Single mum.
I have a young adult son, autistic, at uni. And.a 13 year old.
I basically have to spend 2-5 hours a day trying to get him to wake up, we do alarms, alexa reminders, me standing there, shouting, the lot! He can not wake up and get up. He’s missing lectures, not doing his share of house stuff, hasn’t been outside more than a dozen times in 14 months.
He forgets to eat/make food.
He loses track of time and doesn’t go to bed until 2am, and quite often 5am, he’s just started not going to bed at all.
when he’s on campus it’s really difficult as I have to constantly be phoning him and making his phone do the lost phone alarm as he puts it on silent. I often have to ask security to go and check on him.
I am exhausted. He doesn’t understand how banging around at all hours is impacting my sleep and my health (I am disabled), and tonight, I tried telling him I wasn’t feeling well so was going to bed but he was engrossed in gaming, I managed to finally fall asleep and he started banging his desk and singing. Which startled me awake. I tried talking through the Alexa but he’d got his headphones on so loud he couldn’t hear it. I can’t just go downstairs to get him to shut up. I ended up having a massive panic attack/breakdown as it’s been an awful week and I’m soooo tired, I turned the router off and that got his attention but by this point I could hardly catch my breath. I rang a friend who talked me through it.
turns out my 13 year old daughter heard it all and was crying cos I scared her, I’ve settled her and explained what happened and that I’m ok now. But she agrees we can’t carry on like this.
ive asked adult social services what help we could get and they don’t think they can do anything. Partly because he is at uni some of the year and at home the rest (ie 2 local authorities) and because he has no learning difficulties or physical disabilities they say he doesn’t need help.
(He can’t make phone calls, fill in forms, make appointments etc).
uni do what they can but it’s not their job to get him to wake up. They’ve said once he’s back on campus if he’s yelling at his computer at all hours he will be kicked out.
he wants to learn, he wants to be doing uni, but without my support 24/7 he won’t be able to succeed. And I can’t offer that level of support any more.
I’ve tried talking to him and most of the time he’s not in the right mood to listen so what I say gets ignored he doesn’t seem to think about how he affects me, or his sister. Yet I am convinced he has the ability to, because he hasn’t always been this bad.
I have no idea what to do. I beg you please do not tell me to let him fail, let him figure it out for himself, because he won’t figure it out. He would literally only eat chocolate raisins and yogurts forever if i didn’t keep encouraging him to get proper food (or make it for him), he would literally never go to a lecture as he would sleep all day, he would then be at home permanently.
