A little past 10 on Tuesday night Alex jackknifes up in his bed, throws down his blanket, looks at me, raises his arm and moans, “Tiger.”
“I don’t have it, Alex. Did you have it in here?”
Does he mean the $5, four-inch tiger or the $4, four-inch one with his (her?) head turned slightly to the right? Or the two-inch one that came in the Taiwan-made $1 set that also contained a little plastic lion, a jaguar and – ha ha – a zebra. A food chain for a dollar. Sometimes Alex’s thing for plastic animals is a real riot.
Sometimes. “Tiger? Aw, tiger.”
TIGER! He’s on his feet and lifting his mattress to peer under the bed and around the bedframe. “Aw tiger, tiger. A-ba-ba-ba!” Alex usually uses more words than this.
So do I. “Alex, I don’t have it and I don’t know where it is. You have to take care of your things, Alex. Where did you last have your tiger?”
“Ti-GER!” He’s back out to the living room, where I find Jill shoving her face under the couch and doing her part to erase what’s normal in our household. “I’ve gone through all the regular tigers,” she says. We offer them to Alex. This one? This one? “Aw, tiger.” Back to the bedroom where he goes over the bedframe one more time and starts looking under the radiator next to his bed.
“Alex, we will find it tomorrow. You have to go bed now. Here-” I switch on a flashlight and hand it to him. Alex has never used a flashlight. What a good parent to turn this into a teaching moment.
“Tiger…”
“Alex,” says Ned from the other bed beside us, “go to sleep!”
This tiger is going to be a bitch in the morning.
Alex has a ton of plastic animals – too many to keep straight, Jill thinks – standing at attention along the edges of almost piece of furniture in our apartment. The two-inch-long elephant on the edge of the dining room table. The pigs on the hutch, flanked on one side by the lion and on the other by the lioness. The big elephant, the rhino and the turtle. The plastic cat, the plastic salamander and otter and aardvark and chickens. Animals detailed down to the ruffles in the fur and the shine of the eyes as they stare at you.
Somewhere in their rows is Alex’s idea of order. Those with ASD may develop obsessions for several reasons, according to Great Britain’s National Autistic Society, including:
- obsessions may provide structure, order and predictability;
- special interests may be ways to start conversations and interaction; and
- obsessions may help people relax and feel happy.
Fine but not when the school bus is coming. On more than one school morning Alex demanded a lost plastic animal (Rhino! ‘potomos!) minutes before his bus pulled up. “Alex, come on!” “‘potomos!” In the lobby his hand would shoot up and he’d bolt for the elevator back to our apartment. If we even made it to curbside on those rotten mornings, he’d wriggle back off the bus and sometimes lay on the pavement of the street.
So, Wednesday. I turn on the coffee and wake him up. Maybe he forgot all about it overnight.
“Tiger? Tiger.” His arm is up as his eyes still squint with sleep. What’d Jill once say about this? Life comes to a halt.
“School, Alex, then tiger. You’ll find it when you get home. Mom’s working from home today and she’ll look for it.” Did he toss it out the window, I wonder? I show him the plastic cat, the big tiger, the little tiger, the other big tiger. Wrong. Wrong and wrong. You can’t fool him. Can’t reason with him, either.
“Aw tiger-” I actually get him into his hoodie, out the door and down to the lobby where we sit to wait for the bus. Find it tomorrow, mom will look all day, time for school when he snaps, “Aw elevator!” and he’s up and off.
Jill doesn’t seem surprised when we come back through the front door. “Kind of makes you want to die,” she says. Should we scream and yell? What happens if he does this again tomorrow? The next school day? For the rest of his life? It’s like a peek at living with an autistic adult who doesn’t, when we get right down to it, have to do a thing he doesn’t want to.
“We’re very unhappy with you, Alex,” we say. “Very unhappy.”
“Tiger? iPad?”
Well by god I haven’t lost that much sense as a parent. “There won’t be any iPad, Alex,” I say. “If you stay home today you will clean your room, do the laundry, wash the floor. We’re very unhappy with you, Alex.”
“Very unhappy with you,” he says back. Will he get the point? He has absolutely no reason to.
We call Abby, our neighbor who watches Alex after school and who’s built quite a connection with him, to see if she can help watch him during this day. She comes right up wielding what she seems to think is the answer: Alex’s plastic collie he left in her apartment on Monday. “Alex, is this what you mean by tiger?”
He stares at her as if he just watched somebody walk into a wall. “Tiger?” he says.
“He can be stubborn,” Abby says.
Defiance in an autistic child “is virtually a given,” according to an article on the subject at globalpost. “Autistic children, lacking the social and communication skills that most people use to solve problems, often spontaneously respond negatively to small conflicts. Sometimes it seems as if their defiant behaviors are planned but this is not always the case.”
I couldn’t say one or the other when he bolted moments before the bus came. My spontaneous response was to realize that Jill had to stay home today with him and I’d have to stay home tomorrow and what happened after that was up to Alex and our bosses.
At my desk at work, I keep thinking how he’s home but if I call to see how he is, no illness is the enemy this time. I don’t call. Instead I rehearse what I’ll say to him tonight: And you’re going to school tomorrow, aren’t you? … And tomorrow, school ... The bus is coming in the morning and you’re getting on it.
What will he reply? Repeat it back, which for some stupid reason I still take to mean agreement? Say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry?” and pat my arm? Or just more “Tiger”?
No easing of my mind will come until Thursday morning at 7:25, when he climbs into that bus. Even then, how will I avoid thinking, What about the next day? All I can do is hope he just gets better.
(On Thursday morning Alex goes to school as if nothing happened. On Friday morning, he again refuses to go anywhere near our front door without a plastic animal. A chicken.)
This post is also available online in the Summer 2014 issue of Autism Spectrum News at http://www.mhnews-autism.org/back_issues/ASN-Summer2014.pdf#zoom=100
(See the National Autistic Society’s writing on obsessions at http://www.autism.org.uk/living-with-autism/understanding-behaviour/obsessions-repetitive-behaviours-and-routines.aspx).
(Read the globalpost story at http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/defiant-behavior-autistic-children-16989.html).