Family chores. Preparing for dinner. Setting the table. Opportunities for bonding and teaching important life skills, like recognising right from left, or turn-taking when talking at the table.
Best of all, with your children’s help, the jobs get done in at least twice the time they would have taken had you done them by yourself!
A few nights ago, I asked my daughter to help set the table. In my relentless quest to keep her from being completely sedentary, coupled with the opportunity to reinforce said life skills, I felt justified in choosing her as my helper, rather than one of the other three dancing wombats who were also honing their already well-developed sitting skills.
She duly started the complicated iPad closing routine which she has designed for herself, then came to get the cutlery. In the meantime, feeling guilty that I hadn’t also asked one of her brothers to help, I seized on the closest wombat (my youngest) and asked him to put the glasses on the table. By this time, my daughter was at the drawer, s-l-o-w-l-y counting out the cutlery, and I had put most of the plates on the table.
Youngest wombat, instead of getting the glasses, suddenly ducks in front of her, grabs a fork and puts it into his dinner.
My daughter stops. “He’s got a fork!”
“Yes, sweetheart, he’s just helping by putting his out,” I say reassuringly. But inwardly, I’m fuming. “Troublemaker.”
“But you asked me to set the table!”
“Yes, and you have the cutlery for everyone else.”
She turns to her brother. “I want the fork.”
His answer is predictable and unhelpful: “No.”
One of the features of autism is that the person finds or creates rigid patterns in their daily routines.
A young child might line up cars in the same order every time, or group in colour, instead of playing
imaginatively. A more high-functioning child might have a particular way to get dressed. All of us
find patterns and order a useful tool for learning or remembering things. Life is often repetitious –
this breeds routine. However, if circumstances interfere with our expectations and we cannot cope
with the change, these patterns confine us and no longer support us. This is often the situation for
my daughter, and I agonise over how to deal with it.
The simplest solution would have been to make her brother give her the fork. Then she would have
been content that she had all the cutlery required to set the table. It would have fit her pattern. The
absence of one single item meant, to her, that she could not perform the task properly, so she
refused to do it at all.
Right now, it was the end of the day and my patience was in short supply.
“You’ve almost everything else. Just put it down on the table please.”
“No, I can’t”.
She sets the cutlery down in a heap, and stands there, covering her face with her hands, quietly weeping, but immovable. My sympathy is struggling with frustration and long-term fears.
“No-one will ever give you a job if you stop at the first thing you find hard. You have to find a way to deal with it.”
More tears.
“It’s just one fork. Come on, just do it please.”
She stays on the spot, still crying, shaking her head. “I can’t”.
Finally, I take her by the shoulders, put the cutlery back in her hands, and take her around the table,
helping her place it correctly. Table set. But at what cost? Unhappy daughter, unhappy mother,
slightly smug-looking little wombat at the table (I still wonder whether he was being deliberately
provoking).
Did I actually teach my girl a strategy for dealing with something unexpected? Or was it enough that I forced her through the situation, instead of just doing the job myself?
So many questions, so few answers. In my heart of hearts, I feel that by being made to confront
change, she will learn to understand that change happens, and that trying to avoid it doesn’t mean
it will go away. She will need to deal with it sooner or later. And I hope that if I wrap her with
enough love, she will feel supported through those tough times.
Let’s face it, if we are honest, all of us have our own fork in the road, where we find change difficult, or our expectations uncomfortably challenged. May we all have the emotional support we need to help get us through.
