Ben colored this picture of a girl reading a book on his online coloring app.
It’s a hot summer evening in
Florida. It’s the first non-rainy day in
over a week, so my husband hurries home from work to mow the lawn. I’ll do work all over the house, but if you
know me well, you know that I don’t do lawns.
On this particular evening, I clear the dinner dishes away and settle
down in my armchair to read. Ben sidles
over with his Ipad and snuggles next to me, as he loves to do. I give him a side hug/squeeze and he cuddles
closer. At eight years old he’s getting
almost too big to fit next to me in the armchair, and we joke about this fact
almost daily.
The
lawnmower rumbles in the background. Ben
instinctively begins streaming music on his radio to muffle the sound and
returns to his coloring app. He’s
working on a present for his Papa who he will visit soon. He’s concentrating on his work and though the
music relaxes him, he reminds me not to sing along. My singing tickles his back. After awhile, the mowing sound stops and we
hear a sudden squeak from next door. I
recognize it as the sound of someone cranking the spigot of the garden
hose. Ben instinctively yelps, and I
suggest he get his noise cancelling headsets.
He jumps up, puts them on, and returns to his work. A while later, he asks me if the noise has
stopped, and I tell him that it has. He
takes off the headsets but keeps them close by.
He’s finished his picture now and shows it to me proudly. I assure him that his Papa will love it.
Ben moves
on to his K’Nex, which are a type of building set with various plastic parts
that can be assembled to create as many things as a person’s imagination will
allow. Tonight Ben assembles his own
fidget device. He now has three fidget
spinners (one black, one blue, and one glow-in-the dark), along with a fidget
cube. In his upstairs playroom he has a
huge assortment of squishy balls and items that were his fidgets long before
the spinner craze took the world by storm.
Ben puts two K’Nex sticks together and joins them with a middle
piece. He flips the piece back and forth
in his hand. “This is my fidget calmer,”
he tells me. “It makes me feel
calm. I can use it when I’m getting too
excited, like I’ll feel when I see my Nana and Papa after the airplane.” “Here, try it,” he tells me. “Does it make you feel calm?” he asks. I start spinning it in my hand, but then he
redirects me to try it differently. I
try it his way, and the rhythmic motions are surprisingly soothing. “Yes,” I tell him, “It does make me feel
calm.” He then proceeds to make four
more fidget calmers, in sizes ranging from small to x-large. He hands the x-large to his Dad to try as he
comes in from his mowing.
I used to
spend a lot of time and energy worrying about whether my kid would be able to
function in this world. Through his
early years, I was his anchor, who helped calm the storm of his meltdown. I had to be the strong one- I had to give him
the words to help him cope. But now, at
eight, he is showing me that he is becoming more and more capable of his own
self-regulation. He is listening to cues
within his own body and using the tools to help himself cope. He’s even anticipating his own needs and
finding solutions to future problems, as he did when he created the fidget
calmer for our upcoming trip.
Ben
snuggles next to me again on the armchair, flipping his fidget calmer while I
return to my book. “When I was born, did
you know I was on the spectrum?” he asks.
When he asks me questions that seem out of the blue, I’ve learned that
they are never as random as they may seem at first glance. Still, I usually need a moment to come up
with my response. “No, I didn’t find out
that you were on the spectrum until you were four years old,” I tell him. “But what I did know when you were born was
that I love you, and I love you now more than ever.” I try to push the conversation forward to
tell him more about what it means to be on the spectrum (right now- he thinks
he’s on the spectrum because his back tickles when I sing). I want to tell him how his autism may bring
challenges, but it brings him strengths him too. I want to tell him about the awesome
community of people who are also on the spectrum and will be a great support to
him in the years to come, but, for now, he is done with the conversation. His question has been answered, and for today
that is enough. I let the conversation
go, because I learned years ago that it’s best to follow his lead in these
matters. It may be days, weeks, or
months, but he’ll ask another question at some future time, and our
conversation about the spectrum will begin anew. And so, we sit in comfortable silence in our
cool living room, cuddled under a fuzzy blanket, even though it’s a hot summer
evening in Florida.
