French Sailors and Beyond: My Adventures with Autism

French Sailors and Beyond: My Adventures with Autism

I have a son who has autism.  He’s quirky and funny and sweet but maddening.   He may be lower functioning but he knows what he wants, knows what he thinks he deserves and isn’t afraid to state his case for the above.  And it makes me crazy!

Like many other people who have autism, he tends to be tactile defensive, so collars and labels need to be thought of when I buy his clothing.  He wears acrylic sweaters because wool or wool blends bother his skin.  He has favorite colors—red and maroon and orange and shades of gold—so any clothes item I buy for him, other than blue jeans, has to be one of those colors or in some combination or he won’t wear them.    Sometimes he surprises me about what he will wear, but not often.

When he was about 15, I went school clothes shopping for him at the Gap.  Like his younger brothers, I bought jeans and shirts and other things that would see him through most of the school year.  I bought a very nice, red and navy striped tee-shirt.  He liked the shirt and wore it throughout high school.  It didn’t seem to be his favorite, but it was one which he seemed to wear without too much fuss.  That shirt has been my undoing ever since.

It’s been in the last five years or so he has obsessed about that darn striped shirt! He would wear it one day and then the next, drag it out of the dirty clothes basket. If I told him to put on something clean instead, he would yell…..and I just gave up trying to argue with him after a few days like that. It would become, uuummm, odor-ific, and I would steal the shirt at night to wash it.  Occasionally, I would forget and then tried to trick him into wearing something else—no go with my kid! He would hunt the shirt down, sticking his hand down the laundry chute.  He wouldn’t stop looking for it until I threw it into the washer, started the machine and put detergent in in front of him.  Then he relaxed, knowing the Blessed Shirt would be clean in a bit.

I tried to find another one just like it and asked my God-Sister, who used to manage a Gap store, to help find me another one. She found out what she could and told me they didn’t make them anymore.  I looked online and found a women’s X-large tee-shirt with the exact same stripes at Landsend but could only buy one because it was being discontinued.  I gave orders to Grandmas and Aunts—who all enjoy shopping at Estate and Garage Sales—to pick up anything vaguely like the Blessed Shirt.  They have, but the red and navy stripes aren’t the right width or the shirt with the right sized stripes has a collar.  My kid IS particular but they still have their orders from me to keep trying—one of these days they will find one!

My husband got into the act and looked on line to see if he could find a similar shirt. He is the one who found exactly what type of shirt we are looking for—a French Sailor's shirt.  Sometimes, it’s called a Brittany Fisherman’s Shirt—Ancres loin--whatever! He actually ordered two shirts, with the correct colors, from a store from Brittany— that’s in France, right along the English Chanel. We waited with baited breath for six weeks for the shirts to make their way to Chicago, Illinois and were disappointed when they got here because the stripes were too wide for Monsieur, zut alors!

The Blessed Shirt and its poor relation from Landsend LITERALLY fell apart with wear and washing and there is nothing I can do about it.  He is wearing other things, including his real French Sailor Shirts from France, but I am still looking—he does get his stubbornness honestly.