Allen is sitting on the steps when I come out of my bedroom, blocking my dash downstairs where I will have just enough time to grab some breakfast before I head off to school. His head hangs low, an attitude of dejection.
“I’m giving up,” he says flatly.
“Alright,’ I say. I carefully move around him and down a few steps before I turn and face him. “What are you giving up on?”
“The dryer.” He sighs and looks up at me. “I tried. I really did. But…” he shrugs, “ nothing’s working.”
I nod sympathetically, but I am actually relieved. For the last three months, Allen has been obsessed with fixing the dryer, verging on a meltdown whenever I mention calling a repairman. “I can fix it!” he’d insisted. “Why won’t you just let me try?”
So I’d let him try. He ordered plugs and cables and cords from Amazon, took the back off the appliance and drilled holes into the panel, and spent days fuming about “companies that make things so they fall apart.” Once a week, I hauled the wet laundry to the laundromat and pondered my son’s need to try and revive things that no longer functioned.
It is a trait, I’ve learned, of those on the spectrum, a reluctance to accept loss. Be it a missing tool or the dryer, Allen simply cannot accept, grieve, or move on until he sees for himself that nothing can be done. It is an obsession that sets him apart from his siblings and keeps the shed in the backyard filled with things he’s “working on.”
And it’s part of the process I needed to allow him to go through when his father died suddenly last year; it began a nine month journey in which Allen tried everything imaginable to get his father to come back. The acceptance was hard won.
I reach out now and touch my son’s shoulder. “It’s alright. I know you did your best. Some things just can’t be fixed.”
He heaves a heavy sigh. “I guess so. At least I know I did everything I could.” He leans his head against his hands and a few tears fall. I know he is mourning more than the dryer. I put my arms around his shoulders and we stay on the steps a few more moments, my breakfast forgotten.
“Well,” he says, standing up, “that’s that. Guess you’ll need to get a repairman.”
I think of the dryer parts strewn around the basement, cords running here and there. It is now the Frankenstein monster of dryers. “Or we can just get a new one.”
He grins. “That’s probably best.” He heads down the steps and I follow. It took nine months for him to accept the loss of his father. It took three months to accept the loss of the dryer.
It’s progress.
