It's not like that snuck up on me, what with the speech delay, therapy playgroups, nappies until the age of six, echolalia, nuclear meltdowns, NEPs (negotiated education plans) or puberty. No, I knew all that was merely the supporting act for what was to come.
One night while I was sleeping - it had to be then, I can't account for it any other way - Eldest grew a foot and a half, skipped two shoe sizes, started 'changing' (uh-huh, that kind of changing) and amped up the sass to about four billion. It's phenomenal how fast this is all happening. And I am freaking the heck out.
At 5'4, he is as tall as me now. He is twelve. TWELVE. Two months ago he still needed help turning the taps on in the shower (for fine motor/safety reasons); now he screams if I so much as breathe near the closed door. We started deodorant this year, "like Dad's". And he wears trunks now - not briefs, trunks - but for gosh sakes woman, not the purple ones! Purple is the bad colour! (bit of poetic licence there). He eats like he's preparing for hibernation, which in reality is probably pretty close to the truth because I seem to remember an awful lot of sleeping in as a teenager.
But the newest installment on the road to full-blown teen angst? Pimples.
They seem to have popped up overnight. I don't remember pimples at twelve, but then again, I was probably too busy reading Enid Blyton and The Baby-Sitters Club to bother looking in a mirror (substitute Nicholas Sparks and blogs now and not much has changed!) Of course, this couldn't just be rectified with a quick chat about facial hygiene and the passing of the
So this is why at 8:45 pm tonight I found myself demonstrating the correct technique of applying pimple wash to one's face without chemically burning one's eyes.
A long time ago, in high school I think, we had a teacher give us an interesting exercise. Imagine explaining how to make a cup of tea to someone who does not know what a cup, a teabag, the kettle, or a spoon is. You cannot use gestures. Pick up the tall round thing with the hole in the middle. That flat thing that looks like a stick ("No, you can't say that, assume they don't know what a stick is either") is used to move the white powder ("That could mean any kind of white powder to them") to the round thing with the hole. That bag with the string ("What's a bag?") goes in too. Now fill the big thing with the handle up with water...you get the idea.
Teaching Eldest how to de-pimplify was a bit like that. Or a Fawlty Towers episode.
He didn't want to put water on his face. He didn't want to make bubbles with the wash. He nearly lost an eye to the soap and an errant finger. Rinsing his face afterward was even more fun with the concept of cupping one's hands together to hold water long enough to splash on to his face being utterly lost on him. It was hilarious and tragic all at the same time.
This is one of those things that people in the outside world don't ever have need to contemplate. When their kids get to be about ten or eleven, Mum or Dad sits them down for 'the chat' (even if the Big Chat has come and gone, there's usually the Fun Specific Facts About Puberty chat to come). You might explain things once, with reminders every now and then to put on deodorant, shower and brush teeth. If crazy things start happening to, or coming out of, their bodies at inopportune times, hey, it's all good, it's normal, don't sweat it.
Autistic kids' brains don't work like that. Most of the time with Eldest, an instruction or habit or snippet of important information has to be repeated often, sometimes dozens of times, before it 'sticks'. For some things you need to physically show him how to manipulate his hands, or work taps, or operate simple machines (a toaster, for example - not a lathe, in case anyone was worried). It's all about the visual, miming behaviours for him to mimic later. It can be really tedious and you need a ton of patience. Tonight, for example, he was Not In The Mood for instructions. As we were washing our faces together ("This is how you move your fingers on your cheeks. Watch out for your eyes. Keep your mouth closed") he was snarky and uncooperative. Which means he wasn't paying attention, therefore almost certainly rendering tonight's little demonstration completely ineffective.
If it had been Middle or Youngest, I would only have needed to tell them where to find the cleanser in the cupboard and know that they'd do what they were asked, properly, using a skills set they'd already learned by default. In fact, Middle would probably have spent the time planning experiments to measure the differences in suds produced by adding different amounts of water to the subject's face.
Youngest would have performed the entire task while singing Taylor Swift's latest tune and twirl-dancing around the bathroom. And then finished it off with a gymnastics 'ta da!' gesture with arms above her head.
Eldest...well, it's interesting. Anything requiring an electronic device and we're home free. That kid could reprogram a DVR underwater (probably after having pored over the manual - for fun - as light bedtime reading the twenty-nine nights prior) It's just the repetitive, 'practice-y' kinds of things that he struggles with sometimes.
God help us when he needs to be taught how to shave.
I wonder if there's an app for that?
1 comment:
Ugh on the pimples! By the time he learns how to do the face wash thing, they'll probably be gone, but at least he'll have learned how to keep soap out of his face.
I have a non-autistic child (she's grown now) who is a whizz with electronic stuff too. Doesn't even read the manual apart from the first "basics" page, sometimes not even that. She'll just sit there pushing buttons and switching cords around until everything is connected and working perfectly.
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