Posts by BenWilson
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And I have to admit that I made the decision early on not to watch OF. I can't remember why. I now regret that decision.
Me too. I could invent a reason though. Fortunately, you can rent the earlier seasons on DVD - I'm sorely tempted, if the sex scenes are all Emma's making them out to be.
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There's really nothing like being guilt-tripped by "experts" because you don't want to keep your child in school any more. There's one particular person I'd cross the street to avoid.
At some point you have to trust your instincts. I've pushed to have Marcus go to kindergarten, to promote socialization. It seems to have had a very, very beneficial effect. But there was a good chance it could have been a very negative experience - I had to satisfy myself that the people in the kindergarten were up to the task. I've been pleasantly surprised at just how far they've been willing to go, given how poorly funded they are.
It's actually not unusual, given autism's genetic dimension. You just get a slightly different flavour with each kid. (And you inevitably start inspecting yourself for flavorsome elements ...)
Tell me about it. Am I autistic? Maybe I'm just good at hiding it...even from myself.
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The characters talk about sex constantly, but Charlie, the ultimate he-whore, is always shown in bed in a t-shirt, boxers, and sometimes socks.
This is the standard apparel of male porno stars. I don't think the joke is lost on 50% of the audience. I see coded references to hetero porn for men in that show every time I have the misfortune to be subjected to it.
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I just hope you are finding support for you too. There is a thing called chronic sorrow that parents of children who are 'different' from a so-called norm, can be affected by, and it can come and go.
I've known about it all of my life - my aunt is severely intellectually handicapped as a tragic result of the extremely rare PKU syndrome (especially tragic because the damage is caused by normal food that the conscientious parents are feeding to the child) and the sorrow never left my grandmother. But there is ironic luck in this - probably as a direct result, my father is a child psychologist who specializes in autistic and other special needs children, working with GSE. I have had great support from my parents, and it was he who pushed for us to make the ACC claim (being patently aware of the limits of what GSE can provide by comparison), and this claim led to an enormous amount of support.
But no, I don't really have any professional help for myself yet. It's a very difficult path to even begin down. I guess I could rationalize and say that for several years I have prioritized being "strong" over being "happy". It seemed necessary at the time. I've only recently realized I was depressed, although others clearly had realized.
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I know some friends in a similar position to yours who seem to be on a similar time-frame -- after a year of stress on everything, they're starting to emerge again. It's good to see.
A social worker at the hospital gave me some excellent advice that might explain this. Right in the middle, when we didn't know what was wrong with Marcus, he was just having seizures, didn't know whether he would live or die, whether he had some terrible innate condition like leukemia, and had to watch him in a medically induced coma for 5 days, she told me that it was very common at a time like this to withdraw to only the closest people in your life. She suggested not to be ashamed or embarrassed about this.
I have been unwilling until quite recently to even talk about it online- when you asked after the baby when he was born, I could only say "The glass is half full", by which I meant "Things are pretty fucked, really, but at least we have a healthy boy who will live". His recovery has been truly amazing, but I don't like to hold too many hopes at this early stage. He is very much behind his age in some respects, but interestingly in some others he appears to excel - he has an extreme talent for memorization. Brains are very mysterious instruments - we speculate that the nature of his condition may have actually developed some talents that would in most children remain latent until a much older age. He could speak well before he could sit.
Our stress came much later
I guess that the difficulties with your children were not apparent immediately? I recall you speaking only recently (a year ago?) of receiving a diagnosis for the second child, which was very upsetting to hear but explained a lot. I was certainly sad to hear it - it seemed unfair that such a thing should be visited on you twice.
Stuff's way better now, and I feel pretty good about our choices.
That's been good to see, from afar.
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I don't credit the theory and I've never been able to rationalise this. I just stopped trying.
Sounds almost miraculous. This is, I think, the bizarre thing about alternative medicine - sometimes it has incredible successes, and that can justifying endless failures.
The closest thing I've had to that is having a back problem cured by being thrown down in a martial arts class and falling awkwardly. At the time it was nasty, and I was quite bitter on the instructor for throwing me like that. But over the next couple of weeks a persistent lower back pain I'd had for decades dissolved and has never reappeared. I can't explain it, and I would certainly not recommend it - most of accounts I've heard of awkward falls resulted in severe injuries - fractures, concussions, ruptured organs and dislocations.
And now you've made me all weepy when I have work to do.
Me too. I think I'll take the boy for a bike ride, that always cheers me up.
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At our end of the disability world, I think it's common for parents with autism spectrum kids to go through at least a spell of real passiveness -- you get tired, it's hard.
It sure is. Particularly with a newborn in the house, the late nights have been killing us until recently, when faced with the high attention needs of the firstborn early in the morning. I'm not sure if high attention needs aren't pretty normal for a 3.5 year old anyway, but because he's special, I tend to feel much worse about neglecting him. It's affected everything in my life, work, play, relationship with wife and friends. I think I'm only realizing now just exactly how much stress we've been under - the first year I was running on adrenalin, and determined to make light of the burden.
And to be honest, sometimes parents who are really active are chasing hopes and doing things that maybe even aren't in their children's interest, so much as a way of avoiding accepting and loving the child they have.
It occurs to me a lot. As a computer programmer, it's tempting to treat the condition as a 'bug', and to make a mental dissociation that when I'm playing with him, I'm 'debugging' his problems. I'm sure that's a self-defense mechanism far more than a useful metaphor.
But with respect to love, I have to make a sad confession - I have found that I love him all the more for his condition. Having been forced to put a lot more effort into him than I was ever expecting to, I think the bond is far tighter than it might otherwise have been. My worry is that I don't feel the same way towards the second child, and it's tempting to think of him as having been produced "for the first child", in the belief that the forced socialization of siblings would be beneficial to him. Hopefully this is false, and I just haven't bonded to the second one yet on account of how easy he has been by comparison.
But you, Ben, sound like a champ to me. Keep it up.
Cheers, you're not so bad yourself. I found PAS extremely therapeutic during the first traumatic year - nothing like having an argument about something abstract to take the mind of a concrete and ever-present worry.
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The parents who deal with it the worst are the ones who had it all planned out for their brilliant child.
You really have to let that go before you get anywhere
I'm pretty sure I fall into this category, at least somewhat. My first son had a stroke, and has subsequently been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and more recently 'on the autism spectrum'.
Whilst I'm not expecting him to become a genius, I do wish to give him the very best opportunities that I can. Unfortunately, because he is 'special', the way to do this is not immediately obvious. Things that are appropriate for 'normal' kids may not be appropriate for him.
We receive a great deal of support through ACC, which makes us extremely lucky, but it's a double-edged sword to be exposed to so much expert advice. I find myself bordering on neurotic at times, in my indecision about when to treat Marcus' behavior as normal or not. I see all the time the way therapists work with him, and they encourage us to model around that, to use the same processes. Generally these things work, but they are also incredibly intense work, particularly for people who are not trained to it, who don't do it for a living, and who can't go home at the end of the day and be free from it.
I can fully understand when the therapists tell us that we are pretty unusual in mostly following their advice, and that most families just don't do anything they say, and pretty much leave their kids to themselves. I can even see the appeal of it.
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I finally saw the actual fight, which a friend had MySkyed. I bore out my comments upthread about the actual danger of boxing vs MMA. The Cameron KO was far nastier than most I've seen in MMA (although of course there are some exceptions, typically in striker vs striker fights, which are basically boxing matches), in the sense that he appeared to receive almost nothing but punches to the head from the mighty fists of Tua, who was in a fully planted position. I actually felt a little sickened by it, much more so than I would from seeing, for instance, someone getting a cut in MMA from an elbow which bleeds profusely. Those kinds of injuries heal in a week or two. Cameron's high level of fitness enabled him to take far more damage than he should have and it's damage primarily to his brain .
MMA looks worse, but seldom actually is. That might be down to the training metaphor - a sport where you have to tap-out for safety reasons encourages a far more highly tuned awareness of when you are beaten and should give up. It also signals directly to the other fighter that it's time to stop, rather than throw in a few extra blows to make sure. These are usually the most devastating of all, when the opponent is completely undefended and possibly unable to protect themselves even from the fall to the mat. Or in Cameron's case, unable to fall to the mat, to protect themselves from more undefended blows.
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My chances of understanding what happens at the breakdown wouldn't be significantly diminished if the commentary ended up being in te reo.
A squirrel grip crosses all language boundaries instantly.
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