I'm very happy to introduce blogger and author Jeff Stimpson to PFOR. Hoping everyone will benefit from his experience having an older child on the autism spectrum. Enjoy.
(From Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family's Life With Autism)
My son Alex is up at 2:30 one morning, and he comes to stand beside our bed, as he often does. I take him back to bed, stay for a minute to make sure he falls back asleep, then go back to bed myself.
The phone rings at 4 a.m., waking me again. Please God let it be some drunk guy, I think.
"Alex is in Marie's apartment!" my wife Jill says. Marie is one of our neighbors.
We bolt into the living room, where the lights are on. Alex sits in front of the TV, watching Elmo with the volume low.
He must have unlocked our front door and left our apartment soon after I'd gone back to sleep. Marie says Alex came in and turned on all the lights, including one she herself didn't know how to work. Then I guess he left. Says Annette, another neighbor, who loves Alex, "I thought I heard my door rattling at about 3, but I thought it was the wind."
I hang my head on this morning and pray I'm still asleep and dreaming. Jill says little, but dives onto the Net to Google locksmiths and door alarms. "Alex, you CANNOT leave the apartment!" we take turns saying. We snap off Elmo. I tell Jill I could use some comforting at the moment. She continues to tap the keyboard. Annette and Marie have daughters at home, I think into my hands. Alex is still a cute little 10-year-old boy. What happens if this happens when he isn't anymore?
At about 5 a.m., I learn the word elopement. It's something that autistic people and victims of Alzheimer's do. I know of one boy who did this a lot. He's 14 now, I think, and his parents have put him in some kind of facility.
So. Locks. Marie points out that Alex could lock us out with chain locks and deadbolts, even if they're installed high (he'll simply stand on a chair the same way he once, a lifetime ago, stood on the open door of the dishwasher to reach Pringles). "Of all the stupid things we ever let him play with, the worst was that baby toy where he had to learn to unlock all the locks," says Jill. "'Here baby. Now we'll never be safe from your baby paws!'" We've often thought of a more sophisticated lock on the inside of our door, but NYC fire regs forbid inside-facing key locks. Through this day we discover that we'll need a variance from the fire department -- no, the fire department tells us, we'll need it from the city Department of Buildings, which doesn't answer its phone -- to get a combination lock installed what amounts to backwards. "You want it how?" the clerks say in hardware store after hardware store, turning the locks upside down to show that they can't be installed that way no matter how hard two parents stare at the Medeco displays like a couple of exhausted RCA/Victor dogs.
"My heart is broken," Jill says at one point, between hardware stores. "I'm so jangled I can't imagine sleeping more than three hours straight. For the first time, I see how a couple could break up over something like this." She likens this day to a "hospital day" way back when Alex was a 20-ounce preemie, days during which Alex used to be fine but when she and I would walk around dazed and aching.
Can Alex figure out an alarm? We buy three: two tiny white jobs that stick to the jam and to the door and that when separated while ON! send their sound right through your skull like Elmo's voice. We put one on the front door and another on the door of the boys' bedroom, and I tell Jill to use the latter during my upcoming few nights on a business trip. We also get an alarm that looks like a micro-cassette recorder; it hangs from the knob of the front door and goes off when jiggled.
"You got a little surprise coming to you, Alex," I mutter. "There's a new sheriff in town."
On the first night, the hanging alarm chirps every time somebody opens the door to the porter's closet, which is next door in the hall. The sticky stuff on one door-jam alarm lets go while we sleep; next morning, I find the alarm on the floor, the impact apparently having jarred its switch to OFF. I try not to let Alex, who is up for school already and who I guess decided to just stay in last night, see where the switch is. I have to fiddle with the hanging alarm to get it off the knob; it goes off for a second. Alex giggles.
Marie said that if somebody had to break into her apartment at 4 a.m., she's happy it was Alex. I figure it's best to get the building involved. I tell the head of building security, who is a friend, and he tells the head of the board, and I ask that maybe the building management can help us get the variance for the inside lock. E-mails fly. "Young Alex Stimpson," one e-mail describes him, "who's autistic and almost 10 years old." The subject lines on the e-mails read "small problem."
Good addition to your blog!!
Posted by: Brenda Kaiser | 01/21/2012 at 11:08 AM