1,300 Barking Dogs and She Wants to Drive.....

In the movie Mozart and the Whale there is a line spoken by a young woman in an Asperger's support group......"Normal people lose Autistic people all the time and that's just the way it is."

My daughter was diagnosed with Asperger's in the 3rd grade. Everyday she went to school with the intense fear that I would not be there to pick her up at the end of the day. Her teacher would walk her out to the front of the school each day to my waiting car, but the following day she faced the exact same fear. This same pattern has repeated itself over and over again to this day.

This morning at 5:something a.m. E came in to my very quite, sleep filled bedroom and flopped on the bed announcing at full volume "no school!"..............For no other reason than context (ok, sympathy) I want you to be aware that she has not been in school for the past several weeks (Christmas break) and then days prior to that (snow and wind closures) and then yesterday, the first day back to school for the year, she stayed home with a sore throat....so I, her loving mother, was very ready to have her return to the educational system that allows her to spend much needed time away from home to be quite frank.

Ok, back to 5: something a.m...... I assumed that again she was requesting to stay home because of her throat. So I reached deep inside for sympathy and didn't find any, which emerged from me verbally as "You are going to school I don't care if your throat hurts! The neighbor girl said she had a sore throat yesterday too but her mom made her go and you're going!"

Aspie experience told me though that this was more than a plea to stay home sick, so I began to probe...which sounded like this....."So you wanna flunk 8th grade?" I said softly and with great compassion....."your throat is so bad you wanna repeat the entire year?" "That doesn't seem like a very good idea does it?"

As it turned out it wasn't her throat that was bothering her..... it was that same nagging, endless, recurring, everpresent, perpetual, unending, measureless, unbroken, unceasing, nonstop, perennial, everlasting fear that no one would be there after school to pick her up.

I took a deep breathe and asked "Has that ever happened before?" to which she replied "no" because in fact it has never happened before. Followed by my "For Pete's sake!" which I am sure didn't help.

I reminded her of her experiences with this same fear and how every day someone was there, without fail, to get her. Not one time did she have to find a cardboard box to shelter her from the rain and wind, or forage for blackberries on the side of the road in November when they had long since developed a strange fuzz, in order to survive the long cold night...while the rest of the family sat at home with the thermostat at 68* eating meatloaf with homemade mashed potatoes and garden fresh green beans with apple pie for dessert, not once noticing that she, for some odd reason, wasn't there. Not one time!! But she knew that, so I had to figure out another way to get the point across. "Let's see" I said..."there have been about 1,300 days of school in the last seven years and someone has been there to get you on every one of those days." Then it hit me!! Every Aspie has an area of intense interest and hers is animals......."Picture 1,300 barking dogs" I said, feeling like a glimmer of brillance was beginning to shine forth. "1,300 barking dogs, so loud you can't hear anything else....all barking to remind you of each time someone was there to get you from school." "Can you picture that?" "uh huh" came her enthusiastic reply.

"Ok, now picture an empty kennel.......NO! picture the pointy tip of a straight pin" I said, brilliance surging with every beat of my racing pulse. "Every morning you wake up with the chance to run and play with all these 1,300 dogs, each one there to remind you that your ride will be waiting for you after school, yet for some reason you insist on trying to balance your whole body on the pointy tip of this pin which represents how many times you have been left at school to starve and die, cold and alone, directly across the street from both the police station and the Boys and Girls club." "That seems like an awful lot of work doesn't it.....when you could be running and playing with the dogs.....don't you think?" Silence.........."yeh I guess.....mom, am I gonna get to take driver's ed this year?"

Could someone please pass the Kool-Aid?