I am the patron saint of lost causes...

Here I am.

I will update my life since I haven't posted anything relevant for a long time. I have an apartment in Pittsburgh with Wendy. It is beautiful. I was looking for a job when I first got here and I ended up working at a summer school for kids that have autism and behavioral problems. It was crazy. I got bit, scratched, kicked, punched and called about as many horrible names a 10 year old can possibly conjure up. I would come home exhausted, sometimes I would cry, other days I would have fun stories to tell.

When I got the chance to get away from being beat up, I spent most of my time with a girl who was very far behind her peers developmentally. She is autistic, not very good with fine motor skills and almost completely non-verbal (the only word she knew how to say was bye bye). But I enjoyed my time with her so much. She would walk around the classroom picking up an object in one spot and carrying it over to somewhere completely different. At first it was annoying, but as she warmed up to me it became funny. Neither student nor teacher could ever find what they were looking for and the words "Oh, Jenna" would usually follow the end of their search.

She never liked to sit down, it was impossible to get her to do any school work, sometimes she would just burst out screaming and she made a mess every time she ate anything. But we enjoyed time at the beach filling buckets with sand, and when all the other kids were playing on the water slide we filled up buckets of water and dumped them out over and over again.

All of that sounds like fun, but to get her to transition from one thing to another took enormous effort and most of the time she ended up biting herself as her coping mechanism. When she wouldn't do what she needed to or her wandering/picking up things/yelling got too much to handle we would give her food to get her to do what we wanted. As if she were some sort of pet, filling her up with treats all day long. It made me feel horrible each time it happened.

On the last day of school we played with our buckets and water outside and eventually she ended up playing in the mud, just like a little kid should. When we made it inside she began to have seizures, one right after the other. We tried to get her to sit down, to clean her up, but she wouldn't sit any other time why now? She would get up and start wandering around and it would happen again, she would fall and hurt herself and I was scared to death. She would fight us if we tried to keep her sitting down, but she would fall every time she got up. It was the scariest thing I have ever been through. I feared for her life.

I cried that day when I came home. I had nightmares that she was falling over and over again and there was nothing I could do to help.

There were days I would look into her eyes and get a blank stare in return. My heart hurt for her, for her life, for her happiness. I wanted to help her, to do everything for her, to give her whatever would make her happy, to get her to be able to do everything that she should be doing by the time she is 10 years old. But I could do nothing. She still has so much life to learn, to live and I wanted to give that all to her.

So, someday, whenever I take all those test I have to take, fill out all those applications and send all those resumes I am going to help all the kids that are just like her. Help them in whatever way that I can. Whatever way will give them the life that they deserve to live.

One little girl has changed my life.