From the Wolf Den: Boredom or Something Else?

Parents have an amazing ability to decipher meaning behind words, based on behaviors and personalities and everything in between.

Wolf has an amazing ability to know who has the above skill, and who doesn't. Darn him.

He has long since discovered that lying to his mother is the most futile exercise in manipulation ever attempted by a teenager. Not only can I tell in an instant when he is telling less than the truth, I can also call him on it and receive utter astonishment for my abilities from my son, thus tempering his eventual meltdown at being 'found out'. And isn't that something to be proud of.

I have also found out that for some reason nobody else has this skill, not even Yukon, who prides himself on truth-seeking, so when Wolf was reading his quarterly grade reports to us over the phone during yesterday's Power Hour, my lie-radar jumped.

English, it seems, is not a fav subject (ironic, since the boy spends most of his free time writing movie scripts in true Asperger fashion; this appears to be his obsession these days). When asked about the low grade, the response was typical. "It's boring."

Ah, boring. The catch-all, meaningless term to which Wolf assigns everything not connected with what interests him. Another tricky aspect of AS; kids with the disorder tune out anything that is not associated with their area of interest, making school, church, work, etc. more than challenging.

What was the grade? That's the untruth part. He first tried to tell us that it was a C, then when prompted added a minus to that, then truth won out when I kept saying "and, and, and" until we discovered he really hadn't been going to class at all, pretending to have one or the other issues of health or behavior so he wouldn't have to go. I needed to do my own intervention with new Therapist B. (old Therapist B got a promotion to director of Wolf's unit, good/bad for us) to remind them of Wolf's propensity for figuring out ways to not do things.

Smart enough to figure out a way to avoid that which is 'boring', but not possessing the foresight to predict an eventual bad outcome. There it is, folks. The awful reality of social disability. And it's right there, staring at us.

Sidenote: Wolf will be watched a bit closer to ensure he attends class, although no one can make him pay attention. He will have to discover, on his own, that graduation from high school could, and probably will, be much later than he thinks. But he has to own that fact before he can change it. And right now, he's not willing to.