sigh
chant mistress
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2001
- Posts
- 10,248
My eleven-year-old son and I awoke today (or I guess it’s yesterday now) to a pretty, powdery dusting of an unexpected snowfall drifting across our patio. It was very windy and as we live on the topmost floor of our building, which rises a couple of floors higher than its neighbors in our modest, Midwestern city, the noise of the wind was a steady rush and the window in our kitchen that faces west rattled incessantly as it’s wont to do on such days.
The weather triggered alarm bells in my head and I eyed my child carefully for signs of stress. I used a shim of folded paper to quiet the rattling window but the wind still blew its steady howl and the sky was dark with fast moving clouds.
When his toast came up too dark for his taste, my son screamed a full-bodied screech, a note that can’t really be appreciated unless you’ve heard it because very, very few eleven year old boys scream in such a way. Take the loudest squeal of your most recalcitrant toddler and amplify it tenfold. Then hit a pitch that’s nearly beyond the realm of hearing and maybe, just maybe, you’ll begin to understand that some sounds can actually cause physical pain, and that no ears should ever be subjected to them.
I closed every blind and pulled every curtain and turned the lights down low. I slipped in a CD, one of his favorites, and turned it on loud enough so that it muffled (at least to my ears) the noise of the wind outside. I turned off the humidifier because I recognized long ago that the steady drone of its fan bothers my boy on his “off days” and tried to settle him into a sensory calm, dampening as much as possible any input that might trigger another outburst.
It’s been a fucking long day. My ears still ring from his repeated meltdowns and though he made no deliberate attempt to hurt me, his random thrashings have left me with a couple of tender bruises. (I’m five foot tall, you see, and only top a hundred pounds on my water weight days, while my son is five foot four and outweighs me by forty pounds at least.)
Between his meltdowns, our day wasn’t totally unproductive. We managed some excellent progress on fractions and he read a full chapter of his current Harry Potter book to me and even managed to accurately answer some of my questions about it afterwards. He drew (for the dozenth time, at least) an intricate and perfectly rendered diagram of the water cycle, something we’d studied last year, and we experimented on blowing up a balloon using baking soda and vinegar to generate a gas. We even got in a bit of geography as he used a map of Washington D.C. to show me exactly where the hotel is located where we’ll be staying during our trip there this spring.
But all in all it was a fairly miserable school day and toward the end he was complaining about school being “boring”. Cutting him loose a half hour early to work on one of the teaching programs we have on his computer didn’t help a bit. He wanted to play a computer game instead and that too led to a meltdown.
For dinner I decided to take him to KFC, one of his favorites, but we had to leave, with him in full tears because they didn’t have popcorn chicken, even though I’d told him repeatedly on the way there that the promotion was over. I took him to Radio Shack to buy a new battery for my video camera and discovered they’d just sold the last one. That crushed, more than angered him, and again we left in tears, this time with me crying along. I’d wanted the video camera because this evening we were supposed to go for his therapeutic horseback riding and I’d wanted to tape him riding his favorite horse. When we got home after Radio Shack, though, there was a message on the machine from the Stables. We’d been cancelled because it was just too cold in the riding barn for a lesson.
That was yet another sad time, and by now they’d accumulated through an excruciating day so that we just held each other on the couch while he screamed and I cried.
It was after eleven before I finally got him to sleep. It was after midnight when I found myself drinking a mixture of hard apple cider and peach schnapps and wishing I could go to sleep too. Then I spent a bit of time working up his school day for tomorrow while praying the wind would let up and give us a break. Then I came here and wrote this.
I have hopes for tomorrow. I always do, but hope for me is tempered because in my life there’s always my son, and tomorrow, as today, he’ll still be autistic.
Some things just aren’t fair.
The weather triggered alarm bells in my head and I eyed my child carefully for signs of stress. I used a shim of folded paper to quiet the rattling window but the wind still blew its steady howl and the sky was dark with fast moving clouds.
When his toast came up too dark for his taste, my son screamed a full-bodied screech, a note that can’t really be appreciated unless you’ve heard it because very, very few eleven year old boys scream in such a way. Take the loudest squeal of your most recalcitrant toddler and amplify it tenfold. Then hit a pitch that’s nearly beyond the realm of hearing and maybe, just maybe, you’ll begin to understand that some sounds can actually cause physical pain, and that no ears should ever be subjected to them.
I closed every blind and pulled every curtain and turned the lights down low. I slipped in a CD, one of his favorites, and turned it on loud enough so that it muffled (at least to my ears) the noise of the wind outside. I turned off the humidifier because I recognized long ago that the steady drone of its fan bothers my boy on his “off days” and tried to settle him into a sensory calm, dampening as much as possible any input that might trigger another outburst.
It’s been a fucking long day. My ears still ring from his repeated meltdowns and though he made no deliberate attempt to hurt me, his random thrashings have left me with a couple of tender bruises. (I’m five foot tall, you see, and only top a hundred pounds on my water weight days, while my son is five foot four and outweighs me by forty pounds at least.)
Between his meltdowns, our day wasn’t totally unproductive. We managed some excellent progress on fractions and he read a full chapter of his current Harry Potter book to me and even managed to accurately answer some of my questions about it afterwards. He drew (for the dozenth time, at least) an intricate and perfectly rendered diagram of the water cycle, something we’d studied last year, and we experimented on blowing up a balloon using baking soda and vinegar to generate a gas. We even got in a bit of geography as he used a map of Washington D.C. to show me exactly where the hotel is located where we’ll be staying during our trip there this spring.
But all in all it was a fairly miserable school day and toward the end he was complaining about school being “boring”. Cutting him loose a half hour early to work on one of the teaching programs we have on his computer didn’t help a bit. He wanted to play a computer game instead and that too led to a meltdown.
For dinner I decided to take him to KFC, one of his favorites, but we had to leave, with him in full tears because they didn’t have popcorn chicken, even though I’d told him repeatedly on the way there that the promotion was over. I took him to Radio Shack to buy a new battery for my video camera and discovered they’d just sold the last one. That crushed, more than angered him, and again we left in tears, this time with me crying along. I’d wanted the video camera because this evening we were supposed to go for his therapeutic horseback riding and I’d wanted to tape him riding his favorite horse. When we got home after Radio Shack, though, there was a message on the machine from the Stables. We’d been cancelled because it was just too cold in the riding barn for a lesson.
That was yet another sad time, and by now they’d accumulated through an excruciating day so that we just held each other on the couch while he screamed and I cried.
It was after eleven before I finally got him to sleep. It was after midnight when I found myself drinking a mixture of hard apple cider and peach schnapps and wishing I could go to sleep too. Then I spent a bit of time working up his school day for tomorrow while praying the wind would let up and give us a break. Then I came here and wrote this.
I have hopes for tomorrow. I always do, but hope for me is tempered because in my life there’s always my son, and tomorrow, as today, he’ll still be autistic.
Some things just aren’t fair.
for sigh.
