More from “Nigel At Six:”

We moved into a new house a few months ago. It’s on almost half an acre, with lots of trees and even a playhouse in the backyard. The boys really seem to like it; for the most part they’ve adjusted well to the change. The only difficulty Nigel’s had since we moved in happened about two months after we moved in when the landlord, without notifying us, had bark chips put in areas of the front yard as a landscaping element. I knew Nigel would initially have a problem with it, because it was new. I had just gotten home with the boys on a Saturday afternoon after they had spent the night at their father’s house. Nigel got out of the car and immediately began trampling the bark, shuffling and dragging his feet through it, sending it flying. Brian [my then-boyfriend] immediately started lecturing Nigel, not realizing that it was Nigel’s way of adjusting to something new. I tried to tell Brian that this was Nigel’s way of learning about something foreign (What is it? What is it doing there, when it wasn’t there the last time he was in the front yard?). I explained to Brian that Nigel’s anxiety level goes up when he doesn’t recognize something, especially in his own home. “Well, that doesn’t make it right for him to destroy something that somebody worked on all day,” Brian said, totally missing my point. Nigel could not understand that someone had spent time arranging the bark. He was just trying to assimilate it into his world the only way he knew how. I told Brian that probably tomorrow Nigel wouldn’t even touch the bark; it would no longer be foreign to him. (I was right.) The one thing Nigel could understand was that in dragging his feet through the bark, he had made a mess, and when I pointed that out to him, we got a broom and he helped sweep it up.

[Next I wrote about our experience with trying the GF/CF diet.]  . . . There may be supplements he can take to alleviate some of the symptoms (of autism), which of course I intend to look into as soon as I can. Sometimes I berate myself, thinking, why wait? Why not now, instead of writing this? Why not do everything I can to fight this? I don’t think I have an acceptable answer. There are many components of my answer. One part is because I’m so tired; I don’t want autism to run our lives (but if I just let it be, then it is running our lives, isn’t it? It might seem that way to some. But to me, when we’re at home, we function as a family at a near-normal level. Or at least, it feels nearly normal, and that’s good. It’s only in public that problems arise. So it’s almost easy to be comfortable with it in our daily lives). But mostly I don’t fight it because I seem to innately know that Nigel’s autism cannot be “cured,” at least not by current methods which seem to cure some types of autism. I know that Nigel will learn academically, and he will eventually learn about autism and how it affects him. In his daily life, he’ll work with it, and he will succeed on his own terms.