The Best Kind of Different by Shonda Schilling

Author:Shonda Schilling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

nine

One Happy Camper

WHILE I FELT I WAS MAKING A LOT OF PROGRESS IN UNDERSTANDING Asperger’s and opening myself up to the ideas and techniques that I needed to relearn as a parent, the bad news was that once again I was doing it all without Curt. In February 2008 he went to spring training, so he wasn’t around to learn alongside me or to help with Grant. He also wasn’t there to see what was happening with Gehrig at dinnertime.

Dinnertime in my house had never been terribly easy. Because of all our traveling as a baseball family, my kids got very used to eating at restaurants on the run and ordering whatever they wanted from room service in hotels. The menu rarely strayed far from grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, and of course, ballpark hot dogs. The concept of everyone eating the same food, at our own dinner table, was introduced late in the game—probably not until we moved to Massachusetts. My kids have very limited palates, which, I’m sorry to say, they get from their father. Vegetables are a very hard sell all around.

We always had an especially hard time getting Grant to eat what was being served. Before his diagnosis, we had no idea why, but he would arbitrarily refuse to eat certain foods. After we found out about Asperger’s, we came to understand that some foods he won’t eat because of his sensory issues, which cause him to hate certain textures. But there have always been other foods he’d reject that we knew he loved—mashed potatoes, for instance. He’d become completely obsessed with a food like that for a while and want to eat it at every meal, every day. Then all at once he’d snap out of the obsession and refuse to eat it. Sometimes he’d request a food for dinner—pork chops, maybe. And then when it was being served that very night, he’d recoil from it. Of course, he’d probably wait until you put it on the table to change his mind.

Even when he wasn’t digging his heels in and refusing to eat, Grant was usually too busy talking to take in enough nourishment. He talked and talked and talked over everybody. One of the by­products of his inability to read social cues is that he didn’t understand how to have a normal conversation. In the same way he didn’t know to give other kids turns sliding down the slide at a pool, he didn’t know to let other people speak.

In the past, our misguided way of dealing with Grant’s refusal to eat was to yell at him.

“Grant, eat that!” I would shout.

“No!” he’d shout back.

“Eat that now or you’re not leaving the table!” Curt would shout. For some reason, I’d get angry at Curt for shouting, even though I was doing the same exact thing. Maybe it was because he was so much louder than I was. So we’d scream and make Grant eat. He’d cry and cry. And then he’d throw it up.

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