The Autism Card

I had an incident that got me thinking on Monday. It's really taken me this long to process the whole thing in my brain so that I don't come out and slam (albeit anonymously) this lady on my blog. I think I'm ok now, though.

Monday was a lot of fun. I just want to start there. The situation didn't ruin my day, it just sent me thinking...and I really want to get over it. One of my friends (who is a supermom) invited us to come with her and her kids to this place that is basically an indoor bouncy playground. They have inflatable bounce houses and a rock climbing wall and all kinds of fun for indoors. We ended up with 9 kids and 3 adults bouncing around this place. That seems pretty chaotic, but it really wasn't. It was a great group of kids, and there really weren't any behavior problems (except for Micah going around asking random adults for money...yeah...). Ok, there was a bit of drama between a mom who didn't know what she was talking about and few of the older kids in our group, but it really wasn't a big deal.

My problem ended up being when a little boy repeatedly kicked Ali in the face...on purpose. Not happening. I remove my daughter and the parent comes to me and says "sorry, my son suffers from mild autism and can't control himself."

I couldn't believe it. Someone actually tried to play the autism card on me. She gave the child no reprimand, he went on his way, and she figured that it would totally be fine with me if her kid kicked mine because he has autism.

HA!

I think the funniest part about the whole thing is how calm I am. I'm not screaming at her that if her child can't control himself and randomly kicks kids half his size that he shouldn't be taken out in public. I'm not screaming at her that since her child doesn't naturally understand social situations and what is appropriate, that makes it her job to teach him. I'm not doing this at all. I'm just calm. I'm listening.

I'm so not myself.

She goes on about how hard her life is because her son puts her into bad situations and how rough it was to go through the diagnosis.

Then Micah comes to see me. I introduce my son, who also has autism. I begin to talk about him, and this lady's jaw drops. She just has no idea.

I'm not complaining along with her...though I could. I'm not giving advice about how I dealt with similar situations...though I could. I just talk about Micah. I love my son. I don't ever regret him. This lady seemed to have so many regrets. I feel so sorry for her. She just didn't know what she was missing.

Now, I don't want to judge. She probably loves her son tremendously. It could have been a bad day for her. We all have them. It's just way too easy to slip into a pity party if you let yourself. She ended up leaving the place soon after our talk (which was nice because I found myself watching her kid more than mine...safety stuff, ya know?) and she seemed pretty defeated.

I'm finding myself thinking of all of the things that I could have said to her, but I didn't. I don't think I could have said anything that would have made her change her mind about parenting, so those words I really don't regret not voicing. I just wish I could have been more of an encouragement to her.

On the other hand, where is that lioness protecting her cubs? Why am I not furious? Well, Ali just shook the whole thing off, so it was hard to get too upset. The kid apparently didn't kick her too hard, or she didn't care that much. She cried for less than 30 seconds. It's hard for me to get worked up over that, especially since I was in shock over the mother's excuse for her kid.

Hopefully now that I have blogged about it, I can get over the whole thing. I'm tired of it being stuck in my head.