Difficult.

Confusing.

Painful.

Impossible?

Useless?

I haven’t been writing because I stopped teaching Robert. I realized that teaching him took away the time from his own learning through observation, through connecting images that surrounded him, through efforts to make sense of the life as it was given to him.

I hoped to give him the opportunity to figure out the things related to his and our family lives. And he did. But the ideas or rules that he discovered on his own were often not compatible with ours. Still, he rigidly stood by them protesting any attempt to lessen or modify them. Difficult and Confusing.

1.He gave himself a right to enter the bedroom of each family member without even knocking. At the same time if I went to my daughter bedroom to talk to her or to my husband’s office, Robert protested loudly. I was not allowed to.

2. He insisted on getting rid of items, he considered useless. Since in the last few years his father didn’t wear ties, he gave them all to charity. That was not a problem. However, when he he insisted on giving to charity all of his father polo shirts and vests, we felt angry but powerless.

3.When he noticed that large monitors in his sister’s office were not used, as she mostly worked with laptop, he calmly packed them in the boxes they had arrived, and put them in the garage.

4.Without my knowledge, he cleaned my desk of all the papers. However, he didn’t throw them away and he knew were they were, when I asked him, to retrieve them. They were in the folder on the shelf next to my desk. Not a bad solution.

As Robert continue to assert himself, I do feel slight discomfort of loosing control. At the same time I feel sort of pride and sort of relief.

I just didn’t know how to write about it.