Guest Post: Solid Footing

Today's guest post comes from Kat, a long-time blogging friend who has her own great blog at Spectrum Beach. Kat is mom to two sons: Movie Boy, who is autistic and currently in middle school and his younger brother Ben Ten. Today Kat looks back on an Easter day with Movie Boy and reminds me of the many moments in my son's life when we struggled to learn together: he to master something new and me to see the world differently...

---

Photo copyright Kat All rights reserved

I have a picture of Movie Boy at an Easter Egg hunt when he is about 3-1/2. It is from a series of pictures at a neighbor’s Easter party. In some of the pictures, there are children in the background with animated smiles. Movie Boy is holding a basket in one hand, and a ball in the other. To the untrained eye, he looks like he is participating. But he’s not really. The picture catches him in mid-step. He is getting ready to put his foot down. But I know, because I can see the rigid arch in his foot, and the furrow in his brow, that what he is going to do, before he plants that foot firmly, is to lightly tap his foot on the ground. He needs to see if he can walk steady on that particular piece of ground. Because even though he has walked on grass many times before, he has not walked on this particular grass on this lawn, and he is unsure of his footing. So, he looks like someone who is slowly making their way across a patch of thin ice, except we are in Hawaii and it is 78 degrees and sunny and he’s wearing shorts and sandals. The ball he holds is a constant for him, a security object. We go nowhere without it. He never bounces it, or throws it, or rolls it. He just holds it. The objects he carries help steady him, I suppose. But they also tie his hands up, and weigh him down a bit. So much for a little boy to keep track of, making sure he has the basket in one hand, and the ball in the other. No wonder he can’t think about what is going on around him. He carries a lot of weight, and at such a young age.

Not many people take notice of his careful steps or the fact that he isn’t engaging with the other children. Or maybe they are just too polite to mention it. He gets a few looks, and the parents shepherd their children around him, giving him a wide berth. I hover constantly, my hand outstretched to gently guide him. None of the other children have the issue with the grass, and so become bored with him and move on to interact with other peers. Even though this lawn is the same as every other lawn in our neighborhood, this lawn is different to him and he is out of sorts trying to find his footing. Today, that means that he is just absorbed in his own world, clinging to his comfort items, making his way one step at a time. On another day, he might have had a melt down. But thankfully not today, with so many people looking on.

And so while the other children run and play and laugh and interact and grab at eggs and fill their baskets, Movie Boy has got a death-grip on his basket, a familiar item he brought from home. He’s added this to his arsenal today -- he needs extra security in this strange place, more than the usual ball will provide.

He uses the basket as another comfort item; the idea that it holds things is distracting to him – I reach down and put an egg in his basket and he seems irritated but he moves on. He doesn’t model my egg-gathering action as I hoped he would. Filling the basket is not on his agenda. This does not motivate him or concern him. The promise of candy inside the eggs means nothing because he still struggles with concepts like cause and effect. When another adult shows him there is candy inside the eggs, he is too distracted by the grass and his footing to eat the candy. Adults want to help, but they, like the children, become bored when he doesn’t respond as expected. He never lights up like the other children do, realizing that if there is candy in this one egg, there must be candy in ALL the eggs. This is not in his thought process today.

So why is he here? And why is he doing this? To this day, I ask myself that question. He is so obviously uncomfortable. Maybe I should have kept him home that day. I can admit now, but probably would have denied then, that a big reason we were there was because I wanted him to experience this tradition. I used to go around including him in these things, hoping that something would “click” and he would just get it. You could say that this was more about me than him. But on the other hand, if you don’t expose a child to activities like this, how can he know whether or not he likes them? So, on that day, he went through the motions because I put him through the motions, but it is clear he is not getting the big picture of candy and Easter eggs and parties. At this point, he is just trying to navigate the smooth close-cropped grass. He endures it because he is 3-1/2, and he has to. At 3-1/2, he does not participate to try to make me happy. This concept has not occurred to him yet either. That will come later.

But I do see a glimmer in his eye. I can see that even though he is uncomfortable, that one day, he might become used to the grass and the strange people and the odd plastic eggs with the candy, and then he might put the basket down and have a hand free to participate.

Today, I can look back and realize that if you were to measure his success in how many eggs he collected that day, you would show a dismal result. But if you measured his success in his mastery of that grass, and the fact that the next year when we attended a similar egg hunt he was much more at ease, then you could call his day a success.

It’s just a matter of perspective, really. When you have a child with autism, you have to walk a fine line between pushing them a little out of their comfort zone so they can learn to move in this big scary world of ours, without pushing on them your ideas of what they should want to do.

That morning, my beautiful little three-year-old boy looked up at me, with his big blue eyes, and without words could not tell me what he needed or what he wanted. He couldn’t say he wanted to go, or that he didn’t want to go. He couldn’t even tell me he was thirsty. But I was in the habit of keeping a full sippy cup around at all times and offered it often. When a need or want can’t be communicated, you have to make your best shot at anticipating the need and hope for the best. What else can you do?

These days, he’s 12 years old. And an old pro at Easter egg hunts, by the way. I wish our challenges these days were as simple as Easter egg hunts and overcoming the fear of unknown yards of grass. Today he is finding his footing not on neighbors' lawns but in the big, sophisticated world of middle school. He doesn’t carry his ball anymore, but he does carry more weight on his shoulders than most 12-year-olds ever will. Those early years, him developing those coping mechanisms and finding his way out of himself, and me learning his non-verbal and now verbal cues, and anticipating his needs when he couldn’t tell me, have gone a long way to help us both get through this phase of life. I have grown a lot since then, too. I have a better concept of what makes him happy, and try very hard not to impose my dreams and experiences on him. I know that seemingly unsuccessful days are sometimes the groundwork we need for successful days later. And I remind myself, that I may have to look at his progress from a different angle to see the success of his path. But that is okay.