We planned a little time away for the whole family on the river this weekend at Kaety’s dad’s Alsea fishing house.
Less than 2 hours into the weekend our party train was a flaming wreck laying sideways in a ditch.
We struggle with Emmett. He’s a wonderful kid that spends a lot of time in some sort of hysterical crisis state. We have therapy, medication and management supports in place for him and most days we feel like we aren’t winning.
Some perceived injustice around a milk shake tipped Emmett over. He couldn’t recover himself and had to be dragged screaming out of the Waldport Big Wheel. Body activity is usually the key for getting him back to reality so he and I left Kaety and the rest of the kids to finish their meal and we walked.
6 blocks later I was still dragging a screaming child. 13 blocks…half a mile…on we marched – and on he screamed.
I nodded and waved to people on their porches, who smiled and waved back as I drug a rail thin Gollum-like character locked to my side screaming and writhing for his precious – aka a milkshake.
The walk was good for me as well. My seething rage was calming as I marched through Waldport and I began to wonder why no one was calling the police.
Just past the half mile mark I figured he’d wind down.
He didn’t.
We left Waldport proper and headed up the Alsea. The screaming child spooked up a couple of cranes – which were pretty. We screamed past two fishermen who nodded to me. Again, I was surprised that they didn’t reach for their cell phones to dial 911 as the screaming dialog next to me included, “You aren’t my real dad, I can’t walk any more, why won’t you give me any water, I’m going to say the F word and hurt you!”
We screamed past a creepy guy sitting in a black suburban. Emmett paused in his scream-a-thon Lon enough to ask if the guy in the black suburban was the Guatemalan Drug Lord that Grammy kept talking about. Once we got our drug lord myths cleared that he resumed his psychotic fit.
We had an additional momentarily promising pause in the epic Alsea fit when we found a flattened and dedicated nutria. Unfortunately the milk shake injustice was stronger than a compelling dead thing and he resumed his screaming march up river.
The plan was that Kaety would pick us up when she and the other kids had finished their meal at the Big Wheel. Emmett and I done about 3 miles of 911 worthy screaming when I started to formulate the idea that to be a successful kidnapper you just have to adopt a demeanor of long suffering. We made it all the way to Thompson’s nursery, still screaming and carrying on when I finally saw Kaety pass us and park in a turn-out ahead.
With the truck in his eyesight, but out of hailing distance, I bent down and negotiated his reentry into society.
We agreed that he’d enter the truck without whining, screaming or crying and that he’d make no mention of the inciting milkshake. He had calmed down, and with the respite of the truck so close, he agree to my terms. The consequences for breaking any part of the agreement would be more walking.
As I opened the door to the truck to get him in he screamed, “No fair! I wanted a drink of the milkshake!!”.
I pulled him back out of the truck And said to Kaety, “Find another pull out about a mile up the road”
The next day was going to be a full of things much more complicated than milkshakes. We decided we’d call Grammy and see if she wanted to spend the day with Emmett.
