Unexpected triggers

Some days I am able to tell what will cause a melt down and can work to avoid that situation, for instance I know that crowded malls and loud parades are a trigger I know that if we wake up in an off mood then things need to stay low key, calm and familiar for the day but then there are those things that you can not anticipate and these are the things that usually end up triggering a major melt down these are the things that cause mass kaos and total heartache in our home. That is what happened today a trigger I was not expecting that has now caused a melt down that has lasted ten hours and counting and as I sit here writing this I am still listening to my son crying in his room, I am at my wits end it hasn’t been ten hours of non stop crying, no when his melt down first started it consisisted of him crying and hitting himself in the head for an hour while I tried to restrain him from hurting himself ,after that he hid in his room and when he finally came out from under his covers he made his way downstairs to hide under the kitchen table for forty five minutes after which time I was able to entice him out from under the table by putting in one of his favorite movies “Curious George –A Very Monkey Christmas” where he then sat in the living room with his arms wrapped around his legs and rocked himself continusly for hours only stopping at the end of the movie at which time he would once again start to cry and scream until the movie was started again. He was okay as long as Gracie and I didn’t get to close to him and he will not allow me to touch him so I can not even hug him to make him and I feel better. I know that it is a bad melt down when he doesn’t want to be touched these melt downs last for hours or sometimes even days.

That is where the heartache comes in I know in my heart that I can’t take it personal that this is only the autism and not my little boy and that once this has passed he will be my loving and cuddly little man once more, but I do take it to heart and it does still hurt because as a mother I want to take the hurt away from him and am not able to do so. So here I sit with tears streaming down my face I am exhausted and my body aches from being so tense all day and I am hoping that tonight once Gray falls asleep he will sleep the whole night and not wake up a half a dozen times screaming because if he is up tonight it’s guaranteed that tomorrow will be a repeat of today and the stress will start all over again. If he does sleep all night tonight then he probably won’t get up until late tomorrow morning after he has had a major melt down and is coming out of it he always sleeps for long periods of time because it takes so much out of him to be like that for so long.

We are also almost always guaranteed that any progress that we have made with speech development or learning development will take a step backwards and all of the work that has gone into that development will start all over again. It makes me sad to think that something that he has worked so hard to gain will disappear and I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to him to have gained something and in such a short period of time for it to be gone. Sometimes it is just a matter of a few words that he has been saying that he just stops saying other times it may be something that he has worked very hard to achieve like putting his clothes on by himself for instance. A little while ago he had six seizures back to back and for weeks afterwards he would not say a word and has since stopped potty training. I can only hope that tomorrow he will wake up and things will be okay again.

"Everything will be okay in the end, if it's not okay it's not the end!"