relationships

1 May 2018

Autism Transitions: Full Nest

Turning 23

I didn’t mean to wait a full year to post, but I think I am glad I did. For many families turning 22 means an empty nest, but not us. Much of this first year has been characterized by a sense of relief for him that not everything is changing at once. I share that relief, wholeheartedly. As we prepare for our other children to leave the nest, I am admittedly grateful to know that this man will linger. I understand that we can’t let contentment morph into denial. I also understand that even typical brains aren’t fully developed until age 26 and so extending the transition process beyond 22 means we still need to continually assess the whole person and the whole picture, giving equal weight to the futures of his siblings. Our family is evolving and nothing is truly settled. We are not ready for the long term plan, and if the transition has taught us anything, it’s that planning ahead is an art, not a science. There are few absolutes, and in this political climate we can’t even plan on even the most basic levels of support for our man beyond the family unit.

Not for the first time, it occurs to me that I’ve built my life around this family and any personal ambitions I may have had pale in comparison to what has turned into a life’s work: this person who now stands before me, nearly grown. While I try mightily to extricate myself from the lives of my other children, he fits so easily into who I am now that he is in so many ways an extension of me, and I know my husband feels the same way. We, the three of us, are a single symbiotic organism and even when it is maddening it is also plain that I cannot breathe without them. I don’t think it will always be this overwhelming, but it the feeling that we are thriving together instead struggling to understand and survive is shot through with a kind of success that is difficult to describe.

That said, one year into the transition we are dealing with only a few of the issues I thought we’d face, establishing social connections and opportunities being the most difficult challenge by far. There’s a bit of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for sure, but the best part is that he is controlling the dialogue. So long ago I prayed for him first to be able to say yes or no, then to tell me if he had a good day, then to outline his fears and desires. I got all of those things and more, even as he remains as vulnerable as a preschooler. I still bask in the miracle of him becoming so much more than I was told we could have hoped – but my hope never waned, and never will.

 

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.