Good Night Gorilla

Last night, I read the rooster and Peaches a sweet little book before bed called Goodnight Gorilla. Really, there isn't much reading to it, since it's a book of very few words. The pictures tell the real story.

Since things were going well with them both on my lap happily turning pages, and since I'd been reading up about all the cognitive and inferential difficulties the rooster might have with his still murky issues, I decided to let the language arts teacher in me out of her cave and I doled out lots of reading comprehension questions to the preschool set. And you know what? They nailed them. Peaches got the points you might expect for a gal not yet two, and the rooster interpreted characters' feelings based on facial expression, made predictions, answered "why" questions, the whole nine yards. Last night, when we read together, we were in "It'll be okay land." It feels like it might as well have been a thousand years and a million miles ago now.

Tonight, no bedtime story from this mama, who lost her mind before we even finished the 35 minute commute, who, by the time her little tantrum throwing darling finished spitting in her face, was screaming profanity like a very, very, very bad mother - the kind who is IN Hansel and Gretel, not the kind who does the readaloud in the arm chair with milk and cookies.

How bad was today? Suffice it to say I just spent the last hour on Amazon loading my cart with books that are NOT fairy tales -- every title related to the spectrum that I could get my newly IEPed hands on. And the ones that seemed to focus on behavior? I considered next day Fed Ex for those.

I have to admit something that scares me as I read blogs about other kids on the spectrum: the absence of the anger, aggression, violence, dislikability that I see, but haven't described until now, in the rooster. I am left to wonder/ponder, does the rooster have a mental illness, something darker and more devastating than being on the spectrum? Or do I simply lack the strength, patience, and understanding of any good blogger, let alone any good mother? If I were half of who I want to be, I'd be able to manage his outbursts, protect Peaches from them, ease the pain I know they must cause him too, understand them, reduce them, keep them to myself. But I can barely endure them. Sometimes I rage too. And then after I feel the guilt. It's so ugly, this process, this side of me and us. I can get very dark here, very doomed, very The Lorax. This is all scary stuff to admit, and I'm dreading the comments I'll get, but I've got some kind of drive to tell this story right now, and I almost can't seem to stop even if I want to.

So badly had I wanted to blog about the triumph of last night's "reading" before the waves crashed upon it and washed it out to sea. Instead the context I have to offer is a contrast, a riches to rags failure. I let my husband tuck in the rooster tonight without so much as a kiss from me, and now that he's in bed I'm kicking myself, but yet I'm not about to risk waking him up and letting him take that job off my hands.

Here is to better nights. Here's hoping for more stories with happy endings. Here's hoping I can keep myself out of the oven. Good night, Gorilla.