Good news: Beloved is keeping the day job. We're nominally financially stable for the foreseeable future.
Bad news: The help I'm getting for Chaos is due to run out just when we need it the most.
Good news: It was hellishly expensive and borderline unafordable, so we'll have slightly more money next year.
Bad news: Which will be too late for me to get enough shit together for experimental stuff to help Chaos with.
I feel like such a whiner about this. Chaos is a darling child and I love her. But as she gets older, people are going to assume things. And the wrong sorts of people might try to take advantage of it.
Chaos is a huggy kid. She loves to hug. She also loves to lean on people and flop down wherever she so chooses. She also loves to point her feet skywards. She thinks bare bums are funny.
She's also one year away from going to high school.
Anyone who has kids can see the peril inherent here.
I'm a few short months away from having zero help, and I have to work to train Chaos into behaving at least nominally like a 'normal' person [there's no such thing as 'normal', but Chaos... is definitely an outlier on the curve of expectations] I don't even know where to begin to look.
And because Autism is still society's shameful boogeyman, the things that might help are out of my budgetary limits. Financial help is for the people who need to be in a hospital or a hostel or some other kind of assisted living facility... and we're means tested out of even applying.
Stereotypes hurt. When your average nypical[neurotypical person] hears the word 'autistic', they usually think of a boy who is unresponsive to the world and may have aggressive tendencies. They don't think of a giggly girl who loves to jump and is super-affectionate. I've had people ask Chaos why "she's like that" to my face and then outright deny that girls can have autism.
And when stereotypes and administrivia meet.... You get a clusterfuck of red tape intermingling with a choral drone of, "We can't help you".
I'm worried now. And if you've read this far, you're probably worried with me. But it's going to be okay. I'm certain that it's going to be okay because we always manage to muddle through, somehow.
And, inevitably, the help we needed when we needed it becomes available to us about two months after we don't need it any more. So other folks like us don't have to suffer. Hooray.
I wouldn't mind a helping or three of "not suffering" for ourselves, is all. Just saying.