I might have posted sooner, but am still crying from everyone's stories. then this article did me in.
DS17 (ASD) is a senior in high school but will not graduate this year. His projected date of graduation is 2012.
He will not shower unless forced to.
He will not shave unless I refuse to feed him dinner.
He eats everything in sight.
He wears blue jeans and black shirts. Long sleeve shirts in winter and short sleeve shirts in summer. I still have to take his winter clothes away and hide his coat until the next fall and to make sure they have been replaced with jean shorts and black summer shirts. He has been known to wear his winter coat with the hood up in the middle of summer.
I can - if lucky - get him to do maybe one homework assignment every week. Not surprisingly, he's flunking all of his classes. Again.
His high school wanted me to send him to a school for incorrigible children. The kind of school where most kids are court ordered.
He still touches other people inappropriately, and doesn't understand that some people might not want a hug. He also does not understand that not everyone wants or needs his "help"
Thank God DS9 is more mild on the spectrum than DS17. But he is going to be a teenager soon. And he still wears his shoes on the wrong feet and has "accidents".
And then I have DN5 (CP) who is wearing diapers and always will, and who can't walk up or down a set of stairs by himself. He's wrecked 2 tv's, one dvd player since January, and now our house looks like Fort Knox with locked gates everywhere and a cage over the tv. I was coping quite well until he came to live with us - and now I am drowning.
I hate my job (Mom) and I want to quit. I'm just glad I had no illusions going in that mother hood was going to be a picnic. I don't quit though - I don't have another job lined up. So I go through each day trying very hard not to think about tomorrow, because thinking about tomorrow means that I will realize how many tomorrows there might actually be.
I'm so glad to read that I'm not alone.
to all of you and thank you so much for sharing.