No Solution

Love Bug is now five years old. He celebrated his birthday yesterday with cherry cupcakes and a meltdown at the movie theater because I didn’t send money for him to get popcorn. The daycare has been working with me, they continue to allow him to attend. Wednesday they moved him to the upstairs school age room. He had an amazing day and did well on Thursday too. I am holding my breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop, to be honest. I don’t want to look the gift horse in the mouth, but I am fairly certain this is a honeymoon with the novelty of being in a different room. At some point, I’m sure the other behaviors will emerge. And I am trying to find an alternative solution. I have spent the entire week calling every place I can think or that was suggested to me, in hopes of finding a special needs daycare. It seems to be an impossible task. I have four sheets of papers full of notes from all of the places I have called. I posted on the local autism support Facebook page asking for suggestions. I posted the same plea on my own page and on a local foster-adopt page. I chased down all of the suggestions but still nothing has panned out. I called the local behavioral crisis management line and we will be getting a case manager, but that takes time. I called the state post-permanency hotline and we will get case advocacy and respite from them. We are also getting an advocate from the Disability Network of the state. I called our mental health insurance case manager for help and spoke with the supervisor of the wrap around providers. Still, nothing has resulted in a place for Love Bug to go when I am at work. I am seriously considering opening a special needs daycare because this is simply insane. Our local IU (intermediate unit) basically told me there is nothing for kids in the summertime, I need to wait for him to start school. That is a really long time from now, when we are dealing with an eviction notice. We need help and we need help now. I called an acute partial hospitalization provider (waiting on a call back). That might be our only option. The supervisor from the wrap around service provider really wants me to medicate my child. I really don’t want to do that until we have a better understanding of his diagnosis. Our 7/22 appointment with the neuropsychologist cannot come soon enough. A friend of a friend put me in touch with a woman whose now-grown son is autistic. We spent nearly two hours on the phone talking about the things she had to do 15 years ago to help her son. It was encouraging to hear her son, who is now 20, is in college and doing well. But, it was discouraging that she thought this was an impossible task for a single parent. She stated she could not imagine “doing this” alone. She quit her job to stay home and help her son. She mentioned another mother she knows who left a corporate job to become a teacher so she could be there for her autistic son. I am the sole provider for our family. If I do not work, we will quickly be in a dire situation. I cannot be such an anomaly as a single parent of an autistic child needing full-time daycare, can I? I might be. But, what I am also is tenacious. I will not give up until I find a solution that helps Love Bug and works for us as a family.