Playing catch brings happiness in pandemic
As of now, with my family having avoided a direct encounter with COVID-19, when I look back at “Quarantine 2020,” I’ll first remember playing catch.
It’s always a joy to toss the baseball around with my 13-year-old son Kyle, a good little ballplayer who is almost as excited to get back on the diamond as I am to start coaching him again.
But the games of catch I’ve appreciated most since the coronavirus pandemic kicked in have been played with my 15-year-old son Alex.
Alex was diagnosed with moderate/ severe autism before his third birthday. He’s always been athletic, but he struggles to maintain attention long enough to play even the most simple games. And truthfully, he’s never been that interested in throwing the ball around. Our games of catch before these past few weeks have lasted maybe a toss or two.
But now, aside from riding around on by back, playing catch has become Alex’s favorite pastime.
Alex doesn’t throw the ball now just to appease Dad. He actually enjoys it, which is a breakthrough that parents with children on the autism spectrum constantly strive to reach.
Everyone’s heard the old saying happy wife, happy life. Well unfortunately for my wife Jennifer, the saying around our house for the past 15 years has been happy Alex, happy life.
For the most part, Alex was a happy little kid. That happiness abruptly left Alex as he approached his tween years. Day after day, he struggled to sleep, which has been an issue since he was born, then spent nearly all of his waking hours either sad, angry or both. Life was a bitter struggle for our entire family.
His intense rage, which often included aggression towards others and himself, seemed to come out of nowhere.
Looking back, I think my wife and I dealt with the other issues autism presented fairly well. The diagnosis was difficult to swallow, but we immediately accepted it and directed our energy toward helping him and his brother. We didn’t allow ourselves to be overcome by bitterness. Some of Alex’s odd behaviors were easier to accept than others, but we never paid much attention to the odd looks or insensitive comments we’d occasionally hear in public.
Then the happy Alex we’d grown up with suddenly left us.
Almost overnight, Alex went from a general bundle of joy to a raging inferno of a child. He hit, kicked, bit, pinched. We usually had no idea what triggered his outbursts. He lashed out at all of us. He destroyed our home. When he wasn’t angry, he was uncontrollably sad. He cried, a lot, for reasons we couldn’t figure out.
Alex was with us in body, but not in mind or spirit.
We had been called “model parents” by autism experts who taught us how to help Alex during his early years. But when autism anger reared its ugly head, we didn’t handle it well at first.
Already stressed from dealing with moderate/severe autism and all of his complexities for the past several years, we suddenly found ourselves walking on glass around Alex 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He would seem fine one second, and be putting a hole in our wall or breaking windows the next. We could never relax for a second.
We had experts telling us that reacting in anger to his anger would only add fuel to his fire. We knew they were right, and we tried to apply their techniques. But too many times in those early days we gave in to that internal temptation to yell and fall apart in front of him. Some of those around us, hurt by how badly we were hurting, wondered if he needed discipline like a “typical” child. We wondered too. We took things away from him. We tried verbal reprimands, yelling at times when we were about to meltdown ourselves.
At times, we believe we still pay for those decisions.
For me, the lightbulb came on the day Alex broke his own arm. Unfortunately, I think it needed to happen for me to realize that I needed to focus on my son who was struggling mightily, and not his behaviors. This transformation started the process of accepting his anger and learning how to best help him through it.
My wife, who went through a similar mental transition, puts it best. If someone is wheelchair bound, would you punish them for not being able to walk? Of course not. They are physically handicapped.
So therefore, why would you attempt to apply typical discipline measures to a person with autism, whose “handicap” is the issue they have in their brain? Pretty silly when you think about it.
Thankfully those lightbulbs came on for us pretty early in the entire process.
When Alex is Alex, he’s a funny, kind, loving kid. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He doesn’t know what’s happening when his brain struggles and doesn’t know what to do about it. At that point, he just needs our help and patience, pure and simple.
Eventually, through the help of autism behavioral experts, we learned effective steps to take when Alex becomes agitated. We emptied our laundry room and turned it into a safe/sensory room, where Alex can go to be alone when he’s agitated and work through it. When times are really tough, this room allows us to keep Alex safe in our home.
We know that rewarding and reinforcing Alex’s positives is much more effective than punishing his negatives. It works for Alex. It makes his life better. Kyle does not always get the same level of patience. He’s reinforced and rewarded, and held accountable. That works for Kyle.
Alex still has moments when he’s unable to cope, people get hit and things get broken, but he’s happy for the majority of most days. He’s sleeping a little better. Autism is a challenge like no other that’s constantly tossing curveballs, some of which are downright nasty, and that will never end.
But for now, we have our son back. We were extremely concerned that much of the recent progress Alex has made would be derailed by the stay-at-home order. Alex, like virtually every person on the autism spectrum, craves routine. He abruptly lost school, which he attends year-round, and we also lost the in-home help we’ve been receiving through our local Board of DD. So far, he’s dealt with it all about as well as the rest of us.
Alex has learned to occupy his time with different activities. My favorite, of course, is catch - or catchers, as Alex likes to call it. Close catchers. Far catchers. Slow catchers. Fast catchers, Alex’s favorite. One-handed catchers, which Alex can now do just as well as Dad.
Eventually the coronavirus pandemic will calm down, and we’ll all get back to school and work. I hope the games of catch with happy Alex and Dad never end.
(Record-Courier/TNS)