One of the toughest things about autism is its unpredictability, which has a certain sense of irony, doesn’t it?  The person with autism relies on predictability, craves it, seeks it out, and yet the disorder itself, for those of us on the outside, has it’s own set of rules, or more like a general sense of chaos.  Just when you think your kid has a handle on the process of setting out clothes the night before, and understanding that we can’t wait until bedtime to decide to wear something already in the dirty clothes, here comes a  curveball: “Where’s the sweatshirt that goes with these pants?”  You know, the sweatshirt that got donated a year ago because it had a blob of glue on it…

And I have no solution.  I try to distract, suggest alternatives, to no avail.  “I’ll just spend all night looking for it,” says he.  No, no you won’t.  You’re going to be miserable, making me miserable until you pass out, which most likely will not be until the wee hours of the morning.  And I can only hope you can move past this in the morning, or the first hour of my morning will be a trial, too.

Damn you, sweatshirt-with-the-blob-of-glue.  Damn you.