autism

8 March 2013

Snow Day: Living by Snowlight

Breakfast by snowlight

Breakfast by snowlight

I love the quiet of a house buried in snow. Skylights are blanketed so it’s a little cave-like and the only light is what comes in from the blizzard outside. And because it’s March there is a bit of warmth to the white, and the assurance that it will all begin melting tomorrow. The bitterness of winter is gone, in ways I cannot begin to explain right now (it is a snow day after all – we have some serious laying around to do). The boys are happy, and when Dad and daughter arrive later everyone will be home and “tucked up tight.” Those small phrases pop into my vernacular all the time (scripted speech? Probably).

by Gail Haley

by Gail Haley

The older the children get, the more we seem to quote the books we read to them when they were small. Perhaps this one most of all: A Story A Story – let it come, let it go.

19 January 2013

Saturday Moment: What Are You Going to do With Me?

Dinner out earlier this week

Dinner out earlier this week

It’s the end of one crazy week and the start of another. We’ve had almost every kind of moment – panic attacks, unrequited love, dancing for joy, teenage rebellion, violations of personal space, bursts of creativity, and early morning hugs before school that reset our relationship from whatever happened the day before. And today an exchange – scripted, yes, but genuine all the same – that is both typical and necessary following transgressions large and small:

Me: “You need to stop ______, please.”

Him (hands on hips, smirk on lips): “What are you going to do with me?!”

Me (deadpan): “Love you forever.”

Him (nodding): ” That’s what you’re gonna do.”

Yep.

9 December 2012

When they were handing out Christmas Spirit, he got in line twice

We volunteered to throw the class Christmas lunch at our house and found ourselves in major prep mode. The light snow that had been falling all day put us in just the right spirit. When walked into the supermarket they were playing a snappy version of Jingle Bells. Our boy started to bop a little as he walked in time to the music; I did, too. We bumped shoulders a little and headed toward the bakery, bopping together. I was lost in the moment, having fun.

“Hey there!” Busted, dancing in the store, by the mother of a classmate of my daughter – someone I know well enough to be a Facebook friend but not so well that I didn’t feel sheepish. I threw up my hands.

“Okay, you caught us dancing the supermarket! We are modeling good holiday behavior!” He was bopping off without me so I had to move on, but we left her smiling. When I caught up with him he was very busy at a table piled high with Christmas cookies.

“We have to move these cookies to allow the train to go through!” Among the piles of cookie boxes there was indeed a buried train setup. The cookies were encroaching on the tracks and had dislodged the train from its proper spot. He worked quickly and efficiently, keeping the cookies in neat piles but reorganizing them so they would not interfere with the train setup. He was the spitting image of his father in every wonderful way, so I took a picture to e-mail his traveling Dad and tell him how we’d been caught dancing.

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When I finished sending the mail on my phone I looked up and the teenager who works in the bakery was standing a few feet away, watching us in bewilderment. She had come out from behind the counter to watch us warily and I saw it dawn on her that he was doing a good job, and was improving on what I assumed to be her cookie arrangement.

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He finished up and surveyed his work with folded arms, pleased as punch.

“There! That’s better!” I looked at the girl.

“Is this okay?” I asked.

She nodded slowly, “Oh, yeah.”

And then he was off.

“C’mon Mom, we have to track down that sneaky pizza crust!”

If there is a future in holiday cookie displays, we are in great shape.

27 November 2012

Can Somebody Screen My Mail, Please?

I admit to having moments in which I am thin-skinned. This is one of them. Count it as one thing I am all too happy to miss, for any number of reasons. I know that there is continuing education in our future (where and for what and for how long is anyone’s guess at this point) and that  the college admissions process for typically developing kids is a nightmare. But still. Spare me.

post script

Just as I hit publish, the TV goes on and I hear the familiar strains of “If I Only Had a Brain.” Sense of humor, blessedly intact.

6 November 2012

The Nightmare Before Election Day

I am standing in the same place this photo was taken. My boy has his back to me, motionless, on this side of the blue-tarped wood pile. On the other side is a grizzly bear on its hind legs, paws up, teeth bared. As I search for a weapon unidentified people around me are telling me not to do anything, that it will be okay, but I keep looking for something to hit it with. Whiffle bat? No. Badminton racket? No. Umbrella? No. I run down to the garage and grab the push broom. I run up the hill and around the house and as I swing the broom over my head the top of the broom flies off and only the stick is left. I see the bear turn toward me, I see my boy turn toward me. I swing.

10 October 2012

Did We Do Something Right?

The lesson learned every day? That we don’t take the blame for what goes wrong and we can’t take credit for what goes right. We tried to accept a long time ago that most of what happens in life is out of our hands – and yet…years of data collection and analysis have forced us to look at evidence and then try to predict outcomes. We are compelled to try and control whatever is within our grasp, no matter how slippery.

So now we have this explosion of language and introspection and creativity and we cannot resist the urge to ask, “Did we do something to make this happen?” Maybe. Somewhere out of the many new situations that life gave our boy, a window opened, a breeze blew through and the seeds of success landed and took root. We created some of the circumstances (camp) and others decidedly not (the loss of JM) but at this moment we see a sense of strengthening purpose and engagement and the hope it brings leaves us blinking in the sunlight.

We know it might not last in its current state – I don’t think we will ever be free from regression. And we all regress sometimes, learning from those same mistakes again and again (Why did I eat that? Why did I say that? Why did I drink so much of that?). But when fundamental skills – like speaking in paragraphs instead of phrases – ebb and flow we find we will do anything to keep that window open and the breezes flowing knowing full well we could wake up one morning to find it closed. The prospect of losing something so hard won triggers every possible human response: hope, fear, optimism, cynicism, love, faith, superstition, luck, magic, and faith – all tempered by what can only be called PTSD. The shock and awe of those early years can return in an instant when he looks at me and his eyes are blank and he is seeing only what is inside his head.

But thinking about it now won’t make it happen – and it won’t fix it when it does – so I will be thankful for the gifts we have today and have faith that they will still be there when we wake up tomorrow.

16 September 2012

A Direct Line to Heaven

When our boy was small and we were still trying to figure out what was happening with him, I often said that he was a little closer to heaven and to hell than the rest of us. He was – and is – so much more in touch with his emotions than with the practical world and it magnifies both his joy and his pain in any given situation. As one can imagine, it is a gift and and a curse, but as a parent I place much more value on his gift for presenting vivid, unvarnished snapshots of the most fundamental joys and sorrows in life. This is never clearer than when there has been a death of someone close to him.

He recently lost a classmate to a short, intense battle with leukemia. It all happened while he was at camp, and this turn of events still dominates his re-entry into home and school. He has panic attacks most mornings at school, causing physical and behavioral distress, and we enlisted the help of the school adjustment counselor and the nurse to address his worries.

Earlier this week I met with his teacher and behaviorist who told me that his friend’s parents would be visiting the school to accept a big card that many students from the high school signed honoring their lost classmate.  Leading up to this, our boy was writing down his feelings in a letter to his friend JM and they showed it to me – it was phenomenal, full of apologies for being away while he was sick and a long list of people who miss him. He is really working things through with the counselor, which seems to be making a difference, because he appears to be having fewer the panic attacks. They said that he printed out a photo of JM and drew a gravesite on it. Sometimes he puts his hands on the picture and prays to him (which makes the adults in the classroom cry). When he came home from school that afternoon he sat with me and showed me a bracelet JM’s mother gave him with JM’s name and dates on it. He said that it was good to see his parents and to know that JM’s mom misses him too. I asked him if he cried. He said yes.

We went to the dump that same afternoon and on the way back we passed our church (we do not attend often – singing and crowds, you know) and I told him the church was empty and asked if he wanted to say a prayer for JM. He said yes.

We went in, and I reminded him about the presence of the Holy Spirit and about genuflecting and then helped him say a couple of prayers – he kneeled and held his hands in perfect position; so earnest. I asked if he wanted to go or stay and say some of his own prayers. He said stay. He told JM that he was sorry for missing his funeral and that he hopes he is happy in heaven. Then he closed his eyes, bowed his head and put his hand over his heart and said very quietly,

“In peace. In peace. In peace. In peace.”

It was as transcendent as anything I have ever seen in church. He was quiet for awhile and then said he was ready to leave. I asked him he he felt any better. He said yes.

As we got in the car he said.

“Boy, I really can’t wait for Halloween.”

Why?

“So I can see JM’s ghost!!”

I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing.

“Was that a funny thing to say?”

I asked him if he thinks ghosts are real.

“Noooo. But I still can’t wait for Halloween.”

I asked him if he knows that I am totally in love with him.

He said yes.

4 September 2012

So, How Was Camp?

I wish there was a simple answer to this question.  Was it the right thing to do? Yes. Are we glad we did it? Yes. Did it result in miraculous, instantly recognizable changes? In some of us, yes, but how if affected our boy and how it influences our next moves to plan for his transition to adulthood I am still not prepared to say. We still need to assess his physical health with regard to his diet and digestive system not to mention the dislocated knee (which appears to be fine). We also need to benchmark his academic skills and assess   his social development.  The latter shows greater depth and fluidity, but I can see the potential for him to fall into old patterns with old friends. He seems generally more communicative and more cooperative, though we are still in the glad-to-be-back-home honeymoon period.

Those miraculous, instantly recognizable changes allude to those of us left to fend for ourselves, boyless, at home. My own angst has been clearly documented here, but it must also be said that for all of our hand-wringing the most surprising change was that things here did not change nearly as much as we expected. Special diets, elaborate toy tableaus and the occasional Gerald Mc Boing Boing sounds are not as disruptive to our lives as we may have thought. In our case, the burdens of autism are not nearly as heavy as we were lead to expect – when he was gone we felt more far more emptiness than relief. In earlier years we may have felt it more than we did at this point but I feel the need to point out that the camp experience was more about him being away from us for his benefit, not our need to be without him. Some people really do not understand that. And we do recognize necessity that our other children need to know that his independence as an adult is just as important to us as theirs, which is a point that absolutely must be made with both actions and words. In reality, the hardest part of the camp experiment is that it is so lovely to have him home that we are loathe to think about ever letting him go away again (for the record, he is also perfectly fine with that).

And there’s the rub. The urge to become complacent is, at this early moment, almost irresistible. But we must keep our eye the prize of independence, or whatever measure of it we can hope to achieve. He is vulnerable – we know now that he can endure a lot but we also know that he may be just removed enough cognitively that he might be forced to endure things that he should not. He was in an environment that we knew would not exploit his good nature – where else can we possibly find that outside of home?

So camp, in the end, did not give us as many answers as we might have hoped, but it is making us rethink our questions.

28 August 2012

“I can still smell the look of it.”

This was our boy’s observation as we pulled into the drive thru at McDonald’s yesterday. The fast food Mecca is the bane and savior of many an autism parent’s existence. I wish I could say that I took him there only because after 7 weeks of camp he deserved the french fries, but the fact is that after 7 weeks of him at camp plus a college drop-off I craved the Big Mac even more than he did the fries. I knew we would both be sorry in a few hours but we had both been on our best behavior for so long it seemed a minor transgression.

And the phrasing of his remark may not be grammatically correct, but it sums up perfectly the mixed feelings those of us who still go the McDonald’s (oh, come on, you know who you are) have about it – that smell and the very act of pulling up to the window are a sensory memory none of us ever forget. If you have not heard Jim Gaffigan‘s riff on McDonald’s, you owe it yourself to go here.

So, contraband procured, our boy clutched the bag and said, “Shall we wait until we get home?” and then immediately began to eat them – longest ones first. My favorite part (other than the Big Mac) was, as I watched him munch out of the corner of my eye, I asked him to share a fry with me – and, as usual, he gave me the shortest one he could find.