Welcome to Superlativeville

I don't know if it is one of the tendencies of a child with High Functioning Autism, or if it is simply a characteristic of my son, but we have been living in an interesting town lately. The best name for the town  is Superlativeville. Spirit has been moving into the extreme of all situations. We had a little disagreement and I told him I wasn't going to play the game with him anymore. To which he promptly replied, "So you won't play with me ever again?" I tried to explain that I was simply talking about the situation we were in at the time, but he was very distraught that we weren't ever going to play again.

Welcome to Superlativeville, population: Spirit.

I have to keep this in mind as this tendency seems to be penetrating all of his interpretive and cognitive practices. Every interaction is very black or white, especially for those people that don't exist in Spirit's "box" as I like to call it. Spirit has a box, and that box is filled with people that he trusts, and he trusts them with his autistic tendencies. This is probably why we have such a hard time explaining to people that Spirit is HFA (High Functioning Autistic), he is so good at "turning it off" when he is placed in a situation full of people outside his "box" it is often hard for people to see the tendencies.

Spirit lives in Superlativeville, and that is why interactions are so difficult at times. For example there is a young man at school that either doesn't play with Spirit, or is passive about playing with him. This resulted in a conversation with Heart where he expressed that this particular young man "hates me." And there we are smack dab in the middle of Superlativeville. Thing is that all of the streets in Superlativeville run parallel there are no cross streets. Which means you are either on Best Friends Lane or Hate You Way. See what I mean, there is no cross street that a lot of us are on called Acquaintance Avenue. You are either on Best Friends Lane or Hate You Way, and the thing is that most kids don't even end up on a lane at all they are stuck watching Spirit from outside the city limits wondering why they can't seem to connect with anyone inside Superlativeville. The thing is there aren't any phones in this place, just a bunch of parallel streets leading to nowhere. Heart and I have become very familiar with many of the streets in Superlativeville. We have found that what we thought was Maybe Later Blvd. was actually a toll road to Never Going To Happen Lane, and be careful because that toll is one major meltdown. As Heart and I try to find a map to this happy little place, we find that the roads are always changing and the landmarks that could once be counted on to direct us are now completely changed.

All the while Spirit is trying to navigate the roads himself and finding it very difficult. Partly because he hates it when people try to construct crossroads. He is happy in Superlativeville. I mean let's face it if someone loves you then you can predict their behavior, if they hate you there is a similar predictability. It's those pesky cross streets that leave things up to interpretation.

I hope to one day get the map to Superlativeville, so that I can effectively assist Spirit in navigating its streets.

For now we are still looking up.