Changes to school, tea towels and masking (or NOT masking!)
Last post I mentioned the challenges we have been facing with Mars climbing anything and everything and a little bit of how it has impacted us as a family. At the time we were keeping Mars home from school while we brainstormed with the school and our Ministry of Education (MoE) as to how Mars could be at school safely.
One month home Mars is still at home, but we have decided to do a dual enrolment of school and Te Kura (Correspondence school) this way we can still have the support from school and have his teacher aides come and work with him at home, relieving some of the pressure on me as quite frankly “I don’t know what I am doing”.
As a way of trying to deter Mars’ climbing antics we are fundraising to get some complex and engaging climbing equipment for home, with the aim to encourage safe climbing while his brain catches up to the safety elements of roof and tree climbing.
We wanted a way to give something awesome as a thank you to those who donated so we are selling a tea towel with a very special design by Mars’ Dad, Anu. If you wish to purchase please follow the link! We can’t ship outside New Zealand as the logistics are quite overwhelming and challenging with our time poor brains, but there is an option to donate if you wish.
Mars has discovered a love of letters at the moment, and I enjoy seeing random words pop up on the fridge in alphabet magnets, or hearing him read number plates on cars as we drive around the city. He will often say the letter then give the phonic sound and my heart just melts at the joy on his face as he works his way through each letter.
Something that has been playing on my mind for a year or so now is masking. I tried to find a good definition to sum it up but decided a mash up of multiple definitions was best “a conscious and/or unconscious suppression of autistic traits in order to appear neurotypical”.
The reason it has been playing on my mind is because Mars does not mask. I don’t even know whether he would be aware of how to mask, it certainly doesn’t come naturally to him. And I find myself in various support groups of parents of autistic children, and even though these are online they all give me the impression that their children mask, it has made me ponder how common not masking in children really is?
I don’t mind at all that Mars doesn’t mask, I like that he can march to his own beat and not care about what others think, a trait I am sure most of us would love to have.
I can only speak from our experience but I do feel like having no level of masking brings additional challenges for the parents, mainly because it greatly reduces the quantity and quality of social interactions for everyone. This is purely based on the multiple threads I have read, videos and conversations I have seen and heard. And probably stems from many feelings of envy. For example I will see a family video with them at the fairground, kids with ear defenders and still having fun in spite of their challenges and it tugs at my envy strings. We still can’t do those things. It can be hard to accept. I console myself by chanting “social media shows the highlights, social media shows the highlights”.
Will Mars mask at some stage in the future, I don’t know. But we will continue to support him however we can to help him feel happy and comfortable, he is a great kid just as he is.
Would love to hear your experiences on masking and not masking, it can be a bit of a contentious issue I know, but it is always nice to hear experiences from both sides.
No masking here! Although I will say my son likely has some degree of stress in certain situations, school or social outings, in NOT being able to mask when some part of him knows he’d fit in more if he could (or maybe that’s just me projecting my stress onto him?). But mostly my son is who he is and I don’t think he has much worry about trying to be someone he’s not. As Mars gets older he may find places/reasons where fitting in becomes important to him, or he may never care. We keep focusing on finding the places/people that accept B as he is.
Good luck with the climbing safety, and with having him home — glad you can get some staff to come to you, that’s great! I “homeschooled” for a year and didn’t know what I was doing either, ;) — and I also had some home therapists for him which was a huge help!