Helena Mary Cole

As an autistic person and a mother of three autistic kids, looking forward to back-to-school is something I have yet to experience. Ever since Clark started junior Kindergarten in fall 2017 (I was very pregnant with Lance, who was born in early October that same year)), it’s been stressful in some way every time. This year was especially bad. Mr. Cole’s work schedule changed very suddenly last June (he worked 3 – 11 every day for close to a decade and now he works 7 – 3), which means I’m solely responsible for getting the boys to school by 8:10. They aren’t getting a ride with Dad anymore, and having to walk with Mom is a big adjustment for them. From my perspective, the biggest evil is that I have to get up a lot earlier than I used to, even last school year. 

Getting up early – make that getting out of bed at all – is not my strong suit. Autistic sleep disturbances, which could mean having a lot of trouble falling asleep in the first place or else waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to get back to sleep for a long time (a nightly occurrence), are a huge part of the problem. When 7am rolls around, I usually still haven’t had enough rest. Couple that with extreme difficulty making transitions, in this case, the transition from being in bed to being up and about, and I find that I have to push and push and push myself to get up. I’ll know in my mind that I have to get up but my body will be like, “Shut up, brain! Can’t you see I’m exhausted?” It can be a Herculean struggle. 

Ugh. Just now, I had a minor episode of imposter syndrome. Some impish little thought pushed into my head, saying, “You think you’re autistic because you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning?” But no, I do not “think I’m autistic” because I have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. No one is autistic for trouble with transitions alone. There are half a dozen or so criteria that need to be met for a diagnosis, and having trouble with transitions is a common trait linked to one criterion in category B (extreme difficulty with change, to the point where it disrupts your life). 

So, anyway, I’ve struggled all my life with getting out of bed and I’m currently in a position where I have to get three kids, who also have trouble with transitions, out of bed, breakfasted, dressed and to school. I’m usually tired and somewhat cranky. I’ve discovered I can bribe myself to get out of bed with sugary breakfast cereal (if I snooze twice, I have to eat Shreddies; only once, and I get to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch with All Bran buds on top because I’m a little old lady, LOL) but it’s still a constant struggle, pushing myself to get everything done. The kids get different breakfasts. Lance and Leah are okay with peanut butter toast, but Clark, who practically lived on peanut butter toast for six or seven straight years of his life, won’t touch it anymore. He prefers yogurt and bananas. 

Also, the boys get different lunches because the foods they’ll eat and the foods they’d rather starve than eat are different in each case. It is complicated. The upshot is, they expect and prefer to get the same items in their lunch every single day, so I am not plagued in the early morning with such decisions as “What should I pack in the boys’ lunches today?” Of course, yesterday, at about seven o’clock, I discovered we were out of sugar snap peas and so I substituted a cherry Greek yogurt for Lance, which I know he loves. But of course, at the end of the day, I heard about it. “Mommy, why didn’t you put any peas in my lunch? And Mommy, I don’t want the round Jell-O cup, I like the square ones.” He means the orange Fanta Snack Packs, which we were also out of. Not every store carries them, so I substituted the little cups actually manufactured by Jell-O itself. Big mistake. He ate the cherry yogurt but refused to touch the round Jello-O cup. 

I shouldn’t be so hypocritical as to complain, though. About a year ago, Mr. Cole bought a set of spoons at a garage sale that are shaped completely wrong: they are entirely too concave and too pointy on the end. I can’t use them. They are just wrong. If evil were a spoon, it would be shaped like that. Shape matters. 

So, anyway, once the lunches are packed, I’m usually still scrambling around because I always forget to factor in the fact that I have to get myself ready, too, and my morning routine is fairly involved. As a natural redhead, I have high maintenance skin, etc. In any case, Leah is most often the first one at the door. She doesn’t have to stay at school so she’s the only one of the three who’s getting nothing more than a happy little outing. The boys need to be persuaded. From time to time, Lance will try making up some excuse why he can’t go to school that day, but even if he doesn’t, I often have to pull him up off the couch. He’ll be huddled up in a tight ball because he’s “cold.” Meanwhile, Clark won’t leave for school until he’s selected a blanket to wear over his head and a few other favourite objects to carry with him. In past years, he always wanted to bring about twenty stuffed animals to school every day, so he’s actually come a long way. A blanket and a boat-shaped picture frame; a blanket and two tiny stuffed dogs; a blanket and a cube-shaped pillow. Yeah, Clark has serious sleep disturbances, too, and he’s almost always tired in the morning. He looks like he’s planning on setting up a bedroom for himself at school. 

So, finally, after I’ve shouted, “Hurry up – we’re going to be late” a dozen times, stuffed six arms into jacket sleeves, and kicked two backpacks out the door, we’re reading to start our walk. The first thing we do is cross the street. 

Just for fun, Lance, who will be seven soon, has recently become “too tired” to walk to school and insists on riding in the stroller, which he calls his Dodge Durango (one of Lance’s special interests is cars made by Dodge). Fortunately, Leah is at an age where she insists on more independence and doesn’t mind walking all by herself. So, I’ve got Lance in the stroller, and Leah is already on the sidewalk while Clark is lagging behind, sometimes even still standing just outside the front door. Leah knows we’re going to cross the street, so she’s heading that way, and I have a constant stream of words coming out of my mouth that go something like, “Leah, stop! Stop, stop, stop, wait! Clark, come ON. Hurry, hurry, hurry.” Clark and Leah have serious auditory processing difficulties (Lance’s are less pronounced). You have to say everything multiple times and even then, you sometimes have to physically get next to them and guide them to the behaviour you want from them. 

Eventually, we’re all poised to cross the street. Heaven help me if there’s a car coming and we have to wait for it to pass. In that case, I have to grab Leah’s sleeve to stop her from going onto the road, and once Clark is finally moving, there’s little guarantee that he’ll stop and wait for traffic to pass. He also has to be stopped with more than words. Having about four arms would be useful. But then, once they’ve stopped, and the way becomes clear, all the same problems rear up again, trying to get them to move again. “Come on, go, now, now, now. Come ON! Before another car comes!” 

It’s called autistic inertia. 

And, goodness, everyone on our street, plus everyone who lives along our route to school knows my kids’ names because of how repeatedly I have to shout them. The problem of one kid getting too far ahead while another lags too far behind does not stop the entire way there. Some days are worse than others. But Clark is known to drag his feet so much, he’ll be six houses behind while Leah, sometimes with a suddenly energetic Lance, will run six houses ahead. Leah doesn’t have a good sense of danger, and she will wander onto the road if not watched. Fortunately, Lance is good at shepherding her. Meanwhile, Clark will somtimes be at a complete standstill, picking dandelions from someone’s lawn or plucking leaves off maple trees and munching them. He has pica. 

But some days, Clark will walk quite steadily and things are not so bad. Until. Rrrr. Until we get to the school parking lot. Neither Leah nor Clark can be out of arm’s reach for more than two seconds because they’ll wander too far away from me, at a time of the morning when cars are pouring into the parking lot and every parent is just trying to get their kids through the door before the bell. Clark will meander directly in the way of a little string of traffic and again, telling him what to do gets us nowhere. He can’t process the words in that situation. He has to be physically guided. Meanwhile, independent little Leah will almost always have strong objections to my holding her hand or my grabbing her sleeve to prevent her from wandering in front of cars. She doesn’t know why I’m grabbing her and so she fusses and tries to pull away from me, straight into the traffic I’m trying to protect her from. The trick is to get them both to walk on the other side of stroller, on the same side as the empty parking spaces. The stroller will keep them better contained and out of the way. And sometimes, this works. 

Finally, finally, we get onto the pavement that runs along the front of the school building. At this point, I feel enough relief from having gotten everyone safely through the parking that I’ll almost run to the door, with Lance still in the stroller. But sometimes, Clark gets distracted walking past the windows of the daycare wing of the school, where he used to go when he was Leah’s age. He stares through the windows, probably looking for some toy he used to play with all the time, wondering how to get ahold of it again. 

And so, by the time I’m handing my boys over to their respective EA’s, and we’ve convinced Clark that he doesn’t need his blanket in school, and I’m stowing it under the stroller, I have exhausted what little energy I had to begin with. Sometimes, I have to persuade Leah to get into the stroller at this point. She’ll be peering into the school after her brothers, all curious about where they’re going and what they’re going to do there. But she knows the routine. And then, with only one kid, and that kid riding in the stroller, the walk home is quick and stress-free. 

Well, we are getting into a bit of a groove now. Getting up in the six o’clock hour, while still hard for me, is helped along by the low dose stimulant I get in my ADHD meds. Once the kettle is on, and the sugary cereal is on the table, I’m alert enough. 

But the winter’s going to be interesting. The good thing about bad weather is that, once you can persuade him to go out into it, Clark will be inspired to walk faster, so as to get into the other warm building as quickly as possible. The downside is having to manage all the winter outerwear. Right now, all I have to do is round up three jackets and six pairs of shoes in the morning (we were late for school one day last week because one of Leah’s shoes went missing – sucked into the vortex – who knows if we’ll ever see it again. All I could find was the mate to some other missing Skechers shoe that once belonged to Lance. And so we made do with that, and to this day, she’s still walking around in mismatched shoes, one slightly bigger than the other), but when winter comes, it’ll be six boots, six mittens, three parkas, three pairs of snowpants, three scarves, and three hats. Plus my own stuff, I guess. 

Well, life is a mad scramble but also funny in its way. 

Still, I wonder what it’s like to look forward to back-to-school…