The Joy of Parenthood

Okay, so Mo has her impulse control issues. Don't we all?

She's a ferocious nail biter, for a start. Her fingers and toes, there's barely a half a nail on any finger. We get on her about it, but she's determined. She's a scab-picker, too, and her wounds take forever to heal because of it, and inevitably leave needless scars.

She's a flight risk, too, of course, though that's been less an issue the past year or so.

Then there's the random curiosity factor. On our road trip, one morning after I'd gotten out of the shower and was trying to get her sister up, she spotted my razor and tried to shave her tongue. It didn't seem to bother her, pain-wise, but she bled quite a bit.

This is life with autism. Well, this and a sometimes total lack of verbal communication.

The other night, I had a dream that I was trying to get her to stop biting herself and she had literally bitten off a couple of fingers. Again, it didn't seem to pain her any, being down to part of an index finger, a middle finger and a thumb on one hand. In fact, those wounds were healed over, skin covering the stumps, the parts long since gnawed off and digested. Auto-cannibalism.

But in the dream, there was a fresh wound, maybe the size of a silver dollar, where she had just bitten a hank out of the fleshy part of her forearm. She bled and chewed her own flesh and I was helpless, absolutely powerless to do anything about it.

It's rare that I remember my dreams. If this is typical of them, maybe I'm glad for the amnesia.

So this evening, I look over and Mo has grabbed her pill reminder box from the medicine bag and I come over and ask her, 'Are you telling me you're already wanting to take night meds and put PJs on?' She said no, and as I tried to take the pills from her, said, 'Then let's put the pills back in the...No...Stop!' I tried to grab her hands, but she was too fast, too slippery and too determined. She threw the pills in her mouth and ran for it.

This is terrifying. As it happens, in this case, it was just her night meds, one dose, something I'd have given her in another 40 minutes. And while I keep a lot of stuff (as much as I can fit, actually) in a locked cabinet, the girls' med bag has always been out on the counter. It's never been an issue.

But what if Mo had, instead, eaten a whole weekend's worth of Ritalin? And add to that several days worth of Lamictal? Or a week's worth of her sister's Concerta?

So now I have everything, even over the counter stuff I doubt she'd even think to take, in that locked cabinet.

And of course, there was the time-out. Though that doesn't really cover it. I'm real clear as a parent on this score: when Daddy says stop, it means instantly. You freeze. If you just went off a cliff, me saying 'stop' means you stop in mid-fucking-fall.

So after the time out, and after she finished her dinner, she was asking for Oreos, which she can normally have as a dessert. And I patiently explained that no, she'd made some bad choices this evening (the first was when she hate two or three bites of cottage cheese from a new container and then dumped the rest of the container in the trash), and especially made the choice to keep going when Daddy had said to stop, so no cookies tonight.

That got a pitiful stream of tears, but at some point I have to get through to her, get through the obsessive compulsive aspect of her autism. I know she (probably) won't really eat half of her own hand, but she's perfectly capable of more mundane self destruction. And like in the dream, at a certain point, I'm absolutely powerless to do anything about it.