100% truthful events to narrate that reality with autism is stranger than any fictional account conjured by a sick brain.

• What’s that on the fluzzy white bathmat in the boys’ bathroom? Waking at 5:30 am, I hurried past, with the coffee pot in my sights. Was it a mouse? A stuffed-inside sock?
  No, just a giant poop-turd, waiting for me on the floor. Good morning Mom.
• At 5:45 am, with coffee barely dripping one-eighth of the pot-full, my men awake. No quiet for Mom today. Keeping my #1 objective in sight, I deflect Will’s garage-forays to attempt to open beer. I listen to Jeff’s furtive up and down the stairs-running to make sure it’s him and not Will. I measure flour and milk into the bread machine since there’s none left and I just baked on Sunday. By 7 am I still hadn’t achieved the morning’s goal: brushing my teeth.
• Will threw up all over the powder room at 7:15 am. I guess three 16-ounce tumblers of ice water, a pear and an apple was a bit much. Fortunately the reinforcements fortunately trundled down the stairs immediately after said event, plopping into a recliner, bleary eyed. I guess it is I who is destined for vomit-wiping.
• Meanwhile there’s a rustling sound as I hear Will foraging in the fridge, probably with grapes. I bellow from the powder room floor to the reinforcements asking what the *@%!&%* he’s doing sitting there and allowing Will to eat and drink more.
• By 8 am a CEO-client emails and I realize I have to accelerate showers and rising routine by an hour to have myself ready for a video Zoom session with him in at 9 am. Stressed by needing a client-presentable look, preferably without vomit in my hair, and teeth brushed, I take heart that Zooms don’t show whether you’d flossed.
• Whew! Hair wet but intact, I lock myself in my office from any intruders, survive the call -with minty-fresh teeth no less. I quickly revise a document fast and get the boys aligned for their 10 am Morning Meeting. The first loaf I had baked in between throw-up cleanup browns nicely while the boys name the days of the week and like Houdini Will manages to bolt at least four times from a six-inch gap in front of his chair designed to keep him there.
• At 10:40 am I breathe relief. My superb respite helper takes the boys for a walk and entertainment for a few hours – freeing me to furiously revise documents, bake loaf #2, update spreadsheets, sneak open a pack of my favorite New York Style Sesame Flats to nibble on a few and fly through Zoom calls #3, 4 and 5 until 1:45 pm arrives, and the helper departs ahead of Zoom Call #6 with the boys Exercise Group.
• By 3 pm Will tries his best at a poorly visualized but great idea of a outdoors knot-tying workshop during Zoom #6. With 20 min to spare before my next Zoom, I furiously iterate with clients before Jeff’s 4 pm art therapy class at Zoom #7.
• At last! at 4:45 I give the boys protein bars and pretzels for a quick snack, and hand them off to the hubby while I finish up work, and our lovely daughter makes a spectacular albeit complex fried rice with peanut sauce.
• Uh-oh. At 6:15 Will tasted a fist-ful of peanut butter all over his shirt. I help him change and send him upstairs to get a shirt out of his drawer.
• 15 minutes later, the hubby emerges to find Will has thrown every the contents of three full bureau drawers into the dirty clothes bin.
• Finally, at 6:50 pm, we eat a lovely meal ahead of my 8th Zoom of the day, a slide show at 7 pm from a fellow hiker’s trip up Mt. Whitney two years ago. I stretch out under my favorite fuzzy leopard-skin blanket as Jeff sits singing in his recliner nearby, and Will does laps through the dining room and hallway watching us. I fall asleep before a few slides before it ends, to the sound of hubby calling Will’s name, with Will nowhere to be found.
• We retrieve Will and he has a few small chocolates from me, ahead of a small bowl of creamy hand-packed ice cream that Jenn bought on Sunday. After which he immediately rushes into the bread drawer, plants a fist into my stunningly crowned white sandwich loaf, eating a quarter of the fresh loaf with one giant mouthful. After the ice cream.
• Screaming as if he’d inflicted pain, I was that bad, mad Mom you’re never supposed to be. I made him spit out the bread. I sent him to his room, while I picked bread-hunks off the floor.
• Carrying my work computer up to my office ahead of helping Will brush and floss, I saw the empty bread flats box, near a heap of spent sesame seeds on the bed in my guest bedroom-office. He’d consumed the remaining 12 flats – AFTER the bread steal.
• At 9:30 pm, I made Will vacuum my office, and endure one of “those” motherly chats about how he was a great young man but he had some bad behavior, and maybe tomorrow we can have a better day – while Jeff jumped in and out of bed.

I thought about the day program exercise class staffers complaining about how they’d binge-watched everything new on Netflix and were bored. Or the friend who had time to sew pet clothes on the side. Or faceless people online who laugh about never wearing pants in their new work from home life.

This is us here – autism under quarantine. Wearing pants for sure. Surviving, better than many. Yet oh, man. There are days.