The Family Room

Just tell me to shut up anytime

...but here's the thing: just watching the reading unfold makes watching his tantrums somewhat bearable, the times when he cries and cannot calm himself until a full hour has passed.  "Get away from there," he yelled earlier, and I wondered if someone had said that to him at school. What is he remembering?  What is he working out?

My friend Christa knows a thing or two about hyperlexia, which is basically a precocious ability to read, often without the comprehension that's supposed to come with. I don't think that's what's going on with Isaac, but his ability to decode far outstrips his understanding of what he's reading.  And yet.

"Isaac, how do you think Gerald is feeling right now?" I asked as he read his first Gerald and Piggy book, My Friend Is Sad.

"He's looking at the ground because he is upset," he answered.  "Because he wants to be with his friend."

Yes, I think he's got it.  

*

As the sentences elongate, become more complex, so do the bursts of temper and anguish. He's a gentle boy, but with his growing understanding I see a range of emotion that is sometimes more than he can bear. "Don't laugh!" he yelled earlier, seemingly at no one. Was someone's laughter too loud? Did someone hurt his feelings at school?  I have no idea, and the question--about whether his feelings were hurt--brings the expected wave of guilt, along with a tiny swell of hope.

Were his feelings hurt?  Developmentally, that would be, well, wonderful. It would signal a growing awareness of the rules of the social world and his place in it. It would mean a new level of emotional maturity. And yet the idea that Isaac's emotional radar is developing to that point breaks my heart; I can't bear the thought of my boy in pain, especially that kind of pain.

*

Not long after my mother died, I found myself coming home from every social occasion in knots. God, why did I say that? I'd wonder. And I'd obsessively try to remember everything I'd said that night in case something was just too colossally stupid. More often than not, I'd remember something that would torment me for days, sending a hot wave of blood to my face each time I remembered it.

I'd always been somewhat shy, but this was different. It was obsessive, suffocating and all-consuming. What I didn't realize at the time was that it was also grief; a way for some of my pain about my mother to escape--through any crack it could find.  Over time it passed, and while I'm as capable of anyone of saying colossally stupid things, I no longer rake myself over the coals for it.

I mention this because I wonder if Isaac also feels that kind of physical social anxiety--not quite in the way I did, but in some similar way.  And I just hope that if he does, we can help him find a way to work it out so that he approaches his emerging social experiences with openness and joy.

My greatest hope: that the world cooperates.

Autism is poetry of the mind

In Ralph Savarese's wonderful book Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, he discusses the incredible changes in his son DJ once he learned to read. Literacy gave DJ, who does not speak, a way to express himself, and his voice turned out to be quite extraordinary. It's a rare view into the way a non-speaking person with autism thinks.

DJ uses words fluidly, metaphorically. Sometimes his prose is clear and declarative, sometimes it's reminiscent of Romantic or Surrealist poetry. His father, who is a professor of English, understood this innately, and encouraged DJ to tap into his desire to connect.

Here's an early note from DJ to his dad:

Note to Dad

yes.dearest sad dad you heard fresh self and freshly responded deserting your fears and just freed sad dear saved me. yes. yes. yes. yes.

--DJ Savarese

Note the phrase "dearest sad dad." Who says people with autism don't have empathy? Notice how DJ so deeply understands his father's fear and sadness, and the persistence and care it took to find an open channel through which to communicate. Note the music of the phrase "just freed sad dear saved me"; the internal rhyme of "freed" and "dear." Say it aloud.

And the final declaration: yes. yes. yes. yes.

Can we learn more about poetry by studying autism? About autism by studying poetry?

***
The photo above is Isaac's first real independently-written note to us. If you've been following our saga, you may remember that we've been using social stories to help Isaac cope with his fear of unexpected noise, which has become focused (for reasons that are easy to understand) on fire drills.

If you can't quite make it out, the note says:

"Isaac is upset. I don't like fire drills. They are too loud."

He wrote it last week after a fire drill at school. While the prose doesn't rise to the sophistication of DJ's (he's only five, after all), it makes me wonder what will happen as Isaac becomes more confident about capturing his thoughts and feelings on paper.

It's been a gift for me. I hope it becomes a gift for him as well.