Well our son's difficulties have now unfortunately tipped my (schizophrenic) wife over; she missed a day of her caregiving work the day before yesterday and then has left our home without any notification to anyone.
To put this into context, she has done this two or three times previously over the past three years, although the previous times she took our son with her. (The last time she pretended to me and our son that she was taking him to school, but then drove four hours away to her mother, saying she was starting a new life there).
Mainly I am obviously very concerned about my wife here. She is seriously ill and needs help. This time (after contacting her relatives in case she goes to them) I filed a missing persons report with the police. They said I had to come in as soon as possible and file the report personally, so at 11pm I was cycling through the rain and wind (with only a mickey mouse torch attached to the bike) as that was the only viable means of doing this asap (as my wife has taken the car), and got stopped by a policeman! In the circumstances he was reasonable but traveling back and forth and filing the report took a couple of hours. I might think twice about filing it next time!)
As this is an autism forum rather than a schizophrenia forum, I'm mainly considering this here from the perspective of our son. He is obviously upset that his mother has taken off again, but at least he has the stability of home and the routines of school and home. His mother usually deals with him during the week, so I am having to go into work later in the mornings to make sure he does his morning routine and then I will also need to come in earlier from work to supervise his work. I think he usually has it easy after school until about 7pm when he starts on work so that may be easier to work in with.
Our son was good this morning with his routine. It is possible that his mother's illness is in fact the 800 lb gorilla in the room. I need to make it clear that my wife does care a lot for our son and has done a lot for him. In a lot of ways she is a good caring mother. However her coping capacity is limited and she has not seemed to be able to get our son into a routine etc. She has had some mistaken idea that I favour our intellectually able NT daughter (I think why she decided to take our son to her mother to live the last time she went walkabout like this, earlier this year; which however was hugely disruptive to him - being taken away without any notice to him or anyone). I do hope my wife does get the help she needs and then returns home, but in the meanwhile it may be helpful that I am having direct input into what he does.
05 Oct 2011, 3:49 pm
