Absence and Changes

I apologize for the long absence. Life has been difficult lately.

Still can’t seem to get school under control. My senior is still struggling to get sorted with Personalized Learning. The constant changes and rearranges the school has been implementing has put her in a state of mind where she couldn’t care less if she goes to school any more. That is a terrible place to be especially for a senior, they tend to be biting at the bit to get out of school anyway. Some of her classmates are doing alright, but there have been quite a few kids who have transferred to other schools and a couple that have dropped out. It’s a sad state for education.

My son isn’t having  a much better time either. They finally found an aide, but because of things being unsettled he had a couple of dangerous meltdowns. So now he has two aides. However, things remain unsettled. The school can’t decide what they are doing and hovering around the whole mess is this sense of secrecy. No one is communicating. I keep hearing, “there are going to be changes, but no one is telling us” and “we’re not allowed to talk to you.” That is the part I really don’t get. Why can’t anyone talk to me? I’m his freaking parent! He doesn’t communicate well because of his autism, the only way I know what is going on with him is if someone tells me. Why make a hard situation harder?

It breaks my heart that my son can be in a perfectly good mood all morning, walk to school happily, then walk through the door of the school and immediately start hitting himself in the head and poking himself in they eye. Nothing happened. No trigger besides walking through the door. What does that tell you about the environment at school?

However there is a light in this dark tunnel.

Because of the big heart of one of our neighbors, my husband has been hooked up with a local job.  It’s one of those “I know a guy who knows a guy” situations. Long story short. My husband is home! He starts at his new job this coming week. It’s going to be different. He’s been working in the wind industry for nearly a decade and he’s going to miss it, but as he keeps saying “family first.” Autism, puberty, and stress at home make it necessary to change.

I am stupidly excited about him being home, but I’m also apprehensive. He’s been on the road for nearly 5 years and we’ve only seen each other 8 times a year in all that time. We’re going to have to learn to live together all over again. I almost want to put out my hand and say, “hi nice to meet you.” Routines are going to have to adjust and space with have to be shared.  I know that I’m going to have to learn to give up a lot of control. I’ve been mom and dad for quite a while now. It’s going to be quite an adjustment for all of us.

Hopefully with someone to share the stress with I’ll be able to get back to writing and maybe start feeling like a human again.

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Sorry I’ve been MIA

I apologize that I have not been posting much. Life has gotten completely away from me. Normally I look forward to school starting and life getting back to normal, but this year it hasn’t yet.

The school here has gone to personalized learning and they were not properly prepared so all is in chaos. Children, parents, teachers and staff are all stressed and unhappy. Crisis after crisis seems to be the day to day norm now.

Also they have not yet been able to find a permanent aide for my son. It’s in his IEP that he needs an aide. Constant changes of substitutes will only last so long until there is a blow up. He has never responded well to change or transitions so this is very stressful. I wait each day for a call that something has gone wrong.  I’m terrified of possible violent outbursts.

Depression and anxiety is getting to the dangerous point for me. I’ve started going to a counselor, but there isn’t much that can be done to change a lot of my situations so I’m just spinning my wheels in the sand trap of false hope.  Slowly, very slowly I’m trying to claw my way to the surface where I hope to get a breath so I can continue on.

I hope you will all be patient with me in getting back on track.

Thanks for still being around.

This is Autism, but I Still Love Him

We’ve been having a rough summer.

My son always has trouble with summer, because he is autistic. The normal trials of summer bother my son too like boredom and cabin fever. In that he is like all other kids, but there are a lot of other issues that come into play.  For example, thunderstorms. He’s terrified of them and yet gets upset because we aren’t having a storm every time there is a cloud. There is also the heat. He loves to be outside but the heat gets to him as well as the allergies that come with summer.

This year has been particularly bad because not only has it been over 90 the whole summer but the air has been filled with smoke from all the wild fires. Outside is not healthy. Inside is boring. It’s a brewing storm. Then you add in things like fireworks from the 4th of July. Loud unexpected noises that sound like thunder happening throughout the nights makes him very edgy. For weeks after the 4th he jumps at every little sound.  He wears sound proof headphones, but the fear is there even if the sound is not.

It finally came to a head one day when he hadn’t been sleeping well. It was a couple of weeks after the 4th and we’d been fighting to go to bed every night . He hadn’t been sleeping and neither had I. Bad combination. He was playing video games. (He likes mini golf) and he couldn’t go into a shed in the background. I told him that it was just part of the scenery and he got upset and started to bite his arm. I told him to go into his room until he could be calm. In the few seconds it took for me to set aside the game controller  he had gone into  his room and slammed his head into his window with enough force to splinter it. 

It didn’t hurt him any, although he had some broken glass in his hair. I had to first get him calm and then get all the glass cleaned up. But he was upset to begin with, then he was upset that he had broken the window, then upset that I couldn’t magically fix it, and upset that I was upset.  It was a long time before we could get sorted and then right after that a thunderstorm hit. Needless to say it wasn’t a good day.

It was a this point that I began to think about medication. I hate myself for thinking about it. I don’t like pills. I don’t like how I feel when I take them and usually I have bad reactions to them. So the thought of putting my son on them when he can’t tell me if he is feeling weird makes me shudder. We had tried him on medication once a long time ago when his violent outburst were getting out of hand and it had turned him in to a weeping pile of mush that was still violent. We gave up, threw away the pills, and learned to live with the outbursts.

But he is getting bigger now. He’s 12. He’s almost as tall as me and weighs 120 lbs. So off we went to the doctor. After a long discussion, the doctor decided that it was probably anxiety that was the route of the problem. If we could get that under control then he might not be a danger to himself. I was willing to give it a shot even though I was wary of the possible side effects.  The second problem was sleep. I found some chewable melatonin and I hoped that would help.

The first week was amazing. He was going to sleep because of the melatonin and although he was still getting up in the middle of the night, it was still an improvement. The Sertraline was working. He was in a great mood. We had to make a trip to Helena, which is a two and a half hour drive, for my daughter’s orthodontist appointment and I was expecting a blow up when we had to go home. But he was great shopping and he was great coming home. I didn’t even know how to handle a trip without a melt down.

It was great while it lasted.

About a week into the medications, we were watching tv during dinner and the character’s gloves had run away and gotten into some trouble and were sent to jail. In the blink of an eye, my son exploded. He was pounding his fist on his tray knocking food everywhere and then started to bite himself and hit me and his sister.  It was weird! Usually there is some warning before a meltdown but this was like a lightening strike out of a clear blue sky.

Over the next couple of days he started to get worse. He just kept getting really angry over such small things.  Then the big blow up came. My daughter had another dentist appointment this time to get five teeth pulled. (I know that’s a lot, but her regular dentist hadn’t been doing his job and let 4 years go by without telling us that she was going to have a problem with her baby teeth not coming out. So now we are in dental crisis, but that is another story.)

Now here was my first mistake. My son is scared of the dentist but is also really fascinated by it and as soon as he knew my daughter was going, he started asking if he could have an appointment. I told him he would have to wait for his appointment. The longer we sat in the waiting room, the more agitated he became.

Here was my second mistake. I should have known this trip to the dentist would be hard on my daughter and I should have found someone to watch my son while I took her to the dentist.

You have to understand at this point that my son doesn’t handle other people’s pain well. When he sees you cry he gets upset because he doesn’t understand the reason. Often he will attack the crying person. I am assuming because he believes that will give them a reason to be upset so it makes sense to him in a backwards kind of way. Needless to say our family tries to keep the crying to a minimum and let it out only when he isn’t looking.

Unfortunately my poor daughter couldn’t help it. She’d never had dental problems before so this was her first experience in having teeth pulled and five at one time was traumatic. She couldn’t help it she cried.  This set my son off. He didn’t understand why his sister was upset.

Here was my third mistake. My daughter wanted to get somethings from the store despite how she was feeling after the dentist. I warned her against it but she insisted that she was fine and she could handle it. So I stupidly listened. Half-way down the street my daughter changed her mind. She was in too much pain and wanted to go home. Before the trip I had warned my son that if his sister didn’t feel up to it then we were NOT going to go shopping and we would just go home. I thought he had understood, but when we started down the street toward the stores and then turned around, he got upset.

Here was my fourth mistake. I didn’t take him to get food.  It was about lunch time when we finished at the dentist. Because my daughter was feeling so awful I didn’t want to make her sit and wait while we ate. Instead I took my son to a gas station and grabbed some of those deli burgers and chips and a bottle of milk and headed out. He really wanted to get food at a restaurant and got upset.

Here is my fifth mistake. I didn’t stop at the car wash. It is a treat for my son when he is good to go through the automatic car wash before we leave town. Again, I didn’t stop because my daughter was feeling so badly.  I should have know better. Foregoing the car wash always causes a melt down. It was the final straw.

From that moment on it was a nuclear fallout meltdown. The drive back from Great Falls in an hour. Usually the meltdowns don’t last more that half an hour and usually we can get him out of it by playing I-spy or something. But this time I think the medication was in play. Nothing would stop him from pulling his sister’s hair or punching her from the back seat. He was spitting and trying to break the window with his fists and his feet. Foolishly I stopped on the side of the interstate to try and switch everyone around so that I could keep my daughter safe from his attack.

We ended up chasing him around in the ditch and trying to tackle him to keep him out of traffic. I’m sure the people driving by thought we were trying to kill him. He was punching and kicking me while I tried to get him to calm down and get back to the jeep. He grabbed handfuls of my hair and ripped some out. Finally we got him to the jeep but he got a hold of my daughters neck. In getting him to let go of her he got a hold of my hair and pummeled my head with his fist. I got kicked in the chest, repeatedly bit and he grabbed handfuls of my skin on my arms before I finally got him into his seat and buckled in. My daughter drove while I sat in the back by him and tried to keep him from kicking her and bashing his head through the window. Unfortunately that put me in the strike zone. He was so deliberate with his attacks. This wasn’t like his normal meltdowns. I kept telling him that I would be okay, that he needed to take deep breaths, that I still loved him and he would be alright, but nothing stopped him.

That was the longest hour of my life.

By the time we had gotten home I was near hysterical with terror and guilt. I had to wrestle him into the house. I sent my daughter downstairs out of harms way and took my son to his room. It was dark and he was still agitated. Then almost as quickly as it started he was back to normal. He wanted a drink and a snack. He sat down and started to watch tv. At that point I was doing my best to stay calm. I wanted to sob and curl up into a ball and shake, but I knew it would only set him off again. I stayed out of the room where I wouldn’t trigger him but also where I could keep an eye on him.

This is the damage that I came out with. I was so  stiff and sore. This doesn’t show all the damage. I have a lot of bruises on my head and legs, but you get the idea.

I am pretty proud of myself. Considering the craziness that we went through, my son came out without a mark on him.

My daughter only had a little welt on her neck. I managed to protect both my kids from harm. I don’t know how, but I did.

I called the doctor when things looked like they were as calm as they were going to get. We went over and the doc was shocked at the level of damage on my arms. He thought maybe we needed to up the dose of Sertraline because it seemed like it was working, and he get me some Risperdone pills to use as needed when things were out of hand. We went back home and I followed the doc’s orders. But over the next few days, my son stayed angry. He was mad about everything. He kept biting himself for tiny little upsets. So I talked it over with my husband and we decided to stop the meds.

 

It’s been three days now and he hasn’t had any blow ups. Well, there were a couple of small ones, but I’m not expecting miracles.

The thing is this is our life. I can’t say I’m not affected. I’m a wreck.  I love him completely and I’m terrified for the future. I’m not scared if him. I’m scared of what he’ll do to others. This whole episode has turned my fears into reality. What happens when he goes to school? What happens if we go to Great Falls again?

I know that it may get worse as he gets bigger. I may end up with broken bones at some point. I don’t want that to happen, but I’m not going to fool myself. This is Autism. This is melt downs. It’s hard. I hope that we can get past this someday and he can have a productive life, but I fear the alternative. That it may get too bad and he’ll have to live in a home where he’ll be doped up and live a miserable existence. I don’t want that either.

Right now I’m not feeling real positive. I’m bitter at the world for the lack of help. I’m angry at myself because I should have known better. I’m disillusioned with my life right now. But it doesn’t matter. This is Autism and we get up every day and keep going. I love my son regardless.

Lost My Way

I want to apologize for my absence. Life has attacked from all directions lately and I was overwhelmed.

We had a bad bout of troubles around here including unemployment, legal issues, financial problems and hospital stays. The stress consumed us and I pretty much went into emergency mode where I only focused on survival.

Things seem to be leveling out, not quite sorted out, but at least manageable. I hope to get back on track here soon. Thankfully, a reader on Wattpad contacted me and let me know how much they loved my novels on there and it really helped pull me out of the mire. I feel like I’ve taken my first breath in months.

I will try and get my act together and get sorted out, please be patient with me.

Thanks,

Adriana

Random Song Pick Saturday: If You’re Going Through Hell – Rodney Atkins

Optimism and Autism

My son has Autism. He is eleven years old. I have learned that optimism is a trap.

Optimism: hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.

My husband and I have been married for 20 years. I think we were optimistic in the beginning. We thought that all we had to do was work hard and the world would be ours. The Universe apparently thought that was  a challenge. We’ve been through a lot of difficulties and trials. Life hasn’t always been easy, but sometimes we do alright and sometimes we don’t. Autism has taken us to a whole new level.

I was optimistic that we could handle this new complicated life together, but instead we’ve had to give a lot up including being in the same geographic location. He works away from home because that is the only way we can make enough money for me to be a stay at home mom and still afford all the bills, medical or otherwise. I tried working, but it wasn’t worth it. Child care for a special needs kiddo is hard to come by and I had to keep leaving work to take care of problems that arose with my son.

It hasn’t been easy for my daughter either. She’s had to give up a lot and she’s had to adjust to getting less attention because of her brother. Being optimistic that I could pay attention to both of my kiddos at the same time was unrealistic. I’ve learned that kind of optimism leaded to hurt feelings and overwhelming parental failure. I’ve learned that sometimes I have to find time to devote to my daughter completely even if it means that she  has to skip some school to get it.

Like Sisyphus and the boulder, we start every day at the bottom of the hill.

Day after day, we get up and try.  There are a lot of things to learn when you have a child with Autism; behavioral, medical, dietary, psychological, methods, routines, etc. They all play a crucial role in a stable life. The things that worked yesterday don’t necessarily work today. Sometimes they have the opposite effect. Teachers ask me how to handle my son and I have to say, “Well, that depends on the day.”

Friends don’t really understand why we don’t do things like they do. Most of them feel that I’m being too overprotective and honestly I’m too tired to try and explain it to them. They are always optimistic that my son will be fine. That there will be no problems. Birthday parties, concerts, fairs, we’ve been to them all. We’ve dealt with the migraines and the over stimulation meltdowns and the violence that comes from them.  I’ve pushed that boulder up that hill enough times that I know our limitations. If they want to think badly of me then so be it. 

The teachers at school ask me what my long term goals are for my son. I usually laugh and say, “To get through today.” You have to have optimism in order to have goals, and I don’t.

Optimism has never been one of my strong suits. I’m not one of those people born under a lucky star where everything went right and the world was a bright and sunny place. Things don’t just work out for me. I get by on my brains and my abundance of personality. Things happen. I  deal with them. I’m a realist.

Realist: a person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly.

Optimism can give you a false sense of reality and make you really unhappy because you are always struggling to meet unrealistic expectations.

I know that we are making progress, but to try and  reach a certain milestone in a certain amount of time is more stress than I can handle right now. Don’t get me wrong, I want my son to learn and blossom into a happy healthy adult, but it will have to happen in its own time. I’m just being realistic. I know that my son makes leaps forward only to backslide. That doesn’t make me try any less. I just takes away the expectations and that takes away the disappointments and the feelings of failure.  No one needs those kind of feelings in their life.

People laugh at me when they ask me, “How are you?” and I answer, “Still alive.” I see it as an affirmation that I’m still here. I’m still trying. I am living for the now taking each day as best as I can. I’ve lowered my expectations to the level of “Everyone is still breathing, so we’re doing great.”

So for those of you out there struggling to be optimistic about your children’s autism, it’s going to be all right. You don’t have to be sunny, or cheerful, or optimistic. You just have to accept your life has changed. It’s okay. All you have to do is love your kiddos. That’s the reality .Go with the Zen approach. All there is is the now. They are who they are and that’s okay. They don’t have to be anything else and neither do you.

The Strain of it All

Ooh crap! Now what?

This seems to be the mantra of my family and of many people I know. Life just keeps piling it on. Everyone was so glad when 2016 ended only to realize that January of 2017 is tainted by association with December of 2016! It hasn’t ended or stopped, weird stuff, stressful stuff just keep happening.

For example: The weather. Snow is piled up everywhere and there seems to be no end in sight for the cold. The election, you all thought that was done but nooooo! The media and the government are still squabbling like children. People are still dying. My uncle passed away on January 2nd. There are school troubles, vehicle repair issues, kids are getting sick, unexpected bills are coming out of nowhere, home appliances are acting up.

The stresses just keep coming.

Your whole world seems like it is crushing you. Breathing is becoming harder. There seems to be a weight crushing your chest. Your head seems like it going to explode. You want to cry, or drink, or cry and drink. You can’t talk yourself into getting out of bed in the morning but you have to. You just want a hug and there is no one there to hug you.

The strain seems enormous and when you finally get the willpower to look up…here comes something else to be dumped on you. Eventually you will break.  The strain of it all will get you.

But don’t worry, there is hope.

It is all about how you look at it.

The definition of strain…

Strain  /strān/

verb

1. force (a part of one’s body or oneself) to make a strenuous or unusually great effort.
2. to pour (a mainly liquid substance) through a porous or perforated device or material in order to separate out any solid matter.

Noun

1. a force tending to pull or stretch something to an extreme or damaging degree.
2. a severe or excessive demand on the strength, resources, or abilities of someone or something.

If you look at your life from a passive point of view then you are letting strain be a noun. The strain of stress becomes a thing that is extreme and damaging. The same thing will happen if you take a passive view of your stress. The longer you sit and watch the tide of overwhelming events coming for you the worse you’ll feel. It is damaging and extreme. Even mountains will wear away when water hits it often enough.

However if you think of strain as a verb, an action word, things take on a different look.  The first definition states that strain is the use of great force and effort. Well believe me, the effort to fight the tide of stress takes a butt load of effort. Sometimes more than we have. That is why we must seek help. You don’t have to do it all alone. Talk to someone, friends, family, helplines, it doesn’t matter. Someone will help you. You never know when someone will have the answer to your problems that you didn’t think of.  The hard part is asking. Sometimes it is enough to just talk.

The second definition is even more important. And you are saying, “What? How is sifting through something related to stress?” Well guess what? That is the secret to beating it.  If you let yourself become the strainer then you will sift through the stress finding what is really important. Like a colander, you will catch the bigger stuff first. Those are the priorities. Sort them out first, then work on the smaller items. Or if that isn’t your way then sift out the big stuff and set that colander aside. Work on the small stuff that is manageable first.  Either way you are taking an active roll in a carrying the load.

Have you ever looked around your house and were so overwhelmed by how much cleaning there was to do. It was all too much, so you hid away and didn’t do anything. The next day it is only worse. If you would have done just one little thing it would have set you on the path to a completely clean house. You have to eat that elephant one bite at a time.

Strain is only unbearable if you stand passive and let it crush you. Take it one thing at a time. Its alright to feel overwhelmed when there are too many things happening at once. It is only natural. We can only do so much, but the point is that we must DO something. The tide is going to come whether you want it or not. That is the nature of things, but you don’t have to let the tide take you.  Hold on and strain out what you must.

That camel’s back wouldn’t have broken if it didn’t try to carry everything at once.

I Am Woman, See Me Fix Toilet

Toilets have never been my favorite thing. If you look through my posts you will find quite a few that visit the toilet subject and I don’t mean they are crappy. I remember rather fondly the post How to dispose of a stiff with your teenage daughter.

Here is my latest adventure in the House of the Porcelain God.

Our toilet tank had a crack. I can’t say if it was because of manufacturer flaws or if it was because my son leans back against the tank too hard putting stress on the bolts that hold the tank.  Either way, it had a crack. We looked into getting a new tank but surprise, surprise, you have to buy the whole toilet. So like any good homeowner, I procrastinated and himmed and hawed.

Until it was too late.

My son was upset about Halloween. He wanted it to be right now and didn’t want to wait.He had gone to the bathroom and as he sat there trying to make an offering to the Porcelain God he became more and more upset about Halloween.  He began to cry and then to scream and then to sob all the while sitting on the toilet. Now remember he is autistic and this means sometimes he gets into a meltdown cycle and there isn’t a lot to be done.  Often at that point, I try to avoid giving him attention because it only increases the problem. Sometimes he will become calm on his own. But not this time.

Miscalculation on my part. Never let a child in meltdown stay on the toilet.

He did not calm down. Then next thing I heard was gushing water. I thought he’d turned on the faucet or something. I rushed into the bathroom to find him sitting not on the toilet but on the side of the tub staring at the fountain of water bursting from the bottom of the tank.

Bath toys were pairing up and looking for Noah. The rugs were soak and there was a mini waterfall going down the heater vent. I splashed through the flood that was racing across the floor and turned off the water to the tank.

For the next couple of hours it was mops and towels and buckets in full force. Water had not only covered the bathroom floor, but it had also dripped through the floor and into the bathroom downstairs which is right below the upstairs bathroom. So, I had to clean up two bathrooms. The water in the vent headed south down the ducts to drip out at a junction in my basement right next to the furnace. Had to leave a bucket there to collect the drips all night.

Needless to say Momma was not happy.

Once it was all cleaned up and as dry as it could get, we moved on with bedtime. The next morning we headed off to Great Falls to find a toilet. Nothing like looking for a new toilet on a Sunday morning. Bought a whole new toilet and drafted my poor daughter to once again help. This time was more like Frankenstein bringing home body parts to fix the dead Porcelain God. Maybe I should have called this post “How to teach your daughter to resurrect the dead.”

Any way the box made it home and I took out the new tank, read the instructions about fifty times and then installed the new tank. I did a total redneck number behind the tank though. Got a Styrofoam chunk and wedged it between the wall and the tank then duct taped it in. Hopefully that will keep my son from banging into it and cracking this new one.

So far so good it hasn’t leaked…yet. I’m trying to be optimistic and believe that this will be the last time I have to mess with the toilet but then again I’m delusional sometimes.

The Lies that are the Truth

I always tell my children not to lie. It is a good thing for them to know and live by. I try my hardest not to lie. It’s not easy. Sometimes it is the hardest thing in the world, but I believe in telling the truth.

But this morning as I was walking my 11 year old autistic son to school, I realized that I was lying to him.

I said to him, “Say in between the lines of the crosswalk. That’s where it is safe to cross.”

This is true according to traffic laws. That is why the crosswalk is there, to give a safe place to cross the street.

Then I continued, “It’s like a bridge, you wouldn’t cross a river without a bridge, so don’t cross the street without a crosswalk.”

At that moment, I realized the lie.

The road is no different inside the lines of the crosswalk than outside of it. It is merely lines painted on the pavement. It’s not safe. There is no magic barrier there that will keep him from getting run over. (That thought alone scared the Hell out of me.) It’s just lines.

The only reason that it is safer to cross at the crosswalk is the teaching we get in driver’s ed. The traffic rules that tell us to look for pedestrians in the crosswalks. That doesn’t mean that drivers will, just that they are supposed to.

So in lying to my son I gave him a false impression of the world, but it is a lie that has to be told. The belief that a crosswalk is safe is the only thing standing between me and a child in a coffin. If, in his mind, he believes that the crosswalk is safe then he will be forced to live within that stricture. He will cross at the crosswalk making his life safer than it was before.  It won’t keep him from getting hit, but it will up his chances of staying safe.

It is a lie that has to be told. Ignorance often keeps us safe. If you don’t know you can be killed then you don’t panic about it.

When it comes to Autism, one must be very careful with the ideas that one presents. It comes down to control. Often my son just does what he wants because he has no idea what will happen to him. So I must tell him a truth that is a lie to keep him safe.

I tell him all the time, Big House is safe. (Big House is what he calls our home. I don’t know why, he just does.) Big House is safe from thunderstorms, wind, rain, loud trucks, trains and all manner of other things that he is scared of.

I know for a fact that wind can destroy houses. (I lived in tornado land for a long time.) I know that fire from lightening could burn down our house, we could be flooded, or even have a truck drive through our front door. But when it comes down to it, Big House is safe because it has to be.

It’s another lie that is the truth. If I didn’t tell him this lie then he would never sleep at night and he would be in a perpetual state of panic. How can anyone live like that? We tell ourselves these lies so that we can face living. Not just the parents of Autistic children but everyone.

To Quote Men in Black: There’s always an alien battle cruiser, or a Corellian death ray, or an intergalactic plague intended to wipe out life on this miserable little planet. The only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!

So in the end the question comes up: Do I lie? The answer is: Only when it is the truth.

Writing Prompt: What’s up with your dad?

“What’s up with your dad?”

“Oh he’s just sick of people trying to kill him, mainly you.”

“I didn’t try to kill him!” Jonas practically screeched.

“Yeah, he said you’d say that.” I said without looking up from my game. I was nearing the end of the mission and I didn’t feel like starting over.

Jonas collapsed like the trade center onto the couch beside me smashing the remainder of chips in the Doritos bag and scattering  gummie worms onto the floor.Frowning I glanced down at my fallen snack then shrugged.

“I didn’t try to kill him,” Jonas repeated sullenly, “it just kinda happened. Hey! Get that guy!” he pointed to the screen excitedly.

I hate back seat gamers but Jonas was my best friend so I killed the enemy soldier anyway. “You always say things just kinda happened when usually its you being a dumb ass that causes it.”

“I wasn’t really being a dumbass,” Jonas picked up a gummie worm and inspected it for fuzz. “I didin’t mean to pull out in front that semi.”

I slid him a disbelieving look but he went on.

“It’s not like we were really in danger. Your dad has one of those teacher brake thingies on his side. He coulda used it.”

“Dude!” I dropped the controller into my lap and stared at Jonas. “Seriously, this is the third time you’ve taken drivers’ ed and you’ve nearly killed my dad every time!”

“Not every time!” Jonas whined. “That first time it was Julie’s fault!”