Orange Crush

 Had this whole weird word association going on in my head with a wren outside singing accompaniment. If you expect this to be about soda or REM, now's the time to move along.

Orange has never been a preferred color, and crush can apply to a few things. Like crushing something, really excelling, or being crushed because something fell apart or went sideways, or didn't go the way you expected.

I associate orange with elder and Kindergarten. In many of the pictures of that time, he is wearing an orange shirt. And for the longest time, Texas Orange was his color of choice--he liked the way he looked in it, and it suited him. I try not to fall down these rabbit holes, but there's something in the 2005 timeframe that keeps trying to get my attention. Not surprisingly, lots of things fell apart around that time.  But I survived it, so maybe that's good enough and I leave it there. 

(Younger was never orange. He was red.)

Over the weekend I was reading back in the earlier days in the blog and was a little (not much) surprised at how prescient some of them turned out to be.  I don't chalk that up to great psychic ability, just a keen eye and ear (and fact that I prefer to listen and observe to talking, anyway). I'm also amazed at how far we've come, how all those little wins a long time ago parlayed themselves into bigger successes.

But all things being equal, we had our own devastations and heartbreaks. We're all about duct taping ourselves back together and getting back to it, hopefully doing a better job the next go-round.

I think of some of the things that other families in our shoes have achieved. I am wildly happy for them.  Inasmuch as I can, I have been cribbing from other people's playbooks wherever I can and wherever it made sense, to good effect. But in the end, we have what we have, and we need to make that work. And there's no known script for that, except for the one we are writing and re-writing as we go along. 

And the reckoning of exactly *how* autistic I am has been a bit challenging. Make no mistake, in some ways it has been an incredible asset, but in others, man, I am lucky to be alive from my own lack of common sense. I need to let the boys figure out their own stuff, but man, it's hard sometimes to sit on my hands and watch and furthermore, keep my damn mouth shut when they are trying to parse something on their own. I keep forgetting that whatever I faced is going to look different for the both of them, and whatever each of them face is going to look different for each of them, because they are two totally different people with differences in their operating systems that can't be reconciled into one "tried and true" path.

Does anyone have that, anyway?  Literally the only person I know who ever grew up to be exactly what he wanted to be when he was 13 is my husband.

So the rest of us kinda fall short like that.

Younger's IEP meeting is Wednesday.  We have a plan and a way forward, but I am nudging him to start thinking beyond the next two years. Elder is having a problem many of his contemporaries--regardless of neurological state--are having with regard to planning a life and a future.  And I am finding that the best way to manage the both of us during this time is with grace and compassion.  I'm going to figure out my work arounds to make a way forward for him. 

We did a little geocaching earlier for the first time in a year.  We'll move forward, a little at a time. Progress is progress, no matter how small.