Matthijas' invisible twin

Matthijas has an invisible Siamese twin. He was not there when Matthijas was born, we only learned about him later on. His name is Autism, though I am thinking seriously about renaming him.

Autism has been in a bad mood this week. He is reeking all sorts of havoc and I'm mad at him. Luckily he has been sleeping for the most part, but he's out of control during the day.

Do you remember drama class? When your teacher would say "Today we are going to pick a character out of the bag and BE that character". There would be easy caricatures like The Marx Brothers, the "Soup Nazi" or June Cleaver. Others would be complicated like Othello or Oedipus or Antigone.

Every day is like a grab bag, and you never know what you are going to get with Autism. Some days he is whiny and sullen and doesn't speak. Some days are "stimmy" days with lots of running into walls and couches and nail biting and jumping. Others are the happy peaceful quite before the storm, and then there is the storm. Those days I wish Autism would go away, that we could just cut off the offending appendage and be done with it.

We have had to accept Autism into our home. He is our son. We can't ignore him. He is so much work and because he follows Matthijas everywhere some days I have a hard time separating the two.

But there are those days when I love Autism just like the rest of my kids. He can be really funny and he's the only kid who has ever taken an interest in my linguistics degree. We get to try out new recipes for Autism and he gets snacks and toys my other kids would never be allowed (bring on the Pringles and gluten free, dairy free Oreos!) I also get a lot of snuggle time with Autism. He doesn't sleep well so sometimes we have slumber parties in Matthijas' room. And as Matthijas gets better some of the fun parts are slipping away with the not-so-fun.

Like all of your kids your hope is to teach them well and then one day they will grow up and strike out on their own. I hope that someday soon we will be able to send Autism out the door, having prepared him for the world. It's sort of sad that I realized today that I might actually miss him if one day we find he has gone away forever. But even if Autism goes away without saying good-bye and without a forwarding address we will always have Matthijas and for that I am grateful.

Above is a photo of Matthijas the day I wrote this blog post. Below is a photo of Matthijas now age 7. Much of what I wrote at the time is still exactly the same, except now he sleeps well on his own and swings from days when he says little to days he talks incessantly. He has "the memory of an elephant" and because of the way his brain is wired, he is amazing with "mashups"; any and all things he knows can come out in a story, and it is a puzzle for the rest of us to decipher that keeps us on our toes.