He is autistic. He can’t loosen his grip on the super hero
loop. Everything. All of it comes scrolling back through his
maze of super hero connections and literal definitions. To hear the loop kick in is to almost hear an
old record skip in that same spot play after play.
Super heroes. His adopted
filter. It is almost as if he is
attempting to conjure them to help keep the world at bay. Autism and puberty, swirling together as
one. I can only assume this must be an
intense experience. The bad drug trip
that won’t let you come down anytime soon.
He is defined as high functioning autism. Content at school that is very literal and
black and white comes quite easy to him.
Impressive memory ability. But,
“reading between the lines” presents all kinds of problems. Literature comes with many assumed points of
reference he is simply not wired to have.
When thinking about it this way, the super hero motif makes even more
sense. The good guys and the bad guys
are easily and clearly defined. Out
here? Outside the Fortress of Solitude,
nothing is very clear. The sea of gray
laps up onto the shores of his assigned fortress quite often.
I should mention that years ago, he would have just been considered
odd. Quirky. A bull’s eye for bullies. But his diagnosis affords him some breathing
room here. Generally, kids tend to not
look to humiliate the autistic. There is
some camaraderie. It is almost as if the
diagnosis serves as a PSA reminding kids not to bully. Or, at the very least, to follow a few basic
boundaries when they do.
Most of the time, he is very easy going.
He occasionally strays from his loop, but never too far. He’s the kid in tag that never lingers too
far from home base. But lately, he is
having a hard go of it. His placid face
has been distorted. Deep distress has
enveloped his brow. A meeting has been
called with him in order to try and sort through the troubled look in his
eyes. Mom comes in as well. He has had some incidents at home that we
need to know about.
I always dread these meetings.
These are the meetings designed to limit hope. These are stage four sorts of
situations. We are here to manage pain
and lower expectations.
All parents. All decent, hard
working parents love their children. It
was their children that taught them the power and infinite vulnerability of
unconditional love. And all parents, no
matter how poor or how educated or how well adjusted ---- all of them hold on
to hope for their children. Parents are
the keepers of their hope. They hold
their hope for safe keeping, until a time when the child can hold onto his or
her own hope, latch it onto a few dreams of their own. From the first time a parent checks and
counts the correct number of fingers and toes on that first day, they’ve been
holding onto their hopes. Guardians,
guarding their child’s right to dream with almost as much fervor as they have
guarded the kid’s physical presence.
When it is time to begin managing expectations, when it is time to begin
hoping for the best, yet preparing for much less, sometimes that guardianship
to a lot of broken, contorted dreams can be very difficult to relinquish.
We move through formalities, the reasons for the meeting. We handle some small talk. Everybody is looking for the easiest way to
begin the business at hand. We start
with the student. As suspected, we
aren’t getting any answers. Shrugs and
grunts, mostly.
“I don’t know,” is a popular response for quite a while. Mom finds a moment to jump in.
“Tell them about the roof,” she says.
In her voice you can hear the restrained pleading.
“Tell us about the roof,” someone echoes. We circle around an answer for a good ten or
fifteen minutes.
“I was going to jump,” he finally says, breaking our conversational
loop.
“Why were you going to jump?”
Someone asks. He gets asked this
same question by three different people.
Each person tries a different phrasing.
Each voice sounds a bit more nuanced than the one before. Right before the question gets asked a fourth
time, he leaps up out of his chair and stands straight, with stiff
posture. His fists are clenched, almost
shaking with frustration.
“Because I am different!” He
shouts. “I am different from
everybody! I am different, but I don’t
know how to be the same, so I can never be the same. Forever!
It will never be better! Forever,
it will not be better.” No one says
anything for a while, mainly because there is nothing to say. He’s right.
My mother used to say that she wished that she understood a lot more or
a lot less. She said it was painful
sometimes to know just enough to appreciate how much you didn’t know. Nowhere had it been truer than in that moment
with that little boy. We really just
sort of watch him cry for a while.
Finally, someone asks, “Why
didn’t you jump?” He immediately looks
up. His face has changed. The question has snapped him back into his
groove.
“I knew that I wouldn’t die. I
would only break a few bones. Typically,
super heroes jump off low rooftops like mine, but it’s only to gain momentum
for a much bigger jump.”
And we are back on line. We are
dwelling back among the superheroes that champion a clearly defined world
order. But, this is far from over. Like all good villains, puberty and its self-loathing
death-grip will return with a newly hatched plan of attack. But, for now, the tide has pulled back and
our hero has rediscovered his serenity deep within his Fortress of Solitude.
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