I’ve been feeling very positive so far this year. We were able to get the house mostly caught up and more importantly, we’re maintaining it. This is the first time I can honestly say this, since we’ve been on our own. Maybe that doesn’t sound super impressive but I feel really good about it.
Despite the positive, I’m struggling right now. My kids are struggling and I’m worried about them. I won’t go into the details but Emmett is struggling more now than he ever has in his entire life. He wants me to pull him out of school and homeschool him. He’s not sleeping well and when he does, it’s filled with nightmares. His nightmares are really fucked up because he feels pain in his dreams and actually dies, multiple times every night. He’s usually eaten alive by something, brought back to life and eaten again. He says he can’t wake himself up and he feels everything.
I don’t even know what to say to that. I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like for him.
He’s struggling with out of control thoughts that he can’t seem to silence and it’s driving him crazy to the point that he will just stop functioning. Apparently, it gets worse when he’s at school.
The school is aware of exactly what’s going on with him and they are being unbelievably supportive. Emmett barely made it to school this morning and couldn’t make it past 9:30 AM. This is something that he’s not faking and it’s very obvious to everyone involved. Emmett absolutely loves school and for him not to want to go because he can’t distract himself from his thoughts and therefore not focus on anything, speaks to just how real this struggle is for him. He’s having these mini-anxiety attacks thoughout the day and there’s almost no comforting him.
I’ve had the idea of writing my own blog bubbling away for a while, so looked up dads dealing with autistic kids and found this. So glad I did. Don’t think anything has ever related to me as much as what I’ve been reading on here.
The walking in public bit made me smile. It’s hard to explain to people just how exhausting it is to take your 6 foot tall son for a walk and have to talk him through the whole journey or he ends up walking out into roads or into lamp posts. He has improved a bit, but it’s a slow process that I don’t know if it will ever be complete.
Really appreciate you writing about your experiences. Stay strong.
I’m so very sorry on reading about what your son Emmett is going through at this time. I’ve had periods of watching my autistic son, when he was young and even in his adulthood, go through painful episodes in his life and how awful and helpless I felt by not being able to do anything to remove the problem from his life. One problem that I did have to remove was to remove him from high school because of daily bullying, an unresponsive and disinterested school officials who threaten to take me to court but I checkmated them by home schooling him, which was a last resort. I’m hoping that some how things get better for your son and he can stay in school. At least you have something we didn’t have so many years ago, what appears to be a very understanding group of school officials and teachers. I’m really hoping Emmett gets better soon. My son also use to have bad nightmares but his involved running from the kids who were tormenting him in high school. It took three years to get his bad school experience out of his head. Your boys are very lucky to have a Dad like you.
I’m so sorry to hear your son is going through such a tough time. It must be just awful having to watching him like that. I really hope your able to help him on someway and the nightmares pass as that sounds just horrendous for him