Many people believe that children with Autism don't have feelings. The thing is they do, they just struggle with other people's feelings and sometimes understanding their own. Take J, for instance, he has intense feelings. He feels things so deeply (thus his empathy for the impending death of the mice haunting our house) that he struggles with how to process those feelings. Sometimes those feelings burst out of him in very loud laughter, screams, yelling, etc. The interesting thing is that J struggles with identifying his feelings. We can see him looking anxious and ask if he's feeling anxious. He will tell us no. In fact he may be incredibly anxious but not be able to recognize that that is what he is feeling. Sometimes it may take him a day or more to realize that he was feeling anxious at that time 24 or more hours before.
J also struggles with understanding what other people are feeling. Most likely because he doesn't have a clue what he is feeling so how in the world can he figure out what someone else may feel like. Besides, he's not them, how should he know what they would feel like? It's an amazing train of thought but it does make for some difficult situations. This is one of the issues that led us to placing J in Giant Steps which is a specialized school for children with Autism specifically. We realized that he struggled so much with both identifying his own feelings and imagining what someone else would do/feel/think, that we needed some pretty intense intervention. This was after several meltdowns at our previous public school when J melted down after being asked to write a letter to a dead president. He still melts down when asked to imagine what someone else would think but the school he is in now is better able to manage these meltdowns and get him back focused on the rest of the day. Whew.
So all this leads me to the news of the day. Maurice Sendak has passed away. I remember him from his writing of Where The Wild Things Are. We knew J can take these things to heart and we wanted to make sure he knew so we told him tonight about Maruice's passing. J's immediate response was, "He also write Little Bear. I liked Little Bear much better." I had forgotten that Sendak had also penned the Little Bear series that J still watches on Nick Jr. J processes this for a while and talks about some favorite episodes he has. At this time Brandon mentions that many times people die in threes. I have to admit. My heart sank. I started to panic, where was Brandon going with this? I held me breath as Brandon went on to express to J that Moose A Moose and Z had already died so therefore Sendak was the third death.
For those of you who don't know the Moose and Z story Nick Jr had these two characters narrating their daytime programming for many years. Recently they stopped using them and have started using Bob the Builder and Dora instead. There has been a huge outpouring of rage on the part of many parents about this and the parents are calling for the return of Moose and Z.
When J found out that Moose and Z were gone it was a crushing blow to him. He could not believe that Nick Jr would do this to him! Oh the humanity. I sat in the front seat of our van and rolled my eyes. I have to admit. Part of me is so proud of him for having such strong emotions, especially for these two maligned cartoon characters.
I advised J to write a strongly worded letter to Nickelodeon expressing his outrage at their unfortunate treatment of his beloved characters. He looked at me very confused and said, "Um, if it's ok with you I think I'll just go watch SpongeBob."
Crushing blow.
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