Hard to Manage

Growing up I always felt like I was living on quicksand, like nothing was solid and secure. I felt that things were wrong in my family but everyone else seemed unable to tell. It made me feel like I must be crazy and the mixture of feeling so insecure and unable to get a handle on the world made me lash out. I never lashed out at school, I rarely lashed out at home, that I remember. When I did lash out though it was a doozy.

Somewhere along the way I began to walk out of my house during these melt downs and just leave. That was fine when it happened during the day and I somehow found my way home by night but it was a problem when it happened at night and ended with me wandering the streets alone at night not knowing what to do. I wanted them to come looking for me so very badly, to show that they cared enough to come and ask me to come home. They never did.

On the last night that I went on one of these melt down walkabouts I was picked up by the police, my parents had reported me as being a runaway/out of control. When the officer called my parents they said not to bring me home, so I was taken to a short term foster home. After several days I was brought to some sort of case worker’s office for my parents to pick me up. I was so very hurt and angry, I told them I did not want to go home with them. I was sent to a different short term foster home where I stayed for several weeks.

Sometime during that time I went to a court date where I heard my mother tell the judge that something was wrong with me and she would not bring me home until they had me evaluated. I was crushed. I was very angry with them but I also found foster care to be a special kind of hell.

I have always struggled with situations where I did not know the “rules” and every family and home has their own invisible rules. I realize now that being an aspie put me at a severe disadvantage for figuring out those invisible rules and being able to fit into families. Foster care was unfamiliar people with unfamiliar rules and customs. It was in an unfamiliar place and I had unfamiliar clothes to wear and unfamiliar food to eat. Everything felt foreign and wrong to me.

So after seriously considering telling my parents to take a leap and staying in foster care while working toward getting emancipated,(which I did not realize was out of my reach at the time) I decided that I would do whatever I needed to do to get home to my familiar hell. It’s not that I was being abused at home or that my family are awful people, I really can not tell you why I felt so stressed and trapped during those years. I am still working on figuring that out.

As it turned out the appointment with the shrink was set for quite awhile after school was to start(I was going into my freshman year of high school) and my mom decided that she would bring me home to start school and would bring me to the appointment herself. I remember bits and pieces about the appointment it’s self. I remember that he actually showed me those ink blot things and I thought he could not be serious. I remember telling him that the first one looked like an ink blot several times before he convinced me to think of something else it might look like. He tested my IQ and asked me questions I don’t remember. In the end I was home when he called my mother to tell her that I was not only fine but actually very intelligent. I remember that she looked crushed by that news.

For many years I found that moment to be one of the most painful in my life. The idea that my mom was so sure that something was wrong with me, and so disappointed to find out that I was ok haunted me. What I realized tonight is that she was not disappointed that nothing was wrong with me, she felt helpless and crazy herself. As it turns out something was going on with me, I am dyslexic and have Asperger’s Syndrome. It was not learning that I was ok that caused her pain, it was knowing that I was not ok and that she had failed to find me help.

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