When I was working with JE and we needed a second to work opposite days to me, the common joke shared between myself and his dad was “I wonder how long it’ll take to scare this one off.”

People were okay with working with an older autistic child.
They were okay with working with an older autistic child who has minimal speech and no alternative method of communication. (He dropped PECS long ago and doesn’t have the motor skills for sign – his printing isn’t great, and neither is his spelling, so an augmentative device hasn’t been tried either.)

They were okay with these things until this child, whose head came up to my shoulder at age 10 (I’m 5’9″), had a meltdown due to sensory overload.

And they didn’t know what to do, and they were afraid of him. So they quit.

He scared me sometimes. And I didn’t always know what to do. But I saw distress in those eyes, and fear in the flailing arms and legs, and so I was not frightened away by his meltdowns.

They were too much like my own.

I no longer work with JE. I left because of time constraints – life caught up with us, as it often does. He has a young man working with him now, which is probably better in the long run, anyway. I am no longer strong enough to help when he is melting down. And he should have a male role model who is not his father.

I suffered a fair amount of injuries at JE’s hands. He bit me (hard enough to cause a bruise that lasted a month), he kicked me, he pinched me… and then I learned how close was too close, and my reflexes got better, and (more importantly) he learned to trust me.

When I think of JE, I remember the moments we shared, the happiness, the trust. I don’t think about his meltdowns, though some of those moments occurred after a meltdown.

But my favourite moment of all?

Sitting knee-to-knee and nose-to-nose with him on the trampoline, allowing our voices to roam up and down the scale, as loudly as possible and as high as possible.

In that moment, nothing and nobody existed but the two of us.