I don’t remember when or if I put it this way, but the other afternoon as the boys and I drove the twenty-something minutes across suburbs to The Kid’s therapy, he told me from the backseat: “The Lizard Centre is where I go to learn how to be a grownup.”
Well. Kind of? For all my effort to talk about everything, to make sure The Feelings Train is always stocked with snacks and ready for passengers, I’m learning that there are…interpretations. Their little minds whir all the time, creating realities that must be bolstered or deconstructed, like the other one TK announced into the darkness the other night as I lay beside him and Little Brother:
“Will’s not smart.”
“Excuse me? He most certainly is!”
“No, he’s not smart because he doesn’t have an apple brain.”
Cut to me laughing quietly and ruefully over my own overcompensation, or was it his misinterpretation, of my efforts to lay the foundation for TK’s confidence in light of his strengths and challenges. Which is to say…we got some work to do. Always.
I explained to him and LB, who lay unworried beside me and announced that he has a Goofy and HP brain, are both smart in different ways–and will both need help in different areas, too. “But I’m smart,” TK clarified when I finished talking. I sighed and smiled at the same time, my standard response these days to most everything. “Yes. You are very smart.”
TK has a new kid in his class who doesn’t speak a word of English. The other day when we took LB inside his classroom I noticed a sign on the wall: 50 Ways to Say Hello. I beckoned the boys over. “Hey look, James! They have Mandarin on here! You can tell your new friend ‘hello’ in his own language!”
He was vaguely interested, preferring to build a quick Lego tower instead. I’ve maybe been harping on the new kid too much lately, telling TK how important it is to be kind–“Remember when we were new? How it could be scary at first? You’re being a good friend, right? You’re being kind?”–while he responds, “YES, Mom! You already said that! I AM KIND!”
He is a language I am constantly learning. So is LB. There are a million answers to each of their questions–and that doesn’t even count the ones that don’t get asked. Meanwhile I fumble for answers, overanalyse my responses, and wonder if I’m doing any of it right.
The Husband and I went last weekend to see “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” and from the opening cacophony of sounds that sent me jumping and TH laughing at me, I was moved. Discomfited. Reassured. Validated. Unsettled. No two kids on the spectrum are the same–hell, no two kids are the same–and there is no manual (I’ve spoken to Management about this and the fact remains annoyingly unchanged). But as I watched the story unfold before us–the parents’ love and frustration, the boy’s anxiety and outsider-y-ness–I felt less alone. There are fifty ways to say it–autism, spectrum, special need, apple brain–but there is only one James. One Will. And they are ours. And, somehow, they are happy. More than that, they are loved. Imperfectly, and well. This is all we get to know right now–Management also remains frustratingly tight-lipped on all the questions I have about their futures.
“That means I can do anything, right?” the boy asks at the end of the show, and there is no response from the adults around him. My own apple-brained boy has started to both cling and fly, jumping onto me for the walk to school, laughing as he tells me he’s making me stronger, then running when we arrive to climb the rocks–he never used to do that. “I’m good at climbing,” he says, later claiming to climb a tree while placing one foot on the lowest branch, and I applaud because he never used to do that either. Can he do anything?
No. Can anyone?
While the boys are at school, I decide to take a rare walk around our area–usually I’m attempting to run it, or just walking the distance between our house and his school with them in tow. On this outing I scale the hills that define our streets. It feels less like a walk than a vigorous hike, which was not what I signed up for, but it’s starting to feel natural. Like it’s the same thing anyway.