The Neverending Story

 Younger missed his alarm, hence, his bus.

He doesn't do that often. Most of the time, he is the best regulated person in our house.

Which is a high standard to maintain; perhaps he is feeling it.  Anyway, that would have been enough for one morning if he didn't say halfway to our destination "Damn, I forgot my earplugs.  But you can come back and drop them off."

Context: today is a long day; school, bowling, indoor percussion, in that order.  The earplugs are for the last. He won't need those until 6 pm.

As if I had nothing better to do. I do have to work, and oh yeah, run the other guy to his job and back. But I haven't had my coffee yet, and I am smart enough to not blurt when I haven't been properly caffeinated.  I pause for a second.  "Um.  How about I do that when I have a reason to be back this way--either when I drop your brother off for work or when I pick him up?" I don't mention that he could keep these things in his backpack so he doesn't have to worry about remembering them. 

He already does a lot of that executive functioning stuff--all the stuff the rest of us have a hard time with. Like I said, he gets held to a higher standard.

If that weren't enough, work fell off elder's radar today. Around noon, I started watching the time and listening for him to come up and get changed. When he hadn't shown up by 12:39, I went down to see what was keeping him.  He looked at me blankly and told me he wasn't due in until tomorrow.

Um. It was there that I kinda lost it.  He managed to quickly get himself together, and I was able to deliver him to his workplace--on time, with time enough for him to review the Costco shopping list with me. 

Which has led me to consider all the coping mechanisms each of us has in place for our respective blind spots. As a collective, we can write a fairly exhaustive manual on literally all the coping strategies. The list is as awe-inspiring as it is mind boggling. Considering what each of us has on our own plates, we are doing okay.

Could be better, but I am grateful for okay.

I took advantage of the sortie with elder to get younger's ear plugs over to him.  Meanwhile, a couple of my former colleagues started chatting, and I couldn't attend, because driving.  The high school was in the middle of a lock down drill, but they allowed me to come in and drop off the ear plugs.

I stood outside the high school and pondered the absurdity of it all.  Elder asked me "What's the point?" as I was driving him to work.

What's the point, indeed.

 

Cloud

 So I woke up yesterday at 4:30 am in the deepest darkest hole I've been in since about 2005.

It was the morning of younger's IEP meeting. Also of the panel that elder was asked to join at the last minute.

Down there in the pit with me was all the unspoken accusations, that I didn't do enough for either kid, that I sold them both short and down the river, that I'm not doing anything to help my partner, that I'm no use to anyone at all, really, so why bother?

Fortunately, he woke up right about then and put all that to bed.

But that didn't stop me from dreaming that someone walked away with my mom bag and everything in it (in short, my whole life.  I was chasing after it when I woke up). The whole chasing thing got me out of bed to make sure my bag was where I left it (it was).

But I had other hoops to jump through. Things went a little sideways job-wise and all the static from the night before magnified what would otherwise have been just a nuisance and nothing worth trifling about. Come to think of it, I have had a whole lot of that this week--outsized reactions to minimal bumps.

Trauma will do that to you.  Someone drew a cartoon that aptly describes the thing.

So, yeah. That.

The meeting went fine; younger has his way forward and needs to keep doing his thing. We have a teachable moment with his job, W-2s and all that good stuff that we set to have tomorrow. Elder did his panel, and that went fine. His conversations with his transition coordinator could have gone better this morning. I went down to investigate.

The usual. The anxiety.  The disability. He's freaking disabled, but we can't get the system to see that.  It's almost as funny as having to reapply for benefits every year to prove both guys have autism--I mean, it's not like the autism goes away, but here we are, year after year, proving the proven,

I went down and vented my spleen...again...still...and I saw him tear up. And he apologized.  

And went right back to what he was doing. 

So that might be part of my black hole. For a hot minute it looked like he might lurch forward.  But, he slid back, making excuses, I guess excuses on the face of it, but maybe there's more to it than that. (Isn't there always).

Hubby and I are at capacity.  Not sure what's left for either of us to do. 

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. 

The Awful Rowing Toward Adulthood

 I can say with a fair amount of certainty that this includes me. 

I'm sitting here triaging my to do lists, and all of my activities are nonpreferred ones. I pulled out some of elder's Sudoku books and am trying my hand at them, since somehow working puzzles helps me process stuff I need to process, and the crosswords aren't challenging enough. 

Elder can solve a sudoku as quickly as I can solve a crossword and assures me that "I am doing fine," even though it takes me about four times as long as something it takes him less than 10 minutes to do. 

Can we monetize that?  For real?

He's struggling, too.  I need him to figure out what he wants to do and do it; right now, he is working two part time jobs that are, at best, really part time.  Part of the to-dos is to get him to sit down and start exploring his options. His main goal is "to stay out of trouble."  That's a virtual guarantee if you do nothing. I literally don't know what to do. 

Younger, meanwhile, is doing his thing, has some really long days this month because of bowling and indoor back to back.  He's in a cheerful mood despite not getting his very specific pizza on Monday (put off for another time) and just going forth and conquering in his inimitable quiet way. The dual enrollment thing is a huge win, but as per usual, he is not impressed. 

And I'm still just clearing out. Literally and figuratively. 'nuff said. 

We will get there.

Hard Stuff and Heavy Lifts

 Some things don't take a lot of time, but they do take up a lot of emotional space.

I had a couple non-preferred tasks that needed doing for weeks, and I finally sat down to do them. All told, I dispatched all tasks in less than 30 minutes, but it took me half a month to be able to do them. 

Whyizzit?

I think space has a lot to do with it. The space I am using as my office isn't conducive to doing some of the harder, non-preferred stuff. It really needs to get cleared out, but it's mostly hubby's stuff, so I don't feel like I have the agency to do what I'd like with it (read:  donate it or otherwise make it go away).

But I dragged out the lapboard and brought the other puter down and set myself up alongside younger on the couch.  He made pancakes this am (day off) and wants me to take him on a quest to revisit some childhood memories and take him out for very specific pizza.  Weather will probably mean we're sitting tight and we'll probably watch some of Elder's latest obsession together. 

One of the hard things was returning a call to someone I have been avoiding a few weeks, because I knew it wasn't going to go well.  She alternately praised, scolded, lambasted, lamented and cycled through these things about a dozen or so times.  I'm stuck. She doesn't agree with me, and I don't agree with her. But, I can't disagree; I hmm noncomitally, but it's pretty clear we are not in agreement. Hence the scolding and lambasting. 

But it's a 15 minute or so call, and I live through it, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

It took me 3 weeks to make it, though. I dread phone calls and don't like unpleasant ones all that much.

But there were other things to do;  Dad and Elder are taking down the lights and younger is now officially in enrolled in community college, earning credits for some of his senior year course work.

This was something I literally did not see coming. 

Woot.  I think we may have another reason to celebrate.....

You Will Dream New Dreams.....

 So, just got back from an evening out.  One of my work friends invited me to a friend's house about a month ago.  A bunch of folks about our age get together every Friday night in some guy's downstairs lair, which has two competition dart boards and a fully stocked bar.  We order pizza, talk, and throw darts. They are a great bunch of folks; I'm finding as they try to teach me to throw that they have an abundance of patience.

I threw a bulls eye tonight. Twice.

And we could literally stumble down the hill of the golf course next door to get home if we had to. 

The boys don't mind us going out--in fact, they kind of like the house to themselves for an evening. 

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about my ladies group that meets at the brewery once a month; that's been happening since June, and on any given evening, I never laugh as hard as I do with these ladies.  It's just fun---good conversation with good people, and oh yeah, the beer.....

I spent decades building my village, and the years flew by because I was raising my boys, and there was always, always, always things that needed doing, goals that needed to be met, fires that needed to be put out. I sped along, because life did, and I did my best to keep up.

But as I told the ladies in November, after that emotional championship weekend, it's a good thing to pause and enjoy the triumphs when they happen. I echoed that in my presentation earlier this month. The best thing about savoring these moments is sharing them with others.

I'm playing with the idea of joining a bowling league. Just for fun.

Once upon a time, many of these things were impossible; that hubby and I could go out on a date, maybe do an overnight or two (and we did, twice, pre-COVD, two overnight stays I won at separate silent auctions).  Yet, here we are.   We have the occasional speed date when both boys are otherwise engaged. We have friends now to hang out with and do things with.

We take the date car out for rides.  We need to do more of that.

I thought those times were long over. They were only on hiatus.

It feels good to....be.

Latter Day Uses of the Photographic Memory

 I have a photographic memory, which made me an exceptionally lazy student in nonpreferred school subjects. I didn't give any more time than I had to in memorizing facts for a test (so that stuff could be cycled out of my ROM for more interesting things).  But I did make it a point to actually LEARN the stuff I was interested in, not for any greater good so much as my own interest in whatever it was I was obsessed over at the time. 

To some extent, both boys share some flavor of this. Elder is more me, here--he was a rock star academically because he could learn the stuff for as long as he needed to know it.  Younger, on the other hand, comes by his knowledge honestly--he's a slow processor, but he uses this to his advantage in that he is a thorough learner. He might not get the grades, but you can bet he's mastered the material. 

As one person helpfully pointed out to me, schooling isn't everything; how can you translate any academic success into real world success?  What can you actually do to monetize it, to make a living?

Let's break the monetizing and making a living down, shall we?  On the surface they seem the same, but they are actually two completely different ideas if you dig a little. Monetizing means making money. Making a living could and to some does mean the same thing. Lately, I see making a living as making a life.

And making a life is at least as important as making a living.

What does having a photographic memory have to do with either thing? Actually, not much with the former, but yes, it can mean the world for the latter.

Back in the day, hubby used to tell me I could have been a lawyer for the amount of recall I have for conversations, actions, events and my ability to spit particulars back out at crucial instances.  Both my kids actually share this ability--which is a great party trick, btw, but what does one DO with this? In the present day, my mindfulness exercises are bringing me to particular moments in time that parallel things happening in the present day. At first, this getting knocked sideways in time was disconcerting at best, scary at worst.  What the hell did this mean? Why were these things coming back?  Am I haunted?  

Then I started blogging on some of the things, and whatever I wasn't blogging about, I was talking about; I was processing in the explanation and communication, but what was I processing and why did I need to process it?

Where I am landing is simple; the time frame I keep landing in is contemporary with the ages of both my boys; I can argue that I was more autistic than my older guy at the same age. He is infinitely less tone deaf than I was at the same age. While I was more "out there" than he is (but let's get real, COVD wasn't a thing then), man, the sheer carnage of relationships that crashed and burned for me at that time is infinitely greater than whatever he's done in his entire lifetime up to this point. Professionally, he already puts me to shame, having been at both his jobs five years now (while I have lost count of all the gigs I had in the same time frame); personally, what he lacks in numbers of peeps in his life, he more than makes up for the lack of quantity in the quality of the folks he has in his corner. 

Where the memory kicks in;  I do remember all the details, even the cringe-worthy things.  The beauty of looking back with what I know now teaches me what I did wrong; moreover, it teaches me where others went wrong.  Not everything was all my fault; and knowing this helps me heal. 

I'm not saying that my going back in time is going to fix whatever needs fixing, but I finally have an understanding for some of the whys and how I need to deal with things in the present day and do a better job of it.  And I get to use some of these lessons as teachable moments for both kids. Here's where I could have done better; here's where others could have done better.

So important, because we tend to internalize everything and blame ourselves for everything that went wrong.  It's important to acknowledge (and atone, where necessary) for your mistakes, but it's just as important to acknowledge that what other people said or did to you is 1) not your fault and 2) might not have anything to do with you at all, anyway. How people treat you is more about them than it ever was about you. 

And blogging about all this stuff might help a person or two accept themselves, understand themselves, and maybe help turn things around. 

I'm here to help.  And my kids are here to help me (and sanity check me, because as I said, their memories are at least as good as mine).