The holiday gauntlet

“I can’t do it, mama!” My PDA son cried desperately, “I need to get up, my body won’t let me sleep”.   This was three years ago, on Christmas eve, and Cooper was just starting to come out of a year of burnout. We had already woken up half a dozen times to help him back to bed.   The night had started out smoother than expected.   To our surprise, Cooper had wanted to go to bed at the same time as his younger brother at 7:00pm. He said that he wanted the night to pass quickly so that Santa would arrive. My husband and I gladly obliged, as we still had to wrap presents and stuff stockings. We finally climbed into bed at 11:00pm. It was just as we were falling asleep that Cooper came into our room fully clothed, wide awake, and slightly manic, to announce that he was ready to open presents.   We explained that it was still the beginning of the night and my husband guided him back to his bed, helped him into another pull-up and tucked him in. 20 minutes later he walked into our room again to insist that it was time to start the day.   To parents of neurotypical children, this might seem like the beginning of a sweet anecdote, a young child overcome with Christmas excitement, but I knew we were on the slippery slope towards a full-blown panic attack.   That this was nothing like when I was a child, as I lay in bed full of wonder, straining to hear reindeer footprints on the roof as my eyelids drooped. I knew that we had seen this pattern with my son before, when a stuffy nose or new surroundings converted the demand of sleep into a perceived threat, leaving him panicked, rocking in bed and screaming that it was “too much,” that he would never sleep again.   And in this moment, as an adult, my body felt the tension mount viscerally. It remembered the psychic imprint of his infancy when he would wake every twenty minutes all night, screaming, back arched, with no way to soothe him.  My husband gently guided Cooper back in bed four more times before we heard him shouting and seemingly in agony.    During this time period, I was deep in my “I need to read every single thing ever written by a neurodivergent human online” phase and I remembered a blog post written by a 19-year-old Autistic man about managing anxiety during the holidays. He had explained that the demand of waiting to open presents can simply be too much for an Autistic child. He had suggested staggering present opening over the course of a week or more, to reduce sensory overload and anxiety.   So I went downstairs, grabbed a present, popcorn, and a small bowl of homemade whipped cream, covering it in red and green sprinkles. As he opened his present, I sensed him start to calm. He ate a few bites of the whipped cream, he nibbled on popcorn, snuggled his stuffed doggie, and rotated his six pacifiers from his hands to his mouth, according to their temperature.  (He voluntarily and autonomously decided to stop using his pacifier a little before he turned 8).    We sat with him until 2:30am, when he had finally agreed to stay in his room until morning. At 6:00am, Christmas morning, he bounded back into our room, proud of his success, ready to start the day. And although I was exhausted and had no idea whether he had fallen back asleep that night, I was proud of him too.   As you all know, the excitement and demands of the holidays are upon us, even if we don’t impose them.  Even if on the surface excitement can feel positive, for our PDA children and teens holidays can be experienced as an internal loss of autonomy or demand that sets off the threat response.   As nervous system stress accumulates in their system, it gets harder to access basic needs: sleep, hygiene, eating, toileting, and even safety.