Ying and Yang...shadow cannot exist without light.

Parent/Teacher conferences were this week and Safi is doing spectacular.  She is above where she should be in most areas and her abstract thinking inspired awe in me and her teacher.  For a child her age her abstract thinking is quite good, a kid with autism it is tremendous.  Academically, she is doing wonderfully.  Socially she is a work in progress.  She continues to struggle with waiting her turn, not pointing out the faults in the logic of others (teacher, included), and coping with disappointment.  Those are long term skills to work on, so there were no shockers at the meeting.  On a whole, her light shines bright.  Unfortunately, due to having no school on Veteran's Day  and early release the rest of the week because of parent teacher conferences....the shadow hit us hard midweek.  

On Wednesdays Safi go to speech therapy at school.  She loves it.  She gets to hang out with kids in other classes and grades and loves her speech teacher.  That said, it pulls her out of class and she is bound to miss some cool things.  They have been creating shapes with gumdrops and toothpicks, they then tell you how many vertices there are, etc.  That day when Safi got back to class she wanted to take an Advanced Reader test.  She did, but then missed learning how to create a rectangle using 4 gumdrops and three toothpicks.  When I arrived to pick her up she was in class going through a bunch of papers she was supposed to put in her backpack.  When she finally had them assembled to her satisfaction and she came out of class with the gumdrops and toothpicks in hand I could tell she was going to lose it.  Teacher told her that mom would help her figure out the secret at home (breaking one toothpick in the middle to make the two shorter sides of the rectangle).  I could tell that Safi needed to complete this task literally at school so I got down on my knees and began to help her problem solve.  She was already extremely emotional and easily frustrated.  I had to move her on.  She was crying as we walked to the car and she snapped at Logan not to look at her.  Once we got in the car I asked her to assemble the rectangle, and she did.  Then I checked her lunch and she had eaten hardly anything.  When the kids eat at least half of their lunch they get a small candy on the way to the park.  Safi wasn't going to get a candy, and that was the last straw.  She started getting louder and louder and I told her that if she could not calm down she would not be going to the park.  We rolled up to the park and I had Logan get out of the car and meet Emily and the other kids.  Safi was still freaking out about not getting a candy and I told her she had one last chance to calm down or no park.  All she heard was no park and KABOOM!!!  She began throwing her body back and forth in her seat, a la 3 yr old Safi, and had completely lost it.  I locked the door and pulled out of the lot to go home.  She got up out of her seat and grabbed me.  I pulled over and had the genius idea to tell her something that I had read other parents telling their children from my parent support group, "If you're going to take a swing at me, go for it, and know that it will be the last swing you ever take at me."  Yep.  I said that to a concrete thinking, Classically Autistic kid.  Bets on what happen next?!  You guessed it, she balled up her first, reeled her arm back, and POW!!!  She clocked me in the face.  I was stunned then even more stunned that I was stunned at all given the fact that I had, for all intents and purposes, just given her a direct order to hit me.  She was stunned, too.  And she sat.  She sat for the rest of the ride home.  She walked herself to the bedroom and once the door was closed proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs for a solid 20 minutes or so.  She eventually got it together and I showed her a list of the reasons why she was not given a candy in the car and why she was not allowed to go to the park.  She was calm enough to appreciate the visual aid and a half an hour later when we went to pick up her sister from school she spontaneously said, "Mom, I'm sorry I hurt you and said mean things to you."  She is a remarkable kid.  No Applied Behavioral Analysis taught her to feel sorrow at the thought of hurting someone she cares about.  No Behavioral Interventionist gave her a candy for apologizing to people.  Safi apologizes from the heart because she feels regret, she feels shame, she feels sorrow.  Safi feels.  All people in the spectrum feel, Theory of Mind deficit or not, they feel.  We go to these great lengths in early intervention to create these scripted, rote responses to human emotions and situations when what we really should be focusing on is supporting our loved ones on the spectrum's inner world and experience.  If given the opportunity to frankly be told how and what hurts others without providing the solution, they'll figure it out.  It may be clumsy and untimely, but it will be real.  That's what really matters.

Nixi had an okay week.  She's "stable enough" and that's that.  Again, the transition back from dad's on the weekend ends with a Sunday horror fest.  But here's the beauty of it.  Nixi lost it completely at Emily's house where we try to do Sunday family dinners when we can.  After we left Em texted me that her son Logan had just said, "Having Nixi, Safi, and Sarah is really nice."  We're a family pieced together by love and shared experiences....experiences that we have gone through together.  We are lucky.  Luckier than most.  Psychotic as a hell or not, Nixi is a tremendously lucky kid.  We've got a crew that always has our backs and doesn't bat an eye because we're family and that's what family does.  We are all so used to each other and all of our idiosyncrasies that they just melt away and only the great stuff...the laughs and the love...are remembered at the end of the day.  Truly awesome.

Sarah