Lunch Treat

Earlier this afternoon, the Son of Never Stops Eating did something I honestly didn't see coming: he took me out to lunch after church.

You don't have to, I told him.  We have plenty of food at home.  But he had his heart set on chicken and fries, and he was willing- insistent, actually- to pay for it with his snow cone stand job earnings, so after some discussion about who had the best chicken tenders and fries, we set off for the local Whataburger and enjoyed a delicious lunch.  Today is his last day of work since school is starting this week, and he told me he was going to miss his job and his paycheck and that he was going to stop buying Legos for awhile because he wanted to save his money (but I've heard that last one before, and then two weeks later he finds his newest heart's desire online, and that is the end of the saving money- so I'm dubious about the last part).

If a visitor from the future had appeared to me back in the mid 2000's and told me "In a few years, this kid who isn't talking to you and who doesn't seem interested in human interaction and who just wants to run around whenever you try to get him to participate in anything will be taking you out to lunch with money he earned at a part time job", I would have been convinced that this time traveler's brains were completely scrambled by whatever process had enabled him or her to venture back to the past, or that they had me confused with some other person, but I wouldn't have believed a word of any of it- which is likely a problem time travelers encounter on a regular basis.

This is the problem with autism: I usually have people make one of two assumptions about the Son of Never Stops Eating, when they find out he's on the spectrum.  I once tried to talk to a church youth counselor about the Son of Never Stops Eating participating in activities, and his concern was that I needed to be there so that I could toilet him and help him eat.  His impression (based on one encounter) was that people with autism were essentially helpless.   I also have people who will tell me not to worry about my son's future because he's probably a coding savant; he'll get a job at Microsoft, and them move to Seattle, where evidently he'll fit in just fine.  Neither of these things happen to be true here- the Son of Never Stops Eating is definitely capable of feeding himself (as I write this, he is feeding himself a huge piece of chocolate cake), and he has zero interest in coding.

These encounters usually end in me saying something like "not all kids with autism are similar, that's why it's referred to as a spectrum", and then the other person says something like "oh yeah, I think I've heard that before, so he's not like Temple Grandin? Because I watched that show on TV and it was really good".

In the recent past, one of my concerns about him was what would happen if he got a job and then his employer wanted him to wear khaki pants, or an itchy polo shirt?  At his current job he can wear shorts and a t-shirt, so it was a non-issue.  Since school starts Tuesday, I asked him what he is going to wear on his first day of school, and he responded with "the usual", which maybe because he is a teenage boy or maybe because he hates wearing pants and itchy shirts or maybe both is always going to be shorts and a t-shirt even if it's freezing (that's one of the things I'm always wondering: is this a teenage boy thing, or an autism thing, or a Generation Z thing, or am I just being an overthinking mother and it's not a thing at all?".  So then I asked him what he'd do if he got a job and had to wear clothes he didn't like.

He sighed deeply.  Mom, he says, I don't like itchy clothes for school but if I had to wear it for work, I would do it because I am getting paid at a job and I like money but school is just school.

I wanted to ask him if he was also willing to wear deodorant to work, because the last time we had a discussion about deodorant he was insistent that deodorant was for school days only, but some things I honestly just don't want to be aware of.

The entire time we were eating, The Son of Never Stops Eating's latest Lego creation, some V-wing or X wing or something like that space fighter, was sitting on the table next to his Whataburger box of chicken tenders, and at least twice someone stopped at our table to ask him- with apparent genuine interest- if he'd built it himself and how long it had taken (yes, and 2 hours).

Yep, back in 2009, when I was chasing the Son of Never Stops Eating around a baseball field, trying without any success to get him to at least look at me and maybe try swinging a bat, and he was running away from me with the speed of an Olympic sprinter, I never saw a day in which I'd be sitting at a Whataburger with him (and an intricate Lego creation he'd built) eating a meal he'd paid for with money he'd earned himself and having conversations about why it would be OK to wear itchy clothes to work (but definitely not school), whether Mr. Burns is more evil than Darth Vader, and how he might join the art club at school (but maybe not).

I saw a lot of possible futures, but not a single one looked like this.