A Bittersweet Day-Update

Image by sofafort via FlickrLast week, I posted about the efforts that my wife and I have been undertaking in trying to get our 16 year old son placed in a residential educational facility on Maryland's Eastern Shore.  After months of battling with the school system, they finally agreed that it would be the best place for our son. I talked about the mixed feelings that I had regarding that decision.

At the time, we were not sure when his start date at the new facility would be.  There were a few more forms that needed to be updated and filled out.  Yesterday, my wife called me to inform me that we now had his start date, Monday, November 8th.  I had just left the office and was on the beltway headed to my part time job.  I wished she had waited until I got home last night because my eyes immediately began to fill with tears.  Less than two weeks away.  My immediate thought was, "I'm not ready."

This morning, I woke up thinking about a lot of different things regarding the situation.  All of which made me tear up a bit.  At times, I wish I were stronger about these things.  There is the question of how to tell him what is going to happen, or whether to tell him anything at all.  If we tell him ahead of time that he is going to a new school, he will drop to the ground and refuse to budge.  I suppose we will take him and try our best to explain it to him when we drop him off.  He loves crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, so hopefully that will get him out the door.

While there is a huge part of me that isn't ready for this to happen, there are times when I want it to happen now.  Those times are when he angers me.  Earlier today was one of those moments.  He asked me if we could go to Borders in Annapolis Mall.  That in and of itself isn't bad, but we have had two bad incidents with him at Borders recently when he wanted me to order a DVD for him that you can not buy, usually it is a DVD of Wheel of Fortune or another game show.

He doesn't fully comprehend that you can not buy everything.  I have recently started downloading game shows for him off of YouTube and burning them on to DVD for him so that he will have them.  Still, he wanted to go to Borders.  He told me he wanted to go there so I could order him a Wheel of Fortune DVD.  I tried to explain that we could not get that there, and we were not going to go.

He immediately went into one of his meltdowns.  For those of you with experience with an autistic child, you know what those can be like.  For those of you who don't, you would think it is a temper tantrum, but it really is more than that. He dropped to the ground and started getting angry.  Anything near him, he picked up and threw across the room.  At one point, his glasses went flying.  Still it is better to have had the meltdown here than at Borders.  I wanted to drop him off to the school right then.

There is so much that needs to be done between now and then.  He is going to need a whole new wardrobe because the school has uniforms.  We will also need to supply him with a fresh supply of his own toiletries and such.  He usually share mine at home.  It would be nice to have a party for him before he left, but we already have plans for the next two weekends, so we won't be able to do that. 

The school usually has a rule that we won't be able to see him for 5 weeks, but with the timing of his start date and Thanksgiving, I think he will only be gone for two weeks before coming home for a long weekend.  When he goes back after Thanksgiving weekend, he would be back at school for four weeks before Christmas break.   Hopefully, the transition won't be too hard on any of us.