Prioritising Home Life With The Family For The New Year
With the new year fast approaching, a lot of us will be reflecting on the year. Through the highs and
Read moreWith the new year fast approaching, a lot of us will be reflecting on the year. Through the highs and
Read moreYou know what I’m thankful for, especially this time of year? I’m thankful for an extended family that gets it. They really get it. Every Thanksgiving my one aunt on dad’s side, hosts a ginormous dinner for all of the f…
Read more10 things about our Zoombezibay (water park attached to our local zoo) trip that were notable today!!1. Sahara can wait in line without prompting or support !! When did this self control and awareness happen?2. Self advocacy Rocks.. she verbally asked …
Read moreStep 4 is predicated on the first three steps. You learn some stuff about autism. You get familiar with someone on the spectrum. You get comfortable with someone on the spectrum. Once you do that, you’ll be in a much better position to be a positive pr…
Read moreTo Lydia with Love Lydia comes in Like a gust of March wind And throws her things helter & skelter. She would let them lay on the floor For a week or more If only we would let her. Now she’s really neat, when she’s on her feet tap dancing or ballet She can pirouette […]
The very things that many people think make the world go round, actually make the world go wrong for anyone associated with autism. Hustle and bustle, chin-wagging, dropping everything to do nothing, spontaneity, chilling, trusting instinct, nous, crackling atmospheres, surprises, adventure. Society is bred and nurtured on wholesome truths like variety is the spice of life. When for so many touched by autism, variety is the spectre of life. A world where the primers of improvisation and intuition make it a world wrought with bafflement and, quite, frankly, danger. Off script, on high alert – us and Isaac.
Battening down the hatches has its appeal, believe me. Burying our heads in quicksand, getting lost to a limited life of fierce logic, linear living and uniformity. Scripts, structure, rigidity, predictability. Repetition, repetition, over and over.
And revealed to me in these positive and proactive moments – when brightness seeps in and there’s buoyancy and a bouncy spring in all our steps – is that Isaac’s existence can be one to really revel in. That despite how ill-fitting the world can be for his autism and dyspraxia (from sensory overload to the ubiquity of physical and visual disorder) right now, permeating this 8 year old boy’s climate is an extraordinary kindness. We are discovering microclimates of care and love orchestrated by friends, family, even strangers. At this very particular moment in time.
Out and about, his turn of phrase, turns heads. Bringing joy more often than not. Who can’t fail to warm to a young boy earnestly commenting that he is “so happy when I’m on a bus; having such a lovely time. Can we watch a little bit of buses and trains please daddy when we leave this bus for the street near the station at Highgate? Highgate has a capital H. Capital letters are for restaurants, people, names and places.”
Thoughtfulness can be found in the least expected places. Some recent repair work to our house meant a cavalcade of builders disbanding in his space – and disrupting. The noise and mess could easily have accelerated in Isaac’s troubled mind to a torpedoed home landscape. Step in builder Jim and his innate appreciation of autism, and perception of Isaac.
Fanciful maybe, but it even felt he allowed for Isaac’s visual perception and motor skills challenges, showing him where work would happen, bricks moved, tools left, mess cleared. Unifying for him this tapestry of disturbance to his world into a digestible, comprehendible whole.
But what if he arrives there and it’s not yet open? A kink to the flow of the punctiliously prepared day exposed already. Like a cumbersome computer ever expanding its ram capacity, Isaac’s ability to store information increases by the day; the flip side being a crash when the storage malfunctions will be ever more dramatic.
Talking of trains (which Isaac rarely doesn’t do) Isaac’s monologues of multiple station names and their adjacent roads are – at the times when he’s open to communicating this extraordinarily processed and recalled information – received with relish by friends. In awe of his photographic memory and encyclopaedic knowledge, blessed by his idiosyncrasies, these fleeting episodes affirm the value of his ‘difference’ and how it can instil optimism in all.
When things are good, it’s an extended family micro climate where his exuberance, eccentricity and infectious hysterics, just makes them smile and laugh. It’s so gloriously spirited.
They clash, of course. My wife mediating magically. But there is a kind of beautiful complementary nature to their interactions. Her typically evolving play is imaginative, implying the fine spatial and visual skills that he is so bravely battling with. Compering her mini tea parties can become quite chaotic – she creates, he crash, bang wallops. But Tabitha loves his rebellion somehow.
As she was, as if seated breathlessly in an atmospheric auditorium, by his extraordinary delivery, word perfect and completely from memory, of the entire Gruffalo story; most amazingly, in the exact tone and tenor of the film they’d both been rapt by. This sublime skill of his – entertaining and enthralling Tabitha (and us) in equal measure.
All these events and relationships emphasize just how safe and comforting the many man made microclimates of kindness, openness and awareness are, when we are lucky enough to find ourselves in them. Sometimes in public, usually not. Where awareness has been impressed upon people with vigour.
Who knows the longevity of this not impossible to locate kindness? I feel tears when recollecting the tantrums that people interpreted abjectly in the early years, when kindness was at best evasive. I block out the din of inner dread when contemplating him getting older. Where the world is one of dipping in and out of things; with intuitive filters and edits life-saving tools for folk – anathemas to how Isaac sees the world, pursuing excessively, fixating, immersing, obsessing. When his quirks may be not as refreshingly received. A crushingly conformist world at odds with those deemed odd.
…where ridiculous resides and because I always seem to take the long way around a story: My little dude is funny. Except, after BDC taking him shopping for new sneakers tonight, and finding that his feet are quickly reaching my size (he’s only 8!), he’s not truly” little”. Though I will probably refer to him as my […]
[ alternatively titled: the Rabinowitz Bubble Revisited] Today is officially our first full day of summer break. I haven’t written much over the last several months. Well, let’s be honest. I haven’t blogged at all. I’ve really missed writing here but for me to write something down it takes time, quiet, and a lot of […]
For whatever reason, though it’s something anxiety related I’m guessing (which deserves a much longer post), as soon as Henry puts on his jacket to wait (inside) for the morning bus he stops talking. Every morning he asks earlier and earlier if he can put on his jacket. This morning this is how this conversation […]
On one hand I can understand how innocent you think your project is. Just send home a paper about ancestry and ask kids to have their parents fill in the ancestry for mom, dad, and both sets of grandparents. They return with it, you have a great class discussion, everyone learns something.