A quick note: I have decided to call the eight year old that I PCA for Beckett. His brothers will be Alvin (older) and Isaac (younger). This is for the sake of protecting their privacy.
It has been a great weekend with Beckett.
There are a couple of hallmarks of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Two of them are a “lack” of empathy (I will explain this in a bit) and struggles with imaginative play.
The lack of empathy thing? A lot of people see that as an indication that people on the spectrum have no regard for the emotions of others and do not care about others at all. They act as if this is a statement that people on the spectrum do not experience love or friendship. This is incredibly false. What it actually means is that it’s difficult for people on the spectrum to imagine what someone else might feel in a given situation. This is not true for every single person on the spectrum. However, with Beckett, he struggles a lot to understand what someone else feels, or to understand what certain emotions mean. I can give you a million and one reasons why I feel as if this way of stating it is extremely problematic. For one thing, there’s the fact that I know a lot of people on the spectrum who empathize to an extreme, as if they feel the emotions of every person they have ever met. For another, there’s the fact that empathy is so multi-faceted that stating a lack of empathy creates an extremely problematic perception, and causes a lot of assumptions that autism is similar to sociopathy. And lastly, there’s the fact that it’s just a difficulty — not a complete inability.
The imaginative play thing relates to that a bit, I think. Beck would generally prefer to play a game with set rules, to do a craft in which someone tells him exactly what to do, to reenact situations that have already happened, or to act out plays in which he is told exactly how to behave. That’s just what’s easy for him.
That being said, I have a couple of great stories that have left me positively ecstatic. I’m struggling not to giggle over these just thinking about them. Beckett really is an amazing kid.
The first goes a bit like this:
Beck has PT on Fridays, which means that I either hang out in the background in case he needs some help with toileting or starts having behaviors that his PT can’t get under control. I’m there as a back up, generally. Yesterday, I got to hang out with Isaac, because their mother had a migraine. The differences between Isaac and Beckett are huge, but I love the fact that Isaac still has this intense admiration for his big brother. Anyway, I digress.
My typical Friday schedule involves getting Beck up from his rest, getting him his snack, and chit-chatting a bit until his PT is ready for him. He’s known that I’ve been working on figuring out how to get Clarence (my bunny) moved in to my apartment for a couple of weeks, so that is always the first thing he asks me about. Yesterday, I was able to finally tell him that Clarence would be moving in on Sunday.
Beck: FINALLY!
Me: Yep, finally! I’m so excited!
Beck: YAY!
So that’s a pretty big deal as is. The fact that he recognized that 1. I’d been waiting for a long time, and 2. My excitement meant reason to celebrate. But the better part comes a bit later. I played with Isaac for a while, playing typical games that one would play with a four-year-old. When their mother’s headache wore off, she came downstairs and asked that I transition myself out by making sure Beckett recognized that I was headed out.
Ordinarily, we praise Beck like crazy if he remembers to say anything other than hello or goodbye. “How are you?” and “Have a good day!” are very much desired behaviors. Hugs are also great. Granted, Beckett-hugs are more like body slams that frequently cause bruising, but he snuggles his head into your stomach, squeezes really tight, and makes a sweet little noise in an attempt to imitate the sound that frequently accompanies hugs. I’m not sure how exactly to describe that sound, but it’s the sound we make when we’re illustrating how tightly we are squeezing someone. Anyway, he does this, and sometimes he holds on for a good thirty seconds before he lets go, and they are sweet moments that I always savor.
Me: Hey, Beck. I’m heading out. Bye, bud! I had fun chatting with you!
Beck: Bye! Have a good week-end!
Me: Hey, thanks! I appreciate you saying that. I hope you have a good week-end too!
With that, I started to walk back up to the main level.
Beck: I hope —
Me, stopping dead in my tracks: What was that, Beck?
Beck: I hope you are happy when you pick up Clarence!
Me: Thank you so much, Bud! I think I will be!
Beck: Because you love him!
Me: That’s right, Beck!
Beck: I hope that Clarence will be very excited to see you!
Did you catch all that? Because it was all 110% HUGE. We praise Beck for so much as remembering to ask how someone is or to wish them a good day, even though most of the time, it’s unclear whether or not he actually understands the reason behind saying these things. We never know if he’s sincere, because well, I think we all know that we occasionally are insincere when saying these things because it’s just social etiquette. It’s what we are supposed to say, whether we actually care how someone is or not.
BUT Beckett recognized yesterday that I was excited to see Clarence, and that, because I love Clarence, I will feel very happy when I get to be with him. He also then took it a step further and thought about an animal that he knows only from my mentions of him. He imagined what Clarence, some rabbit that for all he knows could be purple, six feet tall, and a figment of my imagination, would feel upon being reunited with me, and upon coming home. HAH. Inability to grasp empathy, my ass.
The second of these stories, in my opinion, is just hilarious. Frustrating, yes, but hilarious.
Beck loves my keys. I have no idea why. He asks me a million and six questions about them every day. And they are almost always the same questions. He’s especially fond of my “e-ronic” key (electronic). One of the first things he does after getting up from rest is run to the table whose drawer I put my keys in, pull them out, play with each key on the ring, and then begin the bombardment of questions.
Today, he was a tad flitty. And by a tad, I mean that I spent today sprinting after him across the house and yard to catch him before he dropped electronics in the toilet or bolted into the street. He pulled out my keys and I answered the questions while trying to clean up the pile of random papers and other odds and ends he’d thrown out of a chest of drawers before he could sprint off to some other part of the house again. We continued our game of sprinting throughout the house for the next couple of hours, until it was time for me to go home. We did the transition activity, I walked over to grab my keys out of the drawer. and…
It was empty.
Ah, crap.
Hey, Beck, I have an announcement. My keys are not here!
Beck: A mystery!
Me: Do you know where you put them?
Beck: It wasn’t me. It was my body double!
Me: Oh, do you know where your body double put them?
Beck: Yes, I do. He put them in a hiding place.
Me: What was the hiding place?
Beck: It’s a mystery!L
Thirty minutes, a visit from a neighbor, and six scenarios later, Beck had provided us with the following information:
- A thief has it.
- The thief was wearing all black.
- The thief took it home.
- It was dad.
- “I dropped it out of midair!”
- “Lauren has to stay over for one night.”
- Alvin took it.
- Isaac took it.
- It was the mailman.
- The neighbors have it.
So in other words, the only thing anyone was certain of was that Beck had hidden it somewhere.
The great part of this story, though, is that he’d come up with all of these alternative situations of what might have happened. And that is imaginative play. Which is something we’re always trying to get him to work on. He’d even pulled out a pad of paper to write down clues. Of course, the clues he’d managed to write down were RED and ARC, which I think was supposed to spell car. We eventually found the keys, and I left while Beck was continuing to come up with stories about how the keys had ended up hidden in a pile of books.
The thirty minutes of searching was frustrating. I was anxious to get home. But Beck had spent those thirty minutes fully engaged in our imaginary play scenario that wasn’t actually imaginary at all, making up lies (which are not always good, but in this case, he was practicing his ability to think hypothetically, which is very hard for him), and interacting and engaging with five other people.
And that, folks, is awesome.
Purposeful Meandering 