On October the 8th we played San Marcos in our Homecoming Game. It was the first whole homecoming game and performance I’d been to, the first for Colin, and for Chloe (evil sister), who was there as a guest of the high school dance team. Other than that I’ve been to half of a Texas State Homecoming as part of a ESL Conversation Group at work, and the Japanese students had to teach me the Texas State “hand sign” for “Go Cats.”
Thus, when the weekend finally ended, I was eager to read Colin’s assessment of the whole affair. And when he handed me his written “review” of the game, I was ready to read how he felt about the surprise half time, improvised band performance, or the king and queen, or all the beribboned mums that most of the girls and some of the moms had pinned on their shirts, on uniforms, or in the case of the dance team, on garters around their legs, or for the cheerleaders, on their megaphones, or for the twirlers, on the back of their pre-performance beach chairs.
Here’s what he wrote:
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| Where are those mums? Maybe Dragon/Aquatic Lady's carrying hers in her _left_ hand . . . Maybe all those ladies are carrying their mums--and they've tucked in their ribbons . . . right! |
Here’s what he wrote:
Being in homecoming wasn’t the horrible especially if you are a shadow. All you have to do is stand and the other band members play the opener. After that we got to go and sit in the bleachers and drink water.
Then:
The blue dudes wearing the masks looked like spacemen and played awesome.
This gave me pause. The “blue crew,” the flag carrying guys who run up and down the field after every point is scored, hadn’t painted their faces as usual or worn masks and hadn’t “played” anything.
Still, I read on:
When we got back to NBHS I was a little tired but I knew we played awesome and won the gold.
Huh? I’d asked him to write about Homecoming and the Homecoming Game. Somehow, he’d skipped the event of the season for NBHS and half of New Braunfels. What I was reading was a description of a USSBA (United States Scholastic Band Association) marching contest we’d gone to on Saturday after homecoming in San Antonio. But not only that was wrong:
What a spectacular day this was and I wish I could relive it again.
Now, he wasn’t just not writing about homecoming.
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| Drumline "Blue Men" in formation. No mums in sight though . . . |
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| There's the band, but where's the football team? And why are we at Judson's "Rutledge Stadium"? Oh . . . . . . . |
Having graded more freshman essays than I care to remember, I know English essay lingo and this was that: lingo. It reminded me of some of the journal entries he’s made for English classes in the past. Like something you’d want to believe someone would feel, and, in his case, like something that didn’t ring true. The language was formulaic, similar to the kind of talk we gleaned by from him when he was little.
Then he used his echolalic, gestalt type language processing. Echolalia involves whole sale, repeated verbage, sometimes words, and in Colin’s case and that of other high functioning kids, sentences and sometimes whole books and songs. Some of the kids even memorize the scripts to entire movies. And they, like Colin could with his books and shorter “scripts” from TV shows or books, can repeat them with minimal cues and without the book being in front of them or the movie being on. Sometimes, they can even use chunks of this language, as Colin did, in situations in which the language actually works for them (hence the gestalt label—the whole chunks spewed like impressions to inkblots). Specically, this type of language is called mitigated echolalia.
Colin’s most famous bit of mitigated echolalia occurred when he was two and not yet even diagnosed. While his father held him one night next to my parents’ grandfather clock, he said to my Uncle Hill, “And now it’s eight o’clock!” and pointed at the clock’s face. My Uncle’s eyes widened as if he’d heard a budding genius or an apparition speak: the grandfather clock’s hands were, exactly, at eight o’clock. What poor Uncle Hill didn’t know, and what we simply found funny then, not knowing that Colin was autistic or what echolalia meant, was that Colin was simply repeating a phrase from one of his story books—albeit at precisely the right time and place for that comment to be made.
Besides, we were used to Colin’s repetitive talk by then. Even when he was not yet speaking, Colin had been happy to lie in his crib for 45 minutes to an hour after waking simply babbling to happily, and then, later, talking ceaselessly. When the babbling turned to words, and he kept “entertaining” himself, I’d sometimes listen and hear him saying words or phrases from books or shows he liked, but again, we didn’t know that persistence echolalia was a “red flag.” I even asked the doctor office if it was okay for me to leave him in his room alone for all of that time—since I was working on coursework for my graduate degree and writing a lot in the mornings, his slow, happy rising was a sort of boon, albeit one I felt guilty about. The response was that as long as he was happy, he was fine. And, so I left him until he’d begin to say my name which, other than his father’s, was one of his few communicative words. Again, no one knew then what his long recitations were prompted by, and, even if we had, I’m not sure we could have intervened much earlier.
So, back to the story at hand, when I read those last two lines in his description of “Homecoming” (now, obviously, our last USSBA Band competition), I asked him to tell me the truth about the day of the contest. I told him, rather wrote for him a request that he tell me, really, what he’d thought of his experience at the competition.
And I got this:
OK, honestly that was not to pleasurable. I mean I’m pleased we won 1st place but I felt “left out” which kinda screwed up my attitude because no one gave high fives, no-one patted me on the back, Heck no one even congra[d]lated me but they congradulated the rest of the shadows . . . !!!
Setting aside the exclamatory, hyperdrama of 15-year-old language, “Left out” is a great triggering phrase for parental anxiety, whether your “left out” kid is autistic or not. Plus, having just gotten a call from my good friend about how well he was doing, I felt that we were having another roller coaster crash from great to horrible, something we are very familiar with from Colin’s in years past. In fact, we’d been extra vigilant (especially my algebra-knowledgeable husband—thanks Rog) academically this year because we hadn’t wanted to deal with this sort of crash in academics.
So I worried that Colin really was being hurt somehow—for about two minutes. Then, I reminded myself that the other kids had always spoken to him and seemed to like him, and I simply felt sad. Maybe the end of something good had come?
Still, tired (a warning, always) and not yet at a solution for him myself, I tried for another description of Homecoming. Didn’t want the memory of it to wear too thin . . . and I got a paragraph about a different band competition (in which the Unicorns this time came in 2nd—which was the competition time before last) except for the last line, which continued along the “left out” vein:
Nobody talked to me like always!!!
And finally, continuing along the line of thinking which endorses continuing a behavior without changing it and each time expecting a different result (a.k.a. insanity), I asked a third time for a couple of paragraphs on the homecoming game.
First came a paragraph titled “Positive,” which included yet another description of the men in blue masks (boy, did they make an impact) who looked like “moon men playing drums instead of humans,” and a “Negative” paragraph”:
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| "Shadows" Marching to Watch (Note fist clenching disgruntled Shadow from left--that's Colin "Shadow Man" |
1st of all was the 40 minute drive with others. I didn’t like the being of feeling left out which . . . makes me feel like nobody in the band likes or respects me.
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| Colin "Disgruntled Shadow Man" in line at front; "unloving" Unicorn Band in Formation beyond |
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| All Bands' Drum Majors waiting for awards to be announced: Unicorns' (to left, black cotton-swab plumes) band wins 1st! Yey! (Sorry, Sad Shadow Man--but really, "they done good") |
Though tired and sad, I knew we had to address Colin’s problem. For while I knew the kids in the band liked him, that they spoke to him and accepted him, I also know that folks will persist in a behavior only as long as it’s being reinforced, and he had to talk and listen to them and respond for him to become reinforcing.
So, prone in my bed at about 11:30 p.m. (oh, it’s 11:45 p.m. now), I called Colin in for some on-the-fly social problem solving. After about 30 seconds, I surrendered, as I’m about to now: He was too tired, I was too tired. And I trudged into his room to pray with him as I do every night. But I did talk with him, very briefly, after his nightly prayers, after having to re-pray after a smarmy attempt to work in a directive about how we “should act” instead expressing gratitude and asking direction . . . finally I asked him about listening to the other kids around him and when you hear something you know about, chiming in or asking a question.
“Uh. I tried that before in 8th grade. These two boys, they’re friends of mine now, but then they said, ‘Butt out. This isn’t your conversation.’”
To which told him that this kind or thing happened to me (or at least a lack of responsiveness in my adult “peers” that equated to the more blunt, 8th grade repulsion), but that you had to keep trying it and most of the time it worked.
He still wasn’t that comfortable with the “listening to others” approach and asked if I could help him. I said I could, but, my head inclining more and more toward the floor and my voice angling into a lower, duller register, I mainly wished the social skills group hadn’t disbanded for lack of participation (not enough high functioning teens in New Braunfels) and wondered if I could ask the speech teacher for help.
Again, sleepy, I don’t think very creatively, or practically. Sleep, I’m finding, will let me see possibilities where, before, I’d seen mainly obstacles or grief. And, at the least, it’ll give me the time to consult a trusted friend—something I did do the next day.
Then as my wise friend pointed out to me as regards the missing high fives, “He could have just held his hand up.”
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