Levels of Love

Can you love someone else's children? Adoptive parents say "absolutely yes!" Do step-parents say the same thing? http://www.thedhx.com/2008/08/17/other-womens-children/

Hide the Presents

It's time to hide presents at our house. My parents used to hide presents before Christmas, but I always found them. It was rare for me to not know what I was getting well before the big day. The challenge was to find them before they were wrapped - sometimes I could get enough of the tape neatly unstuck to peek inside and see what I had, but that was always dangerous. One tiny little rip could give away the whole covert operation.

In my house, wrapping the presents ahead of time actually causes more of a problem than merely hiding things in plain sight. Our autistic son Jack loves presents, by which I mean he loves opening them. He generally cares little about what's inside, it's the thrill of opening that gets him going. And he is absolutely oblivious to the shame of detection. He'll unwrap a present right in front of you, at high speed, just to get it open before you finish leaping over the furniture in a vain attempt to reach him before he exposes the big surprise you bought for one of the other kids. If it's his present he opens, it's basically "so what?" Just wrap it again and give it to him on christmas morning.

So in our house, if you wrap presents before you hide them, you had better have them under lock and key. And on Christmas morning, assign someone to guard the presents, otherwise Jack will have opened EVERYONE's presents within three minutes of being let into the living room. I can't count the number of times he's opened everything when no one was looking - the first time he did it was before christmas and he opened every single thing under the tree and then we had no idea what belonged to who or where it had come from. That was a mess. That was the last year we put any presents under the tree. Ever since then our tree has been rather lonely looking, as all the beautifully wrapped packages that get delivered immediately get locked up in the back of the closet. So much for pretty wrappings. We also had to stop using tree ornaments that looked like little wrapped packages after he tore all those up as well.

My kids love cell phones

. . . and I don't know why.

My two teenage girls go wild for new cell phones. They are both at the young end of teenagehood, so they don't actually make that many phone calls. I don't allow text messaging, so they don't do that at all. (They also are bewildered and completely unable to comprehend why I don't allow texting, which I'll liken to my own bewilderment as to why my parents didn't allow me, at 16, to go out to bars even though I could).

Experience Mental Illness

I do not have bi-polar. But I do have some insight on how mentally and physically tiring it can be for those who do have it. And you, too, can gain this insight. Here's how.

Sign up to live for a week with a person who is cycling. Cycling is the psychiatric term for moving from one mood level to another. Not all who have bi-polar cycle to the extreme ends of the mood spectrum, but they swing farther and faster than those who do not have bi-polar. There's also differences in how long each cycle is. For some, each cycle can be weeks or months, for others, there can be several cycles in one day.

In my house, my husband's cycling tends to scoop me up and carry me with it. When he cycles, he sort of clings to me, I assume for some hope of stabilization to prevent himself from taking destructive actions when he's not fit to be making decisions, but by demanding my attention I am forced to respond, at least to some degree, to his own mood, which often takes me through extreme emotions as I struggle to respond to the panic in his own behaviour and mood. It often is like the reaction you would have when you recieve tragic news - a loved seriously injured, a crisis pending, family members arrested, you know the type of thing. For a person without bi-polar, that is the type of event that can cause an uncharacteristically sudden change in mood and thought. Those times cause stress and fatigue.

So when my husband is cycling, and I am forced to respond to his out-of-proportion reactions to events or words, the same type of sudden change is induced in me, along with the stress and fatigue that follow. And it intereferes with my ability to go on about my normal daily activities. Which, I believe, gives me a tiny taste of the toll that mental illness takes on those who live with it.

It ain't pretty.

Wow there's a lot of us

I have to give a shout out to AMC Theaters. They are a national chain and they have begun a regular event - "sensory friendly" movie showings. They appear to be working with autism societies in cities all over the country to publicize these periodic showings of first-run movies designed specifically for audiences who might have trouble or be worried about attending regular showings. I could find no mention of this on the AMC Entertainment website, but they are doing these all over the country.

During these special showings, the lights are left up, the sound is lower than usual, and the audience is free to be noisy or walk around as necessary. The theater also allows people to bring in their own snacks and beverages so that special diets can be accomodated.

I attended one of these this past Saturday. I have one son with cerebral palsy and one with autism. I still take the son with cerebral palsy to regular movie showings, even though he can get loud when he is excited. He's non-verbal, and since he uses a wheelchair he is obviously disabled, so while I would prefer he not shout in the theater, other audience members give him a bit of a pass. It's harder with my son with autism, though. He does not look so obviously disabled, but he is also loud sometimes, and he also ocassionally jumps up and down or rocks violently in his chair, which is disconcerting to others, especially now that he is larger than I am. So we had pretty much stopped taking him to theaters.

But Saturday, it didn't matter! Everyone in the audience knew what was going on , and was probably sitting next to their own child who was doing something "weird." One little boy was wandering the aisles examining people's watches. Another ran around and around the front section of seats for most of the movie. I saw people escorting special needs audience members from toddler age to up into their twenties.

The experience was so wonderful, and I will definitely be going everytime they have one. I think our local AMC is planning to do this monthly. It was great because both my sons enjoyed themsleves immensely - without me constantly trying to shush them - and because so many other parents were able to do something fun for their kids without being stressed about their behavior, which means the kids didn't have to stress either.

Support AMC. They are good corporate citizens.