As young children, we are all taught a few basic lessons; “Don’t play with matches”, “Don’t stick things in electrical sockets”. I think, for the most part, we all take these lessons for granted and expect that everyone above the age of about five or six has been taught this lesson, and will abide by it.
Young children are naturally curious and want to explore the world around them. Through the loving input of parents and other caregivers, children learn to explore in safe ways. They learn not to touch hot stovetops, to not touch broken glass, not to play with matches. They learn these actions can not only cause pain to themselves, but to those around them. They learn to control some of these exploratory impulses.
My son was not so lucky. As a child of about five or six, he was living with a mother who was “too tired” to put food on the table for her three small children. If she was at home, she was lying on the couch. If she were not home, she would leave my son and his sisters with her boyfriend of the moment. More often than not, the children would be just plain ignored.
So, instead of the normal period of exploration that most children go through, my child was trying to find food. He was trying to potty train his little sister, so she wouldn’t get beaten. He was trying to figure out how not to get beaten himself. He would walk to the store and try to figure out how to steal some food without getting caught because he simply needed to eat.
Because of this profound lack of parenting in his early life, my son never learned a few key lessons that we all take for granted. He simply was never taught how to have compassion for those around him. He was never shown it; he had no idea what it looked like. He was too busy trying to survive. To this day, he doesn’t understand how to put someone else’s needs before his own. He doesn’t understand that other people have thoughts and feelings that can be hurt by the things he does. He hears people tell him that again and again, but he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand why someone would want to put their own wants or needs last. It’s all about survival.
When we were new parents, we had no concept of the depth of his disabilities in this area. We allowed him all the freedoms one would normally accord a child approaching the teen years. His bedroom was his own, and we didn’t see the need to inspect it often. That all changed the night the fire alarm went off.
It was the middle of the winter, around 3 in the morning. The smoke alarm jolted my husband and I out of bed and the dog sat up shaking. We raced into the hallway to our son standing there, wide-eyed saying “I think I know what happened”. His door was open, and thick, black smoke was pouring out into the hallway. I turned to look into his room and I couldn’t see the window on the far wall. The room was barely six feet wide.
He quickly admitted that he had been trying to melt Lego pieces so he could build cars that looked like they’d been accidents. He also copped to sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night a few nights earlier to swipe a box of matches. He’d realized that the matches were burning entirely too quickly to melt the Legos properly, so he’d tightly rolled sheets of paper to make little torches. When he was done, he’d stuffed the still glowing torches into drawers full of paper. Thank God, they snuffed themselves out almost instantly.
My son spent much of the next day cleaning every surface of his room, and throwing away all the papers and tainted Legos. The bedding all had to be washed and every little cobweb now stood out in vivid black against the white walls. The carpet stunk for weeks. We also began to do periodic sweeps of his room for contraband.
My husband and I went to the store and bought a few new “toys” for ourselves. We purchased a second fire extinguisher that was mounted right outside our son’s bedroom. We purchased a smoke alarm that we mounted right inside our son’s bedroom. We even bought an alarm for our son’s door. He is no longer able to leave his bedroom in the middle of the night without us realizing it.
We thought this incident was long behind us, and some of these more dangerous impulses were under control. That is, until this morning. My son has a small fan in his room (the window doesn’t open, another lesson we learned) that he unplugs each morning while he’s getting ready for school. Today, through some brand of magic, as he was pulling the plug out from the wall, the metal prong from his belt buckle came into contact with the prongs from the fan. Both the outlet and the plug were quite scorched and it flipped the circuit breaker in the house, just as my husband was getting into the shower.
In his ever-present survival mode, my son quickly tried to explain that it was an accident, as he was getting dressed. He’d left his belt open and the prongs accidently brushed into each other when he bent over. My husband had him reenact this action, and to no surprise of anyone, the two prongs stayed far apart. The story quickly changed to reflect that the belt had been in his hand, not around his waist. The truth was hiding from no one.
So, yet again, we find ourselves at a crossroads. How does one parent a child who has the emotional maturity and impulse control of a small child, while still allowing that child the freedoms accorded to most teenagers? I’m not talking the privilege of going out with friends on a Friday night; I’m simply talking about being able to trust that he won’t do something to hurt himself or someone else. For the time being, we’ve removed anything with a plug from his room. I know this is a bit of an overreaction, and not a real solution. I guess the contraband sweeps will have to extend to anything metal now.
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