Sunday 21 October 2012

A turbulent week



This week was supposed to be a calm and quiet one. I didn’t have that much planned and my parents were on a holiday to France. That means that I was alone with my brother and sister, meaning that I could play my music without headphones when they were out and I could have friends come over and things like that! Sounds fun right? I probably had a blast right?? Nope.

If you have read my last two blogposts (http://thedailydaysofanasperger.blogspot.nl/2012/10/the-flu.html and http://thedailydaysofanasperger.blogspot.nl/2012/10/agreements.html ) you would know that I was still recovering from the flu and that my Monday didn’t start out that well. This trend continued.

About an hour after I posted “Agreements”, I went to the kitchen and scrambled some eggs to put on a sandwich for breakfast. While scrambling the eggs, I saw some children from the school across the street picking on another child. They weren’t just calling names (which they were also doing by the way), but they were pushing and pulling him and things like that. It was awful. They were probably in the 5th or 6th grade (for Dutch people: Group 7 or 8) and I’m a short girl and they were with about 7 or 8 of them, so I was contemplating whether or not to step in. There were no teachers or parents around at the time. Then they started choking him with his keycord and I drew my line. Enough was enough, I wasn’t about to just stand there and watch this happen.

I left my eggs (they weren’t in the pan yet, don’t worry) and stepped outside, yelling for them to stop. They didn’t hear me in the noise they were making themselves, so I stepped very close to the girl leading the whole thing and told her to quit it again. She quickly hid the keycord behind her back and said “Oh, it’s just a game ma’am.” Yea right! If there’s a game where a group of children pushes and pulls one kid while calling him fatty and then start choking him, then it’s a terrible game. No, I wasn’t buying it. I told her I’m not an idiot and that she had to give him his keycord back. She went on with her lies, asking me “What keycord?” I said: “You know what keycord, give it back!” Then the kid who got picked on felt supported and said: “Yea, give it back.” She finally took out the keycord from behind her back and responded with “Fine.” She gave the keycord back and I went back inside, furious about the whole thing.

After I got inside, I went back to scrambling my eggs in the kitchen. Suddenly one of the kids outside grabbed something from the ground and got prepared to throw it through the kitchen window, towards me. The rest of the group quickly grabbed him and yelled at me “He’s got a rock! Get away!” I got scared and quickly got to the couch on the other side of the house. All my memories from the bullying from my past got back at me and I had a panic attack and started crying. I had a quick look outside, saw the whole group walking towards the school, then I quickly went upstairs to my sister who was still in bed (but awake).

Later in the day I was a bit more calmed down and called the school to tell them what was going on. The woman on the phone almost wanted to tell the class I called in and to tell them what they did was bad. I told her that’s not a smart thing to do, as I already almost had a rock through my window and didn’t know what they would do if the woman would point out that I called in. She said she then didn’t know what to do and that she would speak with the school board the next day (the school board wasn’t there at that moment).

The next day I got called by the school and they said there were more complaints by neighbours about lack of respect by the school kids. So the school decided to make a school project about how to treat the neighbours. They asked the children to think of activities to help the bonding with the neighbours.

This doesn’t really help the kid that got bullied in my opinion, but I do think it’s great that they got the children involved in thinking about activities to help bond with the neighbourhood. At least, when the children respect the neighbourhood more, it’s easier to help keep an eye out with these things and we can feel a bit safer.

The rest of the week went fairly calmly, but I wasn’t feeling completely recovered from my flu yet. Because of this I kept on coughing the whole time, I shivered at even the slightest cold and had so little energy, even doing something like going to the supermarket drained most of my energy. Of course I had no energy for having fun with friends or something like that. At one moment I seemed to be getting my energy back and could even walk around in the city a bit. Then, on the night from Thursday to Friday, my temperature shot straight up again. The whole of Friday I felt terrible again. I did go to the Weekly Autism Meeting, but I got in a little later and didn’t do much. I was mostly there for the company and some supervising.

Yesterday (which is still today to me, as I haven’t gone to bed yet. But I’ll stick to the clock time now, as most people will read this during the day) I felt a little better. I’m still coughing a lot and I haven’t got all my energy back, but it’s still better. But my parents would be coming back from France around 16:00 (4 pm) and because my brother was busy with school, I was sick a lot and my sister can’t do everything on her own, the house wasn’t in its best shape. So I used all the energy that I could spare, and so did my sister (my brother was out for the day), to clean up most of the things that we couldn’t do last week. We did do housework, it’s not THAT bad, but there were still a few things that we were behind on.

After that was done, my energy for the day was gone. The rest of the day I simply watched some television and surfed the internet.
So that was the week that was supposed to be filled with tons of fun. Let’s hope next week will be better. I’ll have more planned, so I’ll be busier, but on Thursday I got a day to an amusement park with my sister planned and on Friday evening we’ll have a big Halloween party at the Weekly Autism Meeting. I’m looking forward to those two things!

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