• Understanding Autism from the Inside

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Living on the edge of Meltdown-ville

Kids having a quarrel and fightI can tell you a lot about autism, but what I cannot tell you is how to avert my own meltdowns indefinitely. I’m so overwhelmed and angry, and am now hiding so Aspie Teen won’t see me cry.

Even on a day like today, when the house is calm (school bus has not come yet), the baby is fairly happy, a single thing, a lost item, a ruined plan can send me sailing off the edge. I’ve been spending everyday trying to avert the Tot’s meltdowns, a constant exercise that feels like being on stage all day, then getting trapped in a crowded after hours party. It’s constant sound, crying, TV, computer, and video games blaring. Constant touching and pulling and being tugging on–even being pulled on in the bathroom! ENDLESS interrupted and incomplete tasks…with no one seeing the flashing yellow lights–the warning, the Mayday, that mommy meltdown is imminent!

Baby woke me this morning just before eight. I trudged into the kitchen to make a bottle only to find out we were out nursery water. Hubby went out last night for formula, but apparently hadn’t brought home water. What made it worse was that he made the last bottle, and left for work knowing there was no water. I began my day furious!

I woke Aspie Teen so he could stay with baby, and dressed to run out and buy water, except hubby had by bank card when he went out last night and never put it back into my wallet!! Can you say, super shit list??

I call him at work to find out where he’d put my card, and what the hell he was thinking leaving without even telling me we were out of water to mix the formula. Well apparently he left a gallon of water in the van and intended to being it in before he left but with getting the Tot and the little man out to school he forgot. And he left the card in his pants pocket.

Ok, crisis averted. I retrieved the water, made the bottle, card is upstairs–we’re good; not really.

Problem number one:
I woke in such a tizzy, yelled at the Teen to get him up, and was so angry and worked up by the time I called Hubby at work that even though what I thought (stupid head went to work with no water here and took my card with him) wasn’t so, I still could not switch  gears. Oh my gears can turn from calm to furious in the blink of an eye, but not the other way around.

It was a good hour before I was calm enough to put two thoughts together.

Fast forward a few hours. How did I wind up locked in my bedroom writing this post on my phone??

Sometimes I need to do something, or accomplish something tangible to salvage my day.

Read on…

Jeannie Davide-Rivera

Jeannie is an award-winning author, the Answers.com Autism Category Expert, contributes to Autism Parenting Magazine, and the Thinking Person's Guide to Autism. She lives in New York with her husband and four sons, on the autism spectrum.

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