Autistic and Healthy

I am constantly adjusting my son’s life to fit into life itself. I have to continually realign him in his world. He tries as is typical for teenagers, to push the limits of my sanity with his constant questions and attempts to ignore life’s little necessities. We made a huge jump this school year, skipping the 8th grade and going into high school a year early. The middle school was torturous, even with an aide, the rotating class times and structures drove him to a deep dark corner of his autism self. I tutored him over the summer on the couple on-line classes he needed from a local university to enable him to go. It was easy, because it was a routine every day, and it was like he never really left. Maybe we should all consider year round school for our autistic kids, that way we don’t have to struggle with the routine changes of summer break? I don’t know, just a thought! So he started high school at 13, with 4 classes in the high school, and 5 on line at home with me. By moving him ahead, I had given him a reason to be different, and hopefully a reason to not get picked on as much. It is going well, kind of, you know in an autism parent kind of way I say it is going well. Our going well isn’t quite the same as other parents, it’s going well. So it is going well, but it was going better. The four classes were great, but then we had an IEP meeting about his speech therapy. The high school has a social skills class that they started a couple years ago. I have avoided group speech and language therapy all his life because I wanted him to learn peer appropriate speech, and not speech from other kids who had some of the same challenges. Which I announced at the meeting, and got a reality shot from Will’s psychologist who was attending the meeting with me, because she said, “Ann he is one of those kids.” AAAHHHHH Deep breath. She is totally awesome and totally right, he is one of those kids. Yeah he is. So I said yes to the class and his learning social skills in a group of 10 other higher functioning autistic kids. Then there was the dilemma of how to fill the hour between his last class and the social skills class, because it was only offered the last period of the day. I needed something structured for him to do. The other option was that he could come home for those 45 minutes and I would take him back up to school. I was also worried because I had tried to avoid his being at the school in the chaos of the first and last bells of the day, he could get really upset if someone got too close to him, or said something he didn’t understand. He asked to take ROTC. We said yes, and now he suddenly had 7 hours of class at school and 5 hours at home. It was going pretty well, you know pretty well in an autism parent kind of way, for a few weeks. Then he decided he wanted to stay after for ROTC something on Thursday nights until 4pm. Okay, we can try, but I was starting to worry that he was having too much “human contact” as I call it in his day. It went okay, but barely the first week. The second week, he wanted to join the ROTC color guard. I struggled, but I said yes, let’s just try it once. Okay, bad, really bad decision. Wednesday was color guard, and yesterday was ROTC something, and both days he was a violent, whimpering, mass of meltdown. I can now say that it is in no way okay. He just can’t do it. It is too much time around other people. Time to realign my son. We are okay with school, the seven hours at the high school, and the 5 hours at home with me, but no after school. It just wasn’t going to work. He really wants it to work. He really wants to be a part of a group, especially a group that doesn’t require social skills and interaction other than needs based conversation. It is going to take me days to get him back on track. I don’t have to adjust my other kids, they just seem to flow with life. My son however, got the bumpy road of life, and there isn’t any flow and I am always trying to find the smoothest journey for him. By the way, the social skills class is AWESOME! He says it is “superfluous.” I say AWESOME! The first day of class they read a story about body language, and then talked about it. He had never heard of body language before, and finds it an annoying concept—but it just smile, because it is AWESOME!—May your path today flow smoothly—God Bless–Ann.