mustard sandwich

Sometimes something strikes me as so brilliant and hilarious that I find myself giggling under my breath for days.  Typically, it's Rogan that precipitates these episodes.  That man, though he generally hasn't a clue what he's said that gets me laughing hysterically, never fails to find my funny bone.  Thank gawd too, laughter is mostly the only thing that gets me through.

I wanted to tell you about just such an occurrence. It happened 2 days ago.  I am still giggling my ass off over 48 hours later.

It needs a little back story.   When we first got our diagnosis, someone gave me a Jenny McCarthy book. I'm not going to get into the 'Jenny' debate here, but I will say, despite all the controversy surrounding her, that book did get us started on the biomedical path, so for that I'm grateful.

The introduction to that book was written by a Dr. I think, who spoke about his experience with his ASD child.  And of course, being the horrible cynic that I am, the one thing I took away from that blurb was the bit where he said, entirely seriously and honestly, something to the effect of, 'and then we introduced fish oil to his diet, and within days he went from being non-verbal to speaking'.  I may be engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, but it was along those lines.   The first thing I did when I read it was run to Rogan and read it back to him.  We laughed and cracked jokes as we tend to do with everything, not because we didn't believe it had happened for him or for others, but because sometimes, it's just hard to imagine something so simple creating such a HUGE difference.   And of course, we had already started getting the comments from people who had read an article or had heard from a cousin's brother's friend that 'insert thing' was THE answer for their ASD child.  Rogan and I refer to those 'things' as the 'silver bullet' and lots of families find theirs.  I think we are probably still so cynical and jaded, because we have yet to find ours (and man have we tried).

Now for the meat of this post. (I have a feeling I'm going to write this out and then realize that no one gets it or cares or even thinks it's funny. oh well, too bad.  I do.)

So, we're driving in the car and I remember that my friend had left me a voice message earlier in the day with an incredibly sweet story about a friend's ASD kiddo who is entirely non-verbal but spontaneously sang a song he heard on the radio.  I thought R would appreciate the story as much as I did.   So, I enthusiastically say to him, 'Oh I forgot to tell you, (friend) called and left me a message today telling me about her friend's son with autism'.  I think he could tell by my excitement and smile that it was a heart-warming story, and so, before I could even get the first word out, he looks at me and says...."yah I know, mustard sandwich, long story short, completely verbal.'    Holy shit, I laughed so hard, for so long.  And now you know, in case you don't really know us, all about our twisted sense of humour.

The moral of this story is two fold.  The first fold is that my husband is the funniest dude I know. The second fold is, it's ok to laugh at your reality, in fact I think it should be mandatory.