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| Mighty Unicorn Band. You can see Colin, can't you? He's on the right. Yes, right there. |
So now I have been to two high school football games in my entire life, as has Colin, my son. Colin is in his first year of marching band as a freshman in high school. For those who didn’t read my first entry, Colin has High Functioning Autism. I am attempting to record or at least give my impression of his thoughts and feelings about being in a marching band, being in high school, and being autistic.
The first item I’ll contribute because a.) I found it before I located his description of the game, (which he’d taken to his room), and b.) Colin’s second performance posed a threat to him that the first game didn’t pose: rain and the possibility of more rain.
If you know much about autism, then you know that autistic folks often have great hang-ups with sounds, smells, tastes, and visual stimuli that neurotypical people don’t have—or at least not to the extent that an autistic has. To further complicate your comprehension, each autistic person, (kind of like us neurotypicals), has different combinations of sensory “things” that set her/him off.
Here’s a list that I asked Colin to write this summer because sometimes he prefers writing to talking. In the list, he writes about sensory challenges/issues and how they affect his emotions, anger:
I’m feeling like the real world is the problem. That’s keeping me mad. Here are some examples of how it’s effecting me:
• When I’m trying to imagine certain things a lot of loud sounds tend to bother me such as barking, our dogs snorting [they are Pugs so this goes with the territory], even when people yell such as my sister I tend to go off.
• People repeatedly calling my name these people are – mom/dad.
• People sniffing which often keeps me from concentrating and eating.
• The rain makes me feel like an earthquake’s going to hit because of the loud noise on the roof and the sound of it makes me feel nervous just because. The sound of the rain going under the car sounds different, odd, doesn’t match the sound you’re used to driving in the rain. And I don’t hear it everyday.
Those are the main things that disturb me it would be really helpful if you could write some techniques down on how I can get over those things. [We, the parents “repeatedly calling his name,” have been working on these “techniques” for years. And years. But we can’t think of everything, or, half the time, many things. So feel free to suggest things!]
In any case, back to the rain-threatened band.
I knew that the rain might be a problem. I’d had to pick Colin up early from practice the day before because it was raining, and I thought to call another band parent (bless you, Jennifer, for answering so many of my rather silly calls and questions). In so doing, I found out that practice had been cancelled early. As an autistic teen who can hardly keep his school notes organized, Colin doesn’t have the cell phone that seems to be in the hand of almost every high school or middle school student I see. For example, Colin’s “yelling” sister has had one since she was 11. Colin has shown a desire for a cell phone one time: the day we gave his sister Chloe hers. He said, “I want one of those,” as we passed her the holy grail of tweenagerdom at her birthday.
Since then, he has expressed absolutely no desire for this critical piece of technology without which most teenagers and tweens cannot live. Thus my need for helpful parents who can tell me when their teens have phoned them with useful information (don’t laugh, you know their info can be useful).
Again, thanks to my friend’s relayed information, I got Colin early from rehearsal the day before the game. Hunched and head lowered to avoid the downpour, he scrambled into car after I had waited 30 minutes in an unmoving line and assumed his typical position for a drive through rain: modified fetal with his fingers stuck in his ears. At once, he gurgled a plea that I turn right to go home, thinking I would avoid driving through puddles this way. But by now, puddles were general over New Braunfels. And puddle I drove through had Colin humming and digging his fingers ever deeper in his ear canals.
This should have been a heads up to his mom that game day might be a problem. Did she prepare for this though? Not until the high school speech pathologist called her at work the next day at three. She’d been talking to Colin about handling the rain and would be able to sit with him through the game that night as she is a band chaperone. Seredipitously, this angelic person had worked with Colin in middle school (angelic person’s photo here):
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| Angelic speech path/band chaperone. May a thousand blessings "rain" down upon her! |
Then she told me that Colin might need me to bring a pair of black socks he could wear to the game. They were walking to the band hall to see if there were spares.
Now, I started worrying. Only three weeks into the semester, Colin had been having trouble in Algebra, as I figured out after trying to help (very unsuccessfully) with his homework the night before, Spanish, and World Geography. In short, I had begun fearing he might need tutoring the school wouldn’t provide.
On “red” alert, my brain began emitting fear like my flatulent old red Honda had exhaust: if Colin failed academically, he couldn’t be in band, which offers the kind of socialization that you can’t find many places for autistics in a small Texas town. Here, the only social skills group that has been formed for kids on the autism spectrum keeps falling apart for lack of participants, something that has distressed me over and over. Plus he actually liked that group, just like he likes band. What to do?
Drive back to New Braunfels, pick up his medication, drive home, fix spaghetti for his second supper after the game, cool and refrigerate spaghetti, and don a yellow/gold Heisemann Trophy-positioned-squirrel tee shirt in an effort at showing football “spirit.” Appending Colins band button photo to the shirt, I grabbed the camera and drove to the game . . .
Where I realized, once seated in the stands near Colin, that I was wearing the opposing team’s colors in a field of royal blue band parents. Oops. Remember this was my second game and second game only. Plus I had again managed to get as close to Colin as I could without looming over him (though I’m sure that, by season’s end, the poor dance team girls I use to hide myself from Colin are going to hate me and my wild-eyed attempts to peer through their ranks to keep tabs on my son).
In the end, though, once again, Colin had a good experience: the rain didn’t happen and spectators watched the sun set through a cloud streaked sky as our kids played, performed, gossiped, screamed, and in some cases confabulated under the bleachers. Fear quelled, for the moment, I sat texting my husband who was in Lubbock at his parent’s old house. Reading glasses balanced so “un-cooly” on my nose, I relayed impressions of Colin’s performance (good) and the exotic culture of high school football, including our mascot, the seven foot unicorn, introducing the opposition’s mascot, the not-as-tall-bison, to the band, and snippets of other parents’ reactions to the game, such as their collective groan at the announcement of the opposing team’s band’s choice of halftime music, Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface.”
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| Giant seven-foot Unicorn peering over sign on left. Bison on right. Yep, the brown furry one. Go, Mascots! Go! |
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| Wonderful twirlers and poor shot of beeyootiful "cloud streaked" sky. See, no rain! |
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| That's Colin, dead center, on end, standing and participating in grand display of Unicorn hand sign. |
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| Colin at end of line on right. You can't see it, but he's glaring, or at least giving me a hard stare. Good ol', normal teenage behavior. |
So, having read and seen my ridiculous parental perspective on the game, here, at last, is Colin’s:
I was afraid of the rain because it could mess up the pads of my horns [and] mean that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore. Also, [I was afraid] because I am wearing my band uniform and it might mess up its color and ruin it. So basically I wouldn’t want to mess up or ruin any of my band equipment under any circumstance.
I really enjoyed the game because I got to sit next to Mrs. G. and talk to her about how the game is going to be, as well as meeting some of my friends that weren’t in band. I didn’t like the atmosphere however because there were bugs buzzing above us and near the lights and in particular I don’t like insects. The band on some parts was ok. [I really enjoyed] that I got to play in front of the crow. I also I liked to cheer on the football players.
And, as an antidote to the thousands of wistful, faery-sprung creatures on tee shirts, in cover art, in movies, and on friends’ youthful, doodled spiral notebooks, here is Colin’s rendition of his schools’ mighty mascot:
In the spirit of the antiquated but beloved Public Enemy, “Power to the Unicorns, Ya’ll.”
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