About a year or so ago, I wrote a post about the difficulty DC has with using the telephone (Don’t forget to call Mom). We haven’t made all that much progress since that post but we continue to work at it. As I said in that post, he does know how to use the telephone, but he only uses it when he is told to. It is never spontaneous. Most of his calls are to me, to tell me he is leaving work and again to tell me that he is home.
Much of the conversation with me when he calls is a script. There were a few times that he was late calling me to tell me that his transportation arrived. Wondering if he had just forgotten, I called him and he told me he was “going home nowwwwwww”, which is what he tells me every day. As it turned out, he was not in the car – he was not going home. The car was running late. He has his script and he rarely deviates from that script.
It was a very long process – a very long process to teach him how to get into the house by himself. Because I work and because his dismissal time from school seemed to get earlier and earlier with each step up (from elementary to middle school to high school), I was always worried that, due to traffic or some other unforeseen circumstance, he might arrive home before I did. I wanted him to be able to get himself in, lock the door and call me – just in case. That whole process is a blog for another day.
He does now have someone after work that comes to the house and is with him for life skills and community activities for 2 hours a day. Still, there might be times when his car is early and he arrives before his aide does. It does not happen often but do I always want him to be prepared.
Having said that it does not happen often, coincidently it this happened twice just recently….
The Phone Rings:
DC: Hi Mom, I am home.
Me: Hi, DC. Is Mrs. H there yet? (I knew she wasn’t, but would be there in seconds – but still I like to try to get the correct replies)
DC: No.
Me: Did you lock the door?
DC: Yes
Me: Did you lock the door?
DC: No.
Me: Please go and lock the door. You are supposed to lock the door as soon as you come home.
DC: Okay
Me: Don’t hang up! (He does not understand that he can just put the phone down, lock the door and come back)
He hangs up…
and second later the phone rings
DC: Hi Mom, I am home again!
I mentioned his “Going home nowwww” script above. He uses the same script every day. Once in a great while he will change it up a bit, but it does not last. He reverts to his regular script the next day. As I also said above, I can’t take his scripting to be what is actually happening. Fortunately he always talks to me on speaker, so if what he is telling me, is not what is really going on someone – his boss or the driver will chime in to give me the real story.
The other morning DC, as he does every day, announced that he only had “Two Dollars Left” . This is always his way of telling me he wants money for hot lunch at work. He doesn’t understand money and I think he believes I have a never-ending supply of it in my wallet. I discovered that I didn’t have any cash so I told him he would have to make his lunch that day. He was not happy about this at all and began to get very demanding about money for hot lunch. I explained to him again that I didn’t have any money to give him for lunch and if he did not stop behaving this way, I would not give him lunch money any more and he would have to make his own lunch every day.
He stopped.
When he called me from the car on his way home that afternoon – he went right into his normal conversation:
That morning’s conversation must have been on his mind all day because before he hung up he yelled
“I want Mom’s money!!!!!!!!”
I could hear the driver laughing and I really couldn’t help laughing myself. I guess when there is something that is really important to him, especially when there is food involved, he can and will go “off-script” to make that perfectly clear to me.
Taking it a Step at a Time 