The Po Show

For Life

I had to pick up Matthew from the office after school today.

I stood with Tessa in the cafeteria at pick-up, watching all the kids file in and out, past the time when Matthew should have shown up. I felt an increasing sense of foreboding; I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, when I asked one of the aides if all the classes had been dismissed, she got on her walkie-talkie and was told that I needed to pick him up at the office.

He was waiting there, tears in his eyes, with his teacher, who tried to smile at me, but she looked stressed. We walked back down the hall to speak privately, with Matthew pulling on my arm and trying to drag me back the other direction. He was crying, tantruming, hitting the walls.

It seems that he got very upset during OT, and the OT had had to bring him back to class, saying that he wasn't able to continue in small group. He was out of control, and his teacher didn't feel it was appropriate to dismiss him with the rest of the class to the cafeteria, so she tried to talk to him and calm him down. He got more and more upset, so she walked him down herself.

He got increasingly upset as his teacher tried to tell me all this, and I finally said that I'd talk to him and try to find out what happened, but we had to go. He screamed, cried, threw his scarf and gloves repeatedly, kicked the carseats in the car, freaked Tessa out completely. It took a long time for me to get him calmed down at home, and I realized that what had happened was that he got into an escalation loop of frustration at OT, and he spiraled out of control. He became upset with being upset, and with the teachers working to get him to act appropriately. What upset him most was having to hear the OT tell his teacher what had happened (a negative account of himself) and then hear his teacher convey that to me. I've seen it a million times, but it hasn't happened to this magnitude in many years.

And I'm struck, that it's never going to completely "go away," his inability to deal with his emotions at times. It's better, everyone talks about how much better he is. But it's part of him, this scary loss of control. It's much harder for me to deal with both emotionally and physically now that he's nine years old and almost 5 feet tall. It's much harder than when he was 2, or 5. Today, when he refused to go to his room after school, I realized that there wasn't much I could do about it. I couldn't force him to go. He's too strong for me. All I could do was say, "No videogames," but someday that's not going to have any effect.

What's going to happen when he's 13 and taller than me, and much stronger? I hits me again that Asperger's never becomes "outgrown." It's for life. I try not to think of it as a prison sentence, but it's feeling like that now.