My daughter Ella had three separate meltdowns on the way home from school one day. She wanted so badly to talk about her day, but Maddie, her 7 year old sister, was interrupting our chat, younger sister Annelise was singing to herself, and baby brother Teddy was laughing and making noises at Annelise. All that auditory input was more than Ella could take. She began hitting the chair in front of her, the window, her leg; yelling at us that we couldn’t be quiet, we wouldn’t listen, we didn’t care about her, and we didn’t love her. She was hurting herself with the strength of her physical outbursts, telling Maddie to stop looking at her “in that way”, and then she ran into the house and into her room when we got home, yelling “why does everyone hate me?”
I got the other children distracted playing and watching a movie, and went to talk to Ella. I asked her to tell me about her day. She told me that she had a bad day and it was mostly because of Carrie, the bully. On this particular there were four different instances of Carrie shooting dirty looks, and then Ella accidentally hit her on the head with her umbrella at the end of the day when they were getting ready to leave. Carrie erupted at her for it, and Ella walked out of school feeling worse than she ever had. She got in the van, very stressed and unprepared to deal with the chaos of 3 small children.
After she told me about her day, we talked about her meltdowns. I asked her if she realized that they were caused by bottled up stress and emotions she had not talked about. She told me that she wished she were not too afraid to talk to her teacher about how she feels about her bully glaring at her. She wished her teacher would use her occupational therapist’s recommendations for allowing her to do small things to help alleviate stress in school, especially allowing her to take tests and do writing assignments in a quiet place outside the classroom. I told her I would talk to her teacher, but with 2 weeks left, she will probably just need to deal with things.
I asked if she realized that other people are affected by her meltdowns. I gave her the mental picture of being a tornado coming into our car after school, whirling and then tossing cars and roofs and tractors and glass at us as she melted down. We were doing what we usually do, but it was more than she could handle because of the bad day she’d had. She laughed at the imagery, and agreed that we were all doing what we usually do.
I also told her that Maddie had been asking questions about her. About why she can get over a fit and Ella can’t. About why Ella has meltdowns at the store or in the car, and she doesn’t. About why Ella won’t eat a lot of foods and wears the same clothes and shoes all the time. And that Maddie is starting to be embarrassed when Ella has a meltdown, but doesn’t know why Ella isn’t embarrassed.
Trying to show her a parallel, I mentioned to her that after her father has been away on business for half the week and comes home, that we have noticed that he does not handle the usual noise and ruckus of our house well, either. He tends to retreat into the bedroom with the laptop to stay out of the chaos. Everyone is doing what we always do, but it is too much when he is not used to it or in the right emotional state to deal with it.
I asked Ella if she had noticed that I had been acting different when she had a meltdown, recently. I asked her what I did when she had a meltdown about picking out clothes the other morning. She said “You didn’t walk away, you didn’t yell and tell me to hurry, and you helped me make choices”. I told her that was right. I asked her how I reacted today in the car while she was freaking out, she said “You didn’t yellin my face, you didn’t say you would ground me, and you tried to make everyone be quiet in the car”. I agreed. I asked if that was different than I had acted before, and she said yes.
I told her that I had been doing a lot of reading about how her brain works. I also told her that she inherited the way her brain works from her father. I had been pointing out to her recently that she has inherited different things about her body from different people. Her eyes are blue like Grandma’s, she has freckles like me, and she processes things and reacts to things the way she does because her brain is more like her father’s. She has inherited her father’s same ways of thinking, reacting to stress and to loud noise, his coordination for things like putting on socks.. his love of predictability and how it makes him makes feel safe. I explained that I like the novelty of choosing where to eat after church, and he stresses out if we don’t always go to the same place because it brings him comfort and stability. I told her it took some real hard thinking for me to understand why her Papa felt that way because it didn’t make any sense to me at all. That the sameness would be boring and limiting to me, because that’s how my brain thinks.
I asked her if she remembered the test she had taken at a new doctor’s office. I told her that she and her father, and many other people, have brains that process the same way. I explained to her that her best friend has a reading problem. Her friend’s mom is learning more about how to teach her because there is a name for her reading difference and the way she processes words and numbers. I told Ella that she has a processing and reacting difference called Asperger’s Syndrome, and that about 1 in 150 kids have Asperger’s Syndrome or another one of the Autism Spectrum disorders. I told her that I knew there were kids at her school that have Asperger’s or Autism also.
I told her that the books I had been reading had helped me understand how to help her work through her meltdown, that it would not help if I demanded that the meltdown stop, and that she was having a meltdown because of her perspective on the situation. I found out that I needed to see her perspective, not just mine. I also explained that it was hard for me to make my brain think the same way hers does, and sometimes my brain is too tired to think that way.
At the end of our conversation, she said she didn’t have any questions, but that she was glad that I could read about it. I told her that it was helping me be a better mom and a better wife since I think her father has it too. Her demeanor softened quite a bit during the course of our talk, and we connected in a way that I don’t know that we ever had before. I had never seen her feel so misunderstood and rejected, and she seemed more aware than usual that she was different from people around her.
At the end of the day, I was just doing my best to help her make sense of her place in the world, and to give her reassurance that I love her for exactly who she is. I have no idea how much of my explanation stuck in her head, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am not keeping her diagnosis from her, and that I am empowering her to understand herself. I hope she will do the same for her own children.
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