Liminal Week Antics: Autie-Proofing

Last updated on January 3, 2025

As often happens for people who have produced offspring and then conflicted in some way with their co-breeder, the kids now spend alternate holidays between our house and the ex’s. This year, the blessed week of childlessness for me came after Xmas, during the most liminal time of year.

For those who might not know, liminal is a real word (no matter what the spell checker says) that means “on the threshold of, or barely perceptible.” This is extended in the current paradigm as an ironic emergence in fascination with liminal spaces, liminal entities, and other in-between spaces. There whole communities devoted to it, even.

The last week of the year between Xmas and New Year’s is the most liminal time on the calendar. It stretches into an infinity of surfing on couches, munching on snacks, playing video games, and otherwise vegetating for months – and then realizing that it’s only Tuesday.

And it’s not like leisure is the exclusive thing that makes the liminal week so hard to experience in real time. I’ve been busy as hell, and I’m still stuck in a cycle of “I have all the time in the world to get these projects done” and “holy fucking shit, it’s Thursday already?!?”

There are some things that I am simply unable to do while Daniel is home. That’s just part of the challenge of having a profoundly disabled kid with intellectual impairment and communication difficulties. As lots of parents with autie kids experience, kicking walls and doors is a favorite pastime: it provides a very specific type of tactile, impact, and auditory feedback for the kid, but it also inevitably leads to things like keeping hole-patching kits on subscription and having to pull the actual two sides of the wall back together outside his door. Daniel is seventeen now, and while we haven’t made a lot of progress in toilet training, he’s still very much a strapping young lad who also doesn’t have any concept of physical limitations.

So, on my list this week to do while the boys were out:

• Design and build an anti-banging door system.
• Deep clean the carpet (this is a regular thing)
• Re-repair the extra platform I had to build under the veil bed (that’s a whole other story).
• Scrub down the walls (also a regular thing, but hard to do with he’s home)
• Build a set of shelves where the Trash Can’t formerly was (where we used to keep the recycling) to get my large kitchen appliances off of the tiny-ass counters – bonus for putting the bottom shelf on rails for easy access.
• Build the counter extension in the kitchen with the shelves for extra small appliance and preserved food storage.

No biggie, I just have to completely clean out, purge, and rearrange the entire garage full of so freakin’ much stuff… but most of it isn’t even stuff that I want to get rid of. We have camping gear, costuming materials, woodworking stuff, art supplies, yarn… I have a lot of productive hobbies.

And even all that wouldn’t be that big of a deal, except that 1) both my partners had to work this week except for the 1st so I’m doing this 90% on my own, and 2) apparently I am no spring chicken.

I’m more like a late-summer-to-early-autumn chicken, which means that if I’m not wearing the exact correct shoes, the middle of my back is going to seize up like a homophobe at a furry convention for days. (I also do not appear to own the “exact correct shoes”. The search continues.)

Okay, cool, it’s alright, we’re prepared, we’ve got this. We know it’s a problem, so we’ll just pace ourselves, take frequent breaks, and… then promptly forget, once again, that time is linear, that bodies exist, and that if you stop listening to them for a little while, they will scream like holy hell when you check in with them again.

Stupid meat suits…

Anyway, here’s the door design:

I’ve got a couple of extra hinges since I know it’s going to be ridiculously heavy (by comparison), but this isn’t the craziest thing we’ve had to do to keep our Hombrecito safe (from himself). His door has a Bluetooth latch with no key on the inside so that he can’t go out roaming the house, rearranging the jars from the refrigerator on the counters or trying to juggle knives. (It has a mobile keypad and also an app.) There’s a swing latch at the top of the front door to keep him from wandering the streets and breaking into cars. (Yeah, that happened.) We have cameras in his room (he has attendants and therapists to help with him, so cameras keep everyone safe) and at the front and backs doors so that if anything does happen, we can figure things out quickly.

We replaced all the windows in the house after he broke the one in his room with his head twice, and made sure to get the tempered glass in his room in case he breaks it again (though far less likely now). We installed heavy industrial steel pipes screwed directly into the studs for his curtain rod, and we got rid of his wall-mounted television in favor of an overhead projector. He broke the first tv and was working on tearing up the second when we came up with that clever idea. That did require spackling a huge part of the wall and then painting it with a nice clean-able white coat as a projecting surface, but totally worth it. He would have just torn an actual screen down.

And that’s beyond the “onesies” that he wears all the time, by themselves or under his clothes, which are actually full-body turtleneck dance leotards that zip up the back and have the arms and legs trimmed to half. This keeps him from “digging” and running around stark raving naked all the time – cute habit for a two-year-old, not so great for a grown-ass boy on the far end of puberty. The neighbors get twitchy.

His epilepsy justified the orders for getting him a veil bed, and we also have an activity chair for him that I still need to Houdini-proof (with locking latches so he can’t mouse out of the harness). He has a Dynavox for communicating, and speech therapy and physical therapy twice a week, and if it weren’t for his brother Joseph (Daniel’s all-time favorite human), I honestly don’t know what the heck we’d do, even with all that equipment.

And while I was typing all of this out, I realized that the type of disabilities that Daniel experiences are the ultimate liminal spaces.

He’s nearly a fully grown man with the mind of a toddler – except not entirely, because he’s also very clever and can conceive very weird solutions to complex problems, which leads to our need to constantly check, revise, and update our household security. He has a language all his own, but he also does not feel a deep need to communicate, so the process of finding common communication to express his needs at least is very slow.

For those who might be new and/or don’t already know, I want to put a great big asterisk here and point out that Daniel is not “just autistic”: he has a severe form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome that comes with significant intellectual impairment. The daily medications that he has to take to control the seizures probably also cause some cognitive issues themselves, but we have to opt for the course of care that keeps him alive and comfortable.

I am aggressively against infantilizing autism and I am aggressively in support of any management protocol that prioritizes agency, consent, and safety. Note that I made mention of why Daniel is kicking on the door – acknowledging his sensory-seeking needs – while also recognizing that we still need to be able to live in a house that’s in reasonable repair. Traditional boundary-setting doesn’t work with someone who intrinsically does not understand boundaries, so we have to stay one step ahead in more material ways.

As I sit and think about this concept of liminality, autism itself can feel like a series of liminal phases: our interoception is present but speaks to us from another room. Language decoding happens after a lag of time/space. We tend to go through so many more phases and spaces in our heads before we reach the same conclusions or comparable behaviors as allistic people, but in that expanded process, we are also experiencing so much more on an internal basis for the same function.

We are in-between creatures who carve our own niches of temporal spatial validity out of the maelstrom raging between chaos and order, between feral and civilized states. My Hombrecito got the unfortunate jackpot, sitting in the span of what we would normally expect to be transitional in so many areas, and yet, he’s still a remarkable human with a wicked sense of humor and a stubborn streak he definitely comes by honest.

And now, I’m pretty sure that the wood putty has cured all the way and can be sanded. We’ll check back in next week!

A big thanks to serenity_art from Pixabay for the fantastic header image.

Let me also add that while I have a lot of links on here to Amazon, they’re mostly provided as examples. I do not get any kickbacks or associate whatevers from that.