The last few weeks we have been having a lot rain and stormy weather. I have a love/hate relationship with rain! When I have a ton of work to do that requires concentration, I love rainy days. It forces me to hunker down and get things done. If it’s beautiful out, I think of a million reasons why I can’t sit and take care of what I need. I also love rainy days when I don’t feel well. It’s as if I can justify sleeping all day, watching classic tv and cuddling under the covers. On the opposite side, I hate, fear storms. I’ve always been afraid of storms, as a kid I was totally petrified of them. Now I’m more just slightly stressed by bad storms. Mark, on the other hand really loves storms. He opens all the blinds and watches them. I know that being in the house, there isn’t really a serious danger, but I still worry. I’m sure you’re asking yourself what does that have to do with autism? Just like everything else in our lives… this has a lot of parallels to autism.. at least with Peyton.
He now loves weather, he watches the weather channel, checks it on phone etc. He doesn’t mind rain, now that he’s older, and has learned to deal with storms, as well. When he was younger rain scared him, storms totally petrified him. When he was young we lived in Florida and he lived through several hurricanes. He fed off of my fears and decided they were horrible. If he even thought a hurricane or bad storm was coming he would get so upset and go into a full meltdown. Nothing we did would help him. We tried explaining storms to him, showing him online positive sides to storms etc, he still would get so stressed. I wasn’t sure he was ever going to outgrow his fear. This worried me because I didn’t want him as a teen or adult to be somewhere and a storm come. Say he was at a grocery store and a storm happened, if he had a full meltdown who knows what could happen. I remember people telling me.. “he’ll outgrow it” but I knew because he is autistic, he may not.
I’m not exactly sure how and when Peyton overcame his fear of storms, but he has. He now not only enjoys rain, he sees benefits to it, and he is fine during storms. He dealt with the Houston Flooding much better than I thought he would. In fact he was better than many others! Having Peyton resolve his fears of rain and storms has also helped me. I used to get tense when I knew a rainstorm was coming. His meltdowns weren’t always easy to deal with. I hate seeing him get that upset, especially since there is nothing I could do to change it. We’ve now settled into rain and storms come and go. We don’t feel the need to sing.. rainy days and Mondays always get me down… instead we can sing… our song 🎵🎶 “Turning Autism into Awesomism” 🎶🎵