Say Hello To My Little Friend

On Saturday night, Conor had a burst.  A tantrum.  A rage.  It had been 39 days since his last one. (One more day and I could make a biblical joke.  The irony.)

Ok, let me be honest here.  (If I’m not, what’s the point of the story, really?)

Conor's tantrum was a 45 minute shitstorm of epic proportions that left all three of us bruised and battered. I emailed our outpatient services provider after it was over, and here’s how I described it to her--

kicking hitting biting pinching punching eye gouging head banging scratching property destruction disrobing eloping

I don’t bother with punctuation when I email these things. Makes quite an impact, don’t you think, avoiding the commas?  Too time-consuming, anyway.

Here's just a quick taste of what it felt like. You wanna play rough? Ok. He really gets going around 0:20.

In any case, after the firestorm subsided and my husband got Conor to sleep, I quickly got started.  I poured myself a glass of wine, and then I proceeded to cry.

Oh, I didn’t just cry. You would have been so proud of me.  I bawled and I bawled and I bawled and I bawled until I got the dry heaves.  Then I drank more wine and I settled for quietly weeping because I do NOT like to vomit and I didn’t want my husband to hear me. (Crying, not dry heaving. He can hear me dry heave, that's ok.)

I like to pretend I’m all strong and shit, you know.  I am autism mom, see me cry hear me roar.

And I got drunk.  Well, I drank half a bottle of Pinot Noir and then took my antidepressant, which makes me FEEL really drunk and well, isn’t that the point, after all?

You would think, wouldn't you, that after all these years of these truly awful tantrums that I'd get used to them.  That I would be unfazed, cool, calm, like a cucumber.

Nope.  Oh, I pretend I'm all bad-ass.  "I heard Conor had a tantrum," my sister said to me on Sunday.  "Yeah, whatev," I replied, all James Dean.  Or, since I'm a woman, like Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in The Terminator. She wasn't fooled, but she didn't press it.

Yeah, like that.

I try to be strong.  I try very hard. But really, I'm starting to question whether I'll ever get used to these firestorms.  Conor's had behavioral problems now (read: tantrums) for almost half his life.

(I'm including the years before he regressed, of course. Since he regressed, well, over half the time, realistically.)

So I just wonder... am I ever going to get over it?  Should I be able to? Be able to just wipe my brow, look at my husband, and just say... whew, that was a bad one.

What would it mean if I did?