Not only does Noah have his own milder autism (and all the struggles that come with that) to manage, he also has his brother's autism to manage. He doesn't get the brother he always wanted who would play video games with him and share a room with him. What he does get is extra responsibility. I try to limit it, I do. But sometimes, when you're in line at Papa Murphy's and Nick melts down, you just gotta give Noah $20 and ask him to get the pizza. When it's a choice between not letting Noah get the pizza he really, really wants and asking him to be in charge of paying for it, I choose the pizza because I don't want Noah to lose out on anything because of his brother.
That's my goal--I want to do all I can to make sure Noah doesn't miss out on anything because of his brother.
Sometimes, though, there is nothing I can do.
One of the habilitation therapists who was working with Noah quit on him, three hours before her next scheduled shift, because she was afraid of Nick.
I'll let you take a moment to process that. A therapist whose job it is to work with kids with autism was afraid to work with one of my autistic children because the other had her scared.
The whole idea that Nick is someone to be afraid of pisses me off to no end, so let's not even address that for now. That's way too much Momma Bear for one blog post.
Think about what it was like for Noah. He spent all this time building a relationship with someone . . . and then she disappeared. Without warning, which sucks for a kid with autism who craves consistency. Without so much as an explanation or a goodbye, which sucks for, well, any kid who has someone they care about leave their life.
Yesterday he was asking for her because it was a day when she'd normally come to work with him. What do you say to spare a child's heart? Not the truth. Because he'd either resent his brother, or the therapist who bailed on him with not so much as goodbye . . . or both.
It's a no win.
I wish I could put a bubble around my boys to protect them from the world's misunderstanding of autism. In that bubble, no one would ever look at Nick like he was a monster, no one would bail on Noah or Nick and disrupt their consistency and routine. There's no such bubble, though, so all I can do is protect them as much as I can and buffer the blows when they come.
