Autism & The Dining Room Table

I am blessed to have three healthy, amazing kids. The youngest, tallest and wildest of these is my autistic son Finian.  Sixteen years ago he grabbed normal family life by the scruff of the neck and gave it a good, neuro-atypical shake.  He continues to remind us that if life is indeed like a box of chocolates, then it is unpredictably autism flavoured.

I try to put a positive spin on living with autism but sometimes, much as I love my son, it just sucks.

My life trajectory has not been so much redirected, as plucked out for singular ridicule by the universe, forced through a celestial mincer and presented back to me as a misaligned game of strategy and survival.  The rules are more laughable suggestions than solid guidelines.  It is a game of distorted reflections and unreliable footholds that makes progress slow, tiresome and laced with mistrust.

If God created my life, then evidence suggests he's a drunk toddler driven mad with the power of having too many crayolas at his disposal.  In keeping with the spirit of autism, he may have even eaten a few.   

So, I find myself sitting at my laptop, contemplating the slings and arrows of destiny, when I realise that  my dining room table is judging me.

"Guilty as charged"

The worktop itself is a curious landscape.  

Carefully positioned Bob the Builder toys compete for elbow space with my laptop.   Letters I will absolutely, definitely get around to replying to someday sulk like atheists at a christening. A mirror and tweezers are testament to the many hours I spend plucking man-sized whiskers out of my chin (thank you, never-ending menopause).  Seriously, those hairs should be harvested to build suspension bridges or prison gates or something.  They're tough.

The most notable thing about my dining room table is the glaring absence of food, unless the random bottle of ketchup that appeared there can be described as food.  

This intrepid sauce bottle inexplicably spent the last week in my daughter's bedroom, but seems to have paused to take stock of  life on its pilgrimage back to the larder.  Like it's on a spiritual retreat for condiments.  On my table.

I identify with that bottle of ketchup.

It just spent a hellish week on my daughter's bedroom floor, questioning it's purpose and identity, among a war-zone of decomposing laundry, make-up brushes and dog hair.  It bravely embarked on it's own odyssey to return to its spiritual home (the larder).  Instead, it found itself moored on the dining room table, stranded among the splatterings of life with autism.  The ketchup has an inkling that it would sorta belong on the table if confusion didn't reign.... but really it just wants to return to the safety of the cupboard where it can kick back with the dried herbs and out-of-date mustard.

I am that ketchup.  

I'm a simple, unassuming creature, mostly composed of vinegar and chemical preservatives.  

I also appear to have found myself stranded in a place I didn't chose to visit, in a landscape that doesn't make any sense.  

Nothing works the way it's supposed to (our TV is mostly tuned into Hungarian cartoon channels).  

I can't quite reach the destination I'm aiming for (it would be nice to complete my education before my corporeal expiry date).  

The function of, well, everything is contorted to adapt to autism (see dining room table above).

the artist formerly known as Jean

Meanwhile, the ketchup is delighted with it's own irony.  It represents the food that should be present on my table, while hanging onto the definition of food with the loosest of grips.  It says "yeah, i'm a reminder of how things should be and I'm still kinda crap".

That bottle of ketchup is having an existential crisis.  

My dining room table should be hosting nice, middle-aged dinners with a normal, pleasant family. We would have respectful, engaging discussions about climate change and current affairs. The well-planned meals would definitely not be a hurried concoction of whatever is left in the fridge that (probably) won't kill you.  Instead I am jostling for space with Scoop the Digger, unpaid bills and hair removal implements.  Meal times are about maintaining the curious tension of hitting moving targets with food while not killing anyone.

My table is judging me, as well it should.

Perhaps writing about autism will help me map some meaning onto life's shifting sands.  Sometimes the act of organising thoughts into sentences is enough to untangle knotty ideas.  Perhaps it will also motivate me to clear my table.