My sweet sister-in-law, Randi, sometimes babysits our son when I have medical appointments. For a recent appointment I had with my allergist, I got him dressed and asked him to keep his clothes on for the entire time his Aunt was here. Tony has a history of pretty intense tactile defensiveness as his skin nerves are much more sensitive than a neurotypically “normal” person, so he usually wears only his underwear in house unless there is a therapy session in progress. Currently, after programming I did in habilitative therapy, he will keep his clothes on in home for the entirety of all therapy sessions (though he didn’t use to be able to tolerate that), even ones that last 5 hours for ABA or Hab, but this is the first time he’d been asked to keep them on for his Aunt.
I returned home about 3 hours later, and when I opened the door, there was my sweet, fully clothed son to greet me at the door, eyes wide to the max, expression nervous…and his shirt was on backwards. So I commented to Randi that he must have used the bathroom, because he will sometimes take his clothes off in home to do that during therapy before putting them back on so I figured that to have been the case.
Not quite.
Because I didn’t repeat the expectation for his clothes to stay on in front of Randi when she arrived, he knew she didn’t know. So he stripped completely down (even took of the undies), and ran around the house butt naked. She got him to “compromise” and put his briefs back on, but when he heard the garage door open, she told me he ran and put his clothes back on as fast as he could. And they were all on when I walked in the door, just the wolf on his shirt wasn’t in the front which is what gave him away.
Sometimes people think individuals with our son’s level of Autism don’t really emote (they definitely do), but he had a clearly recognizable “I’ve been busted” expression on his face after I heard Randi’s recounting. Clearly our little man was hoping I’d think he’d kept his clothes on the entire time like I’d asked.
Three hours and a mad dash to get dressed before I got inside…and he kept it in his head the whole time what I had asked him to do and was aware his Aunt Randi didn’t know and tried to capitalize on both in a way that brought him less clothes and all the rewards that would come from him actually having kept them on.
We can see the problems, or we can see the potential.
Should he have kept them on? Sure. But, moments like this are the ones people won’t believe until they see it for themselves, and they are part of why I have worked so hard and given up so much of my own life and time to help him on this journey. Underneath the enormous challenges that have been brought to him by his combined disabilities, is a kiddo who can remember something his new school speech therapist mentioned once at the end of a session and ask for it on his speech device the very next day at the time speech therapy would typically be happening for him in school.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, he’s a lot smarter than most people realize. That doesn’t mean I think he’s going to cooperate cheerfully with learning certain things at first. As we have discussed before, he has some huge challenges that make most everything feel pretty difficult for him. I know if someone asked me to work on something I was doing way worse than everybody around me on all day every day, I’d probably not be so cheerful all the time either. And that’s a whole lot of stuff for him. In my opinion it’s much easier to feel cheerful when everything is not so difficult. Though it may not be easy for him, the potential is definitely there for him to continue to grow so I’m just going to prioritize seeing that more than any problem that arises.
