Reflections on love, parenting and life from a middle-aged cowgirl. Fueled by good wine, strong coffee and the conviction that learning is a lifelong process.
My alarm went off at 5 am as it always does on a Monday.
I hit the 'snooze' twice, as I also always do.
I made coffee, made some breakfast, put some dishes in the dishwasher.
5:30, I woke up my daughter, as I always do on a Monday. Fed her breakfast, got her meds out for her, told her to get dressed at 6:00. Came out of the shower and made sure she had her shoes on.
At 6:35, I started to call to her to head out for her bus, when something caught my eye. Horses. In the dry pen, waiting for breakfast. Waiting for Denise to come do the morning feed. Denise, who was bringing her granddaughter over, to do a little pony camp to which my daughter was also invited because...
About a month ago I took my horse to a schooling show. We've had a lot of fun doing various things all this year, and I was excited about the progress we've made. I was sure that we would have a great outing.
I might not have minded so much about the serious show people that showed up (at the end of the year? For a schooling show? After you've clearly cleaned up on the real show circuit?) if it weren't for the fact that my own horse and I had a really rotten day. I'd brought his two stable mates and on top of that his half-sister and one of his trail riding buddies were there. He couldn't stop worrying about where all of his friends were for more than two seconds, and if he couldn't see any of them he'd get panicky. He was prancing and trying to take off, wouldn't stand still, wouldn't stop calling to them. In the ring he kept trying to angle himself toward the exit. All in all the day was horribly frustrating and disappointing. The judge hated us, but that's OK because I wasn't super fond of us, either.
I try not to care about competing. At this stage in my life if we are doing something that actually awards places, I'm pretty happy either way, so long as I'm happy with myself and my horse. But for days after that schooling show I felt so small and incompetent. My thoughts kept spiraling downward.
Maybe I really don't know what I'm doing.
Maybe I'm doing everything wrong.
Maybe I should just quit trying to do anything except trail riding.
Maybe I'm just an idiot.
I had a couple of really good rides at home in the weeks after that, and a fairly good lesson. Then this weekend we did a half-day western dressage clinic and a dressage schooling show. I entered the Introductory test for the senior age group and the open group, along with a few friends of mine that also take lessons with me.
We placed well, but more importantly Bugs and I had a really good day together. He wasn't perfect, but he was better than he has been and we didn't break our patterns or have a bucking fit across the arena. I really enjoyed the whole day, and being around my friends and watching everyone ride.
I liked the format of the show. It was my first dressage experience, so it was new to me. In dressage each rider goes individually the judge gives scores on each element of your ride. There are a LOT of elements, and even if you mess up on one of them, your whole ride isn't a wash. Not only does the judge give you a score, but you also get comments as to why it was a better or lower score. Those comments not only let me know what we need to work on but also helped me to feel some confidence about the things we are doing right and the direction we're moving.
Last night as I was reflecting on how much better I felt after having a positive show experience, I recalled what I often say to others and what has been a powerful message for me at other times of my life:
Everything changes.
No matter how well or how badly things are going, you can count on things changing.
Race Car Man is struggling so badly in school right now. We've had a meeting almost every two weeks all year long, but things are not moving in the right direction. The strategies that have been implemented that are supposed to help him are not helping him; they are escalating the situation. His teacher is frustrated, his dad and I are frustrated, but most importantly, my son is frustrated. His therapist was able to get him to discuss how he was feeling through some indirect questions, and he expressed to her quite clearly that he feels like he is a "bad kid" who makes "bad choices."
I can't adequately explain how devastating that was for me to hear. The tears flowed.
This year has been so difficult. We had asked for an aide for him full-time, and we got one, but the first one didn't last and the second one is still new and in the words of the district "needs training." In other words, not qualified.
The district psychologist has observed him once. I've been pushing for the district to engage the therapist he sees, who is the director of our local autism resource center, to do some classroom observation and feedback for the teacher, and they've resisted. They spent four weeks observing him, had an aide assigned and we had one conference call with the psychologist who still, despite saying he would, hasn't contacted our therapist to discuss the situation. Two months into the school year and things are worse than they were the week he started. My son is not accessing any learning, and we've had to pick him up more than five times in the last four weeks.
Last Thursday he was suspended for two days after a morning in which his behavior escalated almost from the time he arrived at school.
I feel like his disability is not being taken into account when he begins to react to his choices. If he isn't making good choices, maybe none of the choices he's being offered are incentive enough for him. If his behavior keeps escalating, clearly the strategies they are using to try and calm him down are having the opposite effect. Rather than expecting my son to change, I want the school to change their approach. I don't blame his teacher. She hasn't had another student like him. She's been begging for help for quite some time, stating clearly that she has exhausted all the tools she knows and needs help with some new ideas. Its not that she's not open to changing things -- she doesn't know what to change to.
I was feeling really hopeless on Thursday. And in truth, I'm not sure I'm not feeling a little bit that way today. But on Friday I talked to our therapist and she got me in touch with a local volunteer advocacy group, and she was able to give me some bullet points to request from the district, and she provided some potential options for us that I haven't looked into before. I was able to request a meeting with the district special services director and the advocacy volunteer is attending along with my ex and I.
This morning we met with the school administrators and his teacher so that he could come back from his suspension, and I feel like we got a great deal of support and agreement from his teacher, the principal and the school psychologist on the things that we want to see happen from the district.
I needed a reminder that even though things feel hopeless and difficult, they won't always be that way. Nothing stays the same.
Race Car Man came a long way last summer. We took him off the ADHD meds and noticed a significant reduction in his anxiety and sensory issues. When the school year rolled around, his dad and I agreed together that we would start the year without resuming the ADHD meds and see how it went. Needless to say, his teacher was less than thrilled, but we went ahead. She reported an increase in distraction, but he also seems to take way less time to change his behavior when things aren't going well.
She's seen, though, a marked change from pretty good behavior and attention span right about the 11:00 mark every day. We knew we needed to add afternoon medication, but when he had his psych appointment on Thursday my ex and I stood firm in our belief that he needs to stay off the ADHD meds. Not only do we not want to lose the 10 lb weight gain he had over the summer, but we also feel that the behaviors his teacher is chalking up to "distraction" are just as easily caused by anxiety and sensory overload. One of the things I love about our psychiatrist is that he listens to us. He agreed. He did add an afternoon dose of the other two meds, which we expected and are fine with.
The last couple of weeks have been awesome in terms of reinforcing the need for an aide - he's had issues almost every day. Nothing yet as bad as our worst days last year, but still some tough days. On the days my ex spends in his classroom he has a constant challenge helping Race Car Man make good choices and participate in class activities.
This year one change is that Race Car Man fills out his own schedule for the day. For each part of his schedule he chooses a reward, and then he must earn more "smiles" than "frowns" for the individual components of the activity. Last week, almost the entire week, was straight down the shitter. He didn't want to participate, cooperate, communicate or reciprocate. He just wanted what he wanted and damn the schedule. Then on Friday he pulled himself together and had his most spectacular day at school so far. He filled out his schedule. He got smiley faces on all of his activity components and earned all his chosen rewards. He got along with his classmates. He shone!
Monday it was back to the same-old shenanigans, yesterday too.
His great day on Friday lets me know how much he is capable of. His rough days afterward tell me how much of a toll it takes on him to do that much.
We'll just keep plugging along, I guess. We have our followup IEP team meeting a week from Monday to find out if the district is going to follow through with an aide for him. Cross things, people. Cross things.
This week has been a long one and I am hoping that by saying I am glad to see it be over that I am not also simultaneously cursing all of us and causing next week to be somehow worse.
The only place that seemed truly safe and sane was home, where it was just SG and me, the kids having been with their dad all week.
I don't really talk much about work here and that's not going to change. Speaking in generalities, though, CRAZY WEEK. So many metaphorical fires to put out!
It was the second week back at school for the kids. This is a big year for both of them; Amazon Girl started middle school. For the first time in three years the kids are in separate schools. I know this is simultaneously scary and tremendously freeing for both of them. They love each other so much, even with all the fighting they do. Race Car Man has always had his big sister there to depend on and now he's learning to be in the world on his own. Amazon Girl has always felt the need to look out for her little brother. This year she gets to worry about herself and I know that's a big weight off of her.
Both kids have had their challenges already, only two weeks into the school year.
Race Car Man has had a combination of great/bad/OK/good/terrible days. There's no pattern with that one. It would be great if we could predict with any certainty what kind of challenges he is going to have; that way his teacher and classroom aides could at least have an idea of just how much wine they were going to need (or not) at the end of a given day!
Last year at two of his IEP meetings I brought up the thought that he may need an aide who is primarily dedicated to helping him but who could assist his teachers when he was coping OK. His teacher was for the idea but no one else seemed to want to pursue it.
On the third day of school I ended up writing a letter to the district formally requesting an aide.
I am very pleased that I received a phone call very quickly from the Director of Special Services and we have a meeting set up for Monday.
Amazon Girl has had different challenges.
To add some historical context: In the third grade a boy in her class fixated on her for some reason. His obsession expressed itself in constant teasing, poking, touching. She finally complained to me about it and I brought it to the attention of her teacher and school administrators. They observed, confirmed, and promised to keep an eye on things. Eventually he escalated to pushing, yelling and finally hurting her. The day he bent her hand back so hard we had to have her wrist x-rayed was the day I went a little ballistic with the school, and the other student was disciplined. They put my daughter in a different classroom, which I was not happy with but they were separated. Ultimately we ended up moving her to another school, not because of this boy but so that she and her brother would be at the same school after he was placed in his special ed classroom.
Fast forward to sixth grade. The middle school she now attends has students from several elementary schools in the district, including her old school. Guess who also happens to be at her new school? He is not in her homeroom classes, but he ended up in the same rotation for the last class of the day -- Health/PE. Apparently he started right back in with the verbal harassment, which I wasn't aware of. But on Wednesday he crossed the line. As she was walking out of her health class, he shoved her from behind, so hard that she slammed into the metal guardrail of the portable walkway. Her stomach was still hurting the next morning. She didn't tell any adults at school, but met her father in the parking lot and after telling him what happened, called me at work to let me know as well.
My ex and I went together to the school at 7 am the following morning and filed a complaint. The complaint was taken seriously, the boy was interviewed. Amazon Girl texted me later that she had met with the principal and told that the boy was being transferred to a different afternoon rotation so that she would not be in class with him.
I am very hopeful that this is the end of the problem. If he touches or harasses her further we will be contacting the police. I suspect that there are things going on with this kid that I couldn't possibly know about, and I have sympathy for that, but he can't be allowed to hurt my child and cause her to be scared to go to school.
I've told my daughter to find an adult right away if he comes near her or speaks to her. But I've also told her that if she can't find any other help and can't get away from him that she should defend herself.
Right now she's happy because she doesn't have to be in class with him; we can only hope that this is the end of it.
It hasn't been a total wash, though. My stepson Josh finished his Navy flight school testing and has been accepted to fly jets! He's moving to Mississippi later this month. Before he does that he gets to go to Texas to do this test where they put him on a centrifuge and spin him both with his pressure suit and without until he passes out. I am told this is to measure his G-force tolerance. Personally I just think the military gets its rocks off on making people incredibly dizzy. After that he takes a short vacation in Hawaii and I am also told I am not allowed to hitch a ride in his suitcase. On a very sincere note, his mom and dad and all of the rest of us are incredibly proud of his accomplishments. Congratulations, Josh. You are a terrific young man and I believe you really can do anything you set your intentions toward.
As for the rest of it, I would just like to know what it is that I could possibly say or do that for Pete's sake would convince the universe to let us have a whole lot of nothing happening the rest of the school year. I'm open to suggestions.
It is a genuine outpouring of distress over the state of parenting in this world that anyone - ANYONE - would tell me, "Oh my gosh, you're such a hero!" because they found out I have a kid with autism. Yet this weekend, while transacting some business with a local vendor, that's exactly what happened. Its not the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last, but its damn awkward. I have found that constantly saying "Oh, not, that's not true," just results in more fervent assertions regarding my possible elevation to sainthood, so as a general rule now I just redirect the conversation. "Say, did you hear about the kid in Kyrgyzstan that got bubonic plague?"
Here's a little newsflash for you, folks: Parenting a kid with autism doesn't make me a hero to anyone except perhaps my kid -- but only in the way that every parent is a hero to their kids. My ex is their hero. My husband is their hero. We are the adults they look up to and depend on. But that's really as far as the hero title goes.
In the grand scheme of Things We May Have to Deal With in Life, Race Car Man's fairly-high-functioning autism falls way down there with ingrown toenails, years when I have to send a check in with my 1040 instead of checking the IRS site daily for my refund status and the inconvenience of needing to pick up after three dogs everytime we want to play in the yard. It isn't what I planned, but it isn't really all that bad.
What was really under my skin about the incident that prompted this post is that the person who was dishing all the praise was doing so because we were talking about school and I described the program my son attends and mentioned communicating with his teacher daily via a notebook that comes home. He thought it was just amazing that I was actually engaged with my son's teacher.
Amazing?
Hardly. Its what parents DO - or at least, its one of the commonly accepted responsibilities of parenting.
And this is really why I am upset, and where I become really judgemental.
There are parents who do not care how their child is doing in school. There are parents who do not attend parent-teacher conferences or back-to-school nights. There are parents of children with special needs that drop their kids off at school in the morning and feel that everything that happens beyond that point is the school's job & problem.
When my daughter started kindergarten she had already been evaluated for an IEP and thus was placed in a special program in our district - an intervention classroom, for kids who have behavioral issues. Open house night arrives and my ex and I arrive fifteen minutes early, with bells on, excited to see where our precious girl is going to be attending school for the first time, eager to meet her teacher and classroom assistants, eager to be a part of the education of our child.
We walked into the door of the portable to find the teacher and her aide staring at us with shocked expressions. "PARENTS! We have PARENTS!" the teacher exclaimed.
"You mean...we're first?"
"No, you're the first parents I can remember having in a long time."
Pause a moment and let that sink in.
A classroom for children with special needs. And no parent interested enough in the well-being of their son or daughter to bother meeting the teacher, seeing the classroom, hearing about curriculum and what methods will be used to address behavioral issues.
Not one.
Our being there didn't make us good parents. It made us ordinary parents, with ordinary care and concern about our baby girl. The parents who were not there, they are NOT, I hope, ordinary. I hope they are the smallest percentage of a minute fringe...and I fear they are not.
When people speak of "heroic" parenting, my thoughts go to parents who have it far more difficult than I. Parents of children who will never be able to care for themselves. Parents who have lived through devastating illnesses, terrible losses. Parents who have dealt with extremes I cannot imagine. And I suspect that most of those parents would very firmly deny any sense of their own lives as being heroic.
The thought that I inhabit a world where the simple act of caring for my children and placing importance on their needs constitutes anything other than the expected acts of a loving parent is more than disturbing. It is heartbreaking.
Since my optimistic post about med changes for Race Car Man a lot of things have happened. Things I couldn't write about while they were happening not because they needed to be private but because I was too mental to be able to talk about them. All is better now, but I needed a few days of perspective in order to move beyond being completely inchoate and albe to construct full sentences.
Race Car Man had to be escorted home on the bus for a seoncd time, had to be picked up before the end of the day twice, got suspended for a day and had to have his meds tweaked. We had one emergency IEP meeting and one bitch-autism-mom discussion with the school district's transportation office. (Parents, know your rights and what's in your IEP. Bus drivers are NOT allowed to independently suspend services specified in the plan.)
Probably the worst day was the day the kids missed the bus because it was early, the bus driver told SG when he dropped them off at school that she wouldn't transport my kid, then the school called me to tell me he had to go home and couldn't come back without a full IEP team meeting and behavioral plan, and when I called SG to go get him kind of lost my temper when I found out somebody (not mentioning any names but it wasn't me) forgot to give him his meds and then we kind of had some ugly words and by the time I got off the phone with him I was on the phone to my EAP for a behavior therapist referral AND a marriage therapist referral. The following day of the new dosages, my ex gave all but one medication in the morning and asked me when I was dropping off the meds at school to give it to him then. Except a change in routine was too much for Race Car Man with everything else that was going on, and I had words with his teacher when she insisted I continue standing there and trying to get him to take the medicine even though I'd been trying for a half an hour and I could tell that we weren't going to be successful and he was starting to get really upset which was not the best way to start his day. Not to mention I was already two hours late for work.
Not a good week. No.
By Friday, though, he managed to make it through a full day successfully and ride the bus home and get all his rewards. That was followed by a decent weekend for all of us. SG and I made up, the kids mostly didn't kill one another and we even made it to church AND over to my parents for an afternoon to make Gingerbread houses.
This week he has done pretty well -- not spectacular, but pretty well. Work was insanely busy with our annual inventory and so many meetings that I haven't had time to be worried about waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guaran-damn-tee you that by next Tuesday I'll be all settled in, convinced that this time we've hit the right combination for sure and Mr. Race Car Man will never have another bad day at school ever. Except of course at some point, he will and once again I will tumble down the slope into a pit of abject despair.
I am astounded by how often I am caught flat-footed when life throws a monkey wrench into the engine that I feel I have finally gotten to run smoothly. Its a constant thing, why does it always seem to upend me so? I should be used to it by now.
Tonight is the company Christmas party, and SG and I are going to go eat some good food, drink some great wine, dance our asses off and enjoy adult conversation with our friends. I will gratefully put the past two weeks behind me for a few hours and I can predict with modest assurance that tomorrow's breakfast will require at least two mimosas before my head feels right again.
I was going to post about our awesome new dog Little Sister, the one I sweet-talked my husband into letting me adopt while he was on the road. She's a Mastiff/Dogue de Bordeaux mix, so fairly big. Instead, though, I am writing about a meeting I had this morning with my son's teacher and principal.
While we've had a lot of very good days since the medication change, the teacher has also seen an amplification of sensory behavior. The day they used clay in art, he spent the rest of the afternoon obsessively washing his hands because he could still feel the clay. His shirts bother him, his socks bother him. Even though his focus improved, his anxiety worsened. And then yesterday, oh yesterday. Yesterday prompted today's meet and greet.
My son has three loves: Video games, computer time and Kindle time. Everything else in life is something that interferes with that time. He hasn't yet been able to understand that notgoing to school isn't going to magically increase the amount of time he gets to engage in his digital universe. He resists doing schoolwork of any kind either at school or at home. Once he is finally convinced to do the work, he finishes it in mere seconds. If he brings home a book to read that he has already read once at school he simply recites it to you without even opening it. (They really need to challenge him more) He loses more play time by resisting than he gains, but he's not yet gained the ability to recognize the cost of this tradeoff.
Yesterday afternoon he had earned all but the last two letters he needed in order to get his evening dose of post-homework electronic joy. However, he was asked to complete some tasks that he refused at school. Sensing he would not earn enough letters to be able to play Skylanders Cloud Patrol on my Kindle Fire, he attempted to rip pages out of his binder, which is his daily communication between home and school. Then he tried hiding it so his teacher wouldn't be able to find it. When it was time to go home, he cooperated to go in line, but once on his bus he refused to sit down. His teacher ended up having to ride the bus with him in order to keep him in his seat. (I'm not sure why the aide on the bus wasn't willing or able to do this, but I'm grateful that his teacher cared enough to keep him safe.)
Needless to say, we all sat down this morning to review what the school is doing and how we can best support Race Car Man.
We're adding a couple of options to his daily sheet of letters earned. This way if he ends the day without having gotten all of them, he will have a chance when he gets home to earn one or two more at most. Doing his homework without fighting is one option, eating his dinner and putting his dirty dishes away is another. This way he still has the opportunity to turn his behavior around, and doesn't send him home without any hope of playing his beloved games. Even though he can eventually calm down enough to just play with his toys, it takes a while to get him past the attitude that life no longer has meaning.
We'll also talk to his doc about med changes next week, and we're going to work together to come up with a reasonable reward system for cooperation in completing tasks at school and homework at home.
I write all this with optimism, assuming that we will see a change for the positive in his behavior.
It is such an intricate dance, trying to anticipate the way I ought to move to meet his needs. One miscalculation and I've mashed his poor feet without meaning to. There is no formula for the perfect mix of what keeps Race Car Man's engine humming. We just have to measure things and try them and change them again if they don't work. The pattern of this dance just keeps evolving and changing, and I must do so as well so that we don't lose step with one another.
One thing I don't do very often is cook, especially when I'm flying solo. Right now my mom is picking the kids up off the bus after school. She has them do their homework and feeds them dinner, making my evenings a considerable bit easier than they would otherwise be. Even on weekends, time seems sort of jacked anymore and I just don't feel the urge to putter around in the kitchen. After catching up on chores and housework and with any luck at all getting to ride, I just don't feel like making anything. Stuff we can heat up is awesome, and if it weren't for Costco bags of frozen raviolis and jars of pasta sauce, the local pizza delivery and our favorite Asian fast food, the kids would be living on cereal and frozen waffles. When I don't have the kids I tend to keep it simple -- cereal, soup, eggs, or even better, going to my parents and eating Mom's cooking. If you are what you eat, I'm usually a can of Black Bean soup.
It might come as a surprise to most people, but I really do love to cook. I pretend to be rebellious and the not-domestic type, but actually crave a clean house, I love cooking and while I suck quite a lot at it, I like to fiddle around with home improvement projects and home decor. But like most things in my life, it boils down to priorities. I love all these things, but I love riding my horse more. I love spending time with my husband and my kids. My chosen lifestyle with its heavy load of upkeep on top of my full time job doesn't help one bit.
The last week or so, however, I got bitten by the cooking bug.
Its Deb Perelman's fault.
Listening to Deb describe her love for good, simple food and her mission to make recipes that contained ingredients that most people had in their cupboards to begin with and didn't cost a fortune to make, I was overcome with the compulsion to mend my lazy, rotten ways.
I pored through the recipes on her website for the Buttermilk Roast Chicken which she had talked about on the radio and do you know, it is just as easy and good as she says it is? All I needed to buy was a jug of buttermilk and some garlic bulbs. Everything else was stuff I already had. I wouldn't have need to buy garlic except its been so long since I actually cooked that the bulb I had was...let's just say it wasn't resurrectable. Or identifiable as garlic.
The final result, after brining my chicken thighs for a good 24 hours, was a double thumbs up.
I definitely felt encouraged and motivated to cook some more. Sunday I hit the Costco and my head was turned by a large bag of sweet potatoes. I bought it on a whim, brought it home and then hit up Google for some recipes. I found a really simple recipe on Food.com that simply called for baking them and then smooshing up butter, chili powder, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and salt. So easy, and because you can microwave them, I was actually able to make them for lunch at work with fairly little fuss.
The funny thing about cooking a meal (as opposed to heating it up) is how healthy and good about myself I feel when I do it. Its ridiculous...I could probably bake a great big cheesy lasagna from scratch and I'd somehow feel super-healthy, even more so than if I'd just had a nice, low-impact can of soup. But there you go. I think we're built to have a sense of accomplishment when we create something with our own hands as opposed to just enjoying the fruits of someone else's creativity and effort.
While I know this period of domesticity can't possibly last, I'm sort of enjoying it. I'm sure I'll get over it just in time for my husband to come home. No one has ever accused me of having my compulsions when they would be convenient.
As crazy as my life can be structurally, in terms of schedule, it is highly organized. It has to be. There are a lot of things we can slide on, but my kids being where they are supposed to be and in the care of the right person at the right time, this is not negotiable. I work 45 miles away from my home; two hours of my day is spent commuting. Because my son rides the special needs bus, pickups and dropoffs have to be orchestrated through the school and schedule changes take up to five days to implement. Knowing ahead of time what's going to be happening and when gives me an enormous (and highly illusionary) sense of control.
So you can imagine when, on a Tuesday, my husband announced he would be leaving over the weekend to go to Nebraska for six weeks, I put my head between my knees and hyperventilated just a little bit (well, maybe more than a little bit).
I'd gotten pretty spoiled having a stay-home man all summer. I didn't have to worry about schedules and buses and where to be and when - I just had to get up on time, get ready on time and show up to work.
My husband was not impressed by my impending sense of doom. "You'll figure it out," he said. "You always do." BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT, DAMMIT. DOESN'T ANYONE CARE THAT I'M PANICKING HERE? And I did get it figured out, with the help of my friend Debbie and my mother. BUT STILL NOT THE POINT.
So we're sailing along pretty splendidly here. I get to see my parents at least four days a week when I stop after work to pick up the kids, who have completed most of their homework and been fed. Four days a week Debbie comes over and makes sure they're out the door in time to get on the bus and then feeds and waters all the animals. Did I mention I have some pretty awesome friends, not to mention parents?
It never pays to feel too much like you've got things under control.
Yesterday afternoon I discovered that my ex's schedule would be dramatically changing - ON MONDAY. All of my arrangements for morning and after school care just got flushed down the commode.
My husband had the bad luck to call me about five minutes after that. I treated him to about thirty seconds of hyperventilating and exited the call.
He hasn't called me back since, and I'm not sure if he's avoiding me completely or just too busy. I'm fairly sure its avoidance. Hell, I'd avoid me right now if it were possible.
Its not that I can't manage it, of course I can manage it. Its that I would just once in a while like some empathy for the fact that its not easy, that its stressful, not to mention lonely and thankless. It would be nice if there were some kind of monetary compensation or fancy award for being the "Queen of Managing Everything." Oh, yes, it would.
This school year has been markedly different for both of the kids. My daughter is coming along swimmingly in the personal hygiene department, and you busy moms out there will know what I mean when I say that its a quantum leap forward to have one kid who doesn't need your help in the shower. Race Car Man is better too. He now takes showers instead of baths, and his biggest accomplishment has been to teach himself to tolerate the water on his face so that I can wash AND rinse his hair without major histrionics.
They've both gotten medication compliant, which is another huge relief. They were pretty good for SG over the summer, but I noticed that if I was home when it was meds time, at least one of them would raise hell for no apparent reason. I surmised, probably correctly, that the drama was simply for my benefit. After all, don't most kids behave better with people who are not their parents? With that assessment of the situation in mind, one of the things I was most dreading about SG being gone this fall was mornings. I was completely prepared for the marathon mornings I remember so well from last year. I spent quite a bit of time girding my loins, as it were, for the morning battle, only to find myself completely shocked (and about as delighted as a dog rolling in horse shit) when no one actually wanted to engage in it. I put together their meds and deliver them to my kids...and they take them.
While you finish picking your jaw up off the floor, let me also say that Race Car Man has improved so much over last year with his efforts to manage his behavior that he actually got an award at the school assembly last week.
I KNOW, RIGHT???? I'm shocked the local paper didn't see this as a newsworthy event!
There are still struggles, of course. Last year my son's nemesis was a bigger kid I'll call "Abel." Abel is the same age as my Amazon Girl and he is on the spectrum, as are all of the 10 kids in Race Car Man's classroom. For whatever reason, Abel was my son's kryptonite. Everytime he made a noise or soothed himself with rocking or flapping, Race Car Man would lose his MIND. He got suspended for three days because for no apparent reason whatsoever, he hauled off and hit poor Abel while the kid was doing nothing more than sitting on a bench and talking to himself. We worked very hard at challenging these behaviors, removing desired activities and having many many discussions on making choices about behavior. There were a few times I simply lost my temper and yelled at him, I'm not proud to say. How long does it take to teach a kid with ASD that hitting people when you're a grownup doesn't just get you in trouble at school - it gets you fired, and possibly even arrested.
I anticipated we would see continued problems with Abel, but since the universe frequently likes to remind me I'm not as smart as I think I am, Abel and Race Car Man are best pals this year.
We are not free, however, of the joy of a mortal enemy. Race Car Man's kryptonite presented itself this school year in the form of a boy I'll call "Sam." Sam, like Abel, tends to make a lot of noise as he copes with the messges his brain is sending him. He also - in my opinion - is kind of a little shit. (And yes, my son is kind of a little shit too, sometimes, but he's MY little shit and therefore adorable). Almost every day my son comes home in tears because Sam has called him names or made fun of him. The day my son got in trouble for hitting Sam, it was (according to Race Car Man) because Sam called him a 'DUMBASS.' I was so tempted not to punish him, because dammit, I think being called a Dumbass is pretty antagonizing even if you don't have autism. BUT, I know we need to reinforce the hitting is a bad idea thing, so I made him write "I will not hit" twenty times before doing his homework. Then I gave him ice cream.
Each week I get an average of three emails from his teacher, updating me on the latest thing my son has done to Sam. Then the other night I was looking through some schoolwork he had brought home. My son's class, which is a special program for children with autism, works on social skills and behavior management. They do a lot of work on identifying emotions and interpreting facial expression. In his folder was a sheaf of papers stapled together. On the front of each page, he had colored in the face of a monkey making various facial expressions, and he had correctly identified the emotions the monkey was displaying - sad, mad, happy. On the back of each sheet, he had written a series of sentences about his own experiences. On the sheet for "sad," I read:
I feel sad when:
I get (sic) bullied.
The next day I sent an email to his teacher requesting more information on how these two boys are interacting. I told her about the name calling incident and other things my son has told me Sam does to him, such as enlisting other classmates in making fun of Race Car Man or deliberately excluding him from activities. I inquired as to which kid was instigating the conflicts. I suggested we might need to meet to discuss ways to help my son cope with this other boy in a more positive way, but that from what I was hearing from my child, there may be more going on than two boys who just don't get along.
In her response she promised to investigate the name-calling and to pay closer attention to the dynamics between the two. I trust her judgment - I know she will fairly evaluate each child's part in the conflict and report back to me, and do everything she can to help them both make better choices.
When my son was enrolled into his current program, I was kind of in love with the idea that he would be with other kids just like him. I had this picture in my head of some sort of Autism Utopia, where all the spectrum kids hung out together and were a big support group. Because they all were coping with the same differences, they wouldn't seem...different. At least not to each other. And because they don't always share recesses with the other kids, they wouldn't have as many opportunities to get picked on by the neurotypical kids. To find out that my son is being picked on by one of his own is enormously deflating. I guess its not that crazy to assume that kids who struggle with their behavior would struggle with their behavior in regards to each other.
I was notified recently by my ad network that something was wrong with my placement and they were suspending me from the network until I fixed it. Rather than fix the problem I have decided it is more appropriate to go ad-free. If you are kind enough to come here and read my ramblings, I should be kind enough not to bombard you with commercials. Sound fair?
