“Is There Anything Else We Should Know?” is the title and refrain in B. E. Pinkham’s essay that tells the story of moving her fourteen-year old autistic son to a group home. It was also the final question on the forms needed to convince the state that this move was necessary for everyone’s safety. What proof did she have, she asked herself, in the “blessed absence of blessed absence of police reports and emergency room records”?

Stories, was her answers:

But after years as an empowered and optimistic parent with a
reputation for maintaining a sense of humor, I resisted incarceration
in this Opposite Land where all of our good stories were “bad” and
all of our bad stories were “good.”

From later in the essay:

Is there anything else we should know?

Yes. After years of singing Yes, I can! filling out those forms became
my debut as a diva of No, I can’t. Of course, I’d written about
my experiences with Stuart before then, but always post-crisis, in the
glow of a victory. The hard truths were there, but those stories all
ended on the upsweep with at least some optimism and a whiff of
earned redemption. Now I had to renounce my faith in my ability to
care for my child in order to get the services he needed—an experience
another group home mother compared to a Christian being
forced to deny Christ.

And I did it. I told on him; I gave evidence against my son.
The shame of that betrayal merged with the recognition
of the truth in those stories to keep my head pounding and my
stomach churning for five days.

Is there anything else we should know?

Yes. Of course I remember that day the previous summer on
the beach at the end of our street. My husband and I swimming with
our kids in Lake Michigan, and then warming ourselves on the sand.
It seemed just a little bit reckless to sit there together with Eve and
Stuart still out there, waist deep in the water. My husband, Arnell,
disagreed. Maybe he’s right, I thought, Stuart would never, even
inadvertently,do anything to endanger his little sister. He adores her.

But I stayed alert, watching Stuart’s every move, watching my
watchfulness, squinting through sunglasses as Arnell lay on his
towel. We’re like that: he’s optimistic about the present
moment—until something goes wrong—but pessimistic about our
future. I always assume we’ll all be okay in the lovely hazy future,
but what might happen right here, right now, freaks me out.

I watched them splash, playing. Stuart laughing. Eve dolphin-leaping
up and under. Both such strong swimmers. A plane razzed its
single engine at us, turning there just below Chicago’s northern border
to circle south again with its cell phone banner ad in tow. Somebody
kayaked past, beyond the buoys. Arnell wondered aloud if the
radio-controlled airplane we’d seen the previous week might return.
A jet ski howled away from the next beach south, zooming the kayak.

Then I saw Stuart’s broad back, trouser cleavage, and red bathing
suit as he dove under the water, but no Eve. The lifeguard on the
concrete jetty had only two others to watch but she saw a game—
nothing alarming. Eve’s arm surfaced then vanished. I slapped my
husband’s leg and stood for a better view. Her open mouth appeared,
her face sheeted in dark hair, but her brother’s hand on her neck
pulled her down.

“No! Stuart, stop!” The lifeguard looked at me, then him. They
were both under again. Eve is less than half Stuart’s size. He likes to
pretend we can all swim underwater like the seals, penguins, and
mermaids in his videos. He only wanted to watch her. He meant her
no harm. I started running. Arnell passed me. I was not afraid for
her life because we had plenty of time to save her—they were only
thirty feet from the beach—plenty of time to wonder if I’d been
stupid and callous.

Before Arnell’s swimsuit was wet, Eve popped up ten feet away
from her brother and kept going. I’d watched the beginning, the
middle, the end, felt no surprise. We had plenty of time.

Eve walked out of the water, head down, round shouldered.
She let me hug her with the towel. I told her she did the right thing,
and she was a strong girl to swim away like that, and I was sorry.
She nodded.

“He didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know, Mom.”

Everything I could say to her on the beach was
already obvious, just the way it’s always been for us.

“That was scary. You okay?”

She nodded. I thought of her dead guinea pig and everything
I’d said then, and how forgiving she’d been as she cried, explaining to
me that Stuart didn’t understand what he did. This is what happens
when her parents foolishly pretend to have a normal family.

(The essay continues in the book.)

Pinkham’s family, including Stuart, adjusted to the transition and, to this reader’s great relief, she writes near the end of the essay, “we’re telling good stories again”. From Pinkham:

Stuart just turned 17 on February eighth. He’s a mostly happy guy, but still has a few rough tantrums every couple of weeks. His biggest pleasures when he’s home on weekends (besides Jello, toy trains, train videos, Sonic the Hedgehog and Wallace and Gromit) is his music. He rolls my desk chair in front of the stereo and cranks up the N’Sync, and then “It’s Raining Men” and then “Holding Out for a Hero”. He’ll spin and dance for a half hour or more, sometimes at six in the morning. Of course, the music drives his sister Eve nuts, but my husband and I are thinking about hanging a disco ball in our living room.

His longterm future is foremost in my mind these days. What will happen when he turns 22 and is no longer eligible for school district funding? The rate that our state pays to the group home agency will be less by then too because there’s a wildly mistaken bureaucratic assumption that adults are less expensive to care for than children. Illinois’s funding level for adults with developmental disabilities is 51st in the nation. (We’re even behind the District of Columbia.) It’s nearly impossible for an agency here to provide the level of care that my son will require for a decent life. Nearly! The people at his current agency are passionately working to expand their adult residential and vocational programing. We’re working and hoping with them to find additional funding sources, but if they can’t do it, our family will be forced to leave the state and the city we’ve loved for 29 years.

During the 1980s, B. E. Pinkham was an artist and earned all the fine art degrees she would ever want. During the 1990s, she was a landlord and acquired all the buildings and tenants that she would ever want. By 2000, she was a mother and had all the children she would ever want. Since then, she’s been writing. She hasn’t yet written everything she wants. Her work has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine. She is seeking a publisher for her memoir, Let Me Look at You, in which autism plays a shockingly minor role.

Lesley Quinn’s essay “100 Percent” perfectly and poignantly captures the moment every parent of a child on the spectrum has experienced–when a colleague or someone else from outside the sphere of our private lives asks the question: ”So. How’s the family?” They ask “innocently enough,” to “pass the time,” to “be polite.” Yet, there are times when that question creates a “quickening tightness around your lungs—that gentle, uncomfortable squeeze—and you think, Here we go.”

At first, you may have done what Quinn does: “You smile. You nod your head, perhaps a little too vigorously. All is well in my world, is what you hope to convey. But what you think is Please can we not do the parenting check-in thing?” Then you “launch into an interrogation about his family, his offspring, everything in the world you can think to ask.”  Invariably, there is a pause. From the essay:

Today, your colleague asks, “How’s your daughter?”

You feel a wave of weariness. But you nod quickly. You smile brightly. You say your daughter’s name. You say she’s eighteen. You glance above the double doors to see where the elevator is now, how many more floors must you wait.

“Eighteen, already? Wow.” He will probably ask next where she goes to school. He does.

You push the elevator’s Up button again and make yourself answer matter-of-factly, cheerfully, without hesitation, “A small highschool for kids with neurocognitive disorders.”

Then you step back.

You wait.

Often—maybe 60 percent of the time—the response to this is, “Oh.” Because neurocognitive sounds so messy and not fixable, and it always seems to thwart the natural momentum and rhythm of congenial discourse. For people to inquire further, something special is required, something like a straight—yet supple—spine. The remaining 40 percent, those with straight, supple spines, might ask neurocognitive means. Is that some kind of learning disability, like dyslexia?

Your colleague today surprises you; perhaps, after all, he is a superior supple-spine person. At this point you elaborate (briefly, very briefly), that your daughter’s school is for kids with one of several brain disorders on the autism spectrum. But there is that word autism, and it sounds even scarier than neurocognitive, and often after you use it, you can move directly to weekend plans and the weather.

“Ah,” your colleague is nodding heartily now. He, too, checks the status of the elevator. He tries to decide if that Up button needs further pressing. “So,” he asks finally, “any plans for the weekend?”

But a small percentage—maybe 10 percent—won’t be content to stop there. These are the people who will ask how your daughter came to have this disorder. These are the people into whose faces you will look, and if you detect a certain quiet calm in their eyes, you will consider suspending your conversational acrobatics and saying, again without diving into detail, that your daughter had a rough start. You may say (very lightly, very casually and conversationally) that she arrived twelve weeks early, one of those micro-preemies who weighed not quite two pounds.

“But she’s okay now?” the optimists will want to know. “Except for the learning disability?” How they long to hear one of those triumph-over-all-odds, happy-ending stories! Here you face another turning point. You will bob your head around in what is mostly a yes, with a tiny suggestion of not exactly, because by now you are unwilling to minimize, unwilling to construct that simplified, satisfying conclusion. You could, and you don’t know why, but now you won’t. You just won’t do it. Instead, you reward their quiet eyes with that little head-bobbing triangle of truth. Not exactly.

You have no need to elaborate. If you can wrap it up comfortably now, and usually you can, you will say something wry and inclusive, something to chase away the small cloud of misfortune, like, “Parenting…always full of surprises.”

If yet more is required, which is rare, you will say to the remaining 2 percent, those few with supple spines and quiet eyes and something more—that lovely combination of gravitas and grace resulting from suffering—that your daughter has health issues still, but she is also an incredibly brave and wonderful kid. You smile reassuringly. You thank them for asking. By then, surely, your elevator will have arrived.

(The essay continues in the print version of the book.)

I received this update from Quinn about her daughter, Molly:

Molly (left), looking magnificent

On February 14th, twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthday, my daughter Molly opened her apartment door to find a valentine on her doorstep.

Actually she’d been alerted to its presence via a text message from her shy and handsome new friend, K.—whose apartment door is about 100 feet from hers—while she was eating a microwaved frozen meat-paste burrito and a Coke for breakfast. Perhaps K. was concerned she might not find the pink envelope he’d left for her, but find it she did and it precipitated a flood of phone calls home. What did this mean? Was this a friend thing or a love thing? What does one do in a situation like this?

“What about walking down to Walgreen’s to get a valentine for him?” Dan asked.

From Walgreen’s she called to ask if she should get the one with bees on the front that said Bee Mine, or something more neutral, like the one with a cartoon Shakespeare writing illegible (and, therefore, neutral) messages on wee little candy hearts, and also, there were these little heart-shaped chocolates, should she get those, too?—and once back in her apartment, should she write an additional message inside the card, and if so, what should she say?

“Well,” I said, taking the call this time, “you could say something like: I’m happy that you joined the program and I’m looking forward to getting to know you better…”

“Wait, slow down. I’m happy that…what?”

Two days later she called sobbing because her longtime online celebrity role-playing (histrionic, bi-polar) friend—her closest friend in the world for 2+ years (whom she’s never actually met)—was livid about Molly’s exchange of valentines with K. and was now doing and saying mean and hurtful things on purpose.

For years Dan and I have been suggesting with increasing vehemence—but without success—that flesh-and-blood friends are so very much more satisfying than virtual ones. So when Molly announced through her tears, “I can’t do this anymore, Mom. I want to leave the game and change my phone number,” I jumped around the kitchen in silent ecstasy. And despite all the discharges of telephoned grief over the ensuing days and nights, Dan and I, and all the flesh-and-blood human friends we had notified about this important development, remained ecstatic.

Several days later, Molly called Dan all out of breath. “Dad. Dad. I have amazing news.”

“What?!” he said, putting her on speakerphone.

“Guess.”

“K. held your hand?”

“No, but close.”

“He kissed you?”

“Dad. No! Come on.”

“I don’t know, honey. Just tell me.”

“K. just asked me out!”

“Hi honey, it’s Mom,” I said, leaning closer to the speaker. “That’s fantastic! Is he there now?”

“No, he just texted me.”

“And you texted him back?”

“Yes! Isn’t this fantastic?”

“Do you maybe want to invite him to come over?”

So she did, and he did, and there was actual human cuddling on the couch and, a few days later, declarations of undying something, and all of this was cause for a weeklong series of celebratory gin and tonics for Dan and me.

Our gaiety continued for several days until we received a text that sandwiched this breezy message: “A creepy guy just offered me a ride while I was waiting at the bus stop,” between two gushing assertions that K. is the kindest, handsomest, most loving person she has ever known—that she will ever know—and she has never, never been happier.

“How nice,” I texted her back, fumbling for the 24-hour hotline to her program’s director whilst trying to decide if the police should be the first call I made.

After a period of intense investigation that evening, Dan located a five-foot-tall woman with a 10^th degree black belt in something who had already worked with a few people on the autism spectrum. In an hour he’ll make the 2-hour drive to Monterey so he and Molly can spend six hours learning how to kick the shit out of a heavily padded pervert-shaped person.

In the meantime, Molly appears to be avoiding our attempts to reach her. We learned from her therapist this week that she canceled a 9 AM session at the last minute because it was “too early” and she was “too tired” ($125 down the drain). From one of the coordinators in her program we heard that she wants to drop one of her classes at the community college because it’s “stressing her out.” In the past, this behavior would mean the beginning of a downward spiral of the sort that often results in her inability to leave her bedroom. Now, however, it might simply mean that she’s assigned a higher priority to the pursuit of human contact on the couch with K.

In either case, Dan will soon arrive to handle whatever needs to be handled, and I have this day to enjoy a quiet home in which there no longer lives the lonely young woman who watched movies all day, and ate microwaved chicken nuggets and chocolate chemical cake, and pretended to be Anna Popplewell from the Narnia movies in an online game with someone who pretended to be James McAvoy—instead of learning to be a human who is truly attached to other humans.

For me, a pretty good day.

Lesley Quinn is an essayist and writing coach who specializes in assisting high school seniors create deeply felt and compelling college application essays. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She lives with her husband, a psychologist, and her daughter when she’s visiting, in Berkeley, California.

Ann Douglas is a phenomenon, a passionate advocate of families–kids of all ages and their parents. Her essay,  ”As Great as Trees” captures the period following her son’s dismissal from fifth grade just before he was diagnosed with Asperger’s.

Ian says goodbye to his classmates on a Wednesday afternoon,
three weeks into fifth grade. His classmates present him
with a piece of goodbye cake. Conveniently, his birthday has fallen
the day before, so they are able to save him a piece of the birthday
cake they ended up eating without him—the downside of being suspended
from school on your very own birthday. When the decision
to suspend him evolves into a request (nonnegotiable) that we withdraw
him, the birthday cake morphs into goodbye cake to go.

Everyone stands at the front of the classroom, while I snap a few
photos at Ian’s request. The teachers and the principal try to smile and
pretend to look relaxed, but they come across as awkward and uncomfortable
when I look at the photos later on. And as for the kids: they
are either glancing sideways at one another and snickering or standing
frozen like statues who have been asked to play themselves in some
mime version of an ordinary day at school. The boy Ian hit, resulting
in his suspension, is standing next to him, making like they’re best
buddies. Poor kid. He’s probably as confused as Ian is, if not more. I’ll
have to tag this batch of pictures “Theatre of the Absurd.”

Getting out of the building isn’t as easy as snapping the pictures.
By the time I come back for Ian’s third load of stuff—how can
anyone accumulate three loads of stuff in three weeks of school?—he
is crying. Hard. I hug him and guide him out of the school, doing
the shuffle-walk that is the only option when you’re holding on to
someone for dear life.

As we make our final exit, we pass a wall-sized bulletin board
gleaming with photos of shiny apples and the smiling faces of
every child in the school except my child. I guess he wasn’t the
right kind of apple.

Ann had concerns about her son when he was two but it took eight more years before he was diagnosed correctly. From later in the piece:

Eight years is a long time to wait to get the correct label for
your kid and even longer if you’re the little boy waiting for someone
to solve the puzzle that is your life. It means added days, weeks,
months, even years of being teased and tormented, mislabeled and
misunderstood; of having your reputation cemented in your neighborhood
and at school; of starting to believe that you’re bad or defective
or crazy—or all of the above—because you’ve heard people say
that about you often enough.

(The essay continues in the print version of Gravity.)

Writers witness our own experiences. It is through reading their words that we often find our own clarity and direction. It is also through writing that one finds our way through turbulent times as Ann describes in her update:

I wrote this essay — “As Great as Trees” — a few months after my then 10-year-old son Ian was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.

I was dealing with so many powerful emotions at the time; and writing the essay gave me the opportunity to start sorting through some of the confusing thoughts that were spiraling around in my head.

As I re-read it, I’m surprised the essay is as coherent as it is – although you will note, if you read it in its entirety, that I jump from scene to scene and my emotions shift just as quickly as I describe the series of events that changed everything for our family, suddenly and unexpectedly.

If I were to write this same essay today, I might be tempted to edit out some of the emotional lurches, for the sake of clarity. But that’s not how I experienced it when I was living it. I think it’s more authentic in its raw, real-time form.

Since this essay was written, I have found my parenting equilibrium again. I have connected with other parents who have kids on the spectrum. I no longer feel scared or uncertain when I think about what the future will hold for Ian or the rest of the family. How could I? He is thriving and we are living mostly happily ever after in the new normal.

Ann Douglas is the creator of the internationally bestselling The Mother of All® Books series and The Mother of All Solutions, the coauthor of The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby and Trying Again: A Guide to Pregnancy After Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss, and, along with her daughters, wrote the award-winning body image book for teens, Body Talk: The Straight Goods on Fitness, Nutrition, and Feeling Great about Yourself. She contributes to numerous pregnancy and parenting magazine in addition to her own columns in Yahoo! Canada, and Conceive Magazine.  Ann is the mother of four children. She lives with her family in Canada.

The essay, “No Pity,” by Maggie Kast tells the harrowing story of her 34-year-old son’s last days in the hospital. From the first words, I was gripped by the cascade of events told in Maggie’s spare, unflinching prose.

Day 1. For the last six months, my developmentally disabled
son, Stefan, has been trying to make himself throw up, sticking
his slender hand down his throat to the wrist, and he can’t tell us
why. He knows he shouldn’t. He will even tease us with a hand-to-mouth
feint, a crafty look in his eyes, but he can’t say what compels
him. Today we have an early appointment at the GI Clinic of a large,
teaching hospital, where he’s been under treatment for Crohn’s,
inflammatory bowel disease, for eight years. I’m apprehensive,
knowing he continues to lose weight.

“Hi, Pumpkin,” says a nurse. “How are you?”

“Hi,” says Stefan. “How you?” He steps forward to shake
her hand with a slightly uneven gait, one foot turned out more
than the other, then follows her into an examining room. Neatly
dressed in summer shorts and a T-shirt, he’s thirty-four years old
but less than five feet tall and beardless, his hair gelled into little
spikes. Suddenly he begins to shiver in a way I’ve never seen anyone
do before: deep, bone-shaking tremors that run through his
whole body, and I’m aghast. His gastroenterologist appears in the
doorway, takes one look and says, “ER—now.” We hustle Stefan,
frightened and screaming, into a wheelchair, grab the hands he’s
trying to put down his throat, and hurry down the hall. The doctor
explains as we go that chills called rigors (pronounced rye-gores)
are caused by an immune response in which the set point for body
temperature in the hypothalamus rises, and the body shivers in an
attempt to warm up.

“Can’t we go directly to Admissions?” I ask the doc, hoping to
avoid the busy, impersonal ER where no one knows or has time to
understand Stefan.

“It wouldn’t be fast enough,” he says, explaining that rigors are
a common symptom of septicemia, or blood poisoning, and require
immediate treatment. Blood tests soon confirm that diagnosis.

“How do you get septicemia?” I ask an ER nurse as she hurries
by our curtained cubicle.

“From infection in any part of the body,” she says. “Often from
hospitalization.” Vaguely I remember hearing about resistant organisms
living in hospitals, but I can’t stop to think that the help Stefan
needs might come bundled with lethal exposure. He’s trying hard
to put his hand down his throat, and it takes all my strength and
concentration to prevent him. We’re both scared, and sometimes I
think swallowing his hand has become a response to fear in addition
to whatever is going on in his stomach. Soon his heart races out of
control and an ER doctor comes in and starts massaging his carotid
artery, watching the wall, not looking at Stefan.

“I’m not trying to choke you,” he says, “I’m just trying to get
your heart rate down.” I don’t understand how this works, and Stefan
even less, but he lies fairly still, eyes searching for escape like the
eyes of a horse in a fire. His usual patter in the hospital—“Almost
finished? Go home soon?”—is oddly absent. The bottom falls out of
my stomach and my world as I realize that he’s sicker than he’s ever
been before.

From Maggie:

“No Pity,” my contribution to Gravity Pulls You In, deals with my son S.’s hospitalization and final illness, but in most ways this time was the polar opposite of his life. Sick, he was quiet, weak and depleted; well, he was enthusiastic, outgoing, and humorous. Despite limited speech, he loved to engage strangers in conversation and could easily persuade them to buy him a candy bar or a coke. His passions ranged from watching the clothes go round in a front-loading washer (at age six) to joining in rhythm jams with his brother’s rock band (as a teen-ager) to church, concerts and anything with music, the jazzier the better.

In the hospital, S. was isolated, connected to the fabric of his life only by me and the occasional music-loving nurse-tech. But most of his life he was enmeshed with others, first at home, where his closest brother taught him to walk by constructing a tricycle-wagon contraption that allowed S. to hang on, toddling behind while the older boy rode.  Always engaged in family ritual, S. learned at a young age to raise a glass for a toast and say, “Posit.” Though symbolic action was hardly his strong point, he watched when we acted out gifts in charades and tried to guess, enjoying our raucous applause when he got something right. Our other kids always looked out for him and included him in family life, from trick-or-treating to cooking to camping out. Stories about his early schooling, first communion and moral development can be found in my book, The Crack between the Worlds: a dancer’s memoir of loss, faith and family (Wipf and Stock, 2009).

S. loved to make his father’s favorite, Liptauer, a spread made with cream cheese, blue cheese, mustard and Worcestershire sauce, and he often asked for it after his father’s death. This love competed with his fondness for music, creating the conflict in “Joyful Noise,” the story anthologized in Love You to Pieces (Beacon Press, 2008). And he was uniquely skilled at finding remote items in our refrigerator, filled with leftovers and supplies of a six-person family. “Find me the mustard,” I’d say, and he would shift items carefully from side to side until he found the missing jar.

S. participated fully in his group home, El Valor, where he lived from age eighteen. At his funeral, his loving housemates mourned him by placing flowers on the coffin, shuffling or striding to the altar in an uneven line, erasing the isolation of his time in the hospital. And this tribute brought to mind the way he had burst into applause at my mother’s memorial the year before, reacting to a Dixie combo that played some of her favorite tunes. As we followed S.’s coffin out of the church where he’d loved and been loved, we clapped as well as wept, singing “This Little Light of Mine.” I could almost hear his excited yips of joy.

Maggie Kast is the author of The Crack between the Worlds: a dancer’s memoir of loss, faith and family (Wipf and Stock, 2009). Her fiction has appeared in The Sun, Rosebud, Nimrod, Paper Street and others and her essays in America, Image, Writer’s Chronicle and ACM/Another Chicago Magazine.  Her work has received two Pushcart nominations and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council. Excerpts from her book can be found at www.maggiekast.com; links to reviews at ritualandrhubarbpie.blogspot.com.

I vacillate between wanting to post poems in their entirety and wanting to post excerpts. I don’t want to dilute their full impact by not allowing you, the reader, to complete the whole journey, but I want to bring you closer to reading each poem in the context of the entire collection.

Yet, all the poetry in Gravity stands alone and Aileen Murphy’s poignant, “Proverbs 13:24″, is no exception. The view that we can snap our children out of their ‘bad behavior’, discipline them in such a way so they can ‘play well with others’ is, unfortunately, one of the most common misunderstandings about the spectrum.

Proverbs 13:24

He who spares the rod hates his son. . . .

She called to say we needed to talk
knocked on the front door with one fist
held her Bible in the other
Your three-year-old needs spanking
she smiled
he pushes too much
smaller children in his space
does not play well with others
I gaped, fascinated
having lived in the south for not quite a year

I held the door open with my body
waiting while she gathered her things
She and her husband spanked their children
she urged, finger still on a Bible verse
the book closed around it
as she hurried her purse strap over her shoulder

Upstairs, I spied from his doorway
as he lay, face on the floor
brio train cars rolling past his eyes
a tune coming from his chest

One year earlier a priest had said the same
nodding confidently, like I would accept his words
based on his profession, his position
as so many others do, as my mother had
when she spanked my child once
when we were out at a movie

I knew nothing
just to not add pain to his curious world
just that he was happy alone
in his sunlit, toy-strewn room
singing alphabet songs
without others pressing into
and popping the bubble of light
around him

From Aileen:

I have read the whole collection of Gravity Pulls You In, and I have never felt like so many people on the planet understand me, as I do now.  I feel like there are so many strengths and insights and ways of seeing that our children have given us, all of us.  The voices of mothers and fathers in here help me to breathe easier.  The stories of the children, young and older tell me that we are all going to be okay.  One good friend of our family who has a son about eight years older than our son, and who also has Asperger’s told us once that what it comes down to is that it is all just parenting.  We become the parents we need to become, just as any people do.

I wrote this poem probably eight or more years after the event itself, but everything was so solid in my mind about that insane visit by another parent from a play group we had been involved with, that it was not hard to remember details.  I did see this same woman a few years after she came to my house with her Bible, and she sort of apologized, although it took the form of blaming another parent in the group who had put her up to it.

The amazing thing is that when she called to ask if she could come over, I had had the worst week ever with my son.  While visiting another person’s house, he had seen a baby standing up in a crib and had pushed the baby backwards, which was the end for me.  That day, I took him out into the grass and told him to sit there while I got my things together, and not to move.  The baby was okay, but I drove home crying and telling myself that until I figured out what was wrong, I was not going to ever bring him back to another play group or any gathering where there were other children.  When the Bible mother called me, I told her “If this is about my son and his difficulties with other children, don’t worry.  We are not coming back.”  And she assured me “No, no, it isn’t that–it’s just fine–I just wanted to talk to you!”  So, stupidly, I invited her to come over, and the poem tells the rest.

My son these days is a high school senior who will be going to college next year.  He is very independent, and has been all throughout high school, in getting all his homework done, enjoying movies, keeping his room neat, and taking care of our cats, who he loves.  Our cats also love him.

Years ago, when he was young, maybe a little older than the time of the poem, my parents were coming to visit us, and while they were driving, my mother said something she had said before–that she hoped that her grandson would let her hug him.  She and my husband’s mother had both noticed that they could not really get warm, happy hugs from him, from the very start.  My father told her one of the wisest and most perceptive things we have ever heard about our son.  He said to my mother:  ”Your problem is that you come in the door and lunge for him.  You can’t do that with this child.  He is like a cat.  You don’t lunge for a cat.  You have to come in, take your coat off, sit down, have a drink, have some conversation, and then the cat comes to find you.  He might come close and then closer, and pretty soon, he will be in your lap.  You have to be patient.  Our grandson is like a cat.”  And that has turned out to be very true:  Quiet, independent, smart, thoughtful, and able to function just fine with minimal human interaction!

(If you have never seen this book, it is great: All Cats Have Asperger’s Syndrome by Kathy Hoopmann.  She also has a book called All Dogs Have ADHD.)

When my son was first diagnosed, I mostly cried in the car, whenever I was driving, usually taking him to school, driving to work, or shopping.  Not like out loud sobbing, just quietly, so I could still talk to him and hear what he was saying.  A song on one of the tapes we always had in the car was Kermit the Frog singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green” which would tear me to pieces. On the surface, you think it is sad to be green, to be different from everyone else–but as it turns out, he ends up being happy to be just what he is: “I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful. And I think it’s what I want to be.” And this is how we feel about our green boy.  He is fine, he is beautiful, and he is what he wants to be.

Thanks Kyra and Vicki for letting me be a part of this book.

Aileen Murphy is the author of a chapbook, There Will Be Cats (Finishing Line Press), and the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, where she has taught writing since 1994. She is also the Co-Director of the Southwest Virginia Writing Project. She lives with her husband, Paul, and her two children in Blacksburg, Virginia.