Picture this: A mother uses visual cues to cope with her son’s extreme rigidity
By Robin LaVoie
When my 21-year-old son wakes each morning, he comes out of his attached apartment into the main living room and kitchen of our house and sets things to his liking.
He resets the dog’s dish on its mat, adjusts the handle on the coffee pot, fidgets with the spoon in its rest, opens the fridge to confirm front-facing condiments, and checks the pantry for any similarly lax boxes and jars.
He straightens the dish rag at the sink and the towel hanging on the dishwasher, moves the faucet, shifts the soap dispenser, paper towels, and can opener.
He tucks in any unkempt chairs at the dining room table, flips the lock on the sliding door, returns wayward remote controls to their drawer, arranges pillows, clicks (or unclicks) pens.
In other words, he touches anything that might have moved since he went to bed the night before.
This pattern is repeated throughout the day, as he follows our movements in every room in the house. He has judged our habits of “mis-arranging” items faulty for many years, but his monitoring seems to have become more vigilant during this pandemic-isolation.
I know that this “fixing” behavior might help to calm his restless nerves, but it can be the opposite of calming for his housemates – we do not always agree on how things should be arranged, and it can be exhausting to live under his supervision.
In recent weeks, he and I got into a tussle over the proper placement of the toilet paper stand in the hall bathroom. He never personally uses this bathroom, but he still has opinions about how it should look.
Every time I used that bathroom, I found the free-standing toilet paper holder moved to a position that made it unusable from my, um, position. So, I would move it back.
And every time my son wandered into that bathroom during his house-fixing rounds, he found the toilet paper moved from where he last left it, so he would adjust it, probably grumbling under his breath about why he has to correct this all the time.
He and I are pretty much grumbling about each other all day. Not always under our breath.
None of my creative lectures or silly demonstrations of sitting on the toilet and grasping for the out-of-reach roll could dissuade him from his mission. My “Do NOT touch” sign did not work – he was probably equally frustrated that I was not following my own rules.
Of course, this TP tiff and similar arguments around our house are minor annoyances in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re home together all the time, repeating these cycles several times a day? Something had to be fixed.
I unearthed a clue to breaking our stand-off from two presenters at a virtual autism conference*. One of the strategies discussed – to support those who struggle with low executive functioning skills or high anxiety – is to literally give them a picture of what “done” looks like. Asking a kid to clean her room? Show her actual pictures of her room, Messy vs. Clean. Need him to get ready for school? Teach him to match himself to a photo of a clean, dressed, backpack-on, shoes-tied boy standing (and smiling!) by the car.
Visual cues always work well with my guy, so I decided to harness this picture-perfect idea in the bathroom.
First, I taped a photo on the wall behind the toilet, showing the toilet stand in its preferred (to me) position. A strange decorating choice, I know.
Then, the next time I caught my son in the process of moving that TP, I showed him the picture and moved the toilet paper stand to match. This is how the bathroom is supposed to look.
I was doubtful that this could resolve our fierce TP feud, at least not without several weeks of reminders and modeling.
But from the moment I showed him that magical photo – although he still monitors that bathroom regularly – his need to move that TP holder has disappeared. I no longer have issues reaching the tissues!
Now, I know that this solution is still encouraging rigidity, just a type that is better aligned with my own.
And I don’t know how long these photos need to stay up in order to remap what “fixed” looks like to him.
But for now, it’s a fix that gives us one less thing to grumble about!
Picture me smiling.
* See my inspiration for this and other ideas from Sarah Ward (https://efpractice.com) and Jessica Minahan (www.jessicaminahan.com)
You can find Robin LaVoie at itslikethis.substack.com/welcome