The Melancholy Hour

AFTERNOONS are the saddest part of the day. I’ve wondered why that’s true since I was a child. Maybe it has to do with the position of the sun, gravity, bio-rhythms.

I doubt it, though.

It seems to me it must be that, compared to mornings, afternoons are the time of day when possibilities have run out. The day has taken its course, and whatever novelties you had hoped to encounter, goals you planned to achieve, breakthroughs you’d hoped to make, have turned up—or not. One is forced to face what one has made of one's time.

Mornings, on the other hand, are chock full of the unknown. The day is up for grabs!

For instance, this morning I shuffled out of the bathroom to find Huckle in his jammies, feet stomping, harmonica in hand. Never mind the slobber accompanying his haphazard riffing. He was harpin’ and cuttin’ a rug while Beans howled from his post on the couch.

It was a sight to behold!

When a day begins with such exuberance, one can be nothing but hopeful about what is to come. One imagines, “today our Aspie might surprise us with his adaptability."

It happens.

This kind of morning makes afternoon even more disappointing. By the time the low, winter sun is sinking behind Fargo’s leafless trees, a sense of disillusionment, even despair, is hard to shake. It can be so heavy that scrounging for a kazoo, or maybe even a jug, to reignite the morning’s hootenanny crosses ones mind.

The sun always sinks.


But one can make a fire, sit quietly and listen to Huckle and Sally Cat:

“Sally Cat, share or I’ll disappear you!”

“Huckle, you can’t disappear me right now! That’s an outside trick—it’s too cold to go out today.”

And, just like that, the afternoon is gone.

Biggies And Smallies

IT MAKES SENSE for most of us to give some thought to the idea of biggies and smallies.

You know what I mean: the BIG and the small. I.e., proper perspective.

Consider how one reacts to current events. Take global warming. A 20 ft. rise in the level of the sea in the last century is something to take seriously. One might well freak out about it.

It’s a BIGGY.

—As compared to, say, a dry winter in Fargo. Yes, looks like we won't have much flooding and we might have brown grass this spring. (Yawn.)

Smally.

Classifying things as biggies or smallies provides a way to adjust one’s reaction, making it commensurate with an event.

PARENTING:

Applying this concept to parenting is endlessly useful. If you are raising an Aspie, it’s more than that.

Activities, which are merely annoying-yet-tolerable, such as dumping out the dog shampoo into the bathtub and using the tub as a “skating rink,” are eclipsed by other more severe deeds. Pushing ones younger sister down so that she gets dog soap in her eyes and bangs her head against the tub is altogether not-in-the-slightest-bit-tolerable.

Never mind how the Dog Shampoo Affair came about in the first place. It seems an Aspie doesn’t apprehend the differing degrees of intolerability in these two instances. Aspie-boy sees no Big-E. No Small-E. Just E, evidently.

The appropriate magnitudes need to be spelled out: Stop. Think. Remember.

Let’s face it: the biggy/smally concept is extra useful in a family with Aspies. It’s über-useful.

FOLKS WITH A.S. have difficulty distinguishing biggies and smallies on their own. Several studies have pinpointed a pattern in those with AS brain functioning, relating to the way individuals process information. Results from these studies revealed a difference in what is termed “executive functioning”—that is, among other things, the brain’s ability to organize information. When confronted with events of differing degrees of importance (or naughty-ness, as the case may be), it is not apparent to HUCKLE (aka Aspie-boy) that there is a hierarchy of any kind.

Here’s where biggies and smallies come in. The number of biggies is always bigger with an AS child. My son has trouble perceiving cause and effect and must try everything in a real “hands on” way to test his theories. This inevitably leads to mishaps of all variety, which mostly fall into the smally class. Such was the dog shampoo incident. It is important to react to such incidents with a tone that accurately reflects the severity of the situation: dog soap-skating rink=laughter, sister narrowly avoiding concussion=severe consequence. In this way we attempt to model a reasonable reaction to events and point to a hierarchy, which a neurotypical person might intuitively understand.

Another reason for using the biggy/smally concept is that, if we tried to “discipline” our AS child every time he did something objectionable, we would quickly run out of consequences of significance to him. The parent of an Aspie has a conspicuously finite number of discipline tricks in her parenting bag. The interests of the AS child are narrow and may change rapidly. This makes finding a valuable consequence extremely challenging.

Let me tell you, nothing instills an Aspie’s parent with more confidence than heading off on a family outing, armed with a consequence, which is sure to deter any objectionable activities: “If you don’t cooperate, you can’t watch Thomas the Tank Engine when we get home.”

But we parents of Aspies (POAs) must be ever-spry, as the AS child’s interests are narrow and fleeting. The hair stands up on the back of my neck when I think of times when, in the midst of an outing, I trotted out my well planned consequence, only to find that Huckle had moved on to greener pastime pastures.

So the next time you find yourself getting uppity with your Aspie at every turn, STOP! You’re sending your youngster the implicit message that everything he does is worthy of correction. We should be teaching these magnificent kids that only some of what they do is iffy.

CODA:

Try to catch everything, Grasshopper, and you catch nothing.