HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

By Kim Stagliano

My children aren't babies any longer. Are yours?  In the not too distant future, I will become the gray haired woman in this lovely painting by artist Sheldon Feuerstein.  And I'll kiss my girls with as much love as I did on the day they were born.

Happy Mother's Day.

Kim

Comments

[Robin Nemeth]

Well, at least they were pretty clear about their expectations. They fired her. My oldest child.

She got the call yesterday afternoon. She’d put in a total of sixteen hours at the garden store, according to her, and this sounds about right to me. I asked her why they’d let her go and she said she thought it was because she made a lot of mistakes. I said “is that what you were told?” and she said no, that’s just what she thought. And so although she asked me not to (I had to tell her that if there is one thing that _really_ pisses me off these days, it is being told what I can’t say and to whom I shouldn’t be speaking), I went up to the garden store anyway (with my apologies to her) to ask why.

“She makes too many mistakes.” I was told by the owner. “She’s cute and she’s sweet and she’s a hard worker, but, for instance… she rang up a sale the other day for one customer and it was for half a million dollars.” I said “So what? What, that couldn’t have been fixed? What, she ended up actually charging the customer half a million dollars and the customer paid it??” And he just kind of gave me a blank look. “It was a lot of mistakes” he said. I told him that sixteen hours didn’t seem like a very long time to me but it was really not my business, it was his. And that I understood that he couldn’t keep someone on just because they are sweet and cute. I explained to him that she’d asked me not to come in but that I don’t like being told what I can’t say to people, and I asked him to please send her paycheck in the mail so that she wouldn’t have to come in for it next week.

I wondered if the owner was under the impression that she’d been there a tad longer than she was. He’d said that she’d put in a few full day shifts. He looked at the other woman behind the counter, the woman who I think probably was training my daughter, for confirmation, but the exchange of words and looks between them confused me and didn’t really seem to confirm anything. At least, it didn’t confirm anything for me. But then I do have this social deficit.

My husband and I were discussing the grades of my sixteen year old son this morning, at breakfast. Not very good. He’s managed to pull them up to Cs and an A in the computer course that he likes, but this was after a whole year of Ds and Fs. He’s still failing language arts. I’m supposed to follow up with teachers about all of this. (I think he’s in the advanced language arts class. I’ve got to get him out of that, obviously,) “Yes,” I said to my husband, when he was talking about wanting to look at our son’s online student grade book, “that’s right, we are trying to encourage our son to get his grades up”. (We’re looking at a full summer of no television or computer privileges for the boy, if he doesn’t get the grades up. “Perhaps,” I’d told my son earlier in the week, “you might find a summer job. You’re sure to be bored, especially if you’ve no TV or computer privileges”) But I’m digressing, sorry.

“Perhaps,” I said to my husband this morning at breakfast, “our daughter’s got the GFAL (gets-fired-a-lot) gene.” He says that I mustn’t take that attitude, it doesn’t help. Ah well, at any rate she’s only been fired the one time, unlike her mom.

She is getting off to an earlier start, however.

I don’t actually think the CDC has used the acronym ‘GFAL’. It wouldn’t surprise me though if they did. My daughter said she was watching a program about AIDS on TV yesterday, and she thought that it was put together by the CDC, and on the show they kept referring to ‘MSM’. Which, she tells me, stands for ‘men who have sex with men’. She found that funny, for some reason. That they have a long acronym for ‘gay’. I found it confusing. (It seems to me that the acronym ought to be MWHSWM. Maybe her social deficit isn’t as severe as my own?)

I am listening to C-span, and there are a lot of people calling in who are pissed off at the prospect of having to pay off other people’s mortage dept. Digressing again. Sorry.

I suggested to my husband, as we were discussing our son’s poor grades, that perhaps our eldest daughter was fired from the garden store because she thinks she’s only getting a B- in calculus this semester. Well that’s ridiculous, they let her go because she makes too many mistakes. The owner said so. If I’m not going to just take what people say at face value, I’m really going to start complicating my life. And anyway, most people (at least people that you’ve only just met) deserve to have what they say taken at face value, I think that is what most fair people would say.

Maybe the grades just don’t mean much—I know there is such a thing as grade inflation. (When I worked the two weeks at the private middle school I tried to give a student a zero on a math test because I’d caught her cheating. I was told by the math department chair that I shouldn’t do that, that it would bring her final grade down too adversely. I didn’t think it would. I felt that she’d still be able to pull off a C if she really worked hard. “Oh, no one here gets less than an A or a B”, I was told. “The parents expect it.”)

I was a bit curious as to what the MWHSWM was all about, so I did a google search this morning on ‘CDC men who sleep with men’, and it was the third link down that caught my eye. ‘MSM and vaccination’. Sheesh, I do fixate. I know I should probably try to find a job, myself, but I’ll spend time today looking at this site. Sheesh.

The youngest two came home on the bus yesterday and immediately gave me the news of having been picked on. There are twins, they are fourteen years old. My girl brought it up. They both are getting abuse, I’m told, but my boy gets most of it. They’re both very small—a full foot shorter than most everyone else in their grade but that’s not why he gets picked on, he gets picked on because he’s quiet. I’d never heard about this sort of thing from them before, although I’d suspected it from the way my son’s trombone looked. (“It got a locker door slammed on it. There’s a lot of people pushing and shoving in the band room after class and trying to get to the next class on time and it happens,” he’’d explained with a shrug when asked about it.)

I asked him if he’d like me to talk to the bus driver. He’s not sure. His sister stands up for him. She says that the kids spitting on him are fifth graders. I said “are they shorter than you?” and he said yes. I said “are they likely to band together, a lot of them? Are you afraid of them?” and he said no. I said “then hit them”. I said “You understand that spitting on you is a physical assault, and not like just saying nasty stuff?” and he nodded. I said “you’ve already told them to stop, I presume?” and he said yes. “Then hit them,” I said. “Just don’t hit them very hard, the first time, if they’re a lot shorter than you are.”

My family life hasn’t usually seemed this dysfunctional to me.

[Gayle]

Sorry to have to post again, but I have to correct my mistake. "The Happy Prince" was written by Oscar Wilde, not by Edgar Allan Poe. May they both rest in peace!

[K Fuller]

No longer a baby, our son at 15 is a boy in a man's body.
Our emotions are all over the place... Wow! He is always going to believe in Santa, but then, good grief he is always going to believe in Santa.
We envy his innocence and pure joy in just the smallest things. We grieve his many, many losses and all of the things he will never experience.

[Gayle]

Gee, Deborah, thanks a lot for making me sob and bawl on Mother's Day. (Yes, I did.) But, seriously, that poem was quite moving, and I intend to share it with some of my similarly affected friends. If you ever need another good cry, I think you should read a short story entitled "The Happy Prince" by Edgar Allan Poe. Consider it my payback--I mean, gift-- for your having made me cry on Mother's Day. It has absolutely nothing to due with autism, but with giving all that you have. I guarantee it will make you cry.

[Deborah A Delp]

I know this poem as "PATRON SAINT", but it goes by other names as well. For a long time after JR was first diagnosed I was very bitter and angry with God. Then, someone sent this to me. It so moved me that, it changed my attitude toward God and prompted me to have it framed. It hangs in my hallway. Now, when I feel dispair I read this and it so helps me move forward. Feel free to forward this to anyone who you believe could use a little perspective on their life.

DEB

P.S. Get the tissues out.

====================================================================================================

PATRON SAINT
by Erma Bombeck

Most women become mothers by accident,
some by choice,
a few by social pressures
and a couple by habit.

This year, nearly 100,000 women will become mothers
of handicapped children.

Did you ever wonder
how mothers of handicapped
children are chosen?

Somehow I visualize God
hovering over earth selecting
his instruments for propagation
with great care and
deliberation. As he observes,
he instructs his angels
to make notes in a giant ledger:

"Armstrong, Beth, son, patron saint, Matthew.
Forrest, Marjorie, daughter, patron saint, Cecilia.
Rudledge, Carrie, twins, patron saint-give her
Gerard. He's used to profanity."

Finally, He passes a name to
an angel and smiles,
"Give her a handicapped child."
The angel is curious. "Why this one, God?
She' so happy."
"Exactly," smiles God. "Could I give a
handicapped child a mother who does
not know laughter? That would be cruel

"But has she patience?" asks the angel.
"I don't want her to have too much patience or
she will drown in a sea of self-pity and despair.
Once the shock and resentment wears off,
she'll handle it. I watched her today.

She has that feeling of self and independence
that is so rare and so necessary in a mother..
You see, the child I'm going to give her
has his own world
She has to make it live in her world
and that's not going to be easy.

"But, Lord, I don't think she even believes in
you." God smiles,
"No matter, I can fix that.
This one is perfect.
She has just enough selfishness."

The angel gasps, Selfishness?
Is that a virtue?" God nods.
"If she can't separate herself from the
child occasionally, she'll never survive.

Yes, here is a woman whom
I will bless with a child less than perfect.
She doesn't realize it yet, but she is to be envied.

She will never take for granted a 'spoken word.'
She will never consider a 'step' ordinary.
When her child says `Mommy' for the first time, she
will be present at a miracle and know it!
When she describes a tree or a sunset to her child,
she will see it as few people ever see my creations."

"I will permit her to see clearly the things I
see-ignorance, cruelty, prejudice-and allow her to
rise above them.

She will never be alone. I will be at her side every minute
of every day of her life, because she is doing my work as
surely as she is here by my side."

"And what about her patron saint?"
asks the angel, his pen poised in mid-air.
God smiles, "A mirror will suffice."

[Musings]

On this Mother's Day the only thing I wish I could fix was the vaccines I got throughout my life (some of which I had no control over since my parents were incharge), and the pharmaceutical pills I popped for headaches without thinking.

The other regret I have is the vaccines I let peds inject into my son - time and again - and the flouride pill in preschool (whatever was I thinking!) he got each day that I said yes to, and the TB test I let them do even after the diagnosis (again, what was I thinking!!).

Happy Mother's Day. Just doing the best we can ;).

[Robin Nemeth]

My daughter came home with an ivy in a hanging basket yesterday. I presumed it was for me, since today is Mother’s Day and she’s never been know to buy herself a plant before. I thanked her for it and hung it up on the shepherd’s hook out in the front yard.

She’d come home early. I didn’t know how long she was supposed to have worked at the garden store where she’d just started her summer job. But she’d been gone less than three hours.

She’d also bought some impatiens that her father had given her money for and asked her to buy, to put in the yard by the deck. “I’m sorry, she said. That I didn’t buy them at Victoria Gardens, and get the discount. I went to Maria Gardens. I’ll pay the difference.” My daughter was still wearing her uniform, the white sports shirt that said Victoria Gardens. “You went to Maria Garden’s to buy plants in your Victory Gardens shirt?” I asked, and she shrugged.

Last summer she worked at McDs. For a couple of weeks. Then she got so nervous because of trouble learning to use the cash register that she quit. She felt it would be better to quit before getting fired. She found a job shortly after at a local Taco Bell, and although she was a wreck the first couple of weeks she stayed on for the summer. Now, she’s thinking of quitting the job at Victoria Gardens. Today, Mother’s Day, she was scheduled to work. But they sent her home after only a half hour or so. It might have been that they just weren’t as crowded as they’d anticipated. Or, it might have been that they really needed to have scheduled someone with more experience, because they were more crowded than they’d expected they’d be. But I can pretty much guess what was going through my daughter’s mind.

“Don’t quit”, says my husband. “You’ll just find another job and you’ll be worried about doing something wrong at that one, too. And he’s right, of course. “Meditate,” he tells her. I wonder if there’s a pill that might help her to be not such a nervous wreck, and then hate myself for wondering. What could be worse than giving in to Pharma?, I ask myself. She’s fine. A bit odd, that’s all. That is what the pshrink said when she was four.

Here’s a kid who got a 4.0 grade point average her first semester at college. She’s majoring in chemistry, although she’s afraid of chemicals. She doesn’t know what all of her grades will be this semester. From the grades she has gotten already she knows she didn’t do as well as last semester, but it doesn’t seem to be that she’s doing badly either.

I’m listening to Bob Dylan on the stereo and thinking about adults with ASD, this rainy Mother’s Day morning. My ivy looks fine hanging outside, enjoying the rain. The other children are watching TV. They’ve cleaned up the kitchen (after some prodding from their father) and will see to dinner tonight. How many of my own four are on the spectrum? None. There some who think that’s a good thing, and some who adamantly will tell you it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing if they were on the spectrum. A little while ago Dylan was singing ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”

My daughter is nineteen years old. An adult. But not the kind of adult most people think of when they think of adults with ASD. Most of the talk that I hear is about the people born in the fifties and sixties. Where are they? Where are the people with ASD my age?

Right now Dylan’s singing ‘I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.’ I don’t usually pay attention to Dylan lyrics. Just once in awhile this morning a line slips through. My daughter is on the computer tweaking, with the graphic software, a drawing that she made. I’m thinking about my own experiences in the job market.

My first job was during the summer after I graduated from high school, working in a dog kennel owned by my grandmother’s neighbor. Thinking back, I’d have to say it was my favorite job. Other than the animals, I was alone for a few hours each day. The animals didn’t give me any flak.

Then I worked for one summer at a department store snack bar. They took me off of the cash register and put me behind the snack bar. Before they put me behind the snack bar, they had me take a lie detector test, because somebody had been stealing. I didn’t know, at the time, that lie detector tests weren’t very accurate, so I took it, though I found it vaguely offensive that I was required to take it. I passed it fine I was told.

There was the summer job at the engineering firm, after I’d started college. When I left there at the end of the summer, I asked the office manager if I could use his name as a reference. He said to me “Sure, Robin. You can do whatever you want to.” That should have been a red flag, but Dick was a notoriously sour person, so I shrugged it off. I learned many months later, from the firm’s secretary, that when prospective employers would call him and enquire about me, he would give an unflattering review of my work. I thought it was not very nice of him to tell other people that he was unhappy with my job performance, when he’d never bothered to tell me that he was unhappy with my work or why. Apparently the owner of the firm felt the same because I found out from the secretary, when she told me that he’d been giving me bad reviews when contacted for reference, that Dick had been fired by the owner of the firm over the whole matter.

After I got my engineering degree I worked for Arun for six years. A week or two after I was hired, I noticed that they hired someone else, to do pretty much the same thing that I was hired to do. That struck me as odd, since they didn’t really seem to have that much work for me to do. He was a very gregarious fellow. Spent the whole first week chatting with everyone in the office. Quite an opposite personality from my own. I continued on working there for six years, and the work load did pick up somewhat. However I never got on well with my supervisor. It seemed as though nothing I did was ever right. He would ask me to change a hundred different things on each plan sheet. Just small changes, but so many and they all added up. For instance, he’d want to have the cross sections labeled one way, then he’d decide he wanted it shown differently and I’d change fifty plan sheets to reflect his changes. Then he’d decide to have it shown in a slightly different manner, and I would change all fifty sheets again. This sort of thing would happen three or four times, and often the final layout he’d settle on was one I’d already done weeks previously but then changed at his request. Round and round I’d gone for weeks, only to end up back where I’d started.

I got bad performance reviews. I told him that I felt that the changes weren’t being made because of any fault of mine. He smiled, told me that he would try to work with me. Things never did improve. When I found a different job and left, one of the partners in the front office was concerned to know if I’d experienced any sexual harassment from Arun or anyone else in the office. I think he wanted to make sure that when I said “no”, he had it on record. I think that perhaps if they hadn’t have been afraid of there being some appearance of gender discrimination, they might have let me go quite early on.

The next few jobs only lasted a few months each. NASA let me go, saying I could do the same work offsite and it would cost them less. When I showed up at the NASA office a week or so after I moved offsite, to get a few things I’d left behind, I found there was a young female college intern setting at the desk I’d used.

I haven’t worked in decades. Since my children were born. Except for the job I held for two weeks at the private middle school, teaching algebra as a long term substitute. That job was supposed to last for three weeks, but they let me go after only two. In all fairness, the students were completely out of control the last day I was there. Standing on the desks, throwing pencils across the room. The principal was upset with me, because he said that I damaged their self esteem with the particular form discipline I was trying to use. Which was to ask them to write repeatedly on the board ‘I will ask permission to leave my seat’, or to write it at home repeatedly and then have the pages signed by their parents.

A few years later I had a job working part time with Central Engineering. It lasted for a month or two, on and off. They didn’t have as much work as they’d originally thought when they hired me on, apparently. One day after I hadn’t worked for a week or two, I got a phone call from the owner of the firm, asking if I had a copy of my Professional Engineering license. I said I had it somewhere. “Could I find it, bring it in?” he asked me. And was it framed?” I told him I thought it was. I found it in the back of my closet. I brought it to work with me the next day, as he’d requested. It got hung on the wall of the cubical I suddenly was assigned. (I’d been working out of the conference room up until then.) The day after that, the Ohio Department of Transportation review people came through the office. The owner showed them around the office. “This is Robin, she’ll be working on the Euclid Corridor Project,” the ODOT review team was told. I got to shake the hand of a man from ODOT who I’d gone to school with. I couldn’t remember his name but I recognized him. I worked there at Central for a couple of more days. Then they ran out of work, and I was let go.

After that, I volunteered for a reading program at the grade school. I went to a couple of training sessions. Then they called me and told me that they had enough volunteers, and wouldn’t need me but thanked me for my time and interest.

It strikes me that I’m not supposed to be doing this on Mother’s Day. Fixating on my own past. I’m supposed to be thinking about my children. It also strikes me, once again, that I’m not supposed to be speaking about my own social troubles, or those of my children, in front of people whose children have never said “I love you” to their parents on Mother’s Day or anything else for that matter. But it’s Mother’s Day. Call this my Mother’s Day faux pas gift to myself.

Yesterday, in the Home Depot, I ran into Nabile. I worked at an engineering firm with him for a short time, but I can’t remember where. I couldn’t remember his name either although he remembered mine. Perhaps that offended him. I asked him how he was doing. I noticed the reaction. The one that I used to be so familiar with, but hadn’t seen much in the many years that I’ve spent at home since my children were born. Jenny spoke of it when she wrote of seeing a person in the store, and watching as they tried to pretend that they hadn’t seen her, and tried to get away. “The woman behind the counter wants you,” he said to me, after I asked him how he was doing but before he answered. He pointed over my shoulder to where the clerk was trying to get my attention, wanting me to sign for the special order I was picking up. I signed, and when I turned around again, Nabile was gone. Which is about what I’d expected, cause I’d seen him trying to make his escape as I was asking him how he’d been over the years. Am I overreacting? Was he just in hurry to get home and get stuff done around the house? Or not really anxious to get away at all? I don’t know.

I graduated with over seven hundred people. There wasn’t anyone in my school with full blown autism, but then I don’t suppose there would have been, they would have been someplace else. There wasn’t anyone at all high functioning on the spectrum, either. I would’ve known.

I do think that there are a great many adults out there on the spectrum. I think they’ve always been there and it’s gone unacknowledged. I also think that the diagnosis has been widened, and the diagnosing has gotten a bit better even though the Doctors are encouraged to resist diagnosing.

I also think that the incidence has gone up. Way up. For both high functioning people on the spectrum, and for those with full blown autism.

My daughter just finished tweaking her drawing on the upstairs computer. Now she is watching Death Note on TV. Next week she’ll go back in to work at Victoria Gardens. She is scheduled for Thursday but is unclear about where or not they still want her to come in. I don’t know if they’ll send her home or not. Or if she’ll quit, and look for work elsewhere. Part of me wants to go in to Victoria Gardens today and ask them to please clarify the situation. “Was she fired, when you sent her home today? She’s not sure. Why don’t you just make it clear to her?” I would ask the owner, if I went. But I won’t. She’s not a child anymore. She needs to learn to deal with people herself.

[Gayle]

Happy Mother's Day, Kim. You are a hero to me and my family, too.

[Theresa Cedillo]

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY KIM!

We love you!!
Theresa, Mike and Michelle :)

[Elizabeth]

I always joked with my husband about wanting to get black leather jackets and travel around on motorcycles when we retire. (We are both former Marines who met at Camp Pendleton, CA) Laying in bed one night, realizing our son may not be able to live on his own, I suggested a third leather jacket and motorcycle. My husband says to him laying next to us, "that's okay buddy, you can live with us as long as you want". It was really cute.

[Jeanne]

Happy Mother's Day to you Kim, and to everyone! :-) You are all my heros, I think of you all everyday, whether I know you by name or not, and I wish for the best for you and your children. Enjoy your day, enjoy the love.