Today with Johnathan
I will admit that often with Johnathan’s various autistic needs I feel either helpless or struggle to work out what to do next. Or I find we are engaged in a battle of words that we just can’t seem to stop once we have started.
The last few months I have been consciously trying NOT to even start getting cross or angry at what he says or answering him when he says something that really gets my goat. At the end of the day, neither of us really WANT to argue. And I would love to have a better relationship with him.
Coming at our relationship from a different angle has seemed to help, but by the same token, I feel we still have a lot to make up. I am the one who cares for him when he’s poorly and he knows I will be there whenever he has an issue with understand his friends. I can explain to him what his friends are thinking so that it makes sense to him.
His relationship with his father is excellent. They rarely argue and they both understand each other. And both of them want to play computer games that involve fighting or things that I just cannot physically or mentally keep up with. So I refuse to play these games with him because I know it will degenerate very quickly.
Last night I was talking to Kevin about this issue but he was more than half asleep and didn’t really have an answer for me. After I spoke to him, I remembered that Johnathan had come to me with a Pikmin picture he had created and put words on. He told me that it was just a 3 stage edit he had done. And I also remembered some artwork I had done in 2018 that I needed changes made on but I couldn’t figure it out.
So today, I asked Johnathan about it and we ended up spending five hours working on four pictures. We had a FANTASTIC day. In fact, we haven’t had such a wonderful time in years! Both of us were deeply invested in the work we were doing together and there were NO arguments.
If you look at the new photos on the website, you can see the four things we worked on. Both of us felt happy and fulfilled when we were done. There were no arguments or requests to do something else or demands for fighting games. He now wants me to start more artwork that we can work on together. And if that doesn’t tell you he enjoyed it as much as me, I don’t know what would!