Lately it seems Katie and I have been locked in a battle of wills. For hours, or even days, our lives will run smoothly and I will congratulate myself that all our hard work and effort are finally paying off. Then Katie will ask for a third helping of spaghetti and meatballs, and I will say that she needs to eat her broccoli first (a conversation that happens frequently without any problem). Suddenly she erupts and a fork gets hurled across the room, a pronged projectile I am loath to intercept.

Now a coffee mug is broken and spaghetti sauce is splattered on the floor and counters. I’m angry, and she is close to tears. And neither of us is any closer to knowing what’s wrong.

Katie is also acting out during her in-home therapy sessions. Juan, her behaviorist, and I have been wracking our brains to figure out what has changed. My instincts tell me it’s related to summer school, but it’s a bit like reading tea leaves—except it’s not. All the clues are there. I just need to fit everything together into a coherent whole.

Juan reminds me that all behavior is communication. I know this, but what exactly is Katie telling us? How much of this is frustration over a lack of functional speech and how much is just my strong-willed child attempting to get her way, to assert control? I pour over the facts, shifting through pieces of the puzzle, attempting to find a narrative that will explain the story we now find ourselves in.

It sounds so simple, and yet it’s not.

A couple years ago Katie began kicking the wall of the school bus. Not just anywhere, but high up, near the window. Personally I would have ignored this behavior until it quickly extinguished, but it freaked the bus driver out. It turns out an autistic teenager on another driver’s bus had put his head through the window. and while not seriously hurt, there had been a lot of blood. Katie’s driver hated blood. She wanted the kicking stopped.

I couldn’t figure out why Katie might be kicking. She had never kicked in the car while I was driving. She rarely kicked on the morning bus ride to school, which was much longer and more crowded. She didn’t always kick on the afternoon ride. It wouldn’t happen for months, and then it would start up again. She never kicked immediately, but would start about five minutes after leaving school. Some afternoons she refused to even get on the bus, and on those days, she almost always kicked.

The bus driver could offer no explanation for these changes in behavior. She just wanted the kicking stopped because, you know, there might be blood. I wracked my brain for an answer, but it made no sense. I couldn’t see any pattern. But my intuition told me it was there.

Then one day the driver gave me the same litany as she dropped Katie off, but with one exception: she said the kicking started five minutes after leaving school, right as I was getting on the freeway. It was summer, and hot. The bus had no air conditioning so the windows were all rolled down. Katie is hyper-sensitive to sound. Suddenly the pieces fell into place, and I knew what the problem was. Katie wasn’t complaining about the heat. She wanted the windows closed to reduce noise.

I raced to the local sporting goods store and bought another pair of noise-reducing headphones. She wore them while riding the bus and the kicking magically stopped.

All behavior is communication.

In retrospect the patterns are easy to spot. But that’s only in hindsight.

When I was a child, I read all the Nancy Drew books and later moved on to Sherlock Holmes. For a time I fantasized about being a detective, searching for clues. All behavior is communication. It’s time for me to put on my detective hat and figure out what Katie is struggling to say.

Until next time,
Cynthia Patton