Remember What Month It Is?

Do you?

I'll give you a hint: every month is this month for me. Or, more aptly, for Mo, which means it's me, her sister, the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster, and so on.



Just in case you are one of the many people I run into who learned everything they think they know about autism from watching Rainman on cable, that's what month it is. Autism awareness.

When your kiddo who doesn't sleep through the night reliably gets up full of creativity and energy and draws in ball point pen on the bathroom walls, that's autism. Well, that's the start.



When you ask her what the hell she drew up there while you were still asleep at 3:00 a.m, and she says, 'It's a house,' and 'It's a Molly,' and you're just happy that she's using a sentence (sort of) and actually describing something that might relate to the scrawled pictures, that's also autism.

She's come a long ways from this in a lot of ways, but not so much sometimes.

I finally got the gumption to repaint the hall bathroom. The whole house needs it, and not entirely due to Mo's tagging, but the bathroom is really awful.


For one thing, you can see wallpaper that's been covered over by umpteen coats of paint around the toilet because nobody has ever painted the bathroom and bothered to pull the old stool so they could paint the whole wall. The new stool has a smaller tank.

Then there's the hole in the wall punched by the door knob. It was a quick and sloppy paint job to begin with, but the years have not been kind to it.

So I bought paint and spackle and set to putting things right. I also bought paint for my bedroom, which has been partially painted one color and partially still another for four or five years now. That's not autism, that's a difference of opinion over whether I meant that flat paint would look better or if I really meant that my wife should know better than to ever do anything, ever, at all. A difference of opinion that led to a spousal painter strike so complete my house might be French.

I bought the spackle that's pink while wet, and dries white so you know when it's safe to sand. What a novel invention, and it's only like 3¢ more than the stuff that's always white.



And I used the whole firkin jar of the stuff on just the bathroom and I could have used more.

I also patched the hole. We'll see how long that holds up this time.

Mo wanted into the painting supplies when we got back from Stuff-Mart, and I conceded to her one of those foam brushes. They're like 44¢ apiece, and I grabbed a couple as an afterthought for edging what I can't get with rollers.

I told her, several times, to get out of the bags. This was ten or fifteen feet away from me, but around a corner where I couldn't see. I could hear the bags rustle and come back around to get on her case, but I couldn't actually keep eyes on the stuff.

So I think I've gotten things spackled successfully without giving up more than the one brush, and I come back to the kitchen counter to find both foam brush handles stripped over their heads, and three bites taken out of the sanding block I'd bought.

Yes, bites.

And I realized I should have locked all the stuff up the minute we got home, or not even tried this while I had the kiddos. And thinking this, completely naturally, that's autism, too.