I'm Going to Heaven, Right?

“I’m going to heaven, right Mom?”

Jake asks me this about 1,593 times a day. Seriously, the kid will be in his room and peek his head out just to ask, then waits for me to respond in the exact same way every time, “Yes, sweetie,” before retreating back to the safety of his Pokemon game.

He asks this question, not because he's busy pondering death, so much as because he's obsessed with being a good person. Also, he hasn't wrapped his head around this whole heaven thing, and probably never will, so he continues to obsess about it...

I don’t think I have to spell it out for you, but I will. The kid is riddled with OCD.

According to the National Association of Mental Health, obsessive compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder and is characterized by recurrent, unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and/or repetitive behaviors (compulsions). Repetitive behaviors such as hand-washing, counting, checking, or cleaning are often performed with the hope of preventing obsessive thoughts or making them go away. Performing these rituals provides only temporary relief, and not performing them markedly increases anxiety.

This question is like a tic for Jake. He’s completely unable to keep himself from asking, and he needs to hear my answer. It gets so bad, the barrage of The Question(s)! occurs with such urgency and frequency, that while I answer the exact same way every time (Yes, sweetie!), my tone of voice ranges from sweet, to exasperated, to just plain pissed off, depending on the time of day. Well after the sun has set, I sound as if I might be clinically depressed as the onslaught of The Question! ratchets up with frightening exigency.

“I’m going to heaven, right Mom?” Jake yells from the bedroom, threatening to wake his brother while eviscerating the last vestiges of my crumbling sanity. By the end of the night, I want to become an ice cream eating zombie who gets to watch a few episodes of House (I believe I’ve mentioned I have a huge crush on Hugh Laurie) without being interrupted. I do NOT want to be yelling back and forth from the living room and the bedroom… “Yes, sweetie… yes sweetie…YES SWEETIE… YES SWEETIE!”

So, the other day I was in the bathroom straightening my hair and Jake, having had a stressful day, was yelling The Question! to me from the living room, where he sat watching television with his brother, who was settled comfortably within his own tic-like OCD moment - rewinding and replaying a thirty second clip from Robot Chicken he’d somehow taped. I freely cop to the fact that it was not even remotely close to being an age-appropriate clip which contained an expletive and I immediately erased it when he went to bed that night…

“Mom, I’m going to heaven, right?” Jake must have asked more times than even his nine year old just-becoming-verbal brother could bear, because suddenly (and because I was purposely pretending not to hear) Jaxson sighed very dramatically and screamed, “Yes, sweetie!”

Ha! Okay, that was f-ing funny. Jaxson and I understood one another in that moment - the nine year old autistic boy and his overworked mother came together over the sacred bond of complete and utter annoyance.

It was a beautiful thing.

Not so beautiful, however, a few days later when Jake was particularly worked up and spinning like a top because the following day two very big changes would be made to his normal Friday school schedule - changes which involved a field trip to the ice skating rink and an hour after school for some much needed socializing, via the geek-lab.

(TRANSLATION: Computer lab video game night.)

Yes, both would seem to be fun changes, but changes are changes in my boys’ lives - good or bad, they’re not particularly welcome. Because I change my haircolor with about the same regularity as I change my panties, you'd think Jake would be loosening up a bit in this regard. Not so much.

So Jake had been tossing out the question with alarming ferocity and I was answering him like a good mom when Jaxson started to mimic the question, not even realizing he was doing it - his eyes glued to the inappropriate fifteen second clip from MAD which involved Dora the Explorer barfing into her lunch bag before being dismembered. (I’m not sure how he manages to tape episodes of wholly inappropriate shows that come on well past the time he’s in bed, but I spend at least twenty minutes every night erasing them form the DVR.)

“I goin’ heaven, wite Ma?” little Jaxson mumbled four times.

Oh, sweet Jesus, not him, too. I am not sure I’ll be able to handle it if The Question(ing)! metastasizes to the second kid. Maybe I can get the boys to answer one another and I can free myself from the OCD loop altogether.

“I’m going to heaven, right Mom?” Jake will ask.

“Yes, sweetie,” Jaxson will answer, before asking, “I goin’ heaven, wite Ma?”

“Yes, sweetie,” Jake will say, rounding out the circle jerk of dysfunction.

Now that will be a beautiful day...


***



This post is dedicated to my friend Michael Amrien, who has sailed into Plato’s invisible - where every sound tastes like butterscotch, where smells mingle and crescendo to a ballet of wind chimes - where the sun shines with the force of a thousand unblemished truths, and laughter swirls in Technicolor; a place of perpetual early spring. Where the Sisyphean task we call life is no longer in his memory, and for that I am grateful.

I’ll see you when I see you, my friend. Till then, like the song says: …Take it easy.

A Good Son

Two days ago, Jake decided he simply must get rid of his uni-brow. Let me just say, it’s not a debilitating, socially unacceptable uni-brow. It’s the uni-brow of a half Puerto Rican, half pasty-white kid. Sure, he could use a tweeze—but he’s twelve. Must we begin those types of cosmetic rituals already? I just got the kid on deodorant, for Christ’s sake!

(see blog titled: Discussion Hygiene)

The un-brow discussion went on for over an hour. After outlining the two acceptable ways in which I could rid him of the pesky hairs between his eyebrows, he decided that waxing was out of the question, as well as tweezing. He even mentioned they both seemed like torture.

Yes, my sweet. Welcome to a woman’s world!

“I can shave it!” he exclaimed.

“Do NOT even think about shaving it, Jake.”

“Why?” he whined.

“Because, you could slip and look like your Nanna did for over a year. She accidentally shaved too much and then panicked and shave them both off. She had to draw her eyebrows on, and when they finally did grow back, they were never the same again.”

“Yeah, that’s funny.” He laughed.

“Not if they’re your brows, it’s not.” I sipped my mocha latte and decided I needed to put all of the Bic Shavers® in the house on permanent lock-down. It was going to be inconvenient when I needed to shave my legs, but probably better safe than sorry.

He sat quietly for a moment, pondering Mario from the (Mario Sunshine© craze) on the computer screen.

“I could be careful. I won’t slip, Mom.”

“DO NOT DARE SHAVE YOUR EYEBROWS!”

“But Mom, Mario doesn’t have a uni-brow.”

Ugh! Jake wants to be Mario. It’s bordering on pissing me off at this point.

“Of course he does. He's Italian. But he's a CARTOON so you can't see it. He's got a penis too, but you don't see that either, do you?"

“Mom, don’t say penis.”

“Fine, don’t shave your eyebrows, and we’ve got a deal.”

Another recent conversation involved a note I received from his teacher about him being insubordinate:

Jake wouldn’t pick up his hand sanitizer in class when directed to do so.

Mrs. D


“Jake, why wouldn’t you pick up the hand sanitizer if it fell on the floor?”

“It was all leaking and gooey. I didn’t want to touch it.”

“Um, yeah—it was leaking HAND SANITIZER, not raw sewage. Geeze.”

“I wanna’ be home-schooled.” Jake says this on a weekly basis.

“Yeah, that’s not gonna’ happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Jake. The one thing you really need as an autistic person is to learn to move around in the world with other kids and adults. That’s more important for you than the reading and math and stuff. If I home-schooled you, you’d never leave the house.”

“I like that idea.” Jake brightened only long enough to hear my retort.

“I don’t.”

He constantly tells me he just wants to be normal. Normal, normal, normal. If I could purchase some normal for the kid, I would have done it long ago. But normal can’t be bought, stolen, or cooked in the oven. If this normal business is going to be the death of me, Jake’s obsessions and compulsions are going to be the death of him.

“I had weird dreams last night, Mom.”

“What about?”

“Mrs. Faber was wearing pajamas at school.”

“Yeah? What did they look like?”

“I don’t remember. But I was doing the wiener-tickle thing…okay, okay, don’t say anything I don’t want to talk about it.”

His nightly questions about legendary creatures, whether or not the doors are all locked, and the validity of heaven’s existence have begun to take an alarming turn:

“Mom, would you or Dad ever push me off a cliff?”

“No, honey. Why would you ask that?”

“Mom, you were right. I think I need to get medication for these bad thoughts in my head. I just want to have a normal brain. I don’t want to ever hurt anyone, but I was in the shed playing with my sword and shield and suddenly I got the bad thought that I might throw it at my Dad or Bob. It devastates me, Mom. I have guilt in my heart. I’m sorry I didn’t turn out to be the kid you wanted.”

Oh God… My poor baby.

“Honey, you’re even better than what I imagined when I was pregnant. You’re sensitive and you talk about things that other kids would not say out loud.”

“I’m sorry I’m not the best kid I could be.” Jake wasn’t crying like I felt like doing. He was simply apologizing for what he presumed were his shortcomings.

“Jake, please understand you’re the best kid any mom could ask for.”

“Even with my autistic brain?”

“Yes, in fact I love your autistic brain the most. You’re the best kid, ever.”

“What about Jaxson?”

“Him too.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, buddy.”

“Are you sure I’m the kid you wanted me to be?”

“You’re much more than any kid I could have ever imagined. I love you just the way you are.”

“I don’t want to disappoint you.”

“You never disappoint me, Jake. You try very hard, every day. Harder than any kid I know. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah, I do have to try pretty hard every day.”

God, but I love that boy…