LIFE, LOVE AND LINT

By Nancy Hokkanen

It was evening bath time, and my nine-year-old son was carefully scavenging tiny dark lint balls from the cloudy water and lining them up on the tub rim.

I made a motion to whisk them off to the side, but with urgency he stopped me. “Don’t -- those are my friends!”

I sighed. Another inconvenient autistic obsession. “Sweetie, I don’t anthropomorphize lint. I throw it away.”

He knew what the big word meant, but the other concept took him more than a moment to process.

He sighed even deeper. “I feel like when you throw them away, you’re throwing away pieces of myself.”

Now it was my turn to process a concept. And realize that the black lint came from his socks, and probably had epithelial cells embedded in them. So quite literally I was throwing away a part of my son.

But it was just the emotional part, the spiritual aspect that mattered to him. “I don’t have any friends at my new school, so I decided to start with the fuzzies.”

That, I felt, was aiming rather low. “I’d prefer you started with some of your stuffed toys. They’ve been your friends before.”

Alas, unbeknownst to me, some of the stuffed toys had recently been found guilty of social transgressions. In the dance of my son’s life, they were now relegated to wallflower status.

As my son continued to wax philosophical on the advantages of lint friendship, my mind drifted. Does anyone else on the planet have conversations like this? What would bathtime conversation be like with a neurotypical child? Would I be free from random tantrums and the need to verbally tiptoe to avoid a minefield of potentially explosive topics?

Distracted, I saw more lint on the rug, absentmindedly picked it up and slipped it into the wastebasket. Oops. Too late. He saw.

“What did you do?” he demanded to know.

I decided to stand firm. “I saw crud on the carpet, and I threw it away.”

“Was it fuzzies?”

“Well, if they were, they probably came from my feet. And you certainly don’t want those.”

He thought about it, and then serenely resumed his marine explorations. I thought about it, and then reminded myself that earlier he’d been on the phone with a friend from his old school, discussing video games and Internet sites and laughing away. 

Another paradoxical joust closed. Not the first, not the last, and seldom what I expect. But it’s what I get, and I’m grateful.

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Nancy Hokkanen lives in Bloomington, Minnesota with her husband and 9-year-old son. She contributes to autism listservs and volunteers for Generation Rescue, A-CHAMP, and the Minnesota Natural Health Coalition.

Comments

[maurine meleck]

Nancy,
I just got my first chance to read this. You tell a story wonderfully. Last summer my grandson's friend was the pipe sticking out of the neighborhood swimming pool. Every day he said"I have to go and viist my friend, Pipey now." You're not alone on this.
maurine

[I am the boss of you]

"....Oops. Too late. He saw.

“What did you do?” he demanded to know."

That made me laugh. My son has done this many a time at our house. Like the time I threw out all the Valentine cards he had got and then he decided he wanted them. And then kept asking for them even after I had owned up and apologized for throwing them away. Several times.

Drove me nuts - throw them away you are in trouble, keep them around and he won't look at them.

[Heather O]

Nancy, you have a gift with your intelligent and witty way of putting your thoughts into written word. With all of the issues that come with raising a ASD child, the issue of friends is the one where I have the most difficult time remaining rational.

I find myself getting very emotional when the neighboring 6 year old knocks on our door and asks to play with our NT 10 year old, while ignoring our ASD 6 year old. I want to revert back to a bratty teenager.

Thanks for the great story!

[Anne Dachel]

Nancy,

Your son has some very deep person thoughts. We all want/need friends. Keeping in touch with someone from his old school reminds him of what he's missing now. There's a lot of promise in his reasoning.
Best,
Anne

[Gatogorra]

We are waiting for your book, Nancy. I MEAN it. When I read these things you write, I want more than just 1000 words. I want whole chapters, an introduction, an epilogue, a second release with updates. I'll even savor the end notes.

My daughter has been making friends with fuzzies since she was one, while we waited in the hopes that her twin brother might go back to anthropomorphizing anything as a sign of recovery.

As always, your article made me think. I have a kind of "game" I play when considering my kids' odder behavior where I try to imagine it in the frame work of maladaptation. Meaning the behavior is a manifestation-- somehow-- of the body's positive efforts to survive and heal, maybe sometimes going haywire. I was thinking about this issue of obsessing over "systems" and things or even of extending the boundaries of self and wondered, weirdly, if this was somehow an extension of the body's efforts to regulate systems which were SUPPOSED to be autonomic, automatic, unconscious. As if some of the brain's quasi-conscious energy was having to be relegated to making their bodies operate, which then muddied the boundaries of self. I wondered if this leads to "OCD" behavior in which the sick child tries to control the uncontrollable because this, in effect, is what they're bodies and brains have been forced to do for mere survival.

See what one short article from you sets off? More please.

[Tim Kasemodel]

Great story Nancy!

Knowing your son makes this even more heartwarming, yet more comical as well.

I am grateful myself to be able to see how "the other half" lives. As you know, our son Thomas is far far away from fitting into anything remotely similar to this story. I struggle at times with the thought "I wish I could be in her shoes". With each story like this I am reminded that we all have our challenges. I sometimes feel saddened that Thomas has no friends his own age (only his "paid" adult friends) yet I am spared from the emotional rollercoaster that children like yours present. Not only do I believe Thomas would not recognize a bully, many kids today would be chastised by peers for picking on someone with his level of autism. Not so for the high functioning kiddos.

In my wildest dreams I hope to have a situation sililar to yours, yet you gently remind me I would still need to be prepared for a whole new set of circumstances.

Thanks for sharing your life with us.

Tim