Soup Crackers and Warts

I have come to the conclusion that the secret to getting through life alive is really nothing more than learning how to wrap dire situations in a cloak of humor.  Life is constantly grabbing us from all sides and pulling. Eventually, you either let the steam escape or you explode. Back in the old days, before my son’s third birthday, I was a rather serious person. I ate my soup with soup crackers, and drank my tea with lemon, and paced my miniscule living room while watching the news, occasionally stopping to yell at the newcasters flashing their blindingly white smiles at me from the TV. All I needed was five cats to complete the crazy cat lady persona. But…I was married then, and the mother to a beautiful baby boy. He softened my hardened edges, melted away my cynicism, and helped me see that the world is truly a wondrous place. I reveled in his excitement at discovering the lint trap in the dryer, and how much fun a roll of toilet paper can be, and how long a trail of toothpaste one tube of Crest will make through a house. I learned to appreciate that, even though having vomit dripping from my hair was rather nauseating,  I cherished being able to be there for him when he was sick. I discovered that when the drug store is out of nursing pads, maxi pads would work just fine to stem the flow of milk darkening the front of my blouse, and that it was rather fun to embarrass the poor teenaged kid by asking him if he could check for nursing pads in the stockroom, his eyes looking everywhere but the spreading trails running down my shirt. These were the tiny sparks of humor that lit the dried kindling of my brain. When my son turned three, I would find it necessary to fan those flames daily just to keep myself going.

He seemed like a perfectly normal baby. I suppose he was. He met all his infant milestones. He started talking when he was fifteen months, singing Kid Rock at two years, and revealed his rather impressive hip hop dance moves at age twenty-six months (I know this because I have him on video. I’m saving this video to use as a blackmail tool when he starts sneaking out to parties). He loved lawn mowers. He was my first child, how was I to know it wasn’t typical for a three year old child to sneak out of the house at six a.m. to go three blocks over to mow the neighbor's lawn with his little plastic mower? To me, this was just part of the terrible three’s. I started to ask myself if things weren’t a little out of hand, however, when he unbuckled himself from his car seat to try to jump out of the car so he could watch the State Highway Department mow the grass in the median. I was thankful for child safety locks, since I was driving seventy miles per hour on the interstate at the time. To ensure his safety, I had to pull off on the shoulder and tell him if he wanted to watch them, he had to be buckled in his seat and I would stay there so he could watch. He helped me buckle him back in. He mowed the carpets at home with his John Deere 1/18 scale riding lawn mower. He made a brrrrr’ing noise with his lips for hours on end, as he mowed the “grass” into neat lines. This was fine with me, since I now had a newborn daughter to care for and it did keep him busy for hours. The problem came when I needed to use the bathroom, as he would not allow anyone to walk on his lines and the lines went all the way down the hallway, which is where the only bathroom in the house was located. I learned to play a delicate balancing act between drinking enough to keep my milk supply up, but not so much that my bladder would fill, because those little cast iron lawn mowers create a mighty bump when they hit you in the head. At age 3 and a half, he became a dinosaur. I didn’t think it possible for a child who was barely tall enough to clear the top of the dining room table to become a giant, ferocious, man-eating lizard, but you’d be surprised what a little kid can turn into. The bite wounds on my legs and arms healed nicely, with minimal scarring.

 By the middle of his third year, I had enrolled him in preschool. This is when I discovered my kid was a little “different” than all the others. Mine was the only one grabbing my ankle and screaming “MOMMY!!! YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME HERE!!!!” when I tried to leave the room for the parent session upstairs. He was also the only kid who threatened to rip out the other kids’ intestines when they would try to play with the toy dinosaurs with him. And the only one who would spin in circles and flap his hands singing “tweet tweet, birdy birdy, tweet tweet” during story time, which involved a story that had nothing to do with birds. And the only one who snuck out of the room to go find the toy dinosaurs when the teachers decided to circulate them out of the toy selection for a few weeks. I was called down to the classroom to help locate my son, who seemed to have disappeared. Panic welling up inside me, I raced down the stairs with my tiny daughter grasped in my arms, praying he hadn’t been kidnapped by some evil lurker who would do unthinkable things to my baby boy. I asked them where the toy dinosaurs were – knowing he would never walk out of the room with that big box of plastic T-Rex’s, Apatasauruses, Pachycepholasauruses, and Velociraptors at his disposal. When they told me what they had done, I knew where my son was. We opened the door to the storage room, and there he was, sitting in the dark, surrounded by his dinosaur friends. He looked up as we entered and said with a grin “Hi Mommy! I found dem!”  He sounded like a German elf. It was time to go home, and I knew they would not take him back. He was enrolled in a special preschool for children with autism, and the school arranged to have him picked up by the cute little bus at home each day, after enduring the heartwrenching screams of terror every time I tried to drop him off and leave for the first week of school. It wasn’t really to help my son, but more to prevent all the other high-strung kids in that room from having to deal with the stress of my son’s separation anxiety. It worked for me. It’s hard to leave your kid when he’s screaming for you like he’s afraid you will never return. And it was nice to not have to go out in the breathtaking, frigid winter air to bring him to school. Yeah, I know he had to endure the cold, but he was a little kid. They don't care about stuff like cold. I had him bundled up from head to toe, anyway. He looked like a giant slug, wound in thirteen pounds of wool, and waddling down the steep driveway to the bus. 

Things were good for awhile. He seemed to adapt to his new schedule, learned to use a storyboard to handle day to day transitions, and I enjoyed the three hours of free time to devote to my daughter, who really seemed to get the shaft when it came to one-on-one time with me. It isn’t until you have a child who requires every second of your time and energy that you can begin to understand the toll it takes on any other children in the house. Despite it all, she was a happy, giggly, active little girl, and didn’t seem any the worse for wear from her brother’s frequent tantrums, myriad fears, and severe separation anxiety. Perhaps being born second made her immune to his behaviors. She just didn’t know anything else. I was very fortunate to be able to stay home with my children when they were little. I don’t know what I would have done had I had to hold down a job and manage all of this.

Kindergarten was fun. The tall, bald principal, who I always called Kojak, called me at least twice a week to come pick up my son. Usually because my sweet little boy was running through the halls screaming at the top of his lungs, but sometimes because he would run out of the school and into the parking lot. My answer to his request was always the same “Ho ho!! No way! I jump up and down and clap when the bus comes to pick him up every morning, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to come get him and give up two whole hours of peace and serenity. You run a school, surely you have some glue there – glue him to his chair and give him some toy dinosaurs to play with. I’ll be here when he gets off the bus AFTER school!” I don’t blame the school for wanting to send him home. When he acted up at home, I couldn’t wait to send him to school. I got calls at home because teachers were bitten - “Do you know if he has any contagious illnesses?” to which I normally answered “Yes”. There was always a long pause after that, and then I’d simply say “he has Rabid Child Disorder. There is no cure”. I got calls at home because he spit on other students – “do you know if he has any contagious illnesses?” to which I normally answered “just the same one I told you about last week. I’m sure it’s written in his file somewhere”. I got calls at home because he kicked teachers, threw his chair, ripped his papers, and peed on the floor of the classroom. Every time, my answer was firm – he is not coming home. I NEEDED those four hours every weekday. I needed them, my daughter needed them, my neighbors needed them. I would die for my son, but I would have killed him if I didn’t get that daily break. These kids are not easy to love, nor easy to parent. But if an entire school full of trained professionals couldn’t handle my undersized little six year old, what the hell did they expect me, a common mother with no special skills or training, to do about it? It was agreed that he would be transferred to the autism program at a different school for first grade. Why he wasn’t put in that program for kindergarten still confounds me, but I was grateful he was going to be in a setting that was appropriate for him.

For half a school year, things were almost NORMAL. I felt like a typical mom (except for the deadbolts at the very top of the doors and windows to keep him from running out at night, the four am showers so I would get one before he woke up drenched and wouldn’t go back to sleep, the bloody noses from him punching or kicking if I took away a toy or put him in timeout. But these things were minor and manageable in the course of a day). I could not leave him alone with himself or his sister for even one second. My daughter was in the bathroom with me whenever I was in there, just so I knew she was safe. When the train went by, five miles away, he became so frightened by the distant whistle that we would have to crouch in his closet until it was long past. Nothing consoled him from the lonesome gasp of that whistle. It terrified him for reasons beyond my comprehension.

I was alone. My son was born in North Carolina, but we moved to Minnesota just before his sister was born. I knew nobody. There was no support network, no backup, no one to call and say “can you come over for a cup of coffee and a gab session? I need some grown up time”. I learned that friendship could come in strange forms. The characters in the Land Before Time movies became important to me, as did those in the movie Lion King. See, those characters didn't care that my kid was different. But the moms at the preschool didn't want anything to do with me. I was the mother of that "crazy kid". They gave me wide berth when I came to the school. The moms of the kids at the autism school couldn't come over because our kids would kill each other if they did, and it isn't like we could hire babysitters. That was a laughable concept. I could have become a raging drunk. I’m still thinking about that option, but I’d have to actually drink, and that’s a bit of a dealbreaker for me. I could have become an abusive monster, and there were times I considered that option, too. It would have been so easy to just smack him into next Sunday and hope when Sunday came around that he was normal. But beating a child never results in positive change in the child, and it seems to foster more anger and desperation in the parent. My own mother never did seem to be able to stop herself when she went on a spanking tirade. It is loss of control. As the adult, I had to maintain my composure at all times. But, I do have to wonder what a social worker would have done to him if he’d kicked her square in the face in the middle of a grocery store and started screaming bloody murder as her face exploded in a bloody torrent. Yeah, that happened to me. I had my infant daughter in the basket in her car seat, and I had to wrangle his writhing little body into the front seat of the buggy as he continued raining punches and kicks down on my face and head. I had an audience. My fifteen minutes of fame, and I looked like I had just finished a UFC match. I waited for someone to call the police, hoping and praying someone would so they would take him away for an hour. Maybe he’d be calm when I got him back. But no one did. There were a number of very helpful ladies there, however, who were more than happy to tell me that my son was “going to get hurt” if I didn’t manage to get him secured in the buggy. Really???? I wonder if they went to Harvard to get that level of smarts. No one offered to assist me in getting him into the buggy and safely secured. No one offered to ensure the baby in the basket was safe. No one did anything but offer ridiculously stupid advice that I should do something I was already CLEARLY trying to accomplish. After awhile, I put my son down on the floor, and let him lay there screaming. I didn’t care that people were staring. I didn’t care that my blood was forming a puddle at my feet. I didn’t care that my daughter was screaming in the basket. I just stood there and stared at my son and waited for him to calm down. When the manager said I needed to take him out, I told him that he was welcome to carry him to my car for me, but that I was not picking him back up until he was calm. The manager walked away.

Life with an autistic child is hard. Life with an autistic child who also has some other, underlying issues that are lurking beneath the surface is harder still. He had moments of clarity, when he was funny, and sweet, and played peek-a-boo with his sister and hide-and-seek with me. But the sinister blackness was always there, writhing just beneath the surface. Hide-and-seek was always interesting. He told me where to hide - always in the same place – a space between the refrigerator and the cabinets. It was a large space, large enough for me to stand against the wall comfortably.  He would take my finger and pull me into the kitchen and say, “Mommy, you hide there”. I sometimes considered teaching him the “pull my finger” joke, but knew he would probably try it on everyone, and didn’t want to deal with more stares in public than I already endured. After he placed me in my hiding spot, he would go count, and I would stand where I was instructed. When he was done counting, I’d hear his little feet padding through the kitchen, and he’d come around the corner and see me standing exactly where he told me to stand, and he would scream in terror. It happened every time. And every time I laughed. How could he be terrified to find me in the very place he told me to hide? But he loved the game, despite his inability to suppress his fear of surprises. I wonder if his terror stemmed, not from finding me where he knew I would be, but from the fear that I would NOT be there when he came around the corner. Once, I made the mistake of hiding somewhere else. It scared him so badly that he missed two days of school, unable to function, unable to let go of me. I felt terrible, and never did it again. But the terror returned every time he found me where I was supposed to be, standing there with a smile on my face and my arms wide open, ready to wrap him up in them – but he would rarely allow me to hug him. The closest thing he would tolerate was to wrap his fingers around my index finger and hold tightly. I felt those finger hugs through my entire being, and my heart swelled every time he gave me one. I cherished the shreds of normalcy, even when I had to re-define normalcy to fit my circumstances.

My son’s sense of humor was very dry, probably because he had no idea he was being funny, but I thought he was hysterical. He once poked a large woman in the rear end and said “you have a very large fanny”. She did, so I didn’t really consider his statement to be anything other than rude. She was kind about it, and merely smiled and said “is he getting fresh with me?” I replied that he likes older women. 

He went up to a very old man in the grocery store once, and proceeded to tell the old man that his wrinkly face meant he was going to die soon. The man looked at me, and I told him I should probably go find that obnoxious kid’s mother.

 He would bite every tomato in the vegetable bin at the grocery store, then put them back. He loved to lick avocados. At first I would put them in the buggy to purchase, but I don’t cook with tomatoes much and have no idea what to do with an avocado, so after awhile, I just put them back and hurried him to another aisle. I know to wash my fruits and veggies very well after I buy them. I ‘m sure my kid isn’t the only produce-licker out there.

A lot of years have passed since those early, difficult days. The days are not easy now. But they are difficult for different reasons. Adolescence brings its own brand of desperation. Heap schoolwork on top of hormones on top of anxiety on top of obsessive compulsive disorder, and you have a recipe for General Tsao’s Chicken mixed with Butterscotch pudding. It doesn’t go together well and really, in the end, it just makes everybody sick.

I don’t eat my soup with soup crackers anymore. I eat it with melted soy cheese on toast, because I have become rebellious, and daring, and confident in my choices. I prefer a lime in my tea, and I no longer watch the news, because the internet keeps me well-apprised of the insanity occurring around the world. Besides, I have enough headline-worthy news occurring right in my own house these days. When I look at the funny, hilarious, hysterical, unpredictable life I lead, I find myself thinking…”I could have been given a perfectly normal, sports-loving, obedient, compliant, outgoing, everybody-loves-him kid, but then I wouldn’t have had the chance to get to know this enigmatic, funny, interesting, smart, confusing, frustrating, miraculous, shy, obnoxious, witty, musical genius I was given. And I know I would have felt a hole there, where he should be. Because I was MEANT to be his mother. He was given to me as a gift, a precious gift more valuable than all the riches on Earth. And regardless what happens to him in his future, I will fight for him every single day of my life. Because he is mine. And I am his. Warts and all.”