We had a difficult couple of days this week.  On Thursday, my wife got a call from Anthony's bus driver saying he was having a meltdown on the bus and they did not want to try to let him off without one of us going out to meet him--they usually let him off the bus and wait for him to go into our house, after which we acknowledge his arrival by stepping out of the door to wave to the bus.  So my wife and daughter went out to meet him.  Upon being released from his seat, Anthony first slammed his head into the window and broke it.  He then stepped off the bus and promptly hit his head into my wife's and threw his backpack at her.  Fortunately, our daughter was able to get him away from my wife to prevent further injury to her.  She is now 15 years old and in a much better position to assist with Anthony than she was three years ago (she also enjoys pointing out that she is now a couple of inches taller than her mother!).

I had arrived home just before Anthony did, so I was inside when he came in to go to the bathroom.  He entered the bathroom and promptly bent down to hit the ceramic bathtub skirt (which was already fragmented from previous attempts), shattering several more pieces of it.  He then forcefully shoved the toilet seat up back against the toilet tank--I thought he might be able to break that as well--and glared at me as if to say, "What are you going to do about it, Dad?"

We saw that Anthony was wearing different underwear from that with which he had started the day, and found that his daily school note said he had wet himself shortly before it was time to go home.  We surmised that his rage was due to needing to have a bowel movement, and he did indeed do so once he was on the toilet.

Frankly, the above was not enough on its own to spur to me to write, but there was more to come.  The next day, my wife told me she needed to go pick Anthony up from school because he wasn't doing well again, so I needed to hurry away from work for us to all go together in our bigger vehicle to our younger son's scheduled futsal game.

At the arena, we had just been pleasantly surprised to see our son score the first goal for his team--he is much more known for his defense than his offense--when our daughter pointed out that Anthony had wet himself again.  I hustled him out of the arena to the bathroom and waited for my wife to find a nearby store with some replacement clothes.  As an aside, because Anthony simply doesn't wet himself outside anymore, we have not carried emergency replacement clothes with us for years, but we may change that now.

While I waited in the bathroom with Anthony, our daughter texted me that our younger son scored the second goal for his team as well, and we learned later a third attempt missed only by bouncing off the goalpost.  But neither my wife nor I got to see that, because we had to deal with Anthony. We were glad our daughter, who rarely goes with us, was indeed there so that at least one of us was able to see the whole game.  I write what was happening at the game not to highlight our other son, but to illustrate the effect Anthony had on the situation: We were there to enjoy watching one of our children's activities.  Because of Anthony, we missed more than half of what we were there for, and in this case we were especially disappointed because we missed some noteworthy action.

When we came home Anthony went into the bathroom again as he is accustomed to doing, and started taking off his clothes as he does a lot recently.  He looked at me because he knows I probably don't want him to do that, and I indeed told him to put his clothes back on.  That turned out to be a huge mistake; Anthony was upset from that point on.  I don't remember the order of events after that, but he overturned the table in his bedroom onto his bed, hit the bedroom door multiple times to pull away the hinges that I had just fixed yet again, broke the hard plastic container holding all his puzzle pieces, ripped off some drywall from a hole he had previously created, and broke one of the corner legs off our kitchen table.  Thankfully, the table manages to stand on three legs reasonably well. . . .

I realized after these two days the effect on the mood and health of others in the family as well--or at least mine; perhaps I shouldn't speak for others because we're all different.  But it's difficult to always have things broken around the house, and have them broken more quickly than I can possibly get around to fixing them. On top of that, never knowing when he is going to go off, and having to be prepared to deal with him physically, is tiring both physically and emotionally.  I'm hoping that we get a period of relative calm again for a while so we can go back to some semblance of normalcy in our lives.