Family

The problem with moving.

Autism, Daily Life, Family, Musings, , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As I think forward to the concept of moving again, I reflect upon the difficulties this will present. I also think about the difficulties it has presented in the past.

My wife and I do not enjoy moving, in fact we detest it. Even if our living arrangement is not ideal, the idea of packing everything to move is more frightful. We would rather repair, and disinfect a place ourselves than to move out of an unhealthy situation. We have done exactly that in the past.

While living in ChaoYang, I had some serious difficulty with a coworker at that time. We had a mold issue near the living-room window, the apartment only had 2 bedrooms and a large living room. When we moved in there was a broken kitchen counter, and the gas range fan was caked with an inch of grease.

We repaired the counter using my tools, fixed the toilet flush. And spent nearly a whole day scrubbing the grease off the kitchen exhaust fan.

We had our routines that we loved though. There was a wet market around the corner that we could get almost anything we needed. They had seamstresses for clothing repair. There was fruit and vegetables and fresh meat on the first floor. They sold basic furniture, electronics, blankets, curtains, and everything you needed for a home. They had a pet store, and seafood. There was gardening equipment, and home-repair tools. A whole floor of stationary and decorations for festivals. We loved going there all the time.

There was a supermarket across the street. That building had food booths, and restaurants. every Canadian Thanksgiving we used to go to a certain restaurant we called “The Red Restaurant” because of the sign. They had a Tailor, and pharmacies there. We knew exactly where everything was. Unfortunately the supermarket itself shrank twice while we were there. It began as a 2 floor market, then it shrank to just the first floor. Then our last year there, it shrank to half the first floor. Piano schools, dance schools, and science academies moved in upstairs.

There were two malls that were a short walk away, and we enjoyed walking there as a family. These malls, had movie theaters, and cat-cafe’s. You could sit with your drink and pet a cat. There was a lot of things to do there, including eating, board games, VR games, a couple large playgrounds for the kids and more.

Just around the corner was a great street food culture in the evenings. If we didn’t feel like cooking, we could just walk down the street and buy a large variety of food. All of these little food carts would appear in the early evening, and some of the foods were amazing, and cheap.

After moving to the ShunYi area, we have gone to visit the malls and the wet market in ChaoYang a couple of times. But we have tried to build new routines here. It has been hard, however. ShunYi, while more spread out and suburban, has less things like home repair and tools shops. It took us a while to find good green grocers, and there isn’t a large mall nearby. Instead there is a cosmopolitan shopping plaza.

This area is more expensive than ChaoYang, and it took us a while to get used to it. There is a lot more variety in restaurants and coffee shops. The plaza has more things for the children as well. They can buy birdseed and feed pigeons at “Pigeon Plaza”. There is an outside playground surrounded by a permanent farmer’s market. The plaza has 2 trains for families to ride around on.

Unfortunately some of the difficulties in our routines that arose is change. For the first couple of years we would find a coffee shop, grocery store or restaurant we liked, and it would disappear, or get down-sized and moved. For example there was a great restaurant / cafe next to a fountain plaza. They had an amazing bakery, and excellent fried chicken. after we had been patrons for about 7 months, (Bare minimum to make it a routine), it closed and moved practically next door. Now it is 1/4 the size, has no bakery, and no restaurant. They sell coffee, ice-cream, and sandwiches now.

Our second favorite cafe did the same a few months after that, and moved to the far side of the plaza, a good 20 minutes walk through the compound.

Now My wife and I consistently go to a cafe attached to a book store. It has survived.

But now, we have given notice to our school that we plan to move after this school year. My son has graduated, and we wish to get out of Beijing. While this is exciting, it has already begun to cause fear in my family. We don’t know where we are going yet. We don’t know what type of place it will be. We don’t know how long we will be needing to get acclimate to the new area.

My wife and I are both quite nervous about this, and I we still have 6 months left at this house and school. We have both lost sleep over this, but we made a promise to ourselves that we would leave Beijing.

I feel that even if we stayed, our family dynamic is changing as my son will be a legal adult. And this in itself is a very scary point for us. While he plans to have a gap year to focus on language learning, things are different.

Can we get him a visa to stay with us next year? Can we find a language school for him? Will he have to move out to another country? Is he ready to go out on his own? Have we taught him how to handle himself and his difficulties well enough? What support will he have if he’s out on his own?

If I’m still having trouble setting up and managing myself and my difficulties, how is he going to do?

And this all causes other issues. The more I worry about things, the more I get distracted, disorganized, and lost. I have been needing my personal space, and my huggables more often.

Most people don’t realize this, but it causes me to have more indigestion and heartburn. It also causes me to have more balance issues. (Both of these will be discusses in other articles.)

So as I look forward to the next school year, I need to sit down to put on my shoes more, and rely on my akla-seltzer tablets more. I also get lost in my classroom as I move from my desk at the back to the front of the room. I tend to head back to my desk 2 or 3 times now to get papers and material I prepared and forgot about. I need my alarms more to remind me when I have to finish class, or go get the children. And I need to sit down more when I am on duty watching the children outside.

At home I feel more sluggish in making decisions, and just want to find that next job so I have an idea of where we will be going to.

Wish me luck.

The Peace of a Bookstore.

Daily Life, Family, Musings Leave a comment

I love book stores. Public Libraries to a lesser extent, but not school libraries.

I feel a sense of peace, just being in a bookstore. Walking in, fills me with a calming feeling. Even if I can’t read the books, I feel this calm. the smell of the books, and the quiet of the store.

My local bookstore has no English books anymore. I still love going in there. I can escape into the shelves. They have tables and chairs set up for people to just sit and read their new books at. People sit in the children’s book area reading quietly with their kids. But it is all so quiet, and calming.

These people get it. Books relax.

Every time I think about physical book stores closing in favor of online stores, I feel like crying. Any other store, I don’t mind being online. But book stores need to be real.

Some of my best memories are getting lost in bookstores around the world. I will happily get lost just looking over the titles, and selections available.

There was a bookstore downtown Beijing. It was in the WangFuJing tourist district. It was called the “Beijing Foreign Language Bookstore”. When we arrived in Beijing, it was a four story shop. the top floor was first language books. English and Japanese novels. All age levels, and genres. 3rd floor was textbooks and educational books for learning foreign languages. 2nd and first floors were for the travel guides, information books about places, and other Local information books in English.

For years I loved taking the children there. We would go there almost monthly. I loved it as much as the kids did.

During the Pandemic, the bookstore shrank down to 1 floor. The books were damaged, and on sale. It was now only the foreign novels. The place had lost its lifestream, and was struggling to stay open. It lost. I tried to go there a few months ago, and it was locked up with a “for rent” sign on the door.

I was heartbroken.

Even though I cannot read the books at our local shop, I still patronize them. My wife and I will get bookmarks, notebooks, trinkets, whatever we can to keep the store open.

Please everyone, don’t buy books from online sources if you can. Go to your local bookstore. If they don’t have the book you want, they can order it for you. Don’t let bookstores and libraries close.

Memories vs Reality

Autism, Daily Life, Family, Musings, , , , , One comment

Throughout my life I have done and seen many things. I have some great memories. I have amazing memories of going places. I have wonderful memories of meeting people. I have memories that are not accurate. I have memories that nobody else has.

This always baffled me growing up. I remember experiencing a lot of things, or being told things. I remember seeing things happening. I remember things happening to me. But when I asked people about them. nobody else remembers, or they remember it extremely different.

Tire Swing

Probably the most prominent one is the Tire Swing incident. When I was very young we moved around town a lot. My Mom and Dad had separated when I was still in diapers. So Mom moved to the City nearby. One of the places we lived at was a white condominium. There were 4 buildings all arranged in a rectangle, leaving a kind of paved courtyard in the middle. The courtyard had space at two corners for cars to enter and drive around inside. This happened before My Mom married my step father.

The other 2 corners had space for people to walk through. I remember one corner had a tire swing set up. The tire swing was one where the tire was laying horizontal. It was attached by 4 chains to a central pivot in the frame. The tire could spin or swing.

I don’t remember how old I was exactly when we moved here. But I was lower elementary age. probably 6 or 7 years old. I do remember clear as a bell that one day I was on the swing. I think two of my brothers were, there. Some older boys came in through the corner path, and saw me on the swing. I can still see the face of one of the boys. He had curly light brown hair. They grabbed the swing and spun it as fast as they could go.

I flew off the swing at top speed because I could not hold on. I tried my hardest, but it was just not in the cards for me. As I flew off, I hit the speckled wall. These buildings had little bits of quartz or white rock as a weather proofing sticking out of them.

I hit the wall. and most of the boys ran off. I blacked out. Somebody carried me home.

This did not happen, according to my family.

Apparently, I did have an incident on a tire swing like this, while in upper elementary. I was across the street at the school. This was after we had finally managed to buy a house. My mom and stepfather had been married a number of years at this point.

In the version everyone else remembers, but I do not. I was at the school across the street, (I should have been 11 or 12 at this point). Some bigger boys, probably High School students came through the school grounds. They spun the tire swing really fast as before and I flew off of the swing. But instead of hitting the gravel-ridden building wall, I hit the metal frame of the tire swing.

huh.

Mom’s had Enough.

Another situation that I can remember is different. I believe we were at the condominiums that I mentioned before. Mom was still trying to put her life back together. She was preparing for a date, and of course us boys were being crazy. There were four of us, so we were loud. But I don’t remember being loud or bad. I remember being in the living room.

I remember clearly Mom getting so frustrated. Eventually she had enough and threatened to leave us there, never to return. She stepped outside when she said this. She had not even gone to the curb when she came back to apologize.

This memory is carved in my mind. To this day, I get anxious seeing children take advantage of their parents. The feeling is worse when I see parents losing their temper at their kids.

Never happened, according to my family.

I love my mom. As a father I can sympathize as to how stressed she would have had to have been to say that. But apparently, my Grandmother had done this very same thing. Mom had never told us about it until I brought up my memory. She had promised herself to never pull that on her own kids because grandma had done it.

Head Full of Tubes.

As a child I remember mom telling me clearly about when I was a baby. Mom told me about how when I was born there was something wrong. I remember being told that I had a swelling on my brain or something on the day I was born. Mom told me that the doctors had rushed me off to intensive unit. I was told that they had to put tubes into my head. These tubes were to relieve pressure on my brain. If they had not relieved the pressure, I would have died.

Not only did this conversation never happen, but I did not have tubes in my head as a baby.

I have more memories that are seemingly false too. To this day, I am not 100% sure of my long term memory. There are a lot of things from my childhood that might still turn out to be false. I don’t know. I will hold onto these memories tightly even if they are not real. They are part of me. These memories that I have helped shape me into who I am, even if they are not true.

What makes me worried the most is that I do have family that has difficulty with the same issues. Memories of things that didn’t happen. But their memories are much more recent, and they are not always convinced that the memory is false. I worry about them. I also have fears that this could be my future.