I spent a huge amount of time with my challenged son Matthew before my husband, his father, died. We knew when he was born that he was in trouble. He was born damaged at birth for lack of blood sugar, caused by my O.B. putting me (us) on speed (amphetamines) so I wouldn’t gain weight. The ideal then was a 15 pound gain. My doctor thought I had gained too much weight with my son John, who weighed in at 9 1/2 pounds at birth, and never looked back. Well, I’ve reported all this in the Book of Matthew, published by McLelland and Stewart in 1984 with a U.S. paperback edition a few years later
But now that he’s living with me again, under such bizarre circumstances, I have begun to analyse him/us , his life, and when it changed. When Bill died ,of course. It changed for all of us. I had to make a living for me and my four children and writing was really my only option. I didn’t know how to do anything else. Well, I could type, and I knew a lot about learning disabilities by that time because I had studied Matt’s intellectual problems and took all that time to “play” teaching games with him, bringing in the whole family. We played games every night after dinner. But I think most of this is in his book.
Matt is what they call “high-functioning”. He can do quite a bit for himself and that is deceptive and sometimes unhelpful. He makes people think he can do more than he can and he encourages that.. When asked a direct question about anything, he wants to be agreeable so he will agree.
Do you understand? Yes.
Can you do that? I think so.
But he can’t.
TBC
This retrospective was triggered by a survey sent to Matthew but not quite appropriate for his situation. He joined Weight Watchers last August and started buying and cooking his own food, with my guidance and instructions but he liked it and caught on fast. I separated his food in the kitchen he shares with his room-mate, assigned by Commnuniity Living,t he organition that looks after Matt. I helped him go shopping three times, then left him on his own, not leaving it to his obese, diabetic roomie to do the shopping and most of the cooking of the food he chose. Matt started losing weight immediately. I don’t know why I left it so long.
I said he joined WW. I gave him a few months’ fees so he could have a card admitting him to the session every week. That put him on a mailing list (his name on my e-maii address) and he began to receive pep talks and menus and recipes and exercises to spur him (and me) along. Right now we are working on achieving The Plank in a four-week program—daily. We had to repeat Week Two, but we’re getting stronger, into Week Three now. Anyway, a week or so ago I/we received a questionnaire for Matt about his fat history, and I started to answer it intending to share it with Matt. Easy-peasy until we got to the real history and background , with questions about the dates of his early deviation from normal weight and when people started teasing,, tormenting and bullying him about his weight.
That never happened. He was never fat as a child or as a young adult, so he doesn’t have fat cells, waiitng to be filled up. (You know that theory don’t you?) I had decided to answer this survey because I thought it would be helpful to others to learn that a challenged person can handle a diet— well, Weight Watchers— and actually lose weight. His long-inured counsellor and doctor thought it was hopeless,that he’d never do it—but he was doing it. No opportunity came up to enable me to explain about the bullying challenged people suffer, so I finally left it. But it left me, thinking.
When did he get fat? When his current room-mate was paired with him in the Apartment Program run by Community Living.They’ve been together over ten years. I’ll have to ask Matt how many. He moved to his current apartment about the same time as I left Toronto and moved to Muskoka where I gained weight. That’s when i saw he needed to lose, too, so I drove into the city once a week and took him and his room-mate to a WW meeting. We all lost weight, but the men rapidly gained it back more than I did, though i back-slid quite a bit.
It was my fault. What was I thinking? I hadn’t been paying attention. Now I am and he’s living with me for the duration (of Covid-19) so it’’s easy-peasy again. Lots and lots of vegetables and make purple choices. WW uses colours now which is good because Matt doesn’t count very well.
Tonight we’re having zoodles and jumbo shrimp with lots of pesto and Parmesan cheese. Matt is very patient with my manual Spiraizer and loves shrimp. Fruit for dessert.
i’m going to continue with other discoveries of my blind neglect —not neglect exactly, but mistakenly thinking Matt had learned everything he needed to know. None of us does, ever.
We go on, we go on.