Do You Remember?

Emma's Math class has one last big project for the year:  "Dream Vacation".  It's a really cool premise.  Each student is given a $10,000 budget and has to plan a dream vacation, complete with food, lodging, fuel, gas, air fare, whatever...and make a presentation on it.  They've already completed "Dream Job" and "Dream House".  It gives the kids a chance to APPLY math, which I think is awesome.  Math can be such a dry topic if you don't see the application side, and even the application side can be pretty stiff if it's not a "fun" application.

So we were eating popcorn, watching "The Voice" (or something) and asking Emma, "Where do you want to go on your dream vacation?"

Tropical Island?  No...Hurricanes
Cruise?  No...shipwreck
Hawaii?  Are you kidding?  You want a volcano to blow you up?
Greece?  Tsunami.  (I pointed out that Tsunamis don't really hit Greece, but she wasn't having any of it)

Finally, Leslie said, "Emma, you're funny.  You're so nervous about all these vacations because you're afraid something bad will happen."

Emma asked where I wanted to go.

"The moon," I said.

She immediately agreed.  This of course made us laugh because the reason she didn't want to get on a cruise ship, essentially, is that in the movie Chipwrecked, Alvin and the Chipmunks accidentally fly off the ship on a borrowed kite and land on an island, separated from Dave, their bumbling caregiver.  This sort of separation really makes her anxious.

"You're afraid to get on a boat, but you'd get in a rocket?" I asked incredulously.

"Yeah, cause what could go wrong."

Leslie said, "Oh boy, we should watch Apollo 13 with you sometime."

"Or the shuttle," I added.

The shuttle.  I hadn't thought about it in SO.  LONG.  And even saying it off the cuff I wasn't really THINKING about it.

Emma didn't know what we were talking about.  DIDN'T KNOW. 

And so we told her.  We told her in the way that kids today will tell their parents in 20 years about the Boston Marathon or 9-11.  Or how our parents might have told us about the Kennedy assassination.

Leslie talked about being in school, and I got in story teller mode and tried to really make it interesting for her; I tried to really get her in the moment.  It really is something important to revisit.

My version of the story was essentially this:

"We were in study hall.  We had a really small school, and the cafeteria had a TV that got network broadcasts on it.  Everyone came to the cafeteria to watch."

This part confused Emma a little, so I explained. 

"This shuttle lunch was really a big deal.  There had already been a dozen or more launches, but they'd done this nationwide search...they'd trained a teacher to go into space.  The idea was she was going to go up and experience it, and when she came back, she was going to think of all sorts of new ways to get kids interested in learning about space, and develop neat new ways to teach it to them." 

When I said the part about the teacher, Emma nodded understanding, like, "yeah, okay, I get why it was such a big deal in school."

"She wasn't an astronaut or anything, so they had to take a really long time to train her to BE an astronaut and get her in shape for the flight.  This was a huge deal for schools, thousands of teachers applied and she was the one picked."

Leslie remembered how everyone thought she was so pretty.  I remembered that too.  She was just exactly "The Girl Next Door".  Sort of pretty in an honest, small-town kind of way, if that makes sense.

"And the shuttle went up, and we watched it, and maybe a minute or so in...it blew up."

And Emma looked confused and so I explained.  She asked about the crew.  I said, "They were all gone.  All of them died."

I got out the iPad and searched Youtube for "Challenger Explosion".  There was footage from CNN.  I started the video and Emma sat next to me and we watched.  They counted down, the engines ignited, it lifted off.  The cameras stayed with the shuttle and the image got hazier as the zoom on the cameras tried to keep up while the Challenger surged into the distance.  It was three miles into its flight in less than a minute. 

Even though I knew it was going to happen any second, when it blew up my breath sort of caught involuntarily and I felt myself get a little misty all over again at this explosion that happened almost 30 years ago and these people long since dead.

We watched in silence as the rocket spun in wide loops away from the main explosion, circling and quartering across the sky.

"Where are the people?" she asked.

"They're gone.  They blew up with the shuttle."

"Oh." she said, in a small voice, although she didn't sound upset, "What happened?"

"It was really cold that morning," I said, "And they'd already delayed the flight a bunch of times.  And they really wanted it to take off, but the gaskets" (I said gaskets but explained about o-rings later) " ...the seals that separated the flame from the rocket fuel got colder than they should have and got brittle and cracked and let the flame hit the fuel."  I tried to explain about gasoline and fire...and how rocket fuel is like gasoline, but way way MORE.  (Then I told her never to light gasoline on fire...seriously, what the fuck is wrong with my parenting these days)

"AND..." I said to her, "AND, and engineer tried to tell them not to launch.  He told them that the o-rings had never been tested at temperatures as cold as the ones they had the day of the launch and they FIRED him." 

I looked this up later, and found I was sort of wrong.  Roger Boisjoly warned them of the danger and was overruled.  He wasn't fired, but he was shunned at work, and ultimately resigned to become a speaker for workplace ethics.  He was a pretty big deal when I was going to college, the example that Engineering professors used when discussing doing "The Right Thing".  And I think everyone knew that the term Whistleblower was previously a pejorative one...but I think that Roger Boisjoly made it into something else.  I'd be curious about other engineers' takes on this.  It was certainly what I felt.  

How DARE they value launch over safety.  How DARE they value loss of face over loss of life. 

But I digress...

And she looked stunned at this.  "Why?"

I explained what had happened.  I explained about politics and public relations (in a nutshell) and how they thought he was being TOO careful and TOO focused on the details and that everything was going to be fine.  And how he had made them all look so bad.  SO bad.

It brought up a lot of memories for me.  In the moment it was stunned disbelief.

Anway, when all this came up, I was really feeling it, and wanted to share it, and wonder if any of you ever think about it, I mean REALLY think about it, the way we've all thought about 9/11 or Columbine or Newtown or this newest Boston Marathon Bombing.  Because I think it's worth thinking about. 

Constant Vigilance!

We have had a nice long run where we sort of feel like we're speaking Lily's language and Lily is making herself better understood.  And so as each day goes by and we celebrate its meltdownlessness, we feel like, "I've got this HANDLED, yo." 

Someone, a psychologist I think, at a recent re-eval asked us if we could leave Lily alone in a room.  It felt really good to have to think about that.  A year ago possibly, or definitely two, I would have said without hesitation, "No."  For starters she had a tendency to treat our absence from the room as permission to have potty accidents, but also books got ripped, things got knocked over, spills happened...you get the idea.

Time and experience have slowly reshaped the various rooms that Lily spends time in into Lily-friendly/Lily-safe zones, where the things Lily can reach are things that either A)  Cannot be broken or spilled or ripped, B)  We don't care about, or C) She has never shown an interest in touching/picking up/exploring.  And as we became more and more comfortable with Lily's interactions with her surroundings, I think we (but definitely I) started getting a little complacent.  

There haven't been any problems, so why would there ever BE any problems?  I guess that's where my mind was.  I think if I reexamine the room objectively, the same thing happens 9 out of 10 times.  What happened?  I'm glad you asked.  Or maybe not "glad" exactly.

Leslie dropped Emma off at her chorus concert.  Her parents left to go save us seats.  This is in accordance with the Book of Lily.  Divide and conquer, create a safe space, introduce Lily such that she has to spend the absolute least amount of time 'waiting' as possible.  She's not a spectacular waiter.

Two thirds complete with the process, I started cleaning dishes and tidying up before the timer went off to get Lily on the potty and we walked out the door.  Lily busied herself in the family room watching a movie.  I wasn't paying attention, but Lily eventually made her way to the kitchen table and grabbed Emma's plastic drinking glass.  "Uh oh," you say, "I see where you're going with this."  No...no you don't.  Why do you keep interrupting me?

So the plastic drinking glass has a lid, and it's more or less spill proof.  Yes, it has a long plastic straw that allows water to escape, but it's just a dribble, and honestly, if it's upside down, the straw isn't under the water, and it doesn't spill at all.  So this picking up and drinking from Emma's cup?  Not really that big a deal...until I heard the sharp splintered cracking sound and I snapped my attention to where she was standing with the cups straw in her mouth, chewing.  

The straw is rigid plastic.  Broken, even shattered, it's probably not sharp enough to cut you, but she had bitten off a piece of the end and was crunching down on it, the pieces in her mouth, and what I REALLY feared in that moment was that she would swallow them.  

"Nononononono!" I crossed the floor and wedged my finger into her mouth, sweeping the shards out even as she continued to chew.  She was not careful with my fingers, and it wasn't super comfortable.  

I was pretty afraid at that point.  I was staring at her, concerned, as she smiled back oblivious to my worry.  I opened her mouth again and swept it.  I couldn't be sure that I'd gotten it all, and my brain elected at that moment to show scenes of an imagined ambulance ride to the emergency room.

She seemed okay, then she started to cough.  nononono...then stopped.  I stared at her, asking if she was okay, listening to her breathing, watching to see if her mouth moved to chew something.  And that was it.  She was fine.  

It was all fine.  But what I remembered then was the question, "Can you leave her alone in a room?"  What if I had?  I do leave her alone in rooms for short durations, long enough to brush my teeth in the morning, or change laundry before I go to work, but what if she'd been alone and chewed AND swallowed?  My mind doesn't allow me to pursue that scenario longer than it takes to feel the dread start to blossom.  It's just scary shit.

As "Lily friendly" as the house has become, it's a good reminder that she's still a sensory seeking kid without a spectacular handle on her personal safety.

Like Mad-Eye says, "Constant Vigilance!"

"Passing" Glances

When I was a kid growing up, I was taught that it was polite to make eye contact.  I guess the thinking was that it showed the person you were talking to that you were paying attention to them, not focused on other things.  I get that.  I see it with my oldest daughter.  I can usually tell what she's paying attention to by where her eyes are pointed.  "Look at me," I'll say to her, wresting her gaze away from the television long enough to see that she's listening to me.  I'll watch as her eyes slide surreptitiously around me, not out of discomfort, but out of desire to be away from the conversation and back to the TV.

I was also taught that avoidance of eye contact indicated someone was afraid to make that eye-to-eye "soul-connection" because they were lying to you.  I learned from movies and books that thieves and liars could be caught when a well-trained detective, focusing on their eyes and body language, experienced an ah-HAH! moment associated with the suspect's inability to meet his accusor's eyes.  In college I had a manager (cool guy, actually) who loudly extolled the virtues of eye contact, and the virtuelessness of those who couldn't or wouldn't make it.  I remember in particular one candidate for a retail sales position (we're talking minimum wage stuff here) that he immediately dismissed based entirely upon the "shiftiness" of his eyes.  "I don't trust someone who won't meet my eyes when I'm talking to him," he told me.

Overall, I was aware that it was expected of me...of anyone...to make eye contact.

Because....

...Politeness, attention, truthfulness, cultural conformance...those seem like important things, I think.

I don't have any particular difficulty looking people in the eyes, but when I was young I remember actively thinking about it while talking to someone.  Thinking about eye contact...focusing on maintaining it...while talking.  

My wife and I have had conversations about my "autistic" traits, and we talked about this one last night.  When I was growing up I looked at people's mouths.  I wasn't really aware that I was doing it until a classmate busted me for it.  I slowly realized that I defaulted to the mouth because I had an epiphany related to the impossibility of focusing on two eyes at once.  You can SEE both, but you can only truly focus on ONE.  THIS realization led me to shift my focus back and forth, rapid-fire from eye to eye in a ridiculous ping ponging literal interpretation of "You must make eye contact".  I didn't know which one to look at (focus on) so I looked at both.  

Have you ever talked to someone who is blind in one eye?  Or has a glass eye?  Or a lazy eye?  I feel like I'm being rude if I'm staring at the "wrong" eye,  like I'm focusing on the "bad" eye instead of looking at the good and they'll judge my attention akin to staring.  And it's not always clear initially (with someone who has lazy eye) which one is the "right" one to look at.  Is it being polite?

All of this was going on in the back of my mind any time I was conscious of it being an "appropriate" time to look someone in the eye (e.g. job interview).  I'm not kidding.  The focus thing, followed by the shifting from eye to eye thing, followed by the bridge of the nose (so I could see both eyes, though I truly was focused on neither), followed by an awareness that by looking at the bridge of the nose I wasn't looking at the eyes...followed by a realization that...I WASN'T PAYING ATTENTION TO THE PERSON TALKING TO ME!  To use the job interview example, I would be so focused on the eye contact thing and its importance that I would realize I was being called upon to answer a question and had no idea what that question might be.  Was I being attentive?

Last night I went to an Autism Acceptance presentation at my wife's work.  One of the presenters was an attorney who discussed the transition from childhood to adulthood, and setting up finances and trusts and so forth.  The other presenter was Rebecca Klaw, an advocate who does autism consulting for schools and attends IEP's (from her website:  "consultant, trainer and advocate for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and their families.").  Her presentation, "Transformation or Celebration," called upon her audience to examine the validity of a few well-held neurotypical societal ideals...like the importance of eye contact.   This reminded me I'd been meaning to write a post on this and I probably seemed a little rude because I immediately opened my iphone notes and jotted down a couple things I'd been thinking about before she dug any deeper into the eye contact thing.  But my wife didn't notice because she was busy making eye contact with Ms. Klaw.

She used the example of a client of hers who had approached her at a function or in the community to tell her about the progress her son was making, and she specifically pointed out that he was coming along nicely with his eye contact, informing her that he could hold eye contact for TEN SECONDS!  She then had everyone in the room pick a partner and told us that when she said "Start" she would measure ten seconds and we were to maintain eye contact with our partner for the full duration.  It was, of course, ridiculous, and an impossibly long-seeming amount of time.  I picked my wife and although staring into her eyes for 10 seconds was like gazing into paradise, had I picked ANYONE else in the room, it would have been painfully embarrassing and awkward.  Her point was well made. 

I thought...how arbitrary is it to set a durational goal on maintaining eye contact?

http://endlessorigami.com

Here's another example...Let's say I'm eating a banana.  Let's also say that I'm a young autistic man eating a banana in a public place.  I see a man across the way and I recognize him.  He waves and I wave back.  I eat my banana, staring into his eyes as I do so.  I can maintain that eye contact for ten seconds, because I've been working tirelessly at it.  For ten long seconds I slowly eat my banana, staring into that other man's eyes.  It's awkward, arbitrary, and riddled with hidden societal rule infractions that trump the cultural importance of eye contact but about which I am almost certainly ignorant.  Was I conforming to cultural norms?


How do you follow up the lesson on eye contact (a lesson you have doubtless drilled into your autistic child for months and months and months) with the even more obscure rules on sexual innuendo, open flirtation, or brazen staring?  How do you get THAT lesson across?  How many months?  And how important is it REALLY?

Even what we feel we "know" about the cultural appropriateness of maintaining eye contact only applies to our American culture...it's not the same in the Middle East, or Asia, to say nothing at all of those people who have moved to the US FROM those cultures, blurring the rules still more.  How am I conforming to cultural norms when those norms differ from person to person, culture to culture possibly within my own community?  How then do I teach THIS to my autistic child?

When I was a kid I wanted to be the kind of detective who could always catch a lie.  Alternatively, I wanted to be the sort of super criminal would could lie undetected.  If I were to lie undetected I knew that I primarily needed to focus on my body language, specifically my eye contact.  There are, no lie, grown-ass men who believe to this day that you can't possibly lie to them if you maintain eye contact throughout.  I remember focusing on maintaining eye contact through lies to friends (in jest) and really having no difficulty with it.  "But you looked me right in the eye!!!"  Yeah...I did.  I looked you right in the eye and lied to you.  And it was easy.  You cannot tell someone is a liar by looking into their eyes.  Can.  Not.  

The most ironic thing about this is that so many neurotypical people believe the best way to appear honest and open or have a lie pass undetected is to focus on maintaining eye contact.  This causes the strange side effect that the only time they truly FOCUS on maintaining eye contact is when they're also focused on making a lie believable.  In other words, you'll know they're lying because they'll pointedly NEVER break eye contact.  Does that prove trustworthiness?  

Eye contact is not that big a deal.  It's a neurotypical "bad habit".  I inwardly cringe to hear other parents proudly tell me how they're drilling their child on it.  For what?  Cultural appropriateness?  It's arbitrary.  Integrity?  It's a lie.  Attention?  Then you weren't paying attention.  Politeness?  I'm offended.  The truth is, eye contact, while often useful is NOT necessary and often inappropriate unless your end goal is to make your child appear to be someone he is not...someone "passing" for someone you wish he was.  

Stop making such a big deal out of it.

My friend, Bec, has an excellent post on eye contact called, "What's the Deal with Eye Contact?"  You should read it.  Really.  It's very informative, and comes standard with bolded topic sentences and 'bottom lines' that are actually AT the bottom.  In other words, her posts are more structured and easier to understand than my ramblings.  In the article she talks about some of the reasons why it might be important NOT to encourage your child to make eye contact and she talks about reasons why it might be difficult for your child.