Plans changing

 Earlier, I decided to be the bigger person and actually change my 5yo's poopy diaper instead of letting her resist, but I did ask my husband to get her clothes, since she hates being put back into her jammies. He threw down a pair of my next child's pants - I don't blame him, they have a matching pair and sometimes we put the 5yo in 8yo's size because they shrunk - but he said "she could wear them anyway, right?" He didn't know they were new pants though... so that made me kind of sad. Anyway it turns out she didn't want to wear the dress he brought down, and I thought she might have been pointing at her witch costume to wear, but she didn't want that (non-verbal, remember?)... I suspected she wanted her new pink dress, it's all she's wanted to wear since we bought it two weeks ago, but by then I was tired and upset so I just gave up and curled up on the couch to read. It felt like a trigger, something that drained me and made my brain stop working. But I hate that, so I've been thinking about it - what flips that switch to turn off my brain? I've been experiencing it for a long time, and thinking about it a long time - usually I just chalk it up to depression being a butthead, but today I thought back a little. 

Back up to before I decided to change my baby, just a little - I can't remember why, but I'd had to get up for something (probably baby related, she's persistent), so I decided I'd finally use the bathroom and then, wouldn't it be nice if I actually started the pizza dough I wanted to make for dinner early, instead of late? But as I headed for the bathroom, baby decided to come with me, and hoping to help her feel more comfortable around the toilet (and maybe use it some day??), I let her sit in there. Man she was stinky. So change of plans, first I would change her diaper. But she'd want to get dressed, so I texted husband asking him to get the clothes while I changed her. He was mid-video game so he didn't see it until I was pretty much resigned to going up to get them myself, but he got up right as I was gathering some dirty clothes to take upstairs with me and charged up to get the clothes. 

So then about an hour after all that, I finally started making the pizza dough, still thinking about how I went from having a relaxing if abnormal morning, to feeling like a lead-weighted poop, and I wonder if I can't trace it to that moment I made a little plan in my head, a hope of how things would go: potty, make pizza dough, ? dinner prep maybe? And the plans changed, and they changed again, and maybe... maybe I DO hate it when plans change?? How very autistic-coded of me, but I've masked for so long, I just thought it was the plans I hated. Schedules, boooo. But no, maybe it's because I make a plan and expect things to go a certain way, and they DON'T and before too long it's DEVASTATING. Nooooo I don't like it. But I will explore it, certainly I'm not the first autistic person who's had to learn to live through disappointment.

Ugh, like I said, I HATE it. I want to dissociate so bad. But noooo I also really want to eat pizza. SIGH. What a hard life. I'm reading this book that's funny and cute but also a little stupid (poor girl has to pretend to be ultra-rich wife and oh no, he's hot!) so sometimes I don't even want to read that. I want my Emily Henry back, that's the book I finished this morning, Great Big Beautiful Life. Very sweet story, I hardly cried at all but it was still deeply moving (all of her books so far have made me cry, a couple of them left me sobbing)