Now What?

Ever since the concussion, I've been thinking about this 2019 incident a lot, and ironically, at the IEP meeting on Tuesday the person on his team who has known Stow the longest referenced the year this happened, noting that he had a "really difficult time." After the incident on the bus, we never did get things back on track for Stow, and then COVID-19 happened, making it difficult to know if we would have gotten there eventually. The trials he experienced then were a major motivator for getting him a service dog. Without going into details, suffice it to say that I got weekly, if not daily, phone calls from school until they transitioned to online learning in March; he went from being in a low-support environment to a high-support one at school. Maybe it wasn't the bus aide telling Stow to shut up that triggered the spiral, but the changes in behavior pattern strongly indicated that it was.

Dog pic by Stow. We had fun celebrating Shiro's third birthday.

The third-grade year came up at the IEP meeting this week because the woman who mentioned it wanted to highlight how much progress Stow has made since then. "He's a completely different kid!" she said. While Ren and I agree that Stow has grown and matured a lot, we also know that he is, in fact, not a different kid. He is still Stow and things can still throw him. And THAT makes the candy bag assault so much more infuriating. Stow seemed to be coming into his own socially and academically before this happened. He'd taken on leadership roles at school and was working hard to build positive relationships with his peers. The concussion stopped him in his tracks.

Most days now, he doesn't want to go to school and when he is there he doesn't want to do school work. At some point on any given day, his headache returns, and all he wants to do is come home. He's asleep by 7:30 most nights, worn out from trying to get through the day.

He's more wary of his peers, too. The behavior of the two girls who hit him is inexplicable which makes things harder for him. Many autistic people learn a lot about social interactions from studying the behavior of other people. They look for patterns and try to understand the various implicit rules involved in how we engage with one another. If the candy bag girls didn't abide by any of those rules, who's to say that other kids aren't equally unpredictable and dangerous? Right now, he is going through his school day like a kid with open wounds, highly sensitive, pained by any glare or mean word. It doesn't help that he sees one of the two girls in many of his classes. It's important for him that she understands how much she hurt him, but she doesn't or can't.

Another dog pic to brighten this blog post! Here she is playing with her birthday present.

Since the incident, I get almost daily phone calls from school again. Our hope is that things will get easier for Stow as he feels better and better physically. He IS more mature than he was in third grade, and he HAS been doing so much work to manage some of his more impulsive tendencies. But nothing changes the fact that the girls who hit him didn't play by any of the social rules he has worked so hard to understand, and his sense of justice makes it very difficult for him to square the fact that both girls are still in school. 

I suppose these are good lessons to learn. People aren't predictable and the world isn't always fair. I just wish he didn't have to learn these lessons like this.  

Now what?