To my one most loyal reader, the ABU got straight 1s at Festival. The only glitch was during sight reading when 50% of the ABU and several of the second violins just couldn’t figure out the time signature. Primus swears it wasn’t him that befouled the ABU’s stellar reputation.
More will be posted on the whole experience soon. I have to say that showing up on a Friday as a man normally beholden to a 8-5 job to do volunteer work at Festival really pissed off the Muffy crowd. Oh you know who I mean. These women are the epitome of attitude. I could hear them thinking as they stared me down, ‘I am still imbued with the values of the 1960s and I have a husband who makes enough for me to stay home and raise my kids right as opposed to the negligent job you and your working wife are doing loser. Oh by the way my husband also makes enough to pay for the augmentation to keep these puppies perky enough to wear these overly tight sweaters I opt to wear no matter what the season.’ But like I said, more on the social dynamics of volunteering at the land of social economic stratification will come at a later time.
But on to my real topic today, sometimes you see a bit of television that just nails your personal experience perfectly. This past Saturday I watched an episode of Parenthood and it was dead on, really dead on. My beloved spouse who watched the episode with me repeated the comments that she usually saves for Arlo and Janis comic strips, “Hey they have a microphone in our bedroom” and “where is our royalty check?”
How dead on was it you ask? Well there was the possum thing. The one guy who seems to be the center of this television series Adam Braverman (Peter Krause) is lying in bed at night when he hears a sound outside. The sound is slight but obviously animal. The hero he wants to be makes Adam jump out of bed and grab a tennis racket. He then goes outside to face the wilderness threat. I have not tried the tennis racket as a tool of animal control yet but I have observed others do this.
In my family’s case our wilderness noise was the killer squirrel that rampaged back and forth in our attic. Demon squirrel as I came to call it somehow got into the attic via a rotted soffit. The red eyed black furred beast while in the attic got into a box of toys and chewed up my security pillow that my aunt had made me as an infant. The pillow was a blue dog with my name in script on it. I miss my lovey puppy dog. Damn demon squirrel.
Anyway the squirrel by this act of malicious destruction of a forty plus year old pillow so pissed me off so much that it required a trip to ACE to get a squirrel trap. Nota Bene, I looked at other options. However, most animal specialists in the Mid-Michigan area don’t kill squirrels or opossums or other varmints. What they do is live trap the critter and transport. For this they bill by the hour. This paradigm is sort of the INS approach to illegal aliens applied to squirrels, I mean you know the little buggers will just keep coming back. The trap made economic sense because the animal specialists’ hourly rate ain’t cheap.
Facing the choice between sanity and economic ruin it was as I said it was a trip to the hardware store for a consultation with the old guy who seemed to be dean of the place. Most hardware stores have old guys that offer impliedly sage advice. Usually there are hard of hearing, missing a digit or two and wear an eye patch from where that tire they overinflated blew. My guru old guy recommended the Squirrelinator 3000 trap. His next suggestion was to use peanut butter as bait.
Up until Rocket J. Squirrel gave in to his legume lust we had to listen to him scurry up and down the attic from one end to the other. You would have thought the beast was playing ten pins and had to manually re-rack after each frame.
Dad Adam in Parenthood was facing the same thing and his nerves were frayed. I got it; I mean I really felt his pain. The hissing opossum which he inadvertently trapped scarred the pee right out of him much like the very po’d captured squirrel rocking the Squirrelinator 3000 back and forth in my attic did me.
But the similarities did not end there. This Dad character has a son who is “different”. The son has fascination with narrow topic areas. He insists on eating only certain favorite foods and is very rule driven. Finally the son insists on wearing a pirate costume to school. Hmmmh. I have seen most of this stuff (save the pirate costume) before. Then the A word is then mentioned.
Like every impacted parent who sees a reference to Asperger’s coming I cringed. I don’t know if it was the CSI episode where the kid with Aspergers was taken advantage of and made part of a murderous plot that made me sensitive to this or if maybe it was the never stated but very evidently Asperger’s guy who was the rule driven methodical killer on Criminal Minds.
Or maybe it was Sheldon on the Big Bang. Sheldon is a tough one though. He is so ASD that he can be used as a teaching tool for our son. Often I find myself standing there at the end of a Big Bang episode saying, “What could Sheldon have done that would have brought about a better response/result?” This is a regular game we play here. I note that it very hard to keep a straight face when Primus is laughing his ass off at Sheldon because I am thinking something like, son you are Sheldon.
Anyway back to the show at hand Parenthood. The parents hear from someone that these quirky behaviors of there child seem like symptoms of Aspergers. They scratch their heads and try and think of someone they know with a kid with that diagnosis. They shudder when they realize who the other family is. They are worried because the parents of the child seem a bit off themselves.
Next the father begins researching for “Aspergers cure” on Google. Next while still online he hits a faith based site for dealing with Asperger’s. Next he is firing between sites looking overwhelmed and thoroughly confused. I have so been there, so done that. Do I need mention that I am still overwhelmed and confused?
The Bravermans again trying to be the good parents, then tries to get their son in to see a specialist. However the specialist is booked out for 18 months. Via a weird and obviously TV reality only turn they get their son in to see the Bob Dylan of Asperger’s specialists. Hell just to find someone in Mid-Michgian that works with Asperger’s was a Herculean task.
My wife and I had to deal with the vagaries of insurance and filled panels. Blue Care Network of Mid-Michigan had text in their benefit description indicating we had to get a primary care doctor’s authorization to see a specialist. We did that and then we called the insurer. As soon as we got through the endless prompts on the 1-800 number we were informed no that wasn’t how it worked. Instead we were told by this particular clerical we had to get the insurer’s okay on who to see. Oh and by the way she stated in a casual aside there were only five doctors/psychologists in our area (read a 100 mile radius) that are potentially qualified.
Mom dutifully called each of them. Two said they no longer participated with the plan, one dealt only with children with criminal involvement, one was a gerontology focused practice and another had a full panel. Health care even with good insurance is just a bowl of jollies now isn’t it?
It was only when we were breaking down while in contact with one of the “no longer participating” that we found they had one person in the practice who still worked with the insurer and focused on ASD kids. We set up the appointment and much like the parents sat with baited breath at the end of the session. When the diagnosis came our conversation played out almost exactly as it did in the television series. I sat there hoping ASD was a phase and saying something stupid like we’ll get through this, like ASD is something that is anything other that a permanent set of characteristics. Afterwards as God is my witness I told my wife it was my fault and my families fault, just as Adam Braverman does in the series.
The feeling in the episode seemed true to reality. It seems as if the writer who is crafting this plot line has been there/done that. In a later episode there is an incident at school which results in the couple’s child being thrown out of school. In my experience you aren’t really the parent of an ASD kid until you have this or a very similar moment.
The call from the school usually begins with a euphemistically termed phrase like, “there has been an incident”. In the series the incident was the destruction of a fish tank. As the parents noted standing among the shards of glass and the dispersed pretty stones that had lined the bottom of the tank there were no survivors. Yeah I have stood among that rubble a number of times.
In my life the most recent incident occurred when I was going to school to do my parental volunteerism duty i.e, I was going to watch coats for the band festival as noted above. It was there when I was just entering the school that I found myself meeting my son and the social worker in the hallway kibitzing in soft tones with heads down. Hey I knew what this was I have been there many, many times in the past. Before I could get to my assigned task I was pulled aside by the social worker and told “there was an incident”.
The most recent incident for us was that Primus was being taunted by kids in his math class over a pencil having gone missing on a substitute teacher’s desk. Instead of hurting the child (and at six foot 170 pounds at 14 years of age this was theoretically possible) Primus stood up and to quote the social worker called the harasser a child rapist in a very loud voice and walked out of the room because he could not take the harassment any more.
Really what child at 14 unless they are fairly intelligent would go for the heinous “child rapist” term over something straightforward like numb nuts or useless fucker? After stomping out of the room Primus went down to the vice principal’s office. No sanctions followed but the vice principal’s office has now been designated as my son’s cooling down place on an as needed basis. Getting that space so designated is actually a victory because the school resisted a suggestion that it was needed at last year’s IEP plan meeting. (Each year we plan an educational and support track for my son, it is called an Individualized Education Plan).
Yeah, so far the writers of Parenthood are getting this issue right. I hope it continues. ASD is a growing disorder. What the cause is I don’t know. I know the statistics are upward trending for diagnoses of the disorder. I also know scientists have really been arguing the postulated vaccine correlation does not hold true. One thread of inquiry that seems logical to me and which intrigues me is the thought that common chemicals now widely dispersed in our environment, everything from cleaning products to the staples of manufacturing (stuff that is in everything from couches to sippy cups) may impact pregnant women in the early weeks of fetal development. It is not for this series to be a documentary on ASD impacted life or a white paper on causation or treatment. Still it would be nice if the story line keeps the issue of the how a family impacted with Asperger’s copes real.
Here is the link to the initial episode of Parenthood regarding Asperger’s http://www.hulu.com/watch/133234/parenthood-man-versus-possum
1 comment:
So there ARE things worse than rotted soffits??????
Post a Comment