Lynn Hudoba: Keep Calm and Carry On

The “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster that was issued by the British government during the early days of World War II has recently re-emerged as a popular image, presumably as words to live by in our current climate of global unrest and economic instability.

It has spawned dozens of variations, including the fitting companion piece “Now Panic and Freak Out,” as well as wacky knockoffs like “Stay Flaky and Eat Cake”, “Drink Lots and Pass Out”, and “Insult Family and Leave in a Huff”. Coincidentally, those last three taken together describe every get-together of my family for the last 40 years.

I probably could have used “Keep Calm and Carry On” tattooed to the inside of my eyelids this summer, as I tried to cope with my special needs daughter’s summer break and my own health issues, along with the same scorching heat, financial anxieties, and stock market whiplash that everyone else endured.

It would have behooved me to remember it, for instance, while I was convincing myself that an army of goateed fat guys in SUVs had been deployed to tailgate me everywhere I went this summer. Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, I zoomed up their butt after they’d passed me just to prove to them that the ground they’d gained with their antics was exactly the length of my car.

I suppose I could have also tried to stay calm when a middle-aged loser in a Batman t-shirt accosted my daughter as she was dancing in front of the stage at a Fishel Park concert and told her to “get lost”." He got right up in her face, so close that she could no doubt smell the stench of his rotting dreams, decomposing soul, and inflatable girlfriend’s plastic bits. I wanted to disembowel him with my bare hands and mount his entrails on a stake for all of the neighborhood dogs to have at. 

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, staying calm. I guess that would have been one way to go. Had I mustered up the Zen to do so, I could have maybe kept the crowd on my side. They were just as appalled as I was until I started screaming epithets at him in front of their kids. Yes, keeping calm and carrying on sounds all well and good on poster, but in the moment it can be, shall we say, elusive. 

The irony is that I spend half my life trying to get my autistic child to calm down and carry on. We write her “social stories,” which walk her through new or anxiety-inducing situations such as going to the dentist, starting a new school, or breaking a particular routine, and just about every one of them ends with “I should stay calm when … ”

These stories work wonders for her. Something about seeing them spelled out in writing and reading them to herself helps her to process and really internalize the message. Sometimes they work a little too well and she walks around scripting them ad nauseum, e.g.: “If Mom says no, I should stay calm. I should not yell, scream or cry. I can say ‘Bummer!’ or ‘Darn it!’ I can handle it when Mom says no.”

I could naturally come to the conclusion that I need a few social stories of my own, but I can’t help but think it’s the rest of the world that needs them:

“I should stay calm when I am driving behind Lynn Hudoba. She is driving at the same speed as the 10 cars in front of her, and it will not get me to my destination any faster if I pass her. In fact, it will just piss her off and ruin her day, which she does not need right now. See that autism awareness sticker on her bumper? That should give her special dispensation from having to deal with tools like me.”

“I should stay calm when a little girl is doing cartwheels in my sight line as I am trying to enjoy the song stylings of the Rhythm Rockets at a free concert in the park. It’s not like I paid $100 for the ticket or there is anything very interesting to look at on stage. And chances are that the girl did not come to the concert alone, and one of her parents is probably within 50 feet of her and will disembowel me if I so much as look at her sideways.”

Two stories down, eighty million to the power of infinity to go. Bummer.