The Shoes

Looking back now the most significant thing I see in my rearview mirror about my son's diagnosis is a small pair of shoes.
  For me, those shoes were the first red flag.  Putting on shoes, tying shoes, finding shoes, all a universal part of a normal childhood. For our family, shoes were the threshold to a doorway we did not want to walk through.
  A pair of small white spiderman shoes, with blue and red spidermen sprawling across the toes. Favorite shoes, he won't wear anything else. Shoes sitting by the door as we play at a friends house. Time to go, and we call to the boys to come put their shoes on and a quiet happy afternoon ends up in chaos. One hysterically crying, inconsolable, a flat out rage, no longer resembling a child, but some sort of bone-less chicken as we finally, embarrased give up on the shoes all together and drag our traumatized family sheepishly out the door with the shoes in our hands.
  We must have repeated this scene a hundred times. We tried everything to do it differently. Shoes were not a problem in our own home if we were not in a rush. The moment we had to meet a time deadline we were dead in the water. He would freeze up and go into full resistance. Lock up. I couldn't understand it. It didn't make any sense to me and it pretty much made it impossible to go anywhere after a while.
  To be honest, I was a coward. I couldn't stand the condescending looks that screamed " get control of your child! " I felt like the worst mother in the world. A complete failure. The only thing that saved me was having a first child. He was the ruler by which everything was measured and he didn't do the shoe thing. That told me perhaps we had a problem.
  Eventually we ended up seeing a psychologist who did a ton of testing. He assured us that he was not autistic but that he had a "social intuition disorder" . The plug in between his brain and his social center was never hooked up. What we were experiencing around the shoes was an anxiety reaction that built up in reaction to unpredictabilty in his world. If he couldn't see it coming he had no way to prepare for it. Presto, meltdown commence.
  "It's okay though" he said, "he is brilliant. You will just have to teach him social skills the way other kids learn math times tables. Repetition will be the key and remember if the situation changes even slightly, it will be a whole new experience for him. There will not be generalization of understanding as there is with most children." And so that, is what we did. And amazingly for the most part it worked!
  We learned to give him advance notice if we could of what was coming. We are leaving in 10 minutes. Five minutes until shoes, okay I am putting your shoes by the door and presto there he was putting on his shoes. No problem. Bigger issues we would handle by starting with "Hey, we are not mad at you. This is just not the right thing to do in this situation. This would be a better way to handle that. Let's practice that." The bigger issue was that because my whole life at work runs in ten minute blocks I am very resistant to scheduling in my personal life. But hey, I am a mom, and we suck that stuff up for the sake of our kids.
  We managed like that for about 8 years. Until he started to get a bit older..... but that is a story for another day!
In Love and Light,
Kathryn