in Place, Emerging in a Better One

Once you've seen fire on ice, anything seems possible.

Once you’ve seen fire on ice, anything seems possible.

So, I’ve been away from my own blogosphere a while. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. The concept of “shelter in place,” made real during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, really appealed to me over the past several months. The idea of staying in where it is safe so that the world can take time to set itself right before we venture out again. It doesn’t have to be about danger, but sometimes it is about preservation of self. This is what I have been doing – sheltering in place.

But today it seems right to venture back here. Today there is news that is worth sharing, because I can say that investing in hope pays dividends.

In a post last summer, I wondered when it was okay to give aways things that most children outgrow during high school. We all have remnants from our childhood stashed away somewhere (don’t we?), but in the case of our boy we have, well, a lot of things we know that he is not ready to part with. So I kept most of  it. In that process, I took a very long look at the book shelf. The ABC and farm books are long since packed away, but many of the most beautifully illustrated books, picture encyclopedias and easy readers remain. I know he appreciates the images and that they inform both his understanding of a story and his artistic sensibilities.  Still, I very deliberately left the collection of biographies on the shelf next to the head of the bed. I bought them during the middle school years, when they were age appropriate, because they were fact-based, had lot of photos but contained some narrative stretches on highly reinforcing figures in history: Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart. He always looks up facts on the internet about these people; I convinced myself the books were still useful, and they look nice (and not too incongruous) on the shelf, too.

IMG_7353I know he will never be in love with books the way I was. I know he will never delight in conjuring places, events and people from a page dense with type. I know that I am lucky that his visual learning style is tailor-made for 21st century digital information. I know all of that, but all of my knowingness didn’t prepare me for the moment when, upon peeking in to say good night, I saw him reach over and slip a book off the biography shelf, open it and begin reading. Reading for pleasure. Reading for information. Reading pages on which there were no pictures at all. Just type. I slipped away unnoticed, afraid that I would interrupt and ruin the moment by making too big a deal of it.

But it was a big deal. It reminded me (not for the first time) that I kid myself that I know more about him than I do, and that creating limited opportunities for him will yield limited results. I won’t be placing Ulysses on the shelf anytime soon, but I’ll be upping the ante on a lot of fronts based on this moment. It also reminded me that one of the reasons that I felt the need to shelter in place was that the conversations that swirl around the senior year of high school are all about competition and achievement. Conversations that lead to well-meaning questions that I don’t necessarily want to answer. That simple act of opening a book means more to me than an 800 SAT score, but there aren’t many who would understand that, and I am past the point of wanting to explain it (and yet here I am, explaining it).

I need to leave more books on the shelf, more doors ajar, more options on the table. We don’t have to have anyone’s life mapped out by May.

But I had to know something. The next morning at breakfast, I asked him what he read before bed last night.

“I was reading about Abraham Lincoln,” he said.

“Were you looking for something specific?”

“Yes, I wanted to know how he met his wife, Mary Todd.”

Relationships. He was reading to learn about relationships.

30 July 2013

The Miracle of Enough Sleep

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It is a breathtakingly beautiful early summer morning – sunny, cool, dry – and for once I do not have mixed feelings about being awake to appreciate it. I am not a morning person. Never was, never will be. I am awake because I have to be but I can also say that I have had enough rest. This is new.

Last Friday night I slept for 12 hours. I don’t think I’ve done that in the 20 years since I had my first child. We had an early dinner and I fell asleep on the sofa, moved upstairs to bed at 1am and then woke up at 8am. I was aware of bedtime routines and kisses good night but everyone seemed to know what they were supposed to do and follow through. After a week of 5-6 hours a night, that sleep was not only needed, it was transformative. I faced a busy weekend not with fantasies of a nap but with energy and enthusiasm and a sense of emotional flexibility that often just isn’t possible.

SONY DSCI thought about the parents who have gone for years without even those 5-6 hour nights I’m whining about, and I am thinking about them again this morning. Sleep deprivation plagues many people for many reasons. For those who are awake because they have a sleepless child who requires constant supervision, the exhaustion is complete and relentless. Even on nights when the kids manage to sleep through the predawn hours, parental eyes pop open anyway, expectant of the footsteps that may or may not patter down the stairs. Knowing that the child is asleep doesn’t mean going back to sleep for another hour or two. Usually, worry fills in until they do wake up. It’s a hard pattern to break.

For those of us who face the day bleary eyed and worn out, I hold out for the promise and possibility of the restorative power of sleep. We don’t create sleep deficits on purpose – many children on the autism spectrum have intractable sleep issues and keep parents up until all hours, and we use the few hours while our kids do sleep to do things they can’t get done when the kids are awake. It’s just as important for our kids that we are rested as it is for us – people who’ve had enough sleep have more patience and make better decisions. If you can find a way to accomplish that magic 7 hours of rest, it is worth striving for.  Jane Brody wrote an informative essay on the health risks posed by sleep deprivation – it’s good tool for advocating with family and caregivers to let you cobble together a longer night or a decent nap.

SONY DSCI can’t blame autism for my sleep problem entirely. My boy is a better sleeper than most; it is the other obligations (obsessions?) and the worry that keep me awake.  I enjoy the quiet, peace and dark of late nights. I love being awake when everyone else is asleep. Books and movies are more fun in the dark. For years I sat in the dark on the floor of my boys’ room, waiting for them to go to sleep. As much as that process was driven by necessity, worry and confusion, I genuinely loved those moments sitting (sometimes writing) by the glowing night-light and waiting for the steady breathing and gentle snoring that arrived with their slumber. By the time I tiptoed out, no matter how crazy the day had been, we were all in love again. I wanted to savor that feeling and not go to sleep right away myself. I needed some time to wallow in the normalcy of sleeping children and talk to my husband uninterrupted. Still, there were times when I konked out on the floor before they did.

One gift of adolescence is that it brings kids who sleep in, when school allows it. This break in our summer program leaves my boy in bed at 9am still asleep. I never dared to hope there would be a time when he would master a self-directed bedtime routine at reasonable hour and sleep in on a sunny morning, even with sun streaming through the skylight directly on his bed. It might not sound like a miracle, but in its way it is. It gives me time to write this, time to think up some structure for this unstructured day, time to appreciate the breeze though the open windows after a week of hot and humid weather.

Peace of mind and enough sleep – I don’t think I can have one without the other, and having learned this lesson (again) I am going to try not to forget it.

PS: This is my 100th post. Woot.

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16 June 2013

Happy Father’s Day

Taking walks is a Dad-driven activity that varies in popularity among his children.

Taking walks is a Dad-driven activity that varies in popularity among his children.

There are a lot of ways to be a good father. I think the stereotypes around fatherhood are even more constraining than the ones around motherhood – and it appears to be particularly tough on Dads with kids on the spectrum because ASD kids often don’t hew to the traditional mold of father-son relationships. I’ve heard many stories of families with Dads who couldn’t cope with a child on the Spectrum, but am happy to report that I don’t know many of them. Most of the Dads I know have stuck with their families and done their best to support their kids and spouses through this unprecedented time in history when autism went from obscurity to a household word in front of their eyes.

In this world of Dads whom I have seen rise to the occasion of ASD in their lives, my own husband stands head and shoulders above them all in his devotion to, compassion for, and understanding of our boy. He understands what it is like to think in pictures, to read the emotions in a room without need for dialogue, to focus relentlessly on a single goal. He has supported me in my many unconventional pursuits down new paths toward better health and treatment, and sometimes adopted the treatments for himself. He appreciates the gifts of all of our kids, knowing them in a way that is decidedly 21st century even as he revels in a kind of Ward Cleaver image of fatherhood. He plays video games and likes to go on vacation to places where you dress for dinner. He loves Christmas, hates command performances, and requires infusions of salt air and extreme weather on a regular basis. He is loving, stalwart, industrious and hilarious in ways that only those closest to him can truly appreciate. He belongs to us, and we to him, and there isn’t much more you can ask from a Dad than that.

13 June 2013

Developmental Dilemma: What To Keep

Part of me thinks that no one should ever have to outgrow Toy Story.

Part of me thinks that no one should ever have to outgrow Toy Story.

Ever since the 18th birthday earlier this spring, I’ve been in a state of emotional turmoil. It’s only a slight exaggeration. Now I try to make some sense of a teenager’s room that runs the gamut from Winnie-the-Pooh to Scooby Doo with everything in between. It’s a collector’s dream and a parent’s nightmare. I’ve learned the hard way that throwing the wrong thing out means I will be hounded eventually to replace it – it could be five weeks or 5 years from now, just long enough to make what cost me $1.99 in 2003 now cost $67.99 on Ebay today. I know parents who have purged their house of everything Thomas and Pixar to help their kids become adults but my problem is that I really am loath to replace Toy Story with the Man of Steel. To me, that’s just another kind of arrested development. More importantly, he’s not interested in that stuff – he sleeps soundly through superhero movies on a regular basis. He loves what he loves.

IMG_4800And the books. Which ones will he ever read? How can we know what will prove useful or interesting, just by waiting patiently for him to notice the ones placed where he sees them every day? To get rid of the easy readers seems mean, to get rid of the more advanced books seems pessimistic.

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Will he look beyond the action figures to the books behind them? Maybe.

Downstairs are the bins of paperwork that requires filing or tossing – one for school, one for insurance, one for general ASD stuff, one for transition, one for keepsakes and artwork that show developmental progress, or the lack thereof. But I only end up weeding things out I know are redundant – I just don’t know when a school or a court will need to see what we have and I’m afraid to get rid of something that could be a key piece of evidence of … I don’t know. And every bin or toys or papers brings a flood of memories and emotions that don’t want to stay on the shelf where I keep them. I am trying so hard to focus on the future that sifting through the past seems like a bad idea just now.

So I guess I’ll stick with The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music – at least they are live action – and wait a bit longer for the moment when we can at least move some stuff up to the attic. And we will know soon enough what schools, doctors, agencies and lawyers require and then, maybe then, we can let go of at least some of the past.

Remember Cats versus Dogs? They’re all in here.

24 April 2013

Reflections and Reminders in a Snapshot

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Everything is so fraught with meaning these days. While I am processing recent events, I at least have access to some words.  I am grateful for:

  • the first truly warm day after a cold and unforgiving spring
  • a track meet filled with happy, cheering teens
  • schools with dedicated principals, athletic directors and teachers who carved out the time and money to create an interscholastic special olympics team that competed on fields among lots of other typical sports teams on this brilliant day
  • the incredible young woman who chased our boy for 800 meters so that he could make good time in his race (until he swallowed a bug and then walked part of the way until he could sprint, triumphant, for the last 100 meters)
  • the teammates on this yellow bus who waved at our boy through the windows on the highway as we made our way home, and
  • the snapping flag at half mast that says that while life has gone on we stand strong in our support for those who still suffer from the wounds of last week.

Never underestimate the power of sunshine and smiles.

22 April 2013

The April 15 Post That Wasn’t

IMG_4098I was almost ready to publish a post on April 15. I just needed to load the fox photo. But I had an appointment, and on the way home the news on the radio changed everything. Bombs going off in my adopted city on a street I used to traverse every day. I’m still processing  the bombing and all that happened in the days after – me and millions of others. So, after today’s moment of silence I returned to the post I wrote on that day, a day that was already profound for me, even before 2:50pm.

A Different Kind of Marathon.

April 15. Boston Marathon Day. Tax Day. Halfway Point in Autism Acceptance Month.

SONY DSCI bailed on posting every day this month, obviously. Priorities change, and with so many people saying so many things about autism, if I am going to add to the noise it had better be worth it. But on this marathon day there is something to be said about the value of pacing yourself when facing the long haul of parenting. I’ve been following a thread online in which parents share their strategies for separating from their kids for personal time, shoring up their marriages, and finding ways to talk about things that aren’t autism (it’s harder than you think). That conversation follows a number of pieces I’ve read lately in the mainstream media where people without children feel the need to weigh in on the foibles of those who do have children. Too much time on your childless hands, Mr. Bruni? If people without kids are irked by people who talk about their kids a lot, imagine the pique in those who find themselves surrounded by the misplaced angst of parents struggling with sports team playing time or ivy league SAT requirements. And it’s not so much pique really as it is having absolutely nothing to add to such conversations. It makes a better listener and people watcher out of me, for sure, but as the years go by whatever skill I had for small talk sort of waxes and wanes with wherever we are with our boy. Sometimes it seems to have atrophied and I almost don’t trust myself at parent functions for my typical children anymore because the urge to say something truly inappropriate (but funny, I assure you) is almost overwhelming. It’s like the vegan invited to an event at a steakhouse – just because the parameters of your life are different you don’t get to ruin it for everyone else. If it bothers you that much, stay home, right? Wrong. Choose events wisely, but go, and bring your empathy with you.

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So, I left writing this post to do work things and then I checked back on the parenting thread I was talking about, and was validated and educated by what I read there. People have made some hard choices to keep balance in their lives and create independence for their children. It made me think, and so I went and sat in the rare spring sun to contemplate the long-term plan. Out of nowhere (kind of) appeared the boy. He wrapped his arms around my head, kissed it and said, “Are you worried about something?” He wedged himself into the chair with me, leaned his head on my shoulder, and twirled the hair at the nape of my neck with his fingers the same way he did as a toddler. I couldn’t answer him. We heard a door open – saved by the Dad, taking a break from work. We scrambled upstairs and while I crossed the room to talk to Dad, the boy looked past us out the window and pointed (now he points!):

“Baby foxes!” He spotted them – four in all – scampering about, camouflaged almost perfectly against the oak and maple leaves. We would have been too preoccupied to notice, but we found ourselves checking in on them all day as they wrestled and napped, waiting for Mom to come back to the den that sits just up the hill from our house.

He feels ahead of me, he sees beyond us. We have a lot of thinking to do.