THAT’S NASTY!

It’s Friday morning.  The end of another arduous week of trying to get both kids to do their morning routines before I take them to school, allowing me to escape into my work life until 2:50pm when it’s time to pick them up.  Brooklyn normally does a pretty good job in the mornings, but CJ is another story altogether.

Unpredictable is one way to describe mornings with him.  “Groundhog Day” is much more encompassing.  For those of you who don’t know by now, CJ is Autistic.  He is on the low-end of the spectrum and high-functioning, meaning at first glance he appears to be like any other 8-year old, but after a few moments with him you’ll find that the way he processes and interprets information, and interacts with others, is quite different than most.

As I walk past their bathroom CJ is standing at the sink with his hands under the water that is turned on full force.  After about fifteen seconds, when I happen to walk past the bathroom again, the water is still running.

“CJ, what are you doing?”

“Washing my hands,” he says in a monotone.

“It shouldn’t take you this long to wash your hands.  It seems like you’re playing.”  No response, just the sound of water gushing out of the faucet.  “What exactly is going on?”  He’s trying to ignore me.  “That was a question.”

“This.”  He holds up his hand.

“What is it?”  I’m standing about six feet from him but I still can’t tell what he’s trying to show me.

“This!”  He says it louder, as if that will help me to decipher.  I tell him to turn off the water.

“I don’t know what ‘this’ is, CJ.  You need to describe it to me.”

“My finger.”  And so begins the laborious process of trying to figure out what he’s trying to tell me.  I’m a masochist when it comes to this.  It would be quicker, less frustrating, and allow me to keep some of my sanity, if I just inspected things and came to my own conclusion.  But that would be too easy, for both of us.  I want CJ to be able to relate an experience, a thought, a dream beyond saying:  This.  That.  Look it.

“What about your finger?”  I press on.

“There’s something on it.”  I can see there’s something there, but I have no idea what it could be.

“What is it?”  CJ looks intently, studying it, as if focusing through a microscope.

“Poop.”  Um, not what I was expecting to hear.

“Why do you have poop on your finger?”  At this point I’m thinking (okay, hoping) that things probably didn't go too well in the wiping department.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?  It’s your finger that has poop on it.”

“It’s in the sink too.”  I take a couple of steps towards him and before I can see what’s in there I can smell it.  It’s bad.  Like a finger-painting project gone wrong.  I step back to my safe zone.

“Where…How…”  I can’t even form a proper sentence at this point.  “What happened here?”

“I don’t know!”  I look beyond where CJ is standing and see poop on the toilet seat as well.  What in the hell is going on here?!

“CJ, I need some answers, and I need them now.”

“I picked it up,” he blurts out.

“You picked up what?”

“The poop.”

“You picked up your poop?”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

“From the toilet.”  I’m having a hard time grasping all of this.

“So, you reached into the toilet and picked up your poop?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I did it.”  One of CJ’s standard responses that does nothing but drive me absolutely nuts.

“Yes, I know you did it.  You just told me that you picked it up out of the toilet and now it’s on your hand and in the sink.  I want to know why.”

“Because I wanted to.”

“You wanted to pick up your poop out of the toilet?”

“Yes,” he says after dropping his head down.  I let out a heavy sigh.  I feel like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz when she meets the Scarecrow for the first time and asks for directions and everything he says or gestures to her leaves her in a state of bewilderment.  I try a different approach.

“What did it feel like?”  Rather than trying to find out the why, which is the toughest of questions for CJ to answer, I shift to damage control so this won’t happen again...hopefully.  There are no guarantees with Autism.

“Squishy.”

“Yep, that seems about right.  Anything else?”

“And stinky.”

“Now that you’ve picked up your poop out of the toilet, is this something you want to do again?”

“No.  That’s nasty!” He makes a face.

And with that said, I had CJ clean the sink and wash his hands about six times, while I tackled the toilet.

Afterwards, CJ went on with his day as if nothing unusual happened.  Meanwhile, I was spending way too much time trying to figure out what he had seen or heard that would make him want to pick up his own poop out of the toilet.  There had to be something.

After getting out of bed the next morning I remembered waking up, somewhat startled, at about 2:00am with an answer to the poop conundrum.  The sub-conscious can truly be a wonderful thing.

On Thursday afternoon, the day before the poop predicament, CJ’s ABA tutor, Mr. Jason, had been working with him. (ABA stands for Applied Behavior Analysis, which is a common intervention program for children on the Autism spectrum.)  Near the end of that day’s session Mr. Jason asked me if CJ could feed the dogs as a daily chore.  I explained to him that we had recently changed the dogs feeding routine which made things more complicated.  Jokingly I said, “But you can have him pick-up the dog poop in the backyard.”  He said he would be willing to work with CJ to do that.  I wasn't prepared to see that happen, so I suggested that maybe they work on that during their next session.

So on Saturday morning I asked CJ if Mr. Jason had talked to him about picking up the dog poop in the backyard.  Without missing a beat he answered, “No.” 

“So you and Mr. Jason didn't have a conversation about picking up poop?”

He replied with a satisfying, “Nope.”

I stood there for a moment, trying to get into his thought process, his mind, his being.  I knew there had to be a correlation to what Mr. Jason and I had talked about and what CJ did on Friday.  After all, in the middle of the night my subconscious said it was so!

“Did you hear me and Mr. Jason talk about you picking up poop?”

“Yes.”  Aha, I knew it!  

But the strange thing about this is when Mr. Jason and I were having that conversation we were in the living room and CJ was in his bedroom, which was at the far end of the hallway.  There are times when this boy has bionic hearing (remember Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers?), and then there are times I swear he is deaf.

One of the many things that I've come to learn about CJ and his Autism is that it doesn't matter if he is part of a conversation, referenced in a conversation, or a direction or question is posed to someone else -- it is always about him.  There have been countless number of times when a direction has been given to Brooklyn, specifically using her name and something that would only apply to her, and CJ has acted on it.  

Everything that has happened in the past, is occurring in the present, or is about to take place in the future, has a direct and uninterrupted link to him.  It’s not that he’s selfish, although it appears and sometimes feels that way; it’s just that everything is taken literally without a filtering process in place for him.

So when Mr. Jason and I were talking about CJ picking up dog poop, he must have heard, CJ pick up your poop.  It frightens me to think, if and when he is driving and someone says, Don’t crash into that tree! that he’ll crash into the tree.

TL-L 02/01/2014