Repairing our Relationship over Pizza

As many of you know, my “baby” (well, he’s 12, but always my baby) has High Functioning Autism. The meltdowns have become less over time and with lots of work, but they do sometimes occur. We’ve been having lots of issues with math lately. He’s hit a level where it’s not coming as easy and he can’t just do everything in his head.

Last Friday was really challenging. Math lesson sucked again, but he was sticking with it. During a break he was “shopping” around on Roblox and considering what he wanted to add and what he needed to keep access to his private servers. I asked him to make a list of what things cost and we’d go over it. Long story short, his Dad and I thought this was a great opportunity to show him how he would need the math stuff we’re working on in his real life. Well, despite our good intentions, all went downhill and a meltdown occurred.

Said meltdown included tearing up of all the math scratch paper and any other paper within reach. After some yelling (by him, not us), he picked up a torn piece of paper, looked at me and said “THIS is what I think of our Relationship!” And proceeded to dramatically rip the paper in half with a flourish. Honestly, his Dad and I had to stifle a laugh.

Things calmed down, some tears flowed and all was forgiven — however, he had lost screen time for the weekend due to some behaviors he engaged in during the meltdown.

While we were sitting on the sofa post-mortem-ing what had happened, Aaron looked at me with Bambi eyes and said: “Do you think we could go to CPK tomorrow and rebuild our relationship?”

Oh Lord! What you need to know is that CPK is one of this child’s three top places to eat. Seriously?! Rebuild our relationship?? Again, I totally had to stifle a laugh (his Dad had to put a pillow over his face). I looked lovingly at my sometimes uber-manipulative (in a fun way) child and said “yes, of course, I would enjoy that.”

As my husband often says, our son’s future career will either be conman or politician — could go either way.