All About the Boy

I’m never sure how much personal stuff to write on this blog, but every now and then I feel compelled to share. And so right now, even though I’d rather be writing gift guides and assorted other nonsense, I’m just going to rant.

Emmet has Asperger’s Syndrome. Look it up. It’s a disorder related to Autism, but sufferers are said to be “high functioning.” Just looking at him, you’d never know that anything was wrong. But if you spend some time with him, you’ll see that he has trouble with social functioning. Asperger’s sufferers (they call themselves “Aspies”) aren’t good at self-reflection, and they aren’t good at picking up on social cues. They're also (in most cases) uncoordinated, and they tend to have a variety of tics (physical and behavioral). On top of this, Emmet has an anxiety disorder.

Emmet’s life is tough. He is in trouble constantly at school because of the little tics that he’s developed, and because of his anxiety, and because he is afraid of going to the bathroom (which means that he has “accidents”). Emmet makes life at home hard, too. He is almost ungovernable. The things he does that are out-of-line are, essentially, compulsive actions, which means that no chats, no time-outs, no reasoning is useful with him.

My heart breaks for Emmet, because he is such a sweet little boy who just doesn’t understand how the world works. But right now my heart is also breaking because we’re being abandoned. It started out last year, when Emmet’s friends began to distance themselves from him. Even the first graders understood that he was strange and hard to play with.

But right now we’re being abandoned by people I thought were my friends. Our social invitations have dried up. I kind of understand that. Emmet makes any situation difficult – when you’re hanging out with friends, you just want things to be easy. But the harder thing for me is the judgment. As the wise Letitia pointed out to me, people tell themselves that Emmet’s problems come from bad parenting because people want to believe that something like this couldn’t happen to them. Not with their attentive, competent parenting, right? [God knows I’ve thought the same thing; karma is a bitch.] And so the judgment comes down. It hurts.

Now I’m getting left out, too. As I’m sure you’ve surmised, there is no shortage of reasons to dislike me. For instance, what kind of nerd uses the word surmised in conversation? Would you want to hang with anybody who talked like that?

God knows I’m not perfect. I probably shouldn’t have had children. I’m all emotional and flaky and weak. Most of the time I think I’m just not up for this job. I try to use my strengths to help us. I’m good at checking out books from the library, for example. I don’t have a lot of patience for reading them, unfortunately, but Papi does. And that was the other right thing I did – Papi is USDA-Prime husband/father material. Good work on that one, Mamacita.

And now I’ve shown you why I don’t think I could be a writer. I’m generally disinclined to lay it all out there for the world to see. And really, we could have an emoting contest, and I’m telling you, I WOULD WIN. But I mostly try to keep that superpower under wraps. But today I’m telling you this because I need you to leave me some vaguely encouraging remarks in the comment section. I work for the crumbs, you know.