punchdrunkmom

In which we all begin to lose our minds

I took my dog to the vet yesterday morning because he’s been driving my husband and me freaking nuts.

Uh, the dog, that is. Not the vet. Just to clarify.

The dog, Elliott, is old—thirteen-and-a-half, to be precise. He's deaf and he doesn't move very well anymore because he’s got arthritis in his hips. This fall, we put him on a joint supplement and an anti-inflammatory called “Rovera,” a name that is somehow admirably clever while making me feel like I’m buying fictional medication. The plus is that Elliott has been spending less time sleeping on his pillow. The minus is that he is spending more time driving us bananas with his incessant barking.

Elliott has two barks. One is a regular “woof,” like there’s a cat in the yard, the mailman’s here, there’s someone at the door that I would like to sniff and then lick.

The other one is more of a high-pitched “arf.” It means “I want something,” like where’s my treat? The “arf” is delivered in a note at the very top of Mariah Carey’s range, only louder, sharper.

It is an auditory icepick to the brain.

And lately, he just stands in the kitchen and arfs until we want to take him out back and give him the Old Yeller treatment. We give him treats, we let him out, we make sure he’s fed, we go down the list of everything he might need and provide it. And then he starts arf-ing again. On Christmas Eve, he did it all night.

All night, you guys.

I dragged myself out of bed at 1 am, at 2 am, at 3 am at 4 am, because sometimes the arf means “I have an urgent potty situation.” I stumbled through the dark house each time, tripping over presents to let him out.

He launched himself out the door each time, only to stop after a couple of paces, turn around and look at me. And arf to get back in.

:::

So I took him to the vet.

“I think he’s going senile,” I said to her. It wasn’t our regular vet. He’s in Puerto Rico for the holidays. Our regular vet doesn’t give us any guilt—we’ve been through too much together. This one was nice, but she clearly didn’t like my use of the word ‘senile.’

She frowned slightly. “We use the term ‘cognitive degeneration,’” she said crisply, as though Elliott might be offended or insulted or otherwise emotionally damaged by my careless turn of phrase. My father, a doctor, used the words ‘senile dementia’ to describe what was happening with his own mother, so I kind of stand by the senile thing, but okay.

Elliott took that opportunity to arf in the exam room.

“Wow,” the vet’s assistant said. “That goes right through you, doesn’t it?”

:::

After she completed the exam, the vet said that Elliott had some gingivitis.

“I know,” I said. “He had some teeth pulled over the summer.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Has anyone ever told you that you should brush your pet’s teeth?”

 “Yes,” I said, fixing her with a look that I hoped would end the conversation, but instead she kept going. “You should brush your pet’s teeth once a day.”

I sighed. I have two children—human children—whose teeth don’t get as much attention as they should from me. Elliott’s teeth are so far down the list of things I should do but don’t that you can’t even see them. Farther up the totem pole are things like rollover the 401K from the job I quit when Kai was born almost 7 years ago, but before I can do that, I have to change my maiden name to my married name with Fidelity, something that’s been on my mind for 10 years. I am 10 years behind the 8-ball every day of my life, you guys. And I know, I know—don’t have a pet you can’t or won’t take care of. But still. He gets along fine. We’re the ones who are struggling.

The vet disappeared into the back for a while and emerged some time later with a brochure.

“This is a facility that does physical therapy for dogs,” she said. “They have a pool where dogs like Elliott can walk, rebuilding muscle mass. They also do acupuncture and other alternative therapies.”

I thumbed through the brochure. It showed pictures of dogs wearing vests, swimming or walking in pools of water, using the same kinds of stability cushions we’ve bought for Kai, surrounded by pet therapists.

I closed my eyes briefly and took a bracing breath.

It is not that I don’t want the best for my dog. He’s been my companion since my single days, when I lived alone and let him sleep in bed with me, spoon-style.

But I have a son who gets ferried to therapies after school. Hours this takes, miles on the car, miles on my soul. I am constantly told that I need to do more, more, more with him—vision therapy, scripting, homework. Even the NFL runs commercials during football games that I’m supposed to be ensuring that my kids get an hour a day of physical exercise. Right. Plus all of the other stuff I do, I don’t even know what-all—the local school council that approves the budget at my kids’ elementary school, the principal selection committee that chooses the man or woman who will be across the table from me at Kai’s next IEP meeting, teaching yoga, freelance marketing, doctor/lawyer/cook/therapist/wrangler/ninja. I racked my brain for ideas as to how I could sandwich dog PT into a week that often doesn’t even allow for eating.

“How much does this even cost?” I asked, knowing that would be Scott’s first question.

“Oh, I don’t even remember,” she said, having explained that her own dog had been treated there for a knee problem. Meniscus I wondered?  My worlds were colliding.

She looked at her notes for a long time, and then looked up at me. 

“Excessive vocalization is a hallmark of senility,” she said, finally.

I pursed my lips and nodded gravely.

She offered up a trial medication to help mitigate the pending onslaught of senility cognitive degeneration. She also offered up a new pain medication in the opiate family.

I wondered what its street value is.

And if it works on stressed out and overscheduled humans.

Because, you know.

Arf.

 

In which Kai takes his pants off in music class, makes a friend and learns some social graces

A few weeks ago Kai took his pants off in music class.

“Why?” I asked his morning aid, Eva. She was the one who told me, but she hadn’t been there when it happened.

She just looked at me. It was a dumb question, to be sure. I mean, why is the sky blue?

Wanting to get to the bottom of the pants thing, I called the music teacher, who said it was no big deal, some kids were egging him on, and those kids got into trouble.

But then I talked to Monica, who heard that he’d taken his pants off not once but three times.

So I turned to a new source of information, someone who might offer up a realistic sense of what had happened in music class—a second grade girl named Chelsea.

I had noticed this girl in Kai’s orbit for a while. She has accompanied him downstairs to the office on occasion when I was picking him up early. Or she would sit on the bench with Kai and his aid at pick-up time.

When you meet Chelsea, you get the impression that she misses nothing, and it was for this reason that I e-mailed her mother and asked her to ask Chelsea what happened in music class that day. I didn’t mention the pants thing in the e-mail, so her mother got quite the earful about that day’s music lesson over dinner that night.

I gathered a certain sense of wtf from Chelsea’s mother, so I told her about Kai’s Kainess, that he’s on the spectrum, that he has a full-time aid.

Chelsea’s mom then surprised me with a story. She had turned up at school one day when she’d had the afternoon off, to see if Chelsea wanted to have lunch with her.

Chelsea turned her down.

She likes to play with Kai at recess, she’d said, and didn’t want to miss it.

:::

It was not long thereafter that I got an e-mail from Chelsea’s mother that Chelsea wanted a playdate with Kai, and Ryan was invited, as well. I asked Kai if he wanted to go, and he gave an enthusiastic yes.

I fretted over this playdate more than others. I wondered what they would do together. I mean, I was once a second grade girl. This was, of course, back before “play dates,” when you just left the house and went to another one and you were just supposed to be home before the streetlamps came on. I spent hours at my friend Kristy’s house playing Barbies, staging elaborate social situations. There was the Three’s Company-style comedic misunderstanding triangle between Western Barbie, Malibu Barbie and Ken. There was also “philandering Ken,” who would be dramatically called to Barbie’s hospital bedside to discover that she had given birth to their lovechild. (This was the seventies, so our play schemes tended to mirror the Love Boat.)

What would Kai and Chelsea do together? Tag? Would he reject all of her ideas and instead play with her dad’s iPhone?

I wanted this playdate to be a success, because I like Chelsea. Kai’s aid describes her as a tough girl who doesn’t care what other people think. Those were her exact words. I hope she stays like that forever. But what really earned my undying devotion to Chelsea was the day I dropped Kai off and his aid wasn’t there to meet him. I had forgotten she wasn’t going to be there that day. She usually walks him inside the school. As it happens, I was chaperoning a field trip with Ryan’s class, so I went around the block after dropping the kids off to park the car. The bell had gone off, and all of the kids had gone inside the school.

Everyone except Kai.

He was wandering around the playground. Alone. Alone, alone. Like la-di-da, I’m a kid alone in the middle of the big city.

I threw the car in park and ran to him, but Chelsea had seen him first. She happened to be walking to school with her dad.

“Daddy,” she said, “that’s Kai, he’s in my class. We have to help him.”

She reached him before I did.

“Hi, Kai,” she said, snaking her fingers through his. “Let’s go inside.”

I watched them walk into the school building hand-in-hand.

:::

When I picked the kids up from their playdate, Chelsea’s mom said it had gone well, except that Chelsea had made Kai a rainbow loom bracelet for the occasion, which Kai had rejected outright.

“I don’t want it,” he’d said.

Chelsea’s mother explained to him that even if you get a gift you don’t like, you should say a polite ‘thank you.’

Kai protested that he didn’t like the [masculine] green-and-blue stripe pattern, that he wanted, as he put it, “all of the colors.”

My heart broke a little for Chelsea when I found this out, and realized that Kai might break her heart, not because he’s a heart-breaker per se, but because he’s oblivious, that the autism rears its head in moments like these, where he’s just being honest, not realizing that he might be hurting her feelings.

“Chelsea understands,” her mother said, and indeed their friendship formed without any adult intervention.

But still.

:::

I told the story at this support group I’ve been attending.

One of the moms told me that she’s been practicing that very scenario with her spectrum kid.

“We practice,” she said. “If you get a gift you don’t like, you say ‘thank you.’”

I smiled vaguely at her. This is why I don’t like support groups. You mean that in addition to the mechanics of taking care of my kids I’m supposed to teach them stuff? Who has that kind of time?

But on the way to school on Friday, I discovered a good reason to try the same thing.

Chelsea, it would seem, has been inspired by Kai’s fashion sense, and had her mother ask me where I get Kai's ties, and then ordered some with her Hanukkah money. She was debuting a new tie that morning. Her mother texted me a picture. Apparently, Chelsea wanted to make sure I saw it.

I wondered what Kai would say, if he would tell her that ties were for boys, or that stripes were the only way to go tie-wise. I wondered if he’d notice at all. Kai needed to notice, I decided. And be needed to know how to react.

“Kai,” I said, “Chelsea is going to be wearing a tie today.”

“She is?” he asked.

“Yes. And we’re going to practice something.”

I told him that I was going to pretend to be Chelsea, and he was to tell me he liked my tie.

“I’m Chelsea,” I said.

Kai grinned. “Wow,” he said. “I like your tie.”

I nodded my approval, and at the next stop sign, I tried again.

“I’m Chelsea,” I said.

Kai looked thoughtful. “You look great in that tie,” he said.

I tried not to laugh.

We practiced one more time.

“I’m Chelsea,” I said.

“That is a nice tie,” Kai replied.

:::

I walked Kai in to school that morning. I wanted to find Chelsea to compliment her sartorial awesomeness, and whisper-screamed her name into the classroom when I got there. She came skipping over.

“I LOVE your tie, Chelsea,” I said, pulling my camera from my purse.

“I got the hot pink one you suggested, too,” she chirped.

“I am. So glad,” I said.

Kai was taking off his backpack and coat.

“Kai,” I prompted.

He looked at me.

“Here’s Chelsea.”

Kai looked at her, and then smiled his thousand-watt smile. He arranged his face in a mask of happy surprise, and then gestured first to his own tie, and then to Chelsea’s. I suppressed a smile. One day, when he wins his Oscar, he’d better thank me.

“Is that a tie?” he asked, as though he had no idea any of this was going to happen. “It is so cool!”

It is possible that this would have happened without my intervention. I mean, Kai’s not one to judge people’s differences. In fact, as far as Kai is concerned, the more distinctive you are, the better. And Chelsea’s tie was pure awesomeness, like Hermione Granger’s preppy mixed with Ginny Weasley’s sass.

But a little finesse never hurt a guy.

Just ask any man who’s ever been asked by his girlfriend if her butt looks fat.

That’s a script we’ll work on in the future:

Future Me: Okay. I’m any girl. Does my butt look fat in these jeans?

Future Kai: No.

Ladies of the future, you’re welcome.

The real question is why "pick ax" is a vocab word

Kai was asked to use his vocab words in a series of sentences.

His aid took a look at the first sentence. "Uh, Kai? What does this say?" she asked.

Kai shoveld some more Goldfish into his mouth and looked at the paper.

"It says 'The pick ax was on the table.'"

"I see," she said. "Point to the word 'the.'"

Kai pointed to the scribbly loop.

"Nice try. Go find your eraser."

Hey, it was worth a shot, right?