Susan Senator

I awoke with pillow fluff stuck to my pajamas. This sounds like a joke but it is really not. I guess that what happened was that I unwittingly washed these sheets with a pillowcase that had a destroyed pillow in it. In our house, many pillows are torn and restuffed and shedding, and in general disrepair, because Nat still is in the habit of using them for sexual relief. Ironic that he calls it “making privacy,” but here I am making privacy public. I am sorry to be talking about it. I am sorry, Nat.

I have to talk about it, though, because it is really worrying me, because the issue has, at last, surfaced in Nat’s group home.

I am full of this bubbling bad feeling in my throat and I don’t know what is going to happen about this problem. I think that at the moment the staff are stymied. I was told last night that they would now “keep more of a direct watch” or something like that, on Nat at night (this happened overnight). It scares me so much because I do not know how else they could possibly address this problem. We have tried for years to get Nat not to take care of himself with other people’s pillows. We have used charts that explained what he could and could not do at home. We have given him lots and lots of his own pillows. We have told him verbally the rules. We have spoken very very firmly about the rules, once they are broken. Nat’s brothers have had locks on their doors for some time. I don’t, and last weekend when Nat was home I found that my pillow had been torn apart and then stuffed back into its casing all lumpy. So now I have to lock my door? But I know what will happen eventually: he will use the living room throw pillows. That has happened, too. Or the porch cushions.

How will the house staff address this? It was difficult enough bringing it up at the team meeting on Monday. In fact, I wasn’t going to, because it had not ever happened at The House. But our school liaison, who is sharp as a tack and soon to retire, brought it up and suggested something she’d observed in another school. But this approach would not have worked for Nat. It involved restricting his privacy sessions, whereby he had to budget his time wisely. I feel that any kind of restriction is inhumane, but I realize that his method will have to be restricted.

In general, because of his vulnerability, and because I have always had to trust others with him, I have always feared Nat being abused and not being able to express his distress, or not even knowing that it was abuse, etc. etc. So now that this is a problem in The House, even though I trust them and respect them so much there, I worry that somehow this problem will either not go away, or will somehow become a worse problem.

Again, I apologize to Nat for speaking of this publicly, but we have to figure this one out and solve it. It is for his own good.

So… since I don’t want to dread Nat being home this weekend, because of this return of difficult behavior… I am going to be proactive. I have set up a velcro list of Nat’s choices for while he’s hanging out here. I am not telling him what to choose, just giving him the boundaries.

These are backwards, of course, but you can see what I did. (I guess you’ll have to hold it up to a mirror to see the choices. But you get the gist of it. One of those choices is “Make privacy with Nat’s pillow with the door closed.”
He already choose “sit on couch and walk around for 30 minutes… naturally!