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Minor Celebrity

Stories about people. Some of them true.

Archives for May 2011

The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (… at long last the last two.)

May 21, 2011 by martinsdad

9. The Plague of Darkness: 8:20pm
I am in the basement sitting at the computer when Jen gets home. Martin is in our bedroom standing the smallest Lincoln Logs on their ends shoulder to shoulder along the baseboard. Or at least that’s where he had been when when I had gone downstairs. I am actively indifferent to his location.
Jen calls a greeting down the stairs and asks me how things were going. I stay at the computer and call up, “not good.” She asks if she can help. I say I am not doing anything that requires assistance at the moment.
She says, “So, ‘not good’ means ‘pretty bad,’ huh?”
I say, “Yes.”
She says, “Can I take over, then?”
I say (bitterly instead of gratefully), “Yes.”
She says, “I brought you some food from the Seder. Should I bring it down?”
Martin hollers from our room, “Why did you not want me at the Seder?”
Jen to me, “Has it been like that the whole time?”
I call up, “Yes, and worse.” I tell her a bit about hitting and the crying and the peeing.
When she’s heard enough, she leaves the stairwell to attend to him.

I try to concentrate on the screen before me, but I end up listening to more of their conversation than I want.
Despite her efforts to mollify, distract and re-route him, he is inconsolable when it comes to the Seder Plate.
Him: “Mama, let’s go to the Seder.”
Her: “But, Martin, the Seder is over.”
Him: “Why do you not want me to go to the Seder.”
Her: “It’s not like that….”
Him: “But, I did not have the lamb bone, the bitter herb, the vegetable, the maror, the haroset and the egg.”
Her: “Well….”
Him: “But I have to have the lamb bone, the bitter herb, the vegetable, the maror, the haroset and the egg.”
Her: “Well….”

As I listen, I am rooting for Jen to figure out a way to get him to go to bed without either the Seder plate or fabulous temper tantrum. Actually, I don’t care much about the temper tantrum. I just want him to not get what he wants. I want him to be disappointed. I want him to suffer.

Her: “… Well, we can make a Seder plate.”
Him: “Let’s get the lamb bone, the bitter herb, the vegetable, the maror, the haroset and the egg.”

She takes him to the refrigerator and in short order they gather the “vegetable” (celery stalk), a fresh egg, the maror (horseradish sauce), and haroset (from the plate of food they’d brought me). Jen suggests they use some dried basil from the cupboard for the “bitter vegetable,” but Martin doesn’t understand this literal interpretation of the phrase (partly because he would never eat dried basil). He drifts closer to tizzy.
She says, “How about we draw some?” (This had worked the time he wanted to gather all of the animals from the book African Animals ABC.) He starts to say, “Yes” but changes his mind. “Paper is not the bitter vegetable.” Things are getting pretty tense when Jen finds some wilted celery greens in the back of the fridge that look enough like the parsley that is pictured in his book to pass muster.
The lamb bone is another matter altogether. We simply have nothing that resembles a bone.
By now, Jen’s enthusiasm and success have drawn me in and I am actively supporting the project. I offer to paint an empty roll of toilet paper or check my pile of wood scraps for an oddly shaped dowel rod or something. However, Martin’s standards are rising as the evening progresses. Jen suggests that we call a neighbor and see if they have a bone around from a recent meaty meal. I point out that it’s almost 10pm. We shouldn’t call anyone at his hour. I can’t figure out if Jen looks determined or just crazy when she says, “They’ll understand.”
The first person she calls has not gone to bed yet, nor do they offer an opinion on the determined/crazy question, nor have they had a meaty meal. The second person hasn’t either, but they do have dog and, hence, some dog bones. Jen runs over to their house to fetch one.
When the complete plate is presented to Martin he is quite satisfied. He recites the text of the children’s Seder book he has been reading, fondling each of the sacred objects as he quotes the description of it from the book. On the second run through he begins to sample the food from the plate: eating a bites of haroset, nibbling at the celery, pressing the dog bone and maror to his lips, and finally cracking open the raw egg and spilling its contents on the table.


Satisfied, Martin graciously yields when Jen beckons him into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

10. The Plague of the First-Born: 10:30pm
When we first considered the possibility that Martin might be autistic four years ago it mostly seemed like good news. I mean we already knew that his speech was delayed. We already knew that he seemed largely oblivious to other humans much of the time. We already knew he was beautiful and charming and that we loved him. So, at first blush, the diagnosis was good news because it seemed to promise answers to the questions that were bothering us most: why and what should we do.
However, as we read more and more about autism, a dreadful prospect I had not previously considered emerged: it began to seem possible that Martin’s present indifference to us might never change. I mean, it also seemed possible that none of it might ever change, but the part of him never changing that really bothered me was the possibility that Martin might never learn to love me.
I felt that the burden of raising a child who spoke only in quotations of Muppet movies, who was perpetually socially awkward and who never learned to live independently could be borne. But I was not sure at all that I could bear to raise someone who was perpetually aloof.
So, I am sitting at the computer, listening to my wife placate the little villain who struck me in the face, purposefully peed on a chair, shamed me in front of my neighbors and perpetually defied my every attempt to reign him in and I am thinking about Seder. The notion of writing a blog entry about this evening has already occurred to me as has the idea of arranging it into a series of plagues. I start pairing up sections of the evening with the plagues on the Egyptians. Martin’s autism stands in for the Wrath of God. Some plagues go in easily, others require a little shoehorning, but the glaring problem is, of course, what to do with the final impossibly brutal plague.
Martin is my first born child, my first born son, and four years ago I thought he might never come alive to me as a son. He could not carry a conversation beyond the answering of a few simple questions. He almost never asked his own questions.

Now, he and his mother walk down the stairs behind me, Jen is coaxing him toward his room.
Her: Let’s go down to bed, buddy.
Him: It *is not* time for me to go to bed.
Her: Well, it *is* snuggle time. Let’s go snuggle in your bed.
Him (wordless compliance):
Me: Good night, Martin. I love you, buddy.
Him: I love you, too.

The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (… the penultimate two ….)

May 7, 2011 by martinsdad

Start with The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (The first three…), then proceed to The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (…the middle three…), then come back.

7.   The Plague of Frogs:  7:15pm

Despite being unceremoniously tossed across my back, jostled down a flight of stairs and flopped onto the sidewalk, he hits the ground trotting and now, following the brief delay storming the home of our dear neighbors, Martin embarks on his campus circuit.  I turn on the iPod listening to Marc Maron‘s podcast and moving just fast enough to keep him in sight.
Going up the sidewalk we pass 135 chalk drawings of the 44 Presidents, 47 Vice-Presidents and 44 First Ladies (James Buchanan never married, but his niece Harriet Lane served as his First Lady.)

The circuit is going well when we get to the library.  This is almost always the trickiest part.  Two weeks earlier when Sasha, Martin and I returned from one of these trips Jen asked how it went I said, “From the time I found Martin in ‘the men’ with his pants around his ankles and a trail of feces reaching back to the door, things went absolutely perfect.”  (I was not being sarcastic, actually.  I honestly felt quite lucky that: 1) His stool was quite firm.  2) He let me wipe his legs down with soapy wet paper towels 3) The trash can had spare plastic bags in the bottom of it in which I was able to quarantine Martin’s underwear and the paper towels 4) No one burst into the bathroom to find me on all fours sweatily scrubbing the tile grout with paper towels and my son watching me pantsless in the stall doorway and 5) Sasha did not panic when left alone with the United States puzzle for five minutes while I cleaned up the bathroom.)

This time though Martin is fine until he notices that the table of four college students nearest the door has a tray of five cupcakes.  He says, “I think I should like to have a cupcake. (Borrowing the phrasing from a book, of course.  Probably Winnie the Pooh or something.)”  He stands and points his middle finger at the table (not an obscene gesture, just the way he points).  I say, “Martin, the cupcakes belong to the young men and the young woman.  You may not have them unless they offer them to you.”  He replies, “But they HAVE to offer them to me, but they are NOT offering them to me.”  I scoop up the dinosaurs he had been playing with and put them back while I try to draw his attention away from the cupcakes.  It doesn’t work.  He’s getting louder again. I scoop him up.

“Put me down.  I can walk.  (This phrase from an Amelia Bedilia book.)”  I get him to the elevator.  He likes the elevator and it’s the next stop on the circuit, so when the doors open and I put him down he doesn’t run out.  We’ve made it to the next stage.

8.  The Plague of Flies:  7:40pm

The rest of the circuit passes hitchlessly.  He goes from station to station with me following close enough to intercede if necessary, but no intercession is necessary.  I am feeling a little relieved as we come back down the sidewalk past the former denizens of the White House.  Perhaps I can get him into bed in reasonably short order and this tumultuous evening can be over.

Oddly though, he doesn’t go through the garage door as he usually does.  Instead he stays on the sidewalk and continues past our house, to the corner and turns down the block.

Me:  Martin.  Where are you going?

Him: …

Good God.  How long is this evening going to drag on?  When I reach the corner, I see that he has cut through the yard and around to the back door.  I’m still annoyed, but glad he’s gone back into the house.  I follow him in, taking my time.

I head into the kitchen to get a drink and find the counter next to the sink flooded, water dripping onto the floor and two rivulets are making their way across the kitchen and under the refridgerator.

Me:  Martin!  What on earth?!  Why did you poor water on the counter?  What… what the… what…?

Him (coming back into the room from his sister’s bedroom, one of his arms is drenched from the shoulder down.):  Papa.  Don’t shout.  You should not shout.

Me (reaching for a dishtowel to begin my second major Martin cleanup of the evening):  Martin.  What is this?  Did you do this on purpose?  Or was it an accident?  Was it on purpose?  Yes-on purpose or no-on accident.   (I have no idea if I will get an answer to this question.  Mostly, I am saying it to teach Martin that this is something to wonder about in moments such as this.)

Him:  It was on purpose.

Me:  What?  Why?  Why did you pour the water?

Him:  I don’t know.

I am furious.  I feel worried that I’ll say the horrible things I am thinking if I open mouth, so I work quietly sopping up the water.

The dishtowel has gotten dirty from being used to clean under fridge.  I move to the sink and lift the handle on the faucet to rinse it off.  Water jets across the kitchen, catching me on the stomach and re-drenching the counter I have just mopped up.  The auxiliary faucet, a sort of sprayer unit contraption, is shooting water everywhere.  I snatch at it to make it stop and discover that its handle is stuck in the on position.

Of course, this solves the mystery of the water on the floor.  The mystery that I had not realized was mysterious.  Martin had, like me, innocently turned on the faucet only to be greeted by a violent outpouring of unexpected water.  To make matters worse for him, this was followed moments later by a violent outpouring of unexpected vituperations.

Faucet and Sprayer

Martin wanders back into his sister’s room.  I think about apologizing to him, but I can’t figure out a way to phrase it so he’ll understand what I mean.  I go to the basement to get some more towels and pass the steam cleaner.  I work on my apology speech some more.  I find that I want to say that I’m sorry, but I also want to explain to him that the reason I made the mistake is because he is impossible to talk to, impossible to reason with, impossible to live with, impossible to be alive with.  I find that I feel sure that offering a real apology won’t make him feel better and that offering the apology that I want to offer will make me feel much worse.

The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (…the middle three…)

May 2, 2011 by martinsdad

If you haven’t read… The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (The first three…) you should probably go back and do that.

4.  The Plague of Hail:  5:55pm

Him (tears):  Why don’t you want me to be at the seder?

Me (plaintively):  I do want you to be at the seder.  But you have to listen to adults at the seder.  Can you do that?

Him (yelling):  I can not do what adults want me to do at the seder.

Me (firmly):  Then we will have to go home.

repeat 4x

… and then we are home.

He walks into the living room and sits on the couch beneath our picture window.  The lights are off, but the evening sun through the windows reflects off the burnished wood floors and lights up his mordant little face.  I sit in an armchair opposite him.  My face feels hard.  His face looks grim.  I have won.  Now that we are home, I feel safe.

I apologize for being rough with him.  He cries and asks why I pushed him in the car and why I yelled at him and why my eyebrows were down.  I put my eyebrows up and tell him to look and see that my eyebrows are up.  I apologize for yelling at him.

Then we repeat the script about seder two more times.

5.  The Plague of Lice: 6:10pm

I need to eat, so I go into the kitchen to cook macaroni and cheese.  Martin stays in the living room for a bit reading a book.  He is calm now but he’s not talking to me much.  I try to be conciliatory whenever I can while steering him toward calmness.  I ask him a few questions about school, trying to keep the conversation away from seder.

We repeat the seder script again anyway but then he asks to watch the dvd reading of the book Crysanthemum.  I agree, relieved at the prospect of having a bit of time where I’m not confronted with the consequences of having misplayed the entire evening.

We go down into the basement.  He sits at the kid’s computer and queues up Crysanthemum.  I sit at the adult’s computer, fire up jango, espn.com and a web design blog.  I can see him in my peripheral vision.  He is instantly immersed in the world of the troubled little eponymous mouse and I find some helpful code examples for a problem I had been working on during the day.

Fifteen painless minutes later, Martin moves in the corner of my eye.  “Papa, there is water on my pants.”  “What?!?  Why?!?”   I am asking someone not physically present.

Steam cleanerI get out of my seat and walk toward him.  On the way, I pass the steam cleaner I had rented earlier in the day to clean previous pissings.

He is standing now with his knees pointed outward looking down at his drenched zipper.  At first I think he looks surprised, but then I recognize that it is curiosity, not alarm.  I help him out of his pants.  He offers to go up and take a shower.  I turn on the steam cleaner.

6.   Plague of Blood 7:00pm

I have finished the steam cleaning, gathered a load of laundry to accompany his pants in the washer and begun to fold a few things that were leftover from the last load when I hear the front door bang shut.  He’s out of the house.  I grab my iPod and run out after him guessing that he is heading out for one of his pre-scripted perambulations.

I’m in the mode of just trying to get through this evening, so I’m willing to follow him if he’s planning his typical trip up to the college.  His itinerary is complex but I’ve done it dozens and dozens of times:  he walks the block up to the college, through the archway in one building, across the quad, past the statue of Abraham Lincoln, up to the third floor of the library, back down and out the front door, across the street into the student center, past the bowling alley, through the snack shop, across the parking lot, into the stadium, down onto the track, into one of the steeplechase pits, out of the stadium, past the fitness center, back across the street, along the long path back to our block and home again.

Once this course has begun there is no chance he will stop it without a fight.  However, when I arrive on the sidewalk outside our house, I don’t see him on the sidewalk he would take to get to the college.  I break into a trot.  How could he be out of sight already?

He is two doors up on our neighbor’s porch.  The neighbor is trying to talk him out of coming into their house.  Their little boy has gone to bed and so, no Martin, you may not come in to play with his trains.  He pushes past her and dashes up the stairs.  I push past her too, run up the steps, catch him on the landing, throw him over my shoulder and make an excruciatingly funny joke about home invasions.

Gossip

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  • Margie on Drugs are The Answer (pt 1: Just Say Yes)
  • Drugs are The Answer (pt 1: Just Say Yes) | Minor Celebrity on At least they can’t kick him out
  • Martin Lubell on The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (… at long last the last two.)
  • Margie Vlasits "alias mom" on The Ten Plagues of the Martin Vlasits Seder (… at long last the last two.)

The Last Five (in reverse)

  • What is that guy thinking?
  • Birthday Cake
  • New Post
  • Drugs are The Answer (pt 1: Just Say Yes)
  • Local Politics (September 1995)

Friends of Celebrities

  • Rainmom More stories about Martin. Told by his mom.

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Sasha Vlasits

Martin's little sister and Martinsdad's daughter. She is also Jen Graber's daughter. At the time of this writting she is a cheerful and loquacious little girl who loves and attempts to emulate her older brother.

Birthyear: 2008

Jen Graber

Martin's mom and Martinsdad's wife. She's also Sasha's mom. She used to blog about her experiences with Martin at rainmom.blogspot.com.

Birthyear: 1973

Stacy Vlasits

Martinsdad.

Birthyear: 2008

Antonia "Toni" Underwood

Martin's cousin. Daughter of his eldest aunt. Toni is older than Martin by seven months. She's precocious and assertive.

Birthyear: 2003

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