One of my children is a human lie detector who is incapable of lying himself, and he’s teaching his younger brother all his tricks.
Life on the spectrum often brings with it a complete lack of deceit. I won’t say that The Kid has never uttered a falsehood, but I will say that when he has, he has immediately followed it up with an admission of truth. And he demands that level of truth from others: when the kids ask what we’re having for dinner and I tell them “platefuls of broccoli,” he immediately tells me that’s not true; when I say I’ll be “just a second” he corrects me, shouting, “Don’t say that! It’s always MORE THAN A SECOND!” And since I’ve taught him and Little Brother sarcasm, one of their favourite phrases is “thank you” in a sickly sweet tone. TK likes to follow it up with, “That was sarcasm.”
LB is slightly more adept at maintaining a mask than TK, but it falls too. When I ask him if he snuck a chocolate egg from the silver pitcher on the counter, he’ll shake his head momentarily before a grin starts pulling at the corners of his mouth and his signature right-cheek dimple–the one that showed up in the 3D ultrasound–appears. But TK, his face–and the rest of him–is an open book. There simply is no falseness there.
If you want to know how you truly look today, ask him–but be prepared not to love the answer. If you ask him how his day was when it was not good, don’t expect a “fine.” This kind of honesty can be brutal, and it has led to some blow-out fights over toenail clipping that I’d just as soon forget because I’m still apologising for them. But I’m starting to see the beauty of it, the freedom in its wake.
When I first got to Sydney and had a short-lived relationship with a therapist here, she commented that I didn’t look depressed; I was wearing makeup and regular clothes. I wanted to scream at her that I’d rather not look like an elderly gentleman when I take my kids to school. I’ve also heard “but you make jokes all the time” in response to admissions of my struggles, and I want to reply that anxiety doesn’t mean I don’t have a bitchin’ sense of humour. But these things, these efforts, are forms of masks (the only kind that some Americans like to wear, apparently). They are ways we protect ourselves from revealing too much of ourselves, to opening ourselves to scrutiny and judgment.
One of my friends recently wrote (in a book I contributed to, NBD) about how many of us are living like crabs in stock pots:
“Your day-to-day life is one of the slyest ways to lose sight of what matters. You do not need a family crisis to increase the temperature of your stock pot; you can do that all on your own. All you need is a free weekend and a to-do list. It feels good to cross each item out, to take care of business. But the thrill of your own competence easily becomes addictive and, as an over functioning crustacean, you lose your feeling for the waters you were meant for. Life in the boiling pot becomes the only life you know.”
I’ve thought about this a lot lately, about how the masks we wear are similar to the pots we can get stuck in; how we were meant for more freedom, for people who can handle our truths and for waters that are open. How constricted we can be by our own fears of what others think; how we often construct our own narratives or or need to cling to fairy tales/monarchies to feel better about how things are. Just clambering around in those pots while the mighty, unpredictable ocean waits.
“Can you imagine ever going back?” some friends asked us over dinner last weekend, and while they were talking about America, I think of it in other terms too. Can I imagine going back to who I was before New York, before motherhood, before autism, before Sydney? No, I cannot. Thank God. There is brutality here, and beauty. There is sorrow, and bliss. There are riptides, and there are cradling waves. Out here is the ocean. It is sacred, and true.