My internal body clock got me up quite early again this morning. I was exhausted last night and went to bed earlier than I usually would, which probably explains why. Sandy was up not long after me, but the kids were still sound asleep. Sandy and I decided we’d abandon the sleepy-heads and go and get breakfast for just the two of us, which is precisely what we did. We went to the same Denny’s we’d been to earlier this week and enjoyed a T-bone breakfast.
For some time now, I’ve had a runny, sneezy nose and watery eyes every morning. I suspect this is hay fever or some such allergy. It has gotten to the point that I really need to do something about it, so we stopped at a nearby Walgreens to pick up some allergy medicine. There are a plethora to choose from, but after a chat with AI, I decided to try Loratadine. That’s sold here under both the Walgreens and Claritin brands. Medicines are often sold under both brand and generic names. The vast price difference between generic brands and name brands can be pretty eye-opening. Why on earth would people choose to spend twice the amount for the identical medicine when the only difference is how it’s marketed and packaged? The active ingredient is all that matters at the end of the day. Anyway, I picked up a box of 20 tablets for $14. I’m really hoping these are going to help, as I’m quite debilitated each morning, having to blow my runny nose every 10-20 seconds for up to 30 minutes.
We made it back home to find the kids still hadn’t stirred. I had hoped at least one of them would have been up and noticed the note I left in the kitchen. It read: “Dear children. I have kidnapped Mum. I will issue ransom demands in due course.” Alas, nobody saw it. I swear, I’m wasted on this audience—that is, my family.
Sandy decided to go back to bed to grab some more sleep; not surprisingly, since she had been up half the night from 1 am to 5 am. She does that a lot. Shortly thereafter, the kids emerged from their cocoons. I cooked them both some bacon and eggs.
Our house comes complete with its own pool, which I had arranged to be heated. Although we’ve all dipped our feet in it, we’ve not yet fully swum in it. It’s not big enough to really swim in, but it’s plenty big enough to lounge around in and play games with inflatable toys. I decided it was high time we put the pool to use, so I set the example by taking a refreshing dip. The kids followed me, and later, Sandy followed after she got up again.
We spent the better part of an hour having fun in the pool. After drying up and showering, I went to take a nap ahead of a planned visit with Joey to a nearby cinema to see the third instalment of Tron. It seemed apt, since we just rode the Tron Lightcycle Run roller coaster at Magic Kingdom yesterday, and he was wandering around toting his Tron toy Lightcycle discs. Along with Joey and me, there were just three other people in our cinema auditorium. It seated around 200 people, but Thursday mid-afternoons are obviously not especially busy cinema times here.
Adjacent to the cinema building is Target, where Joey and I had window shopped earlier in the week. Joey asked if we could pop in again to peruse the toy section, so that’s what we did. We didn’t come out with any new toys (there’s a first!), but I did promise to pick up a particular Transformer toy for Joey the next time we spotted it somewhere. As Sandy requested, I did find a pair of short trousers and a pair of swimming trunks for Joey.
Back home, it was time to sort out our dinner plans. Sandy had a hankering for the Golden Corral, which we frequented on occasions in times past. The nearest one was along Highway 192, an infamous stretch of road littered with various kinds of tourist traps. Anything and everything can be found somewhere along 192, including a wide range of restaurants.
We found the Golden Corral, and I was relieved of around $100 for the four of us to gorge on whatever we wanted for the duration. It was exactly as I remembered it: not especially fantastic quality food, and perhaps overpriced for what it was. However, being a buffet meant that each of us managed to find something to eat.
Just a block or so up the road was a Walmart petrol station. Our rental car had by now dipped into the bottom eighth on the fuel gauge, so I took the opportunity to stop in to fill her up.
I really had no idea what it would cost. You don’t just fill up and then pay after the fact for whatever you put in, as is the case back home. Here, you have to pre-pay an amount you think you need. The pump will stop filling when you reach the value of fuel you prepaid for. If you overestimated and don’t pump for the amount you prepaid, they refund the difference to your card. At least, that’s what I was led to believe by the person at the checkout counter when I asked how the process works.
The last time we were here was seven years ago. I vaguely recollect pumping a similar-sized people mover back then to the tune of $60-$70, but I couldn’t remember exactly. I figured petrol would be more expensive now, seven years on, so I requested to load $80 into the pump. In the event, I ended up pumping just $43 worth of petrol. Perhaps this car has a smaller tank because it’s a plug-in hybrid, or maybe I didn’t remember correctly how much it cost me seven years ago. Either way, I had thirty-ish dollars coming back to me.
When I got back in the car, Sandy sheepishly asked whether it would be OK if we popped into Walmart. My eyes glazed over as I immediately lost confidence that this would be the first day we might underspend the predetermined budget for a non-theme-park day. “Ok,” I announced to the car while staring beseechingly through the windscreen, “who wants to go to Walmart?” I did this expecting the kids to be unenthusiastic, hoping against all hope that the illusion of democracy might somehow work in my favour. Much to my chagrin, three hands raised. Mine wasn’t among them.
Reluctantly, I pulled into the car park and we made our way through the flaming gates of hell, or the Walmart main entrance, as Sandy insisted on calling it.
Predictably, we all split up and lost track of each other. In the end, I found some nice T-shirts for myself. Jae had her own money to spend, although she couldn’t physically spend it since Walmart doesn’t do contactless payments, so her shopping would have to come out of our bank account, and we’d have to find some way to settle up when the dust settles. Joey latched onto the toy aisles and found the particular transformer I had promised him earlier at Target.
Joey casually asked me when he would see all the Beyblades he had ordered, which we had delivered to our good friends Kristy and Carlos in Jacksonville before we arrived in Florida. In my tiredness, I casually suggested we wouldn’t see Kristy for another week or two, as they are currently out of town. Joey went back to whatever he was doing, and I went back to what I was doing, which was to mindlessly wander through endless aisles of random merchandise with a glazed zombie-like expression of nothingness on my face—such was my enthusiasm for being here.
Joey tends to become sullen, moody, and non-communicative whenever he’s upset, something doesn’t go his way, or he becomes anxious about something. We see the same behaviour whenever he sees a new toy he really wants but cannot get. Whether this is due to his autism, social anxieties of one of the other backpacks he’s burdened with, we don’t know. Perhaps it’s a combination.
While looking at the LEGO section, he began exhibiting this behaviour. This set in motion an alarming series of events I need to write about, as it highlights the delicate tightrope we routinely have to walk, and not always successfully. This evening, I have gone through the gamut of emotions, from exasperation to frustration, disappointment, anger, fear, and shame. Sandy and I have been pulling our hair out trying to find the right path and actions to take. In the past few hours, we have gone through hell and back.
We had all made it back to the car, except Joey. I was dispatched back into the shop to go and retrieve him. I found him, as predicted, lingering in the toy section. He had the Transformer he was promised in his hands, but he was staring at the LEGO section. I had interpreted this to mean there was some LEGO he really wanted but couldn’t afford. It was late, I was tired, and I was starting to lose patience with both kids for being ungrateful for all the spoiling we’ve been doing. We cannot justify an endless supply of whatever Joey sees, so I made it clear there would be no more toys for a while, and he needed to accept this and come back to the car. He kept walking at a snail’s pace, forcing me to walk slowly for fear of losing him on the way to the car. I was really getting annoyed by what I interpreted as him pining and holding out for more toys. He needed to be grateful for what he had, which was already considerable.
Before we made our way back to the house, I popped back into the Walmart petrol station, since my card had still not been credited with the thirty-ish dollars I was due. They told me it could take several hours, so I got back into the car even more irritated than I already was. The volcano in me was by now really starting to bubble.
When we got back to the house, Joey refused to get out of the car. Worse still, he refused to give any explanation for why he was so seemingly upset. By now, both Sandy and I are reaching our tolerance and patience limits, which is really hard to do as we’ve both developed the patience of saints in recent years. Joey has received far more than he could have ever hoped for so far on this holiday, and here he is apparently digging his heels in because he wasn’t able to pick out yet more LEGO to add to his already considerable stash back home. Both Sandy and I were really starting to lose it with him.
At some point, you reach your threshold and something snaps. This is what happened tonight. I broke through my tolerance barrier and raised my voice. I needed to get him out of the car and into the house so that I could lock up. We are all thoroughly exhausted and at the end of our tethers. Still, he wasn’t budging an inch. I took a deep breath and went into the house to cool down.
Over the next half hour, Sandy and I took turns giving it a few minutes, then going out to try to get him to move, but we were frustratingly unsuccessful each time. Each time, my voice got louder, and the slamming of the door got harder. At the bottom of this pit of sorry events, I even resorted to a tactic I already knew was doomed to fail—threatening to take his toys from him. Eventually, Joey was in tears. With nothing left in the tank, the only option we had was to let him sit in the car. At one point, Sandy came back after the umpteenth attempt to coax him out of the vehicle and told me he was now lying down on the back seat in uncontrollable fits of crying. We agreed we still had nothing left to try but to let him hopefully calm down a bit on his own. After another half hour, I went out the front door. I could immediately hear him screaming in anguish in the car. It was really hard to hear. I don’t mean I couldn’t physically hear him; I mean it was mentally soul-destroying to hear my son in such pain, and there was nothing I could do. My mental anguish hadn’t yet piqued—worse was to come.
Clearly, there was more going on here than we had realised. This wasn’t normal—not even for Joey. I put on my most compassionate, softly-softly voice and tried to ask him what was really bothering him. I apologised for shouting, slamming the door, and threatening to take his toys away (I feel such shame for allowing myself to lose so much control that I resorted to that tactic). I needed to remove that anguish—the fear of losing his toys—from him, to lighten his load. I need to do this if I were ever to stand a chance of ‘reaching him’ and getting to the bottom of what was really bothering him. It took another agonisingly slow 10-15 minutes, but I eventually managed to calm him down enough that he at least reached out to me for a cuddle, although he was still crying inconsolably. When I asked whether there was something in the store that he still wanted, to my utter amazement, he shook his head. That wasn’t it at all. All along, I had been mistaken. Shit! I had been operating under the wrong assumption all this time, and losing my shit for the wrong reason. No wonder this entire episode has been playing out this way.
The next task was to determine the real trigger. This is an uphill battle with Joey sometimes. Worse still, we don’t always succeed in identifying an underlying trigger. This was my worst fear. It’s a terrible thing to see your child in distress and not know why. I managed to finally get him out of the car and into the house. He collapsed into my arms on the couch, in a fit of crying again, as I tried desperately to comfort him. I spent the next ten minutes trying—desperately racking my brain—to guess what could be the issue. If it hadn’t been him being disappointed about losing out on a new toy, which is what I mistakenly assumed, then I had been berating him incorrectly for the past hour. Not only was that supremely unfair to Joey, but it also meant I was effectively fueling an already raging fire and was not doing the right thing to extinguish it. At this point, I felt like an utter failure of a parent. I had completely misjudged the situation and, in fact, had been making it worse this whole time. Have I learned nothing over the past 20 years?
When Joey gets like this, he is incapable of rational thought and quite unable to articulate his needs and feelings. About the most we can expect from him at times like this is a barely perceptible nod or shake of the head while it’s buried in his hands. I was gingerly asking Joey leading questions to try to narrow in on the original trigger. Was it to do with what happened today? Slight nod. Was it to do with what happened at the cinema? Slight shake. I went through numerous questions before I finally started to make progress. I remembered the off-the-cuff remark I made when he asked about his Beyblades at Kristy’s, so I wondered if it was something to do with his Beyblades—a slight nod. Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. A few more questions and I finally hit the nail on the head. We had three weeks left before we leave Florida, but I had said I didn’t think Kristy would be home until the week after next. That was it. I had finally nailed it. He was worried he wouldn’t be able to get his Beyblades. This worry took root quickly, developed into anguish, and finally overcame him completely, sending him into a full-blown meltdown of epic proportions. It removed his ability to reason or to communicate with us. We made it worse by pushing him too hard, creating a vicious circle. I assured him repeatedly that we would not leave Florida without his Beyblades and that I would do whatever I could to try to get them as quickly as possible. Within five minutes, he was calm again, talkative, and he’d stopped crying and was more interactive with me. We’d gotten there. Phew! What a marathon this one was.
For the next half an hour, he was back to his usual self. He came to give me repeated cuddles before tiredness eventually overtook him and he went off to bed. I have gone through so many emotions tonight that I’ve found it difficult at times to write it all up. I’ve been sitting at the laptop for the past couple of hours with tears streaming down my face at times. Things are rarely this bad, but this isn’t untypical of the challenges we face trying to keep Joey on an even keel.
I think we’re all good now… until the next time something happens that sets him off, and we cannot identify. Thankfully, these types of situations—the really tough ones like tonight—aren’t that frequent anymore. It used to be worse, but Sandy and I have gotten better at being trigger detectives over the years.
Ok, time for bed. We’ll wake up tomorrow and start a whole new day, with an entirely new set of unknowns and challenges to face. But we’ll do so together, as a family.