Caught in a Word Cycle

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My son was terribly sick to his stomach yesterday (the runs) and with each successive diaper changing he was getting more and more tender and pained (even with Desitin).

It got really bad last night when he was so raw he was starting to bleed, and it was heart-wrenching to clean him knowing it hurt, but it would get worse if I didn’t. Well, it seemed to trigger an altogether new level of autistic cycle reaction. He started crying and screaming ‘Mother’ over and over and over…

Unlike normal, he wasn’t caught in just the word for a short period of time and easily distracted. He was caught in the word, the exact pronunciation sound, and the emotion. It was like listening to a record skipping - the exact same sound over and over. Said exactly the same way. Coupled with the exact same crying rhythm.

It scared the life out of my daughter, who subsequently burst out crying. To be honest, it scared me a bit too just because of how different and odd it was.

It also took quite a bit to get him out of that cycle, but as usual - distraction was the best tool, I just needed a really STRONG distraction to break him out of the cycle he was caught in.

Not a good day. Thankfully it seems the medicine has finally kicked in and his stomach problems aren’t showing up today.

I Left My Daughter Behind

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At least, that’s how I feel. I may not have literally left her, but I might as well have for how guilty I feel.

After a conversation with her the other day, she said some things that were really big eye-openers to me.

Can I come to my brothers therapy one day?

Will I get to help teach my brother in homeschool?

It was then that I started getting suspicious about what she might really be saying, and we started talking a bit more about that. Well, apparently I was right, I had been being blind. I’d left her behind in some of the more complex and rough aspects of her brothers autism, in an attempt to shield her from that stress, and what I ended up doing was making her feel left out.

It only occurred to me then that maybe her way of coping with her brothers autism is that she wants to actively help him improve. I hinted at this a bit, and she looked at me like I was the biggest idiot ever and came out with…

OF COURSE I want to help my brother get better, he’s my best friend and my only brother!

I nearly cried. *sigh*

In any event, I’ve decided to encourage my daughter to take a more active role in helping however she thinks she can or wants to. I hope that she’ll start feeling less apart, and more like one of the ‘crew’ as she starts having more freedom to join in some of the even more difficult aspects of raising autism.