It's the holidays, so we're already all running a little thin around here - in money, in time, in patience. But then we oh-so-carelessly decided to remodel a bathroom and replace our kitchen floor in the midst of all of this, which means the house is turned on one side one week (we were all squeezing into a spare shower that is smaller than a very tiny telephone booth. Jim says that to soap yourself you put soap on the walls and rub yourself on them), then it's flipped on the other side the next, with the refrigerator in the living room and pizza for dinner for 3 days and the sound of an air compressor, nail gun and classic rock station in the house where you live and attempt to work all day long. And there's a cold - a tiny little thing that's not even much to sneeze at (har har) that just seems to meander aimlessly from one of us to another that just makes you feel a little thinner on your already thin holiday stamina. Plus, put a guy with autism who doesn't do change or transitions very well under those conditions, and it'll make everyone grit their teeth just a touch. ("I don't want to get in that tiny shower! No! Noooo!" is immediately followed by "I don't want to get out of the tiny shower yet. No! Noooo!") Plus, it's 70 degrees and tough to find Christmas spirit, even if there wasn't a refrigerator in the living room.
Opening up the box that is the holidays when you have a kid with autism, is kind of like hanging out with Clark Griswold in his greatest manic moments of hope for all the lights on the house. He wants to do everything all at once, this very minute or he's going to DIE. He wants to eat candy canes while drinking hot chocolate out of a Pac Man mug that he once saw on eBay while watching Polar Express in 3D and constantly poking the frog that croaks "Jingle Bells" when you squeeze it (thanks, Nana) and reading the Santa Claus book with the Spongebob Christmas tree hat on his head. Did I mention that he's one of those that likes stimulation?
Then, he found the newest Spongebob Christmas special that came on Nickelodeon last week, and life around here got the shiny lacquer finish of chaos that I suppose was missing, though we didn't realize it. I oh-so-innocently DVRd the show, thinking that he'd be interested in it. But Aspergergians aren't known for their ability to moderate the depth of their interests, so not only was he interested, but immediately became obsessed. The whole family has been made to sit down together and watch it several times. He has watched it alone and sung along. If someone new came into the house, they had to watch it. I don't know if you have ever watched any Spongebob, but one time around will do it for you. A fridge in the living room is a pittance of annoyance compared to hearing Spongebob sing "Don't be a Jerk, It's Christmas" for the umpteenth time.
We put a limit on the number of times a day we could tolerate it. But he had found the DVD of this show at the grocery about a month ago, remembered its precise location, and had to have it so that he didn't have to watch it right in the middle of the fridge-laden living room on the DVR, but could quietly watch it in the privacy of his own room without all the judgment from the rest of the family. In a move that, looking back, is the pivotal moment of the weekend, I made an innocent trip to that grocery and forgot to pick up the DVD.
I don't want to go through what happened next after this, but you can sum it up by saying that it began small, but grew into a scene to rival the Hindenburg footage. Oh, the humanity! The fallout took up more mental, emotional, and sometimes physical space than a fridge in a living room. But somewhere in there, typical of his atypical-ness, we were able to get a toehold and break the loop he was stuck in, and we all pulled out of what has come to be known as "The Spongebob Christmas Special Incident." We're all still recovering from it.
Now we're more like a band of war comrades. We stormed the beaches of Normandy and lived to tell about it, so we hug a little tighter and slip each other - even Truman - a little skin for surviving. About 2:30am yesterday morning I woke up to find him standing beside my bed. This is not unusual, because he tends to get up that early quite a bit, and really wants everyone in the house to know about it. I don't mind getting up early, but even that's a little early for me, so I just turned over to go back to sleep figuring that if he really needed something, he'd tell me. Or continually poke me in the back and say my name louder and louder until I got up. But I was able to go back to sleep. And I woke up 2 hours later to find that he'd gone back to his room. When I got out of bed, I found this:
Which makes it kind of worth it. Or at least tolerable. Or at least not as fridge-in-the-living-room stressful.
God bless us, every one. And for the love of all that's holy, help us make it through December.
