Remember the show Mad About You? Paul Reiser, Helen Hunt pre-Oscar? I keep thinking about an episode when Jamie is pregnant and she and Paul are arguing about the relative amount of sacrifice that will be required by parenthood, with Paul asserting that Jamie will, inevitably, sacrifice more. “Why, because I’m the mommy?” Jamie asks in feminist outrage.
“Yes,” says Paul.
“Oh, I’M the mommy?”
“Yes,” says Paul.
“Oh my God,” says Jamie, stunned.
“What?” asks Paul.
“I’M THE MOMMY!”
Amen, sister. I’m the mommy, and I’m still figuring out what that means for MapKid.
Of course, I realized when we got the diagnosis for MapKid that I would have additional responsibilities as his parent. I envisioned those responsibilities involving a lot of hunting down therapies, a great deal of driving to and sitting around during therapies, and a good amount of following through on therapies.
However, I assumed I would have help in in choosing those doctors and therapists by a professional familiar with MapKid’s condition and abilities. It seemed almost irresponsible for me to be in charge of determining a course of therapy. I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Someone–a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a social worker, someone–would be guiding things.
Ha. I remember frantically posting to OASIS, an online forum for the parents of Asperger kids, asking, “Where do I start?” I hoped they would say, you call this person at this number and they will tell you exactly what to do next. They said, you figure it out on your own. Good luck.
How true, how true. Just recently on the same forum I saw a thread discussing those magical, mysterious creatures known as “case managers” who, in fairy tales, provide guidance and oversight for an overall condition. Everyone on the thread claimed to have heard of such beasts but no one had actually seen one in the wild.
So several months ago I reluctantly took on the job of MapKid’s case manager. But still, I thought, the therapy would be provided by someone else. I’m not a psychologist or therapist or expert. I’m just the mommy.
Yeah, well. The failure of our social skills group has taught me a big lesson. Ain’t nobody going to do this but me.
I don’t mean that I won’t continue to seek out help. But “help,” in a general sense, is so dispersed, so variable, so dependent on the mix of individuals involved. If I can get assistance elsewhere, great, but I can’t count on it.
This realization hit me just yesterday as I placed a big honking order of books from Amazon. The Five-Point Scale for Moderating Emotional Reaction. Controlling Meltdowns Before They Control You. The Hidden Curriculum of Social Interactions. Months worth of material to work through with my kid. And as I hit “Confirm Order,” I finally took on this responsibility for myself.
I’m hopeful, and fearful, all at the same time.
As a parent, as a mommy in particular, you start out utterly and completely in control of everything your child does and learns. I stayed home with MapKid until he was 8 months old, and from 8 months until 2 years he had only a handful of hours of daycare a week. If he knew how to play patty-cake, it was because I taught him; that he could sing the theme song to Law & Order (I had a teeny little Sam Waterstein addiction) was entirely my fault. But as kids get older, we start to shift the responsibility to other people. MapKid can read not because of my efforts–although all those nights poring over the Bob Books certainly helped–but because his Kindergarten teacher taught him.
I assumed that we could continue on in that vein. The school would teach him academics, the karate academy would teach him tae kwon do, and the social skills therapists would teach him social skills. In all these cases, I would help with homework and practice, but it wasn’t my job to do what experts could accomplish so much better than I.
Yeah, well.
Maybe this is a process most parents of challenged kids go through. A realization that no one else is going to do this for you. A realization that the responsibility is utterly and completely yours.
Of course, MapKid is worth all the effort I can give him. I don’t begrudge the work. At least there are resources available to me to help. I just wish I had more confidence that I won’t completely suck at the task.
I’m the MOMMY. Who thought that was a good idea?
We didn’t take the Cookie Bandit very seriously.
We were told when we first arrived at our vacation cabin that the Bandit was up to his tricks. But how do you get seriously worried about someone known as the Cookie Bandit? I imagined Cookie Monster with a black mask.
The residents and cabin owners knew all about the Bandit, and certainly they took seriously enough the problem of replacing the windows and doors he had broken. The Bandit stole things when he broke into area cabins, but mostly he took food and drinks, nothing too valuable. More costly than the food he stole was the property damage.
The worst part, said residents, was the feeling they were being watched. The Bandit made a habit of breaking into cabins right after owners left. So he knew who was home and who wasn’t. He was keeping an eye on people. And that gave them the creeps.
We heard that the sheriff’s office had decided things had gone on long enough. I even saw the two deputies working on the case. They were sitting at a neighbor’s cabin, looking at a map, discussing where the Cookie Bandit liked to operate. I smiled, said hello, and went inside to use the wifi.
Still, it was hard to take all of this too seriously. When one night I started to make dinner and realized we were missing the onion we had bought two days earlier, we joked that the Cookie Bandit had broken in and stolen that one onion, leaving behind the chips, the bread, the steaks, and the bottles of wine.
MapKid never used the term “Cookie Bandit”–maybe he thought it was silly. He instead referred to “the man who wants to steal our food.” He seemed to find it puzzling. But then, so did we. Why doesn’t that man just buy food? MapKid asked.
Then Thursday morning we woke up to an enormous racket. Helicopters–flying right over the treetops. The noise and the wind shook the cabin. I felt beseiged.
Soon we learned what had happened. Early that morning, the Cookie Bandit had broken into a cabin where the two deputies were hiding. But the Cookie Bandit was no amiable, slightly disturbed but mostly harmless, kook. He was dangerous. He was armed. He found himself surrounded, and he started shooting.
When was over–and it must have been over quickly–the Cookie Bandit was dead, and one of the deputy sheriffs was fatally wounded.
You can read about it here and here.
How do you tell a seven-year-old about death? And not just death, but violent death–murder?
We had to tell him. Everyone was talking about it–and would go on talking about it–and anyway, how else do you explain the police cars covering the hillside, the crime scene taped looped around the trees, and news vans lined up and down the valley? So my husband kept it simple. He told him the bare outlines: the Cookie Bandit had broken into a cabin, and he was dead and so was a police officer.
We decided to get out of there for the morning, so we went fishing. It was beautiful. We went to a quiet valley in which a mountain stream rippled under tall, leaning grasses. But even there, the shadow of the crime followed us. The adults were snippy. MapKid was cranky and irritable. When we ate lunch, we could see circling above us two enormous birds. My mother-in-law suggested they were eagles. Maybe so. All I could think of was vultures, circling some dead animal nearby.
By the next morning, things had settled down. The Cookie Bandit still dominated conversation, and I kept having to stop things from veering into too violent or graphic territory in front of MapKid. It seemed no matter where we went–dinner at a friend’s, lunch at the diner in the valley–someone would start talking about gunshot wounds or crime scene cleanup, and that’s just not what I wanted MapKid to hear. Frankly, I didn’t want to hear it either.
I didn’t know how much of it he noticed. He didn’t talk about the crime–he kept his conversation firmly on the most important topics: his Garmin, and fishing. But I know he often picks up more than I realize.
That night, at bedtime, MapKid said, “Yesterday was a weird day.” “Yeah, it really was,” I said. “I was mad all day yesterday,” he said.
I wouldn’t have used the word “mad,” myself. I felt anxious, unnerved, sorrowful, even frightened–although I knew rationally by the time I knew about any danger it had passed.
But the more I’ve thought about his word, “mad,” the more I’ve come to agree with it.
It makes me mad that a hard-working, upright officer lost his life. I’m mad that the peace and quiet of a beautiful mountain was shattered by this crime. I’m mad that innocent people now will have to think about this awful scene everytime they walk into their cabin–just because they agreed to let the stakeout happen there. I’m mad I had to wake up to helicopters. I’m mad I had to tell my son about a shooting not 300 yards away from where he slept.
It’s useless anger, of course. Ugly, terrible things happen in all places at all times. All we can do is protect our children as best we can.
But still–I never expected to have to protect him from the sight of violent crime while on vacation in one of the most peaceful places in the world.
This morning I took MapKid over to my parent’s house–the first time he’s seen them since we got back. He told them the story: “There was this bad guy, and he wanted to steal our food. And he got shot, and a policeman got shotted, too. And that man was a crinimal.”
Crinimal–MapKid’s version of “criminal.” We didn’t bother to correct him. “That man really was a crinimal,” my mother said.
All in all, a pretty accurate summation.
I’ve been thinking about his story all day, and how I’ve told the story myself three or four times since we got home. I’ll tell it again, dozens of times, I’m sure, in the next few weeks, and then for years to come. We’ll say, remember the time we were on vacation and the Cookie Bandit got shot up the hill?
What I don’t want to forget when I tell this story is that good man died that Thursday morning–a brave man willing to wait in the dark for hours to stop a bad man. I don’t want to forget his name: Deputy Sgt. Joe Harris.
God bless, and rest in peace.
One thing we have plenty of up here on the mountain is time. Time to sleep late, time to nap, time to read, time to look at the light dance on the aspen leaves–but also time to think.
And what I’ve been thinking about is the social skills therapy we just tried for MapKid.
Social skills therapy is generally deemed critical for Aspie kids. These children don’t intuitively understand the rules and conventions that govern social interactions. They don’t “get” that having a conversation means taking turns talking and listening to what the other person has to say. They don’t know how to ask another child to play or respond to comments from adults. They certainly don’t know what to do if they are teased or bullied. They don’t know how to be friends.
This is obvious with MapKid–perhaps it is one of his most fully Aspergian traits. Conversation to MapKid is him holding forth on the features of his Garmin. Play is something he does alone or, at best, alongside another kid. Friendly remarks from adults–even those he knows well–can prompt growls, shouts, and attempts to climb under his chair.
The worst reaction can come from teasing by adults. At dinner at an Italian restaurant shortly before we left town, he was nearly hysterical when a waiter tried to be funny by pretending to misunderstand his order of, inevitably, chicken strips and french fries. “So you want spaghetti and meatballs?” the waiter said. “No, chicken and fries,” said MapKid, genuinely baffled that the guy didn’t understand him. “OK, chicken carbonara then,” said the waiter, flashing a grin at the adults. “No, chicken and fries!” said MapKid, now really frustrated. “Got it,” said the waiter, “Shrimp scampi for you.” “No!!!” MapKid erupted. “I said chicken and fries!”
The waiter looked shocked. Obviously this was a practiced shtick that he’d tried with numerous kids, usually to rousing success. MapKid was crawling out of his seat, shouting. I tried to physically control him down and my dad, embarrassed and furious, leaned across the table whispering dire threats. I looked over the head of my son to the waiter and said, “He really doesn’t understand.”
“Look, buddy,” I said to my son, “He’s going to bring you your chicken and fries. Right?” I fixed the waiter with a desperate look that begged don’t be cute. The poor waiter seemed to finally get it. “It’s OK,” he said. “I was just playing around. Here, I wrote it down. Chicken tenders and french fries, right?”
MapKid finally settled down and ate a generously buttered roll and the adults tried to regain their equilibrium.
So! This is why we need social skills training. That, and the future in which social interactions between his peers will become more complicated and the consequences of not “getting it” more dire.
I looked around for options starting last spring and found a handful within reasonable driving distance. (Apparently, if we lived in Plano, we couldn’t throw a stick without hitting some kind of social skills something or another, not to mention occupational therapy, speech therapy, play therapy, even horseback-riding therapy. But then we’d have to live in Plano, which has its own punishments.) The closest seemed, in many ways, ideal. They emphasized they did little classroom-type training–everything was generalized, in a play setting. So kids would play together under guidance and learn how to better interact.
It all seemed great on the website.
But the reality never quite lived up to the hype. When I showed up to meet the staff, they didn’t seem to remember I was coming, despite my appointment. When we arrived for his first day, they didn’t remember we were coming that day, either. There was great wandering about and trying to determine which classroom he should go to, all of which completely rattled MapKid, already highly on alert at this new endeavor.
I left that first day with my Mommy Radar humming. It’s not that I felt he was in danger–there were loads of adults running around and it seemed safe enough. But where was the structure? Where was the instruction? MapKid’s reports didn’t help. They had played board games, he told me; they played outside on the swingset. But then, I told myself, you can’t expect him to appreciate or understand that there’s a purpose behind the board games and that this is attempt to teach him about taking turns and good sportsmanship.
The problem was, I wasn’t convinced the board games were about taking turns and good sportsmanship. It looked to me a lot like day care for autistic kids.
Here’s the other thing–and I pray you read everything I say here, so you don’t get the wrong idea of what I mean: the other kids were much further along the autistic spectrum than MapKid.
They were beautiful kids, but kids with lots of challenges. This boy seemed to have great difficulty talking. He seemed to like me–at least, he always followed me around when I was there–but I could rarely get a word out of him, and when he did speak he was very hard to understand. That girl needed help with the most basic of tasks–we often arrived at lunchtime, when one of the staff was carefully feeding her lunch. That boy seemed to do a lot of stimming–repetitive motions like rocking–and he talked all the time in a monotone. These kids really needed help and therapy. MapKid looked like a Rhodes scholar next to them. My heart went out to these children.
It certainly wasn’t the case that I didn’t want my child around these other children–it was fantastic to show him how wide is the range of human behavior and human need. Not everyone is as spic and span and healthy and well-adjusted as might appear in his Sunday School classroom at our upper-middle-class church with its well-educated, expertly-socialized kiddos.
But I did feel like the staff weren’t going to have much time for my relatively high-functioning kid and his relatively minor problems. After all, if you can’t feed yourself, difficulty sustaining a conversation seems like a insubstantial issue.
Further, it was a little unsettling that the staff seemed to delighted to have MapKid in their midst, since he provided a good model for the other kids to emulate. But what model are you providing for him? I wanted to ask.
The kicker to all this was how expensive the darn program was. For three afternoons I week, I paid the equivalent of full-time day care at a top-notch facility for an infant. This while my freelance business is barely scraping along.
So I fretted and fumed and pondered to myself. I consulted my husband; I consulted Dr. Dave (the psychologist who helps me with MapKid). And one day I said, I’m done with this. It was a Friday, and MapKid was expected that afternoon. He’d been at Vacation Bible School every morning that week and was exhausted. I sent them an email that he was worn out and wouldn’t be coming. Then over the weekend I sent a second email that we were withdrawing.
I gave my reasons as purely financial. And, yes, the money is a real issue. But if I had been convinced of the program’s value, we would have figured out a way to pay for it. I had started investigating what our insurance would cover (or, to put it a better way, how to swing the system so that we could fit it into a cubbyhole that insurance would accept).
I immediately got a charming email from the program director offering to get us a grant from a local social services office. I had two responses: first, why didn’t you tell me about this marvelous grant a month ago? And second, oh, geesh, way to blow my excuse out of the water.
I went by the day before we left town to drop off my last check, and I saw the director. I told her we were going to be gone for nearly a month (er, creative license? Slight exaggeration?) and that I would let her know what we wanted to do when we got back. I smiled and shook hands and told them thank you and walked out the door.
It wasn’t until I got into the car that I realized I had forgotten to get the stuff we had taken up there–two plastic shoeboxes, a bag, bug spray, sunscreen, etc.
You know what, I thought, backing out of the driveway, they can just keep it. Consider it my donation to the organization. I’m done. I’m done convincing myself this is a good idea, I’m done suppressing my anxiety. I’m not saying it’s a bad place–it’s just not right for us.
And so we’re back where we started. I’ve been reading up on social skills curricula and found some good options that we could maybe do ourselves at home. I’m not convinced this will work–not only is MapKid usually unwilling to accept me in the role of a teacher, but he also needs to practice these skills on his peers, not me. I’ve pondered setting up my own system, where we practice a certain skill ourselves, and then invite one of his school or church friends to try it out. I can think of a handful of friends who would be willing to let their kids participate in this social experiment.
And I’ll also look at other options. I may end up having to drive to Arlington or Grapevine after all. You do what you have to do.
But I keep thinking of those children, the other children, the ones still there. Are they getting what they need? Their parents are paying for the same services, or more, if their kids are there all day every day. (Maybe they have one of these secret grants.) I feel an occassional twinge of guilt that I’m removing my excellent role model child from their vicinity, but after all, I have to do what’s right for my child, not theirs.
I hope that I’m wrong and that those kids are getting the help they need and that this is more than day care for autistic kids. They deserve more. They deserve better.
The traditional Texas vacation begins by loading up the car and driving for ten hours.
The entire state is desperate to escape the heat in the summer, and the nearest cool destinations are the mountains of New Mexico and Colorado. A veritable invasion of Texans floods into these states from June through August. Talk to Texans and they likely have their preferred family mountain hang-out: Red River. Eagle’s Nest. Pagosa Springs. Jemez.
That’s where we’re going–the Jemez Mountains, northwest of Santa Fe.
Our only departure from tradition is that we begin with a drive up to Oklahoma City, where we join my mother-in-law. Then the next morning we arise as early as we can stand and begin the drive across the plains to the mountains.
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MapKid’s excitement has been rising at a steady rate. Every morning he counts down how many more days until we leave.
“We’re going to the mountains!” he sings as he scurries around the house. In the morning, as we pack up for OKC, he’s nearly out of control. He so spooks one of the cats that she skitters across my feet to escape him, leaving deep scratches behind. He jumps onto the bed where I just finished folding laundry and flails about in ecstatic anticipation, undoing the work of the past half hour. He’s banished to his room, where he jumps about chanting, “Mountains! Mountains! Mountains!”
I wonder what the mountains represent to him. It was the place last year where he got to spend hours of one-on-one time with his Daddy fishing. It was his first real introduction to the wonders of GPS systems. It was the place he bonded with the neighbor up the hill, Ralph, a kindred spirit of 80-odd that MapKid refers to as one of his best friends.
To me, the mountains mean hours sitting on the deck reading or knitting. Sleeping late and take long naps. Visiting Santa Fe and eating buckets of green chiles. It means time to sit and talk to my husband. It means time with my mother-in-law, as well as time my husband and I can go off alone and leave MapKid in her secure hands.
But what does it mean to him?
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We set out, dripping with sweat from the exertion of packing up the car. A sign by the freeway proclaims the temperature: 103. Thank god we’re leaving town.
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Muenster, Texas: Home of Germanfest. I always wonder about the poor immigrants who came from Bavaria or Bohemia or wherever, arrived in some windswept small town in Texas, and said, “Let’s stop here!”
One can only hope they arrived in April, or maybe October. Things must have been pretty grim in Europe to make this seem preferable. Temperature on bank sign: 104.
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All along the way, cows are clustered together under the shade of the few small trees in their pastures. It must be stifling there surrounded by cow-flesh in that small spot of shade.
One cow stands alone on a slight rise. Maybe there she can at least catch some breeze.
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Marietta, Oklahoma. Norton’s Jewelry has the lowest prices on the planet. Who knew?
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“What’s the name of that guy at the store?” MapKid asks from the backseat.
“What store?” I ask.
“You know–the store,” he says.
Husband and I look at each other blankly.
“Where we bought the fish eggs,” he says.
“Oh,” my husband says. “You mean the store in the mountains, where we got our fishing licenses and bait?”
“Yeah, there,” MapKid says. “Was his name Ray?”
A long pause. If I ever heard the name of the owner of the small convenience store and bait shop, I don’t remember it. “You know,” my husband says. “I think his name was Ray.”
“I thought so,” says MapKid.
This is the child who can’t tell you a single thing he did in school most days, who doesn’t remember the names of half the children in his class, who seems oblivious to most people most of the time. But he remembers, from a year ago, the name of the man at the bait shop. Ray.
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I just realized I forgot to stop the mail.
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Ardmore. We eat at Ponder’s, a diner that claims to have been in business since 1963. The kind of place with a glass case full of meringue-top pies and liver and onions on the menu. The dinner salad is a small bowl of iceberg lettuce, a single wedge of tomato, and obviously jarred Italian dressing. The chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes are smothered in cream gravy, and, on the edge of the plate, is a withered piece of lettuce topped, inexplicably, with a sliced beet.
The food is only so-so, but I find the place charming.
At the next booth is a truck driver who keeps trying to strike up conversation. He comments on MapKid’s GPS and on my husband’s cell phone. Our longest exchange concerns the funeral of Michael Jackson, scenes from which are being repeated silently on the TV hanging in the corner. Again and again, Jackson’s daughter breaks into tears and is swarmed by silver-gloved Jacksons, trying to comfort the comfortless.
“Man, he was weird,” says the truck driver. “I mean, I guess his music was OK, but still. He was weird.”
A slow procession moves forward on the TV escorting the gleaming coffin.
“You hear about that coffin?” says the truck driver. “That whole damn thing was covered with 24 carat gold.” He shakes his head. “Weird.”
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Nearing Norman. A sign for the Hilldale Free Will Baptist College.
Nope. Too easy.
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We leave Oklahoma City not as early as we planned, but then we never do.
I sleep most of the way through Oklahoma, waking up somewhere in the Texas panhandle. MapKid refuses to sleep. He holds his GPS and watches the roads. There’s increasingly less to see as we cross more and more barren country. Soon the only line on the screen is that of the interstate.
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The Jesus Christ is Lord Travel Center offers clean restrooms and free wifi.
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I have no desire to live in Amarillo, but I have to admit I love the wide-openness of it all. The way you can see forever.
I remember when we moved to North Carolina several years ago. Driving across Georgia and South Carolina I started to get this weird, claustrophobic feeling, like I was trapped. On either side of the interstate marched trees upon trees upon trees, closing us in, enfolding us in a tunnel of space in this vast forest.
Where I come from, trees are a temporary phenomena. Finite. See a clump of trees, and the other side of those trees is space, land, openness. On the other side of the trees in Georgia are, well, more trees. I thought then, for an instant, how will they know tornados are coming?
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New Mexico, and the landscape changes. More rocks, more scrub, less grass. It’s still hot, but less humid, with more wind. At Tucumcari, the wind tastes of dust.
“Where do we turn off the interstate?” MapKid asks.
“Highway 284,” my husband says. “At Cline’s Corners.”
“After that do we get on Highway 4?” he asks.
“No, we don’t get on Highway 4 until after we go through Santa Fe,” my husband says.
“Oh,” he says, disappointed. “I want to get on Highway 4. That means we’re in the mountains.”
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Cline’s Corners could spend some of the money they making selling cheap tourist crap on improving their restrooms.
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Santa Fe. Temperature in the high 80s.
The TV in the gas station is showing more of the Jackson funeral. I wonder, did Michael Jackson ever get to cross Texas and New Mexico? Presumably he knew about roadtrips, from when he was a kid and they went on tours. What would that have been like? A big van? Later, a swanky bus? Later still, would he have flown above these open spaces and paid them no mind?
Travel like that, travel from one airport to another, is different than this crossing of space and time. You can’t talk the entire time, you can’t even listen to music, nor do you want to. You rest in the open space and let your mind go free. You drive, you sleep, you watch the miles roll by. You are free, for this time, from all obligations and expectations, and your one task is to traverse this vista and find yourself again whole at the other end.
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Los Alamos. Fines double in security zone. Speed and they take you to Guantanamo.
We stop for dinner at the Hillside Diner (”Proud to be Part of Your Nuclear Family”), a complete and utter waste of time, according to MapKid, who doesn’t understand why we would fritter away the evening eating when the mountains are right there. The fact we’re all hungry and exhausted is irrevelant. Highway 4 is in sight.
Buying groceries is a further affront. “When are we going?” he whines.
Security checkpoints ring the city. The bored-looking guard waves us through. The car is crammed to the brim, so full we have to hold the grocery bags on our laps. I’m holding two packages of bacon. If the security guards want to search the car, they can be my guest.
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Highway 4.
“Finally!” says MapKid. His eyes are tired in his thin face, ringed with dark smudges.
Along the winding road, we spot white-tailed deer and something that might have been an elk. The sun has set behind the mountains and dusk has fallen by the time we reach the little convenience store where Ray works. We drive up the twisting dirt road and pull up to the cabin.
MapKid emerges from the car, all exhaustion gone.
“We’re at the mountains! We’re at the mountains! We’re at the mountains!” he shouts.
The adults unload the car, too tired to talk. It’s cool here–66, according to the thermometer next to the hummingbird feeder. I dig into my suitcase for the sweater than seemed so ridiculous at home.
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MapKid runs up and down the path to the deck, around the cabin, along the road, his pale grey shirt ghostly in the growing darkness.
The world demands so much of my child, so much that he finds difficult to understand. Here, he can be a child, be himself, in the open spaces. Is that what the mountains mean to him?
Tomorrow the guys are going fishing.
MapKid had a meltdown yesterday–and oh, lordy, it was a hum-dinger. Full blown screaming, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
The fit got underway as we were getting ready for swimming lessons. We couldn’t find his swimming shirt. Crisis. I later found it in the washing machine, but at the time it had completely vanished and MapKid was unconsolable. He couldn’t see past the problem of the missing shirt. So he lay on his bed (naked) and screamed “I want my swim shirt! I want my swim shirt!”
I have a routine for screaming fits. I say, as calmly as I can manage, “I would be glad to talk to you about this, but it is not acceptable for you to yell at me. When you’re ready calm down, we can talk.” Then I leave the room.
In an ideal world, I would then ignore him utterly until he calmed himself down. But we live in less than an ideal world, and the swimming teacher was expecting us. So after a good seven minutes, I went back in and tried to get MapKid’s mind OFF the shirt and ON to going to swimming. A nearly impossible task. Once he is fixated he can’t seem to shift his attention to anything else.
There’s a name for this behavior. It’s called perseveration–to “perseverate” is to continue something to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point. Perseverating behaviors include an obsession with a particular topic–like, for example, just to pull something out of a hat, maps–but in my understanding of the term, they can also be this sort of inability to move on from a unexpected situation.
I sat there yesterday on my sofa as my son shrieked “I want my swim shirt!” in the next room and thought about the word perseverating. First it’s a dumb word–it just sounds weird. I don’t want to say it in public. Second, so this behavior has a name. What the hell good does that do?
We have a strong belief in the power of names here at the beginning of the 21st century. It’s not enough for something to exist–we must name it and define it, as if by naming it we could control it. Aspergers is a name; autism is a name; ADD is a name. Learned men and women sit around conference tables and endure lengthy Powerpoint presentations to discuss and nail down these names.
Perhaps it is understandable. There’s a long tradition of names having power–in many cultures, your real name, your true name, is a secret. To tell your name to others is to give them power over you. In the Earthsea books of Ursula LeGuin, all names are sacred–to become a wizard is to know the names of all things, because that knowledge gives you ultimate control.
But in this world, the real world, so many things can’t be controlled, no matter how many names you give them. Some things just are. Naming them gives us a handle, a label, a short-cut to communication. It doesn’t change the thing named. It gives you no power.
Of course, sometimes names do give you control you otherwise lack. If you have cancer, you need to know what kind of cancer so you can treat it properly. Our doctors are experts at finding names for things, of nailing down the diagnosis, so much so that we expect it.
But even their name-giving power can fail. I recently ran a temperature for a full eight days but had no other symptoms. Naturally, I went to the doctor, and naturally I expected them to pull out a name for my ailment. “You have a [fill in the blank] [infection/virus/disease/syndrome] and the proper treatment is this [pill/shot/surgery].” Instead, after a fair number of tests, they came up with bupkiss, the fever went away, and everyone decided it had been some kind of virus, thank you very much, that will be a $20 co-pay. In the end, the name didn’t matter. Even had we named it, nothing would have changed.
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So what good does it do me, sitting on my sofa with a shreiking child in the next room, to have this name, this label? I thought when we began the process of taking MapKid to doctors that finding the right name, the right label, would make a difference. It would give me power over my son’s problems. And I so I got a diagnosis, and a 23-page report, and I felt bereft and powerless.
But, I hear you say, the name Aspergers gives you access to doctors and research and support groups and books and therapies and online forums and fellow bloggers. Yes. Yes, it does. And I don’t dismiss those things. They are a lifeline.
But still I see the limitations to this passion for naming. We break down the diagnoses and give them codes and sub-codes; we identify behaviors and sub-behaviors. We break the universe down into smaller and smaller pieces, first with hammers, then with scapels, then by slamming atoms together at close to the speed of light. We name the detritus: molecules, elements, subatomic particles, quarks–and even that is not enough, so we speculate the quarks themselves are formed by tinier-than-tiny strings of energy, curled upon themselves in 11 unimaginable dimensions. We break things down and down and down and what we find at the end is still incomprehensible, and still the universe eludes our control.
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When I worked on my book about composers, I read about how Philip Glass was introduced to Classical Indian music in his twenties. He was trying to write down the music of Indian musicians into scores Western musicians could read, but he couldn’t do it. The rhythms just didn’t fit into the neatly divided and subdivided and sub-subdivided measures of the West. He realized that the Indian musicians weren’t breaking down their rhythms into smaller and smaller pieces, they were instead building up their rhythms from discrete units into a cohesive, ever-evolving whole.
In a musicological sense, I don’t understand what that means–I don’t know enough about either Western or Eastern music–but in other ways I understand exactly what it means. Building up instead of breaking down. Looking for the whole instead of the parts.
When I first went to Dr. Dave, the psychologist who is helping us with MapKid, I sat down on his sofa and he asked me to tell him about my son. I began, “MapKid was tested in the fall of 2008 and received a diagnosis of–”
He held up a hand and stopped me.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t ask you about his diagnosis. I asked you to tell me about your son.”
I nearly cried. First, in shame, that I had let, even for a moment, the label get in the way of the child, out of some assumption that this was how the system worked, that this was how I gained control. Second, in relief, that here was a person who saw the whole, not just the parts.
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I keep reading over this post, and I twice I’ve nearly deleted it. I cut out a whole chunk about the Enlightenment and Romanticism and Modernism, and a bit that drew analogies between narcissism and string theory. My mind is coming at this topic from all directions, and at these moments I tend to cast about seeking intellectual fragments on which to shore my ruins. In the end I’m not sure if what I’ve said makes any sense at all.
Here’s what I’m not saying: I’m not saying Aspergers isn’t real. I’m not saying I regret going to doctors. I’m not saying that for some people names and diagnoses do have benefits. For some, to name something is to make it less frightening, and that in itself gives them control.
For me, however, that control has definite limits.
I’m struggling with my frustration with the insufficiency of names. And with my powerlessness.
_________
Persevating behaviors. Or a child who feels his world is terrifying and unmanageable unless he can control some portion of it by, for example, wearing a red swim shirt.
I want to tell my child, I understand. I know what it’s like to want to control the universe. But you can’t. The shirt gets lost, the 23-page report gets misfiled, the names have no power.
I want to say, the shirt doesn’t matter, the diagnosis doesn’t matter, the names don’t matter. What is important is you, and you are whole, and I love you.
__________
We eventually made it to swimming, and he wore a green t-shirt.
The old GPS had become inadequate.
It’s a yellow, hand-held GPS, a Garmin e-Trex, and my husband bought it several years ago when he was into geocaching. (The apple, you see, doesn’t fall far from the tree.) He later bought a second, fancier model, and last year when we went on vacation to the mountains, he let MapKid play with the older and simpler one. It became MapKid’s dearest possession.
But the GPS had limitations–the display is black and white and doesn’t contain any maps. All it does, basically, is record your path, show your latitude and longitude, and allow you mark different positions. When my parents got their own GPS for their car, the kind intended for driving, with color maps and spoken directions, he was smitten.
So one evening we got out the piggy bank and started counting. We didn’t even attempt to count the pennies, but we added up the dimes, nickels, quarters, and dollar coins (a favorite of our tooth fairy) and got around $45. We figured with the pennies it was at least $50.
The least-expensive color GPS models are around $100. So we told MapKid if he could earn $25, we would pay for the rest.
MapKid’s first plan for making money was to sell his maps. He had been peddling hand-drawn maps for a while, pricing them at a very reasonable 8 cents. Now, he announced, they would be $110. We explained about pricing at what the market would bear. We finally decided $1 would be reasonable.
Money could also be earned for various chores, although the first few times negotiations nearly broke down when he insisted he get the entire $25 just for picking up his toys in the living room. I stuck to $.50.
Money could also be earned for politeness out at dinner, behaving well in Target, and not yelling at my parent’s house, because, well, none of us are above bribery.
MapKid kept a running tally of his progress on a much dog-eared piece of paper. On night we realized he only had $3 to go. He woke up that morning and declared he wanted to do chores. So after cleaning his room, picking up the living room, helping with the laundry, and doing some other random tasks I pulled out of the air, we deposited the last dollars in the piggy bank and wrote $25!!!!!!! surrounded by stars on the progress sheet.
We put the money in the bank, and that night MapKid and his dad ordered the GPS from Amazon.
We weren’t expecting the shipment for nearly a week, but it came early, on the night of my high school reunion. Our babysitter got to spend the evening observing the GPS’s finer features, and at night she gave her permission for the GPS to sit next to MapKid’s bed with the warning, “I don’t want to hear any beeping.” Pity she didn’t know he had already learned how to control the volume.
Now the GPS (or Mrs. Garmin, as MapKid has named it (her?), after the brand and the female voice that gives directions) is his perpetual companion.
“I bet I’m the only kid who has a GPS,” he says to me. And, “I got the perfect Garmin.”
Mrs. Garmin goes wherever we go, providing directions even to places we travel to several times a week and certainly don’t help finding. She’s a happy soul. “Reaching destination,” she says, and on the word “destination” you can tell she’s simply delighted to have performed this service. When you ignore her directions, she doesn’t sound annoyed or irritated, just worried. “Recalculating,” she says tersely, and you can tell she thinks you’re about to go totally off the rails and is really concerned.
“I love my Garmin, mommy,” MapKid says.
The only downside to her directions is that she doesn’t tell you what road you’re turning on, merely that you need to turn left or right in 1 mile or .3 miles or whatever. (GPS models that say street names cost more.) The screen has the names of the roads printed, but naturally MapKid has the screen in the backseat. I can ask him where I’m going to be turning, but he’s still learning to read, after all, and his interpretation of road names can be kind of . . . odd. “Aw-hee,” he said, when asked the name of one road. Make that “Ohio.”
So driving has taken on a surreal quality where I know where I’m going but I don’t know how I’m getting there. On a recent trip to the other side of town, Mrs. Garmin took us on a route I never would have picked on my own, through neighborhoods I didn’t know existed and along a stream I’ve never seen before. It was disconcerting driving ahead through the unknown. In the end, we arrived safe and sound, and now I think the route is ideal, with far less traffic than the way I had been going.
“Don’t you think my Garmin is really cool, mommy?” he asks me.
I don’t know how long the Garmin-love will continue. He’s been toting around the old yellow one for a year now, so his track record for sustained interest is high. All I know is that right now, my kid is utterly and completely happy. As I write this, he sits on the living room floor chatting away about roads and highways, features and options. “This is where the SD card goes,” he says, and “It’s cool that it’s got a touch-screen.”
“You know what I really like,” he says. “I really like that has all the roads. Don’t you like that, mommy?”
I like it a lot, buddy. I like it a lot.
So you’ve heard the metaphor, right?
Having a child that is different–disabled, special, challenged, what have you–is like getting ready to go on a big trip to Italy. You’re excited, you’re thrilled, you’ve wanted your entire life to go to Italy and here’s the big day. You’ve planned your visit to the Vatican Museum and read Rick Steves and booked your hotel room; you’ve packed clothing perfect for Italian weather and memorized a few Italian phrases.
Except when the plane lands, and you’re not in Italy. You’re in Holland.
This is not what you planned at all. Instead of sunny hillsides dotted with olive trees you’ve got canals; instead of Michelangelo, Rembrandt; instead of pesto . . . whatever they eat in Holland.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Holland. Amsterdam is fascinating, Vermeer is sublime, and the tulips are amazing. But if you were counting on Italy, Holland is going to take some getting used to. You’re going to mourn the Italy you don’t get to see before you can wrap your head around the joys of the Netherlands. But those joys are there, and there’s no point wasting your vacation being mad that Holland isn’t Italy.
The point, of course, is that having a “different” child isn’t bad, it’s just not what you expected. And you have a choice about how you deal with it. You can either rant and rave about that difference or you can celebrate what makes your child unique and wonderful.
I have a number of beefs with the Holland/Italy metaphor, but let’s tackle just two to start with. First, you may be in Holland, but your travel companions are all in Italy and having a whale of a good time.
Here’s what I mean: you meet friends for dinner and from your perspective, you’re sitting a cafe in an Amsterdam square and everyone is drinking beer. For them, for your companions at the exact same table, it’s a taverna in Florence and everyone is drinking red wine. The two countries hover over one another, but only you can see Holland.
Is that too obscure? I mean that there are rarely moments where you can forget that other people are out there with perfectly ordinary kids doing perfectly ordinary things (Italy) while you are trying to make your way with your unique kiddo (Holland.) If you were just in Holland and could put Italy out of your mind, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t work that way. Italy is always there.
I can imagine this might be different for someone whose child was seriously disabled–with Down’s Syndrome or low-functioning autism, for example. These parents find their lives dominated by their child’s condition; they spend every day going to therapies, dealing with doctors, addressing crises. Holland is going to be a much bigger presence in their lives. And I can see how it would be tempting then to avoid all the Italian travelers altogether. Why be reminded of where you can never go?
Secondly, I’m not in Holland all the time either. MapKid is not severely disabled (for which we are deeply thankful). He goes to a regular school in regular classes; he’s not the special education system because he’s never needed it. You could spend time with him and think he was a perfectly ordinary kid, albeit with a rather odd and intense fascination with maps. So most of the time, I hang out in Italy, which is great–except when Holland suddenly intrudes.
I’ll be bebopping along in Rome, checking out the ruins and enjoying some gelato, and then, BAM! I run into a windmill.
It’s as if the two lands are mysteriously superimposed, one existing, faint and ghost-like, on top of the other, and I never know from step to step where I am walking. One minute I’m in the Florence cathedral, the next, the Delft marketplace.
It’s a schitzophrenic existence. It’s easy to forget that your friends don’t have the same view as you. They see the Bay of Naples; you see Rotterdam. It’s easy to resent what you perceive as their ease and comfort zipping around Rome as you constantly seek to get your bearings and determine where the hell you are so you can figure out in which language you should order coffee (espresso? koffie?). It’s unsettling to never know where you’re going when you set out. You can plan your day-trip down to the last detail, but if you turn the corner and find yourself in Maastricht instead of Venice, all those plans go out the window.
I suppose what the metaphor is supposed to teach me is to celebrate the fact that I get two vacations for the price of one! See Italy–and Holland! Double passport stamps straight ahead! Enjoy the Hague and the Vatican all in one day!
Yeah, well. Whatever.
What would help would be a map. I imagine a tattered and badly folded thing, held together by tape and good intentions. Here is a street map of Milan, here the Tuscan countryside, then, at an odd angle, the Dutch highway system. Old Roman roads are bisected by unexpected canals. The Apennine Mountains end abruptly at the North Sea.
Alas, I suspect even my mapmaker couldn’t chart me a guide to this strange land. I will have to find my path myself, stumbling along the way.
We’ve just survived (I think) what could have been a really ugly situation.
MapKid LOVES karate–and has since he started a year and a bit ago. Yet his behavior there is consistently worse than almost anywhere else.
Karate combines a great many things that can tip him off. First, he often genuinely doesn’t understand what to do. MapKid seems to have a hard time watching another person make a movement and then imitating those movements himself. (Unwarranted theorizing ahead: Asperger’s folks have been found to have fewer “mirror neurons,” cells in the brain that are responsible for imitation. Connection???) So it’s hard for him to do things right. He truly doesn’t know where to put his arm for a punch or how to lift his leg for a kick. And so he gets frustrated.
Then there’s the constant competition. For some reason, MapKid HATES to lose. At anything. At anytime. Not winning is a disaster of epic proportions, kind of like the eruption of Krakatoa. Now, it’s one thing that my dad always let him win at checkers. But at some point in life you have to learn that you can’t always win, that losing is OK. Karate should be the perfect place to learn this, because several times at every class there are contests and challenges and competitions, and, guess what? He can’t win them all. But almost every time he loses, he loses it.
Yet he loves karate. And I love it for him. He needs to learn about losing. He needs to improve his gross motor skills. He needs to be around other kids. He needs to be drilled in the values they emphasize at karate, like self-control and discipline.
But all that means every class pushes, pushes, pushes him. And so we get meltdowns. And fits. And screaming. It’s ugly sometimes. A few weeks ago I literally had to carry him from the building because he got so upset over not earning a piece of candy.
MapKid’s karate class is taught by a wonderful woman I’ll call Miss Kathy, and she’s awesome with MapKid. She keeps him on track, helps him when he needs it, steps in and averts crises on a regular basis. She’s told me they’ve had lots of kids with challenges, and one of her own could throw a tantrum like nobody’s business. Most of the parents have been really great, too–I had one mom get my purse and help me to the car during a previous meltdown.
So last weeks’ class was a big shocker.
MapKid was at his worst. He challenged another kid for his spot in line (a big no-no), he whined that his legs hurt during stretching, he refused to run around the room, and he completely botched the punches. An all-around disastrous class. So, no surprise, he didn’t get a “focus” sticker for the day.
He started to protest, but Miss Kathy steered him over to where I was sitting and started explaining why he didn’t get a sticker. So far, so normal.
But then she said that it was much worse than that. An assistant teacher, whom I’ll call Miss Madi, had actually QUIT because she couldn’t handle my son. Two parents had complained he was disruptive. We had a major problem, and essentially after this month we needed to come up with a solution or he was out.
I did not cry in the dojo. I made it all the way to the car, and I’m proud of that. And my beloved child is kind of clueless, so he didn’t notice I was crying until we were halfway home. He had proposed a marvelous new route home from class and was enjoying it so much I probably could have had hysterics in the front seat and he wouldn’t have had a clue.
I felt punched in the gut. I had thought this place was safe. That no one would judge him (us?) there. That they understood and wanted to help.
Now, this? Parents complaining, Miss Madi quitting?
I don’t know how I’ll look any of those people in the eye again. Humiliation competed with rage. On the one hand, I get it. MapKid can be disruptive. He’s hard to handle. He’s hard to teach. I get that. Heck, I live that.
On the other hand, seriously? Who the hell do you think you are, complaining about my kid? What do you know about him, or me? And quitting over one child? What is your problem?
How dare you threaten my child?
Because isn’t that what it comes down to, in my primitive mommy-brain, a threat? An attack? An unsympathetic, unwarranted lashing out at a child who understands so little that he asked me hours later why wasn’t Miss Madi going to teach any more?
The rational part of my brain realized I was over-reacting, of course. But still I felt the temptation I’ve sometimes experienced, which is to Never Leave the House Again.
I fumed about it all weekend. My husband and I talked about it a lot, and we decided that we would suggest MapKid have private lessons and hope that in a few months he could rejoin regular classes.
Then, yesterday, I called Miss Kathy. I dreaded making that phone call.
And, amazingly, everything changed.
Apparently MapKid isn’t the only one having problems. The dojo has several kids with Asperger’s right now, and all of them are having trouble. So they’re going to make one of the MW classes be just for them. Miss Kathy is going to work on making the class as Aspie-friendly as possible.
My primitive mommy-brain nearly started to cry again. This woman wants to help my child!
This is what we all need: someone who understands difference, who appreciates it. Someone who recognizes different people learn differently, and that sometimes adjustments need to be made for these people.
We’ll go to the new class tomorrow, and I’m actually not dreading walking into the dojo. Last Thursday, I couldn’t imagine saying that. We can keep going to karate, MapKid can proceed at his own pace, and he’ll be safe from annoyed parents and unsympathetic teachers.
Crisis averted. Thank God for Miss Kathy, and for all those like her.
My parents have headed off on a summer jaunt to Europe (with complete and utter disregard to my childcare needs. ahem.), and MapKid and I were talking about when they were leaving and how long they would be gone.
“So England is an island?” he said. “What’s an island?”
“It’s a piece of land that is surrounded by water,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. A short silence while he digested this information. “So it’s kind of like a Kit-Kat.”
It took me a second to place Kit-Kats in my mind–but then I remembered: the candy-bar. MapKid had gotten one the week before as a prize at karate. But the connection to England had me beat.
“Um, how is England like a Kit-Kat?”
“Because a Kit-Kat is a piece of cookie surrounded by chocolate.”
Of course.
It’s old home month here at Chez Map-Maker. This weekend we’re attending an informal get-together of college friends, and the weekend after that is my 20th (gasp!) high school reunion. All of these events include family picnics, which creates a unique problem for me.
How will MapKid behave? And what do I tell people about his behavior?
You just never know how this child will respond to stressful events full of unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. Sometimes he can really pull it together and act like the charming child that I know and love. Other times, however, the stress really gets to him and it all ends in a hideous outburst of nightmarish proportions.
So the question arises: do I, or do I not, tell people about Asperger’s Syndrome?
I know the answer that some members of my family have for that question: Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, do we use the A word in public. They have good reasons for taking this stance. They don’t want the label to define who he is. They don’t want a diagnosis to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They resent assumptions other people might make based on that label. They don’t want people to look at him funny.
I understand all these reasons. I even agree with them, to some degree.
But I also admit to leaning the opposite direction sometimes. The fact is that people often look at my kid funny, whether they have any idea what’s going on with him or not. At a recent get-together of church friends, MapKid (a) ate only a hotdog bun, (b) stayed ten feet from the pool at all times, (c) repeatedly warned the other children of the enormous dangers of the campfire and tattled to their parents when they seemed to be ignorning these dangers, and (d) tried to sell everyone maps. This is unusual behavior for a 7-year-old. I could see these people (kind, generous, gracious folks, all of them) giving him curious glances.
No one wants their kid to be the subject of the curious glance. I wanted to fling myself bodily between MapKid and that glance. I want to shout, “He’s got Aspergers! Give him a break!”
There’s a t-shirt you can buy online that reads, “I’m not rude, hyper, or weird. I’ve got Aspergers. What’s YOUR problem?” I totally get that. It’s a way of acknowledging behaviors that are different but reframing them so that they’re not bad or strange but . . . organic. This is how my child is wired. Yes, this is using Asperger’s an excuse–or explanation, if you will. It’s a way of saying, please don’t judge him–understand him.
But if I’m honest with myself, I must admit there’s another reason I want to claim the Asperger’s exemption: to give me a break.
In general, I’ve found that most people are remarkably tolerant of misbehavior in children. Most people take the attitude that all kids act up sometimes and that the correct response should be humor and sympathy, not condemnation. I will never forgot the story of my friend Lorri, whose toddler erupted into an epic temper tantrum one day at the mall. Lorri had made the strategic error of parking at the Neiman Marcus, so she had to carry her shreiking, flailing, biting kiddo through the elegant marble halls of the Neiman’s cosmetic section, confident that every adult within earshot was stigmatizing her as a terrible mom. Then a blue-haired lady in the middle of a makeover shouted across the din, “Don’t worry, honey, we’ve all been there!”
While most of my experiences has been like Lorri’s, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to sink through the floor when my kid acts up. Recently MapKid and I went to dinner at our favorite local hamburger joint. The restaurant has three booths, which are his favorite places to sit. This night, however, we walked in and realized all the booths were taken. MapKid stomped his foot and screamed, “I WANTED TO SIT IN A BOOTH.”
oh.my.god. i.could.have.died.
It is a credit to the establishment that a good half of the adult diners laughed. Of course, also in attendance was a certain Mean Old Lady(1) who glared at me. I concentrated on corralling my kid, whispering dire threats of immediate departure, and glaring at him furiously. (In my family, this is known as “a good talking-to.”) But what I wanted to do was fling myself on the mercy of the restaurant and cry, “He’s got Asperger’s! It’s not my fault!”
The diagnosis can be my excuse, too–my exemption. I’m not really a bad parent, I want to say. I’m doing my best. I can’t control these things. Yes, he’s seven, but he often acts like he’s four or five. Please don’t judge me, either.
So I will admit to the temptation of walking into my reunions and announcing, “Hi! Good to see you all! This is my kid–he has Asperger’s! So cut him some slack! And me, too, while you’re at it! Yeah, he’s kind of weird sometimes, and sometimes he starts screaming for no apparent reason! But I’m still a good mom!”
This is terrible idea. And I won’t do it. But I can admit to wanting to.
In moments of intellectual clarity and emotional fortitude, I am able to realize that it’s no one’s business how my kid behaves or how I parent. I’m nearly 40–I long ago got over the 8th-grade conviction that everyone in the universe was watching my every move and commenting on it negatively. Most people won’t pay the least bit of attention to my son’s behavior, and even if they do they won’t think a thing about it. As for those who do judge, like the glaring Mean Old Lady in the restaurant, well, who gives a damn?
Alas, these moments are few. The rest of them time my son’s more Aspie behaviors are like a vivid scar across my face, raw and sensitive and visible for all to see. You know how when you have a welt or scratch or even, for heaven’s sake, a zit on your face and someone just happens to glance at you, you’re convinced they’re staring at your horrible deformity? It’s all too easy for me to overinterpret the least glance at my son as annoyance or bewilderment or criticism. And then my mommy-brain goes into seizures and I want to either hide both of us away in the house and never come again, ever, or I want to defend both him and me to the world. He has Asperger’s. Whats YOUR problem?
In any case, I will go to both of these events, part of me as tense and wound up as a spring, and we’ll see what happens then. Probably all will be well, no one will notice anything the least bit off about my kid, and if they do, they’ll probably just think, hey, he’s Elizabeth’s kid–it would be remarkable if he weren’t kinda weird.
And if it’s a horrible disaster . . . well, I guess I’ll blog about it.
_________________
1. OK, so maybe the Mean Old Lady was simply an elderly diner having a really crummy day made worse by my screaming progeny. That doesn’t mean I don’t hate her with the blazing passion of a thousand suns.
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