Thursday – A Matter of Punctuation
Sep. 30th, 2010 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
I fell in love with my son the day he looked me in eye and smiled. He was 3 months old. I was so relieved that he was not going to be like my kid brother. I thought I was home free.
My kid brother was always odd, even when he was a baby. I remember the daughter of a family friend who used to babysit us both (we are 18 months apart in age) commenting about him.
"He was the strangest child. He would look at you, but he never smiled. You were okay, Nina. You were a sweet baby. But he was always...different. I can't explain it, but he was."
When Becky told me this, I was a teenager and I felt kind of smug that I had been a sweet, lovable baby and Ron had not been. He now self identifies as having Asperger's Syndrome. At the time, though, no one had a name for what was wrong with him, beyond "weird."
We had a love-hate relationship, my kid brother and I. I found him annoying, and I thought he was being annoying on purpose. He, in turn, found me untrustworthy, in no small part due to the fact that I had inherited my mother's wicked sarcasm gene, whereas Ron takes everything anyone tells him very, very literally. He told me once as an adult that he hates it when someone walks up and tells him a joke one-on-one; he likes to hear jokes when he is with a group, so he knows the appropriate moment to laugh by watching the people around him.
I hope that one day scientist will discover the gene that carries sarcasm, and those of us who can't speak without using it will be vindicated. When this report comes out, I will show it to my kid brother, becuase he is big on scientific data. Maybe he will forgive me for all the "bad advice" I gave him that was actually me making fun of everything (which is my own coping technique). Probably not, but maybe.
My kid brother very often walks around with a perplexed look on his face, like he finds whatever is happening around him to be confounding. He even has this look even when nothing much is going on in the room. Babies often have this look, too. My son wore this expression as a newborn and I found it so alarming that I looked at him and said, "Please don't be like your uncle Ron. Please?" Humor is my strength and my refuge. The idea of raising a child with no sense of humor terrified me.
When he smiled up at me from his crib 3 months later, I took it to be his answer: "Okay, I won't be. Look, I think you're funny right now!"
And he's not. My son has a great sense of humor and loves to laugh. We were reading Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs last night at bedtime, and he kept finding silly things in the illustrations that made him laugh to the point where he could barely breath. We picked up the book at the used bookstore last weekend, and he adores it. My son makes eye contact, too. His usual facial expression is not perplexed; it is curious or interested, and occasionally beaming. At home it is, at least.
At school, and sometimes in crowded or noisy places, his face clouds over with frustration and anger. Sometimes he looks afraid. When he is not with his social anchors, his father and I, things can get really ugly.
When my kid brother was little, he walked around with a question mark over his head. Now we have a name for what made him different, and the question mark is a period because the riddle has been answered. Today it is my son who has a question mark over his head; it is a different color than my brother's, and in a different font, but it's every bit as bold.
My eyes see clearer now than when I was young, and I've learned a thing or two since I thought my weird kid brother was being annoying on purpose. My parents were not soft on discipline and I don't think a day of my little brother's childhood passed without him being spanked or punished for one thing or another. It didn't help. It didn't change his behavior and it didn't make the question mark go away. They could not beat the Asperger's out of him; half the time he didn't even understand what he was being punished for.
When my son goes into a sensory overload and has a meltdown at school, I don't believe he does it on purpose, either. I'm certain there are plenty of people who think his behavior is indicative of a lack of discipline at home. I'm sure there are also plenty who think that I should soundly punish him for whatever happened at school once he gets home, instead of talk to him like I do and then simply not give him the "good behavior" reward he had been promised if he had a good day. These have been the most effective things I found that work with him, as unreliable as they are. Believe me, I've tried everything, and everything else has failed. Talking and offering (or withholding) rewards has been moderately successful.
Until I find an answer, all the draconian punishments in the world are not going to change my son. Experience has shown me that they actually make things worse and intensify his episodes.
Beneath that question mark (which many people confuse with an exclamation point, or else a pair of parenthesis that I have failed to put the proper data inside of), stands a beautiful and intelligent little boy with a great sense of humor. I fell in love with him 6 years ago when he smiled up at me from his crib, and I'm not giving up on him.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
I fell in love with my son the day he looked me in eye and smiled. He was 3 months old. I was so relieved that he was not going to be like my kid brother. I thought I was home free.
My kid brother was always odd, even when he was a baby. I remember the daughter of a family friend who used to babysit us both (we are 18 months apart in age) commenting about him.
"He was the strangest child. He would look at you, but he never smiled. You were okay, Nina. You were a sweet baby. But he was always...different. I can't explain it, but he was."
When Becky told me this, I was a teenager and I felt kind of smug that I had been a sweet, lovable baby and Ron had not been. He now self identifies as having Asperger's Syndrome. At the time, though, no one had a name for what was wrong with him, beyond "weird."
We had a love-hate relationship, my kid brother and I. I found him annoying, and I thought he was being annoying on purpose. He, in turn, found me untrustworthy, in no small part due to the fact that I had inherited my mother's wicked sarcasm gene, whereas Ron takes everything anyone tells him very, very literally. He told me once as an adult that he hates it when someone walks up and tells him a joke one-on-one; he likes to hear jokes when he is with a group, so he knows the appropriate moment to laugh by watching the people around him.
I hope that one day scientist will discover the gene that carries sarcasm, and those of us who can't speak without using it will be vindicated. When this report comes out, I will show it to my kid brother, becuase he is big on scientific data. Maybe he will forgive me for all the "bad advice" I gave him that was actually me making fun of everything (which is my own coping technique). Probably not, but maybe.
My kid brother very often walks around with a perplexed look on his face, like he finds whatever is happening around him to be confounding. He even has this look even when nothing much is going on in the room. Babies often have this look, too. My son wore this expression as a newborn and I found it so alarming that I looked at him and said, "Please don't be like your uncle Ron. Please?" Humor is my strength and my refuge. The idea of raising a child with no sense of humor terrified me.
When he smiled up at me from his crib 3 months later, I took it to be his answer: "Okay, I won't be. Look, I think you're funny right now!"
And he's not. My son has a great sense of humor and loves to laugh. We were reading Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs last night at bedtime, and he kept finding silly things in the illustrations that made him laugh to the point where he could barely breath. We picked up the book at the used bookstore last weekend, and he adores it. My son makes eye contact, too. His usual facial expression is not perplexed; it is curious or interested, and occasionally beaming. At home it is, at least.
At school, and sometimes in crowded or noisy places, his face clouds over with frustration and anger. Sometimes he looks afraid. When he is not with his social anchors, his father and I, things can get really ugly.
When my kid brother was little, he walked around with a question mark over his head. Now we have a name for what made him different, and the question mark is a period because the riddle has been answered. Today it is my son who has a question mark over his head; it is a different color than my brother's, and in a different font, but it's every bit as bold.
My eyes see clearer now than when I was young, and I've learned a thing or two since I thought my weird kid brother was being annoying on purpose. My parents were not soft on discipline and I don't think a day of my little brother's childhood passed without him being spanked or punished for one thing or another. It didn't help. It didn't change his behavior and it didn't make the question mark go away. They could not beat the Asperger's out of him; half the time he didn't even understand what he was being punished for.
When my son goes into a sensory overload and has a meltdown at school, I don't believe he does it on purpose, either. I'm certain there are plenty of people who think his behavior is indicative of a lack of discipline at home. I'm sure there are also plenty who think that I should soundly punish him for whatever happened at school once he gets home, instead of talk to him like I do and then simply not give him the "good behavior" reward he had been promised if he had a good day. These have been the most effective things I found that work with him, as unreliable as they are. Believe me, I've tried everything, and everything else has failed. Talking and offering (or withholding) rewards has been moderately successful.
Until I find an answer, all the draconian punishments in the world are not going to change my son. Experience has shown me that they actually make things worse and intensify his episodes.
Beneath that question mark (which many people confuse with an exclamation point, or else a pair of parenthesis that I have failed to put the proper data inside of), stands a beautiful and intelligent little boy with a great sense of humor. I fell in love with him 6 years ago when he smiled up at me from his crib, and I'm not giving up on him.
