Three ways of dealing with "Do what I want right this second!"

Janey's brother William is currently on an Amtrak headed to see his aunt Carrie, my sister.  He called this morning to Facetime with me, so he could show me the scenery and I could vicariously enjoy his trip.  However, Janey was in no mood for me to talk to him.  She wanted to go to the store.  She asked, and that quickly elevated to asking in a scream, and then plain screaming, and then trying hard to grab my phone away from me, and that failing, to jumping up and down in fury and biting her arm.  At that point, I told William I had to go.

This kind of scenario has happened a lot this summer.  Janey wants something.  She wants it RIGHT NOW.  She is furious not just if I have to say no, but if I say "in a few minutes" or "not right now".  I've been trying to figure out the best way to handle this kind of setup.  Here's a few of the possible ways...

1----Give in and do what she wants.  To be honest, this is what we've usually been doing for the last few years, as those who read this blog a lot probably realize.  After the horrible year that included the psychiatric hospital and then the medical hospital, both for long periods, we made a decision to make Janey's life as happy as we could by as often as we could having the answer to her wants be "yes".  It's not like we always said no before, but we had tried a more moderate approach.  The boys were younger then, and we hadn't yet quite embraces the philosophy that whatever gets us most quickly to a happy and calm Janey is the quickest route also to a happy and calm us.  Of course, there are things we can't do when she asked, but mostly, she seems to get this and just not ask for those things, like car rides in the middle of the night or salami when there is none in the house.  She asks for things she knows we can deliver, if we agree to, and we try to honor her requests.  It's worked pretty well, but this summer, it's wearing us down.  Maybe it's wearing ME down more, as this is one of the longest stretches I've had her all weekdays without any school.

2----Treat Janey as much as we can like any other almost 14 year old.  Say yes when it's reasonable, tell her to wait when she needs to wait, say no if we just don't want to give her what she wants to have or do what she wants to do.  In some ways, this was our old way of doing things.  It also goes with assuming competence, in a way.  We can assume she can learn in the natural way that sometimes you have to wait and something the answer is no.  It's what most people (especially without experiece with Janey's brand of autism) would see as the right answer.  It's what I always did with the boys, and I must say they responded well to it.  A no meant no.  They were not prone to begging or nagging.  I think I said yes often enough when I could that they learned I wasn't just saying no for no reason.  However, the 10 or so years that I tried to also use this method on Janey were, to be frank, a complete failure.  She was unhappy so much of the time, and she didn't learn, at all, what the boys  learned pretty easily---to be patient, to accept no as an answer.  We gave it a good trial.  If I thought it would work, I'd do it again. 

3---Use a hybrid method.  Accept that the way Janey sees the world and perceives the world and understands the world is not typical, no matter how much I presume competence.  But also realize that Tony and I are human beings, that we simply cannot always do what Janey wants, that the boys, although adult now, also deserve to get their ways sometimes, that we are worn down and tired out and need to figure out a way to keep going.  This hybrid method is what I'm starting to do more.  One part is not responding instantly to Janey.  Sometimes, even if I could do what she wanted right away, I say "Yes!  Just a minute, though..." and then I make her wait a minute.  I've done that approximately 10 times while writing this, the last right during the last sentence, when she asked the most common thing she asks---"Cuddle on the bed?"  Also, if she asks for something we will do in time but not for a while, I say yes and then give the timeline---for example, if she asks for a car ride at noon, I might say "Yes!  Daddy will give you a car ride when he gets home!"  He gets home about 5.  I only do that if it's something we WILL do that day---I'm not going to lie to her.  If the answer is just plain no, I say it but then offer a quick replacement.  If she asks for a ride and I know there will be no ride that day, I saw "No ride today, but we can talk a walk to the store right now!"  Or I say no and then quickly make us busy, so the no is a bit buried in whatever else we are doing.

In an ideal world, the #3 method would work.  I think it could work, not because Janey really will start to understand or accept delays or a plain no, but because waits or substitutes or distractions will become part of a routine, part of what she knows is a possible outcome when she asks for something.  The #2 method relies on an understanding of other people's needs and motives that I quite honestly don't see Janey having.  The #1 method relies on us as parents being responsive in a way that worked for a while, but that I think we are getting too old and tired to carry on, even if it did give us a few very nice years.  In reality, I don't know if method #3 will work.  It isn't working too well so far.  And perhaps there is some #4 method I'm not thinking of right now.  Whatever the solution is, or if there is a solution, as both Tony and I press further into our fifties, I think we need to figure it out.

A tough day and a scary news article---thoughts on respite

Today was one of those days.  Janey and I were both not in the best of moods.  I tried hard to keep her happy, and I'm sure she tried hard to be happy, but it didn't work out.  From my perspective, I spent hours doing exactly what she wanted---giving her the food she asked for, changing her TV shows, taking her for a car ride, snuggling with her---and then each time I didn't do exactly what she asked the minute she asked, she blew up and screamed at me.  I'm sure her perspective would be different, but I can only speak for sure about mine.  I felt tired, unappreciated, sick of it all.

And then I saw this news piece...  Read it here

But for the kindness of a stranger, this could have been a horrible tragedy.  As it is, it gives an answer, right there, to why I worry so much, why I sometimes give in to despair.  Here, in one of the riches countries in history, in a state with so many resources, THAT'S the best that is offered to care for people like Janey?  I have so many questions about how the man came to be alone on the very busy highway, but at the very, very least, there was some huge negligence going on, and by not reporting him for missing for as long as happened, I suspect some covering up, too.

My friend Michelle and I often joke back and forth with each other when we've had rough days (or weeks or months or years)---"I've got an idea!  Why don't you just get some respite?"  Then we laugh and laugh.  Because basically, there is next to no true respite available.  And when there is, well, that story above illustrates the fears I have of it.  It brought back flashbacks to the one respite I did try---you can read about there here if you wish.

Why is there so little respite, and why, when there IS a chance for there to be respite, or adult care, are there so many problems with it?

There's a few reasons, I think.  One is that unless you yourself have parented, long term, a child like Janey, a child with very little language who functions intellectually at about a toddler level, you don't really get it.  You might be as well meaning as the day is long, but you don't totally understand the EVERY SINGLE MINUTE part of the parenting.  There are no breaks, ever.  You can't let your attention slide.  This does two things.  Because people can't picture how all-consuming the job is, they don't understand why we NEED respite as much as we do.  And when people are hired to provide respite, or, bless them, volunteer to do respite, they often find themselves over their heads.  That was the case with the respite house we took Janey to.  They were hugely well meaning, they were well funded, they were a lovely place.  But they didn't get how much Janey (and other kids, I am sure, but I can only say for sure about Janey) needed to be watched.  

Another reason---our society doesn't value people who care for those with special needs very much.  We don't pay them enough, we don't train them enough, we don't screen them enough.  We as parents care for our children because we love them, because they are precious to us.  And even for us, it's too much sometimes.  I can't tell you how much I welcome Tony's arrival home every night, to give me a break.  I can't tell you how much I look forward to the school bus coming in the morning.  So, if someone else is caring for Janey, someone who is not her parent, I know it's a tough job.  I want that person to be well compensated, well trained and most absolutely well screened.  I want them to be valued, and to be treated as valued, but also I want them held to incredibly high standards.

The third reason is a dark one.  I truly believe most people are very good people.  But some people aren't.  And those people are sometimes drawn to people like Janey, who don't communicate well.  That is a horrible, everlasting fear of mine---that rare kind of person.  Or less evilly, some people snap when they lose patience.  Or simply tune out. Whatever happened the other day with the autistic man in the article---someone "caring" for him either did something cruel and evil, or someone lost patience, or someone tuned out.  And in cases like this, or the case of the many of us with children similar to Janey---well, there can be some very horrible endings.  Or horrible happenings that we never do find out about, because our children can't tell us.  And that, my friends, is why, even in those rare cases where there is respite, or as I look to the future, when Janey needs adult care, I don't have a lot of trust or a lot of hope.  Or a lot of answers.

Summer without summer school

A couple days ago, it occurred to me I'd barely thought about the fact that Janey wasn't in summer school.  It wasn't just that I didn't regret my decision not to send her---I barely remembered that usually she has gone. 

It's not that everything is perfect, but more that summer school always seemed to add more stress than it took away.  The first day, the bus showed up, although I'd sent back two forms saying she wasn't going, and also answered an automated phone call that way.  That shows about how organized summer school is.  The bus honked---45 minutes after the time the form I'd received (also after saying over and over she wasn't going) said the bus would get there.  I pictured the other summers, waiting out in the hot air for a bus that took forever to come, trying so hard to convince Janey not to go back inside and take off her shoes, trying to keep her calm and not screaming.  And then when she got home in the afternoon, dealing with her being very unhappy, most likely due to a program that just wasn't good.  And getting calls like the one I did last summer, from the only teacher so far I've ever encountered in the Boston schools that just didn't seem to like Janey, asking me if I had any ideas for keeping her from crying all day.  I did have an idea---and it was to take her out of summer school for the rest of the summer.  Next year, I'll try again, as Janey will be in a different program then, a pre-high school one (hard to believe).  But for now, I am quite sure I made the right decision.

What have we been doing?  Not as much as I planned to, as always.  I've tried to get Janey out of the house some every day, and mostly, we have---maybe not to exciting places, but to stores or fast food or errands.  We also do our daily walk to the "ice cream store" for chips.  We play outside after that walk.  Up until this week, Janey was napping a fair amount (and still sleeping at night).  She needs a lot of sleep, and I don't think she always gets as much as she needs during the school year, despite a bedtime of 7pm (which is her choice---not one we enforce!)  She watches plenty of videos, and we snuggle a lot.

The thing we've been doing I love the most is reading.  I've always read to Janey, of course---books are my life, and I love to read aloud to my kids.  But Janey didn't always want to hear what I had to read, or she just wanted the same book over and over and over until I couldn't take it any more.  Her teacher told me about a way she had been getting Janey to pick books and listen to them more, and I have been using a modified version of that.  I pick out three books I'd like to read to her, and ask her which one she wants.  She picks one, I read it, and then I set it aside and show her the other two, and ask again.  I read her next choice, and then lastly read the third one without asking.  Usually she doesn't want to hear all of the third one, which is fine, but sometimes she does.  Then I ask her if she wants any of them again, and often she re-picks the first choice.  Then I put the books back on the shelf.

Today I tried something new---reading her a chapter book.  I picked "Betsy-Tacy" by Maud Hart Lovelace, one of my favorite books and the start of a great series.  She listened a bit, and then did something that I loved.  She said "I want...I want...bones!  Bad!"  I knew right away what she meant.  She wanted to hear a book we've been reading a lot, "Katie Loves the Kittens" by John Himmelman.  The cool thing is that the book is about a dog, but doesn't have a bone or the word bone in it, and Katie the Dog is a little naughty, but no-one calls her bad.  Janey just picked the words to describe the book that related to it---"bone" for a dog and "bad" for how Katie scares the kittens by mistake!  It's very rare Janey forms a totally new request like that, one that shows she understood the book and wanted it enough to work hard to tell me what she wanted!

We've had our share of tough times, of course.  One day, Janey had been napping and Freddy and I were watching something on TV.  When Janey woke up, she wanted her own show and she wanted it RIGHT NOW.  I told her she could watch it when we were done, and she started screaming.  I said "You know, Janey, you are being a little selfish"  Evidently, that was not good for me to say.  Janey screamed loudly for a long time.  I gave her a shower, which usually calms her down, but it didn't, this time.  Then I snuggled on the bed with her, with some screaming still going on.  I did what a do a lot---tried to give her words for what she was feeling.  I said "You know, it's okay if you want to say 'I am very angry at you, Mama!  I didn't like what you did, Mama!' You can even say 'I hate you, Mama!''

Well, that is just what she did want to say, I guess.  She immediately said "I hate you, Mama!"  She said it like she meant it, and I am pretty sure she did.  Then she said it about five more times, in an ice cold, angry voice.

I had a mixture of emotions.  I was very glad she was expressing how she felt!  But at the same time, it was something I've never really heard from her before, and I'm pretty sure never from the boys (there seems to be less of that kind of drama with boys!)  It surprised me that I felt hurt---but that is part of being a mother, especially of a teenaged girl, and it's part of how Janey is in many ways no different than any other 13 year old, especially when they are spending large amounts of time with their mother.

Most of the time, though, Janey still seems to like me fairly well, and although some days I'm quite (extremely) glad to see Tony coming home from work so I can collapse for a while, we are getting through the summer in pretty good form.  I hope Janey would agree with me.

Janey in Lists

Things Janey loves to eat

Juice from the pickle jar
Spaghetti sauce
Boiled greens
Cheddar cheese---must be freshly cut from a big block
Cherry tomatoes
Onions with the skin on

Movies Janey likes

Home
The Spongebob Movie
Coco
The Little Mermaid 2
Hercules
Care Bears---Journey to Joke-a-Lot

Janey's biggest talents

Remembering tunes and lyrics of songs
Smiling in a way that lights up a room
Her sense of humor
Her beauty inside and out
The special way she has of uniquely connecting to each person she loves

The most frustrating things about Janey

When she screams and we can't figure out why
That she isn't fully toilet trained
When she bites her arm
How upset she gets when one time out of a hundred, we insist on watching our own TV shows
Her utter lack of patience

Janey's favorite things to do

Car rides
Showers
Dancing
Snuggling
Eating
Rearranging furniture
Rearranging cats

The toughest parts of being Janey's parent

The need to absolutely constantly be on alert
The tiredness when she doesn't sleep
Cleaning up difficult messes
The very loud screaming
Over ten years of the same TV shows

The best parts of life with Janey

Seeing her happy
How often she makes us laugh with her
The many, many times she surprises us with what she says and does
The wonderful people I've met that I wouldn't know if I didn't have her
How she brings our family together

Janey's favorite music

The Beatles
Toby Keith
Christmas music
Black Sabbath
Meat Loaf
Weird Al
The Ventures
Nursery rhymes
Show tunes

Janey's most said phrases

"Snuggle on Mama's bed?"
"Want to take a shower?"
"Go for a car ride?"
"Want to go away?"
"Go to the ice cream store?"

Things Janey hates

Hair brushing
Coming home after a car ride
People saying "just a minute!"
Cats that keep coming back after they are rearranged
Being out of cheese

Things I think Janey could do if I could figure out how to unlock the keys

Read
Use remotes
Access much of her vocabulary
Consistently use the bathroom
Sleep on a regular schedule

My biggest fears regarding Janey

That someone will hurt her when I'm not there to protect her
That she get sick and not be able to tell me what is wrong
That she will somehow get lost
That when I someday die, she won't understand why I left her
That when I am gone, she will not be taken care of

The summer starts now

When the boys were little, as we pulled into the driveway coming home from the last day of school, I'd always say "The summer starts...NOW!"  I'll say that to Janey as she gets off the bus this afternoon.  Her summer is starting.

Marshall Point Light, in the town I grew up in
in Maine.  Even with surroundings like this,
I still hated summer and I still do.

It's going to be a different summer than usual.  I'm not sending her to summer school this one year.  Last year, summer school was basically a disaster.  Her teacher was not a good match for Janey.  The bus was horrible, showing up whenever it felt like it, leaving us sometimes waiting outside in the hot sun for long, long periods of time.  The program itself seemed to consist of far too many kids crowded in one indoor room, being taught academics by a too small staff.  It infuriates me that in a city with hundreds of summer programs of all types, taking advantage of all Boston has to offer, that the best they can do for those with some of the greatest needs is to stuff them in a room.  I'll go back to trying summer school next year, as Janey will be in a different program then, the pre-high school program, but this summer, we're taking a break.

Of course, I'm a little panicked about how summer is going to go.  In the best of times, summer is my least favorite season.  I don't like heat at all, I don't like the lack of routine, I don't like much of anything about it.

I had all kinds of notions about setting up very detailed schedules to get through each day, but then I did a reality check and knew that would not work.  So I am trying something simpler.  Each day, in the morning, we will go someplace.  It doesn't matter where really.  It might be out to a fast food breakfast, or for a walk in a park, or to some store like Target, or to a pond to swim.  Once a week, I'm going to aim to take the train into the city, just to hang out.  Freddy is home this summer and is wonderfully willing to help out, or I would not really be able to attempt many of those things, but with his help, I think it will work.

I'm also going to pick one academic area a day to work on a bit with Janey.  I'm talking very basic stuff here, like picking a letter and working on learning to identify it, or talking with her about concepts like bigger or smaller, more or less, over or under, things like that.  I'll decide in the morning what that day's target will be, and then I can work it into the day---things like saying "Look, that flower is bigger than the other one!" or "I see a B on that sign!"

Aside from those two goals, I'm going to allow myself not to feel guilty about what gets us through the day.  If we get out in the morning, I'll relax if the afternoons are all videos and sitting around.  My energy level by afternoon is usually extremely low.  I can do things in the mornings, but afternoons---not so much.  Often, I get upset with myself over this, but I'm trying harder to be realistic.  Quite frankly, Janey probably wouldn't care if all day were just hanging out, as long as we took her now and then to the ice cream store and as long as Daddy gave her a ride at night, but I don't want to go that route.  So---I'll compromise with myself.

I'm still dreading the summer.  But that's not a new thing.  I can't think of a summer ever I didn't dread.  I'll be happy when it's September again.  Janey will have the same teachers next year as she did this year, and I dare say it was her best school year ever this year.  I can look toward that, and I think we'll make it through the next two and a half months.  Hopefully.

"How was school today?"

Shortly after Janey started K0, which here in Boston is what they call public preschool for 3 year olds, I asked her one day after picking her up how school was.  She said "We did music with Mr. Tim.  We sang a snowflake song"  I was a little doubtful, as it seemed early in the year for songs about snowflakes, but I asked her to sing it and she sang a little.  That's all I remember about that conversation.  I wish I remembered more.  It was the only time Janey was to ever tell me about her day in school.

Writing that, I'm crying a bit.  I don't like that much to think about Janey pre-regression.  Her regression was late and severe.  It started a bit before she started K0, a class she was in not at all on an IEP or in special ed, but that she got into because Freddy was at that time in 5th grade in the same school.  The first day of school, I mentioned to the special ed teacher in the classroom (as it was an inclusion school and each room had both a regular ed teacher and a special ed teacher) that I was starting to have some concerns about Janey, and I asked him to let me know if he saw anything that made him share those concerns as he got to know her.  It was only about a month into the year when he said he did, and it was a couple months after that that Janey was formally diagnosed as autistic.  During those months, she lost nearly all her speech.  It has never returned to the level it was when she was two.

I am very grateful that Janey does speak verbally at all.  I know it's something never to take for granted, something that so many mothers of children like Janey would love to hear, to hear a single word ever from their child.

It's still hard, though, to think about when Janey talked more.  Usually, I just don't.  I don't watch, ever, the few videos we took of her talking.  Even though I don't watch them, I wish we had taken more.  You don't think about that.  You don't think that the chattering of your two year old might be something you never really hear again.

During our cross country trip, during which Janey turned three, just before starting the K0 class, we stopped at the Custer National Battlefield in South Dakota.  In the gift shop, Janey saw a family with a girl about her age.  She walked up to them and said "Hi!  I'm Beautiful Janey!"  We still laugh often at that.  She had been hearing from relatives we visited on our trip all the time how beautiful she was, and I guess she'd internalized it pretty well.  I remember that moment so vividly.  It was another last, the last time I remember her ever introducing herself.

Another time, shortly before the trip, Janey started singing "Elmo's got a gun..."  I asked her where she had heard such a thing, and she said "Freddy showed it to me, on the internet"  There was a Sesame Street parody video featuring that song, and Freddy owned up.  That was the one and only time ever she told on her brother.

For a long time, I thought Janey's speech would some day come back to where it was when she was two.  It ebbs and flows, but it's never come close to that level.  Sometimes I read old blog entries and realize that it's not as good now as it was when she was around 6 or 7.

Janey knows a lot of words, words that seem stored and that come out only on rare occasions.  A few days ago, I was reading her "Go Dog Go", her favorite book, and for some reason I asked her what the dogs on the boat on one page were playing, and she said easily and quickly "A banjo" which was completely correct.  I had no idea she knew that word, or other words she's used in that same context, to answer a direct identification question---"raccoon", "drawbridge", "crab", "volcano"---to name a few I can think of.  But in daily life, she uses mostly one sentence, modified slightly for what she wants..."I want cheese.  I want soda.  I want snuggle on Mama's bed"

Every day, every single day, when Janey gets off the bus, I ask "How was school today?" Every day, she doesn't answer.  I don't know if she ever will again.  And I wish, like the old song, I could have saved time in a bottle, and could hear again that one time that she did tell me how her day was.  I wish that a lot.

The mother I mean to be vs. the mother I am

A few weeks ago, I attended a panel at Janey's school made up of five adult women with autism.  It was tremendously moving and informative.  I left that day determined to work harder to help Janey reach her potential, as the women on the panel had, to strive to ignore labels about functioning, to enrich Janey's life in any way I could, but also to respect her as a person, to follow her lead.

I'm not doing a good job.

The bane of my existance

Let's talk about last night, or, rather, early this morning.  Janey went to sleep about eight last night, late for her.  She woke at 1 am.  Tony tried to get her back to sleep, but she was having none of it.  At two, she came to me in bed and woke me up.  I told Tony to sleep and I would take over.  At first Janey watched YouTube videos on the TV, which can be used as a computer monitor.  She does this with complete ease, but after a while, she wanted to watch things on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon, which is done through an Amazon device.  Although the device is in my eyes no more complicated than a mouse, probably less so, all my attempts to teach Janey to use it have failed.  She wants us to put on the shows for her.  That's fine, except she constantly wants to change shows.  After we spend long moments figuring out what show she wants, she watches it for about 30 seconds and then wants us to switch to something else.  That gets old fast at the best of times, and in the middle of the night, it gets unbearably old unbearably fast.  We hobbled through the night, with both of us speaking harshly to the other at times, both of us not doing what the other wanted done.

So what do I do?  How do I handle this?  I KNOW she could learn to use the remote that controls the device.  But when I try, she screams.  She lashes out.  She gets hysterical.  If I simply refuse to change shows any more, she will persist with asking and screaming and so on for hours and hours.  She doesn't quit.  She doesn't give up.  Believe me, I have tried this for YEARS.

I've told myself at times to just accept this, to see it as a time to interact.  Fine.  But it's not an enriching interaction.  It's the same, every time---finding a show she wants and picking the episode she wants, through a combination of single words and backwards and forwards pointing, putting on the show, then repeating in less than a minute.  Over and over and over and over and over, until finally somehow she finds a show she actually wants to watch---for maybe 5 or 10 minutes.  Then it starts again.

This interaction is mirrored in so many others.  Janey asks for a car ride.  She wants to get chips at the store.  She wants a shower.  Nothing else will do.  No variations work.  No amount of refusing, or explaining, or substitution, or distraction, or anything else, works.  When I try something new, she refuses it.  When I give in and do what she wants, but I don't do it fast enough, or exactly the same as the time before, or with a happy enough demeanor, she is furious, a fury that doesn't stop until it gets done right.

In my dream of the mother I want to be, I am endlessly patient. I am creative enough to figure out ways to either break her out of her routines or subtly enrich them.  I am never tired, never sleep deprived, never bored, never just fed up.  In my dreams, Janey is different too.  She responds to my patience by trying new activities.  She surprises me with glimpses of the thoughts I know she has stored in her mind.  She is quirkily fascinating.  She is a full partner in our joined quest to give her the most wonderful life a girl with autism ever had.

The problem here is, of course, that Janey and I am both human.  We are not stereotypes.  We are not perfect.  I get tired too easily, thanks to a thyroid that has given up and a liver damaged by the medication that was supposed to help me have a safe pregnancy with Janey and the lovely "unspecified autoimmune disease" which is slowly getting specified as several types that cause, among other health issues, extreme fatigue. In addition, I am often too easily discouraged. My desire for difficult interactions to end quickly can cause me to take the easy way out of them often.  Janey is stubborn, unyielding.  She is who she is, not because of autism or despite autism but simply because we all have a collection of traits that make us who we are.  She is strong, determined, enthusiastic, yes, but also stubborn and unyielding.  Together, we make up a mother/daughter pair with many strengths, but also many weaknesses.

The mother I mean to be finds a way around the challenges.  The mother I am---sometimes not.  Janey and I am both who we are.  Perhaps that is the message here.  We all do the best we can, every mother and daughter, with the limitations and weaknesses we have, but also with our strengths and our determination and our love.