When What The Hell Happens

I grabbed the door handle with a little tension in my stomach, expecting that I would be greeted with a scowl and the ever-so heralding “why are YOU here?” But to my surprise, after taking the time to enter as discreetly as humanly possible, there was no one sitting there to curse my arrival. The living room was empty. Not only was it empty, but it was EMPTY. It was sparkling clean. Where was all of the mess? You could see the hardwood floors. I didn’t trip on anything trying to get inside and find the space to take my shoes off. The black leather couch had room to sit down on it and the fireplace that was being used as a type of ‘shove whatever in there’ storage had actual firewood in it. I smelled lavender and peppermint and not old spoiled milk or wet dog. The whole vibration was different. The energy of the room, that was normally far beyond chaotic and strained, was eerily calm and peaceful. What the hell happened here? I thought to myself. 

Asking what the hell happened in response to a room that is clean is a seemingly unusual reaction, I know. It is safe to say that some might question the condition of a messy room, but not a clean one. When a kid makes a huge mess, it is standard to ask them what happened. But when there is no mess, asking a child what the hell they were up to is completely uncalled for. But the fact of the matter is, this whole scenario is completely backwards from what most people can understand. If you had walked into this home several times before and witnessed the chaos; an endless sea of uneaten food laying around, the floor carpeted with video games without cases, dirty socks and underwear shoved into the cracks of the couch, and dishes stacked to the ceiling, then you wouldn’t pay any attention to how flip-flopped this perspective is. But people who don’t understand life with an autistic child, don’t know how appropriate it is to walk in to a clean house and say to yourself, what the hell happened here? These things in this house just are what they are.

You have to understand that in this home, the challenges of a manic child and his disgusting, yet untameable habits have reigned king for years. So living here meant that you expected the unexpected to have happened just moments before you arrived. You just adjusted to opening the door and seeing crazy things, like an entire pizza stuck to the ceiling or a bathtub filled with half-eaten pieces of candy and plastic dinosaurs with bubblegum hats. To feel at home here is to have a clear understanding that you will trigger hours of screaming if you try to throw out the candy wrappers that clogged up the drain or remove the gum hats from the bath toys. If you want to feel cozy, you just adapt to the senselessness of it all. You keep the house at its cleanest by ignoring the cheese dripping from the ceiling and showering with gum floating around your ankles; because the conniption that follows the environmental changes of picking up his messes, will only lead to larger messes.

Any strange mess you can think of that is nowhere close to normal, is normal around here. This was the house of “anything the kid does flies” and you will learn what the burning wrath of hell’s fires feel like if you do anything to try and stop him. His brain doesn’t function normally, so he has no real understanding of his odd behaviors and no control over his emotional attachment to things like the pair of tennis shoes he wants to sleep with every night. All he knows is that sleeping with his shoes makes him feel better, and all you know is that it is too exhausting to try and convince him otherwise.

Walking into this clean, calm, and quiet place felt like walking into an alternate universe. I knew she said he was doing much better, but there was no way that this much improvement was the new normal around here. I was not convinced, not even for a second. This was clearly some kind of parlor trick. His new cannabis treatment couldn’t have improved this much this fast. I had only been away for a short month. A slight tingle of uncontrollable joy ran down my spine. The vibes in the house were so good you couldn’t help but shake yourself right into a little dance. Had I just entered The Twilight Zone? I paused in the freshly mopped doorway for a moment, taking note of how quiet it was. There were no noise distractions meeting an autistic child's need for over-stimulation. No sound from the T.V., no blaring radio commercials, and no loud cheering from the stands of a football video game competed for priority to be heard over each other. I shivered a little again before I began tip-toeing across the floor towards the kitchen. I don’t even know why I was tip-toeing. It was just so clean and quiet that, for some odd reason, it felt like the thing to do at the time. 

Journeying further in, I expected the living room to be the only room that was so bright and shiny. It would have taken a team of professionals a solid month to get everything looking the way that it did out there. Trust me, I used to clean houses for a living and the crud that had built up in the corners of the floor in one room would have taken up an entire day to remove. The norm in the kitchen was that you couldn’t ever find space on the counter tops to make a sandwich. I felt like I might pass out when I saw that, not only were the counters cleared, there wasn’t a single crumb left on them. The sinks were empty, so you didn’t have to move around dirty dishes just to fit a cup under the spout to fill it with water. This was all just too much for my brain to process. 

The peppermint and lavender smell was coming from a candle that was burning in the center of the dining room table. Wasn’t she worried that it would get knocked over and make a big waxy mess like last time? There were glass decorations hanging on the sliding glass door... GLASS!. All glass items were considered weapons in this family. Kitchen knives that were normally kept tucked away in the master bedroom were now sitting proudly next to the microwave. That was a far cry from her having put out the pillows I saw on the couch, the ones that have buttons on them. We had learned many years ago that even those buttons had posed a possible risk of injury. 

At this point, I was slowly falling into a state of shock. Okay, I thought to myself nervously. Did they move? And in that moment the strangest, most uncomfortable feeling I had ever felt took hold of me. Did I just walk into someone else’s home? I began sweating a little at the thought of some stranger walking up from the basement to find me standing in their kitchen. What if they had already heard me and called the cops? I looked desperately around the room for some sort of proof of who lived there. And there it was, the same old magnets pinning pictures of familiar faces to the refrigerator. Whew, I whistled. A wave of relief washed over me. Wow! I took a moment to soak it all in; IMPRESSIVE. 

I wondered if they had important company or if child protective services had come by to check on Kevin’s progress and my friend had sent him away with her mother for a while so that things could stay clean during the home visit. His grandmother never kept him for more than a few hours at a time. He was way too challenging for her. Some nights, if we got lucky, his medications would knock him out while he was still with her, and his mom and I could get out of the house together for a few short hours. But whatever the case, it was nice to see their home for what it could have been if he had never been diagnosed with autism. If my friend had been given a chance at a normal life. A life without a demanding child.

And then I heard him down the hallway in his bedroom. He was rapping the lyrics to a newer hip-hop song that I had been hearing on the radio. He was tapping the beat on the floor with his hands softly. Really!?! He’s home right now? I almost scoffed a little at my own thoughts. Things were just getting too weird for me. I slinked silently and slowly down the hallway so he wouldn’t know I was coming. I held my breath so I wouldn’t run any risk of getting caught. I had always loved peeking in and watching him play when he didn’t know I was looking, but he was always really good at sensing my presence. He hated it when I did this to him and he had told me it made me a really big jerk.

I could already see him sitting in his room from around the corner. He was much bigger now. Images of a little four year old boy sitting on a floor covered in building blocks and candy wrappers flashed through my mind while I stared at him. He sat cross legged on the floor, like he always had. He had his special noise canceling headphones on, holding his tablet and watching the music video to the song he was singing along to. I let the stiffness in my body go and began to breathe normally. He was growing up so fast and we couldn’t do anything about it. This was one of those times that I wished I could put a brick on his head to stop him from getting taller than me. The truth was that deep down I was actually terrified of how bad he could hurt us during one of his tantrums if he got any bigger, but parts of me still had an affinity for keeping him small because of what a cute toddler he was and how old it meant I was getting.

He was turning 12 this year. When I met him he was only 3. For me, time went by more slowly watching him grow than it did with my other friend’s kids. The days with him were long and the nights were even longer. You had to be hyper-vigilant and present at all times when he was around. I still had scars on the back of my head from a plate he had thrown at me like a Frisbee for bringing him the wrong kind of doughnuts. I had made the near fatal mistake of turning my back on him to go into the kitchen to refill his bottomless glass of chocolate milk while he was angry. I rubbed the back of my head and smiled. It was impossible to stay mad at him. Every scar he had ever given me (and there were many) was now a treasured reminder of my unconditional love for him.

I took a few steps forward and leaned against his doorway, smiling to myself while I hoped it would be a few minutes before he noticed me. My busy schedule had kept him from seeing me in person for almost a full year, but I was certain that he would be angered if he spotted me creeping in on him before his song had ended. To me, I was so excited to see him I could hardly contain myself. To him, I would just be back and up to my same old tricks. We had never been separated for this long before, but he would expect me to have returned still knowing better than to interrupt his flow. Something about him was different though. I couldn’t put my finger on it right at first. It wasn’t that he had grown and it certainly was not that his bedroom was as unusually clean as the rest of the house. I stood staring at him with squinted eyes, as if that would somehow make the difference become apparent. He was decked out in Detroit Tigers gear, still driving his mother crazy by sitting on his expensive sensory sleep pillow. He had always rapped out loud to himself with an adorable awkwardness. His hair wasn’t any different. The holes in his socks were the same. So what was it then? What was it I was missing that felt so out of the ordinary?

And then it hit me like a ton of celebratory bricks. He wasn’t rocking. I mean he was animated and fully into his rap song, mimicking the singers on the screen, but he wasn’t rocking in frustration at the world around him. He wasn’t blinking at an abnormally rapid rate. His eyes were closed with contentment. His feet weren't all bound up while his toes flexed and straightened themselves continually in a way that had always looked painful. That was totally it! Forget the house, what the hell happened to him? His body was no longer functioning on autopilot! He was sitting normally. His mannerisms looked like a normal kid for the first time in the 9 long years I had known him. He looked like he did just before he had first started showing signs of mental illness. It was like he was a new version of himself… it was as if he was living in a brand new body!

I must not have been able to contain my excitement about what I was seeing. I had finally caught his attention. Inevitably, I jumped when he looked at me. A small butterfly of fear flew around my belly. I was expecting him to fly off the handle at me for interrupting him. I stood there waiting for him to be mad. I sighed deeply not wanting to be the one who had very stupidly set him off. I knew better, and my friend was going to be pissed off and overwhelmed before I had even had the chance to let her know that I was there. Stupid, stupid, stupid. What is wrong with you? I thought, shaming myself. I needed a plan, and quickly. Did I have any candy in my purse? Why hadn’t I bought anything for him when I stopped at the store? Oh right, I didn’t expect him to be here... But before I could come up with any counter play to nip his anticipated outburst in the bud, he smiled at me. 

“Well, well, well... what is this all about?” I said out loud even though I knew he couldn’t hear me over his music. He had the Cadillac of all headphones because his mother needed them to drown out the conversation of social workers and doctors that came and went from their home at all hours of the day. No child should have to sit, day after day, listening to adults talk about what a stressful problem they are. His life was already miserable enough without us making him feel ashamed of what was just the behavioral symptoms of his illness. He already had a hard time finding fleeting moments where he could feel like a normal happy kid. That smile he was giving me now was always bright, and beautiful, and rare. 

“You look so handsome!” I mouthed to him so he could read my lips. He stood up slowly, rapping to me, his voice getting louder as he threw his arms out in front of him, still imitating the moves of his favorite artists. He moved closer and opened his arms out wide, inviting me to hug him. I wrapped both arms around his head and ran my fingers through his thick black curls. He smelled like deodorant. “What? No more stinky boy smell either?” I accidentally said out loud, thinking about how he had to be dragged into the shower kicking and screaming because he didn’t like the way spraying water felt on his skin. “Nope” his mother said behind me. I was completely unaware that she had snuck up on us. 

I held on to him tightly before spinning us around so that I could see her. His hug felt warm and full of love. My thoughts faded back to a time when his tiny hands had barely wrapped around my neck and he was still little enough for me to carry inside from the car when he was sleepy. I looked over at my friend and our eyes met, both expressing our inner joy to one another. For a moment, we just stared at each other as I let huge teardrops stream down my face. She didn’t need to say anything. We both knew what the one other was thinking; God is good. This was nothing short of a miracle. 

Kevin held me tighter and tighter until he must have hit a hyped moment in his music that he forgot I could not hear. He caught me off guard, throwing me off balance as he pushed me away, busting into some Michael Jackson-like dance moves and singing loudly as he spun around in circles while traveling across the room. I stopped myself from falling into his bunk bed and then I finally broke the silence between my dear friend and I with two simple questions: “Who the hell is this kid and where are you hiding the maids?”