The essay, “Flood Plain” by Bruce Mills is taken from his memoir, An Archaeology of Yearning, a book that “explores memory, story, and desire in a home transformed by autism.”  In this entry, Bruce moves us in and out of his own boyhood memories as he moves through his routines with his four-year old son Jacob:

At the end of the week, I again arrive shortly after mid-day to pick up Jacob from Croyden. I sit upon the bench along a wall in the front lobby and lean back against the red brick. Children are arriving for the afternoon. I hear the whir of the elevator of the first bus. From its side emerges a young girl in a wheelchair. Her head tilts against the sparkling plastic head cushion. Her smile unsettles me. She is glancing somewhere where I am not, but I sit up, eager to greet her at the door. I am learning to look into her eyes.

Outside a few flakes of snow begin to suggest themselves, lingering like the descending ash of the burnings of late fall. As I try to make out the snow from the gray sky, another memory urges itself forward. I am twelve and on my Stingray bicycle pedaling through an empty street to a 6:30 a.m. basketball practice. It is mid December. A night snow has covered the street with a blanket of white; except for the shadows cast by the intervals of streetlights and the predictable angles of houses and sidewalks, the landscape has few boundaries. For a moment, I close my eyes and ride blind, until, feeling the thrill of pedaling just beyond some imaginary limit, I stop to look over my shoulder. Behind me, the wandering indentations of my tires, like the frozen paths of small streams, fill with snow, the more distant banks diminished to thin creases of shadow. The street stretches forth like a flood plain fertile with the meanderings of past river channels. It is a world that I had not seen, and so I let myself linger in the space between past and present, this borderless landscape of beauty and loss.

More buses and cars move up to the curb. A few parents enter with their sons or daughters. One child catches my eye; he seems older than the others. After the boy leaves to go down the stairs to his classroom, his mother takes a seat on the other end of my bench. When our eyes meet, I introduce myself and am about to tell her about Jacob just as she is called into the office to talk with the school psychologist. She hesitates a moment, and I sense that she does not want to do the unkindness of not hearing about my son. But I glance toward the office to divert her eyes and assure her. “Perhaps another time,” I say.

After she goes, I can feel the vibrations of my son’s unuttered name on my tongue and the way my lungs had filled to hold the beginnings of an unformed tale. For a moment, I see myself through her eyes—an eager father whose son now plays in a place previously unimagined and who pauses on the threshold between a world just opening up and another seemingly canceled out. I glimpse with sadness the distinct outlines of that person that Jacob has begun to erase.

(The essay continues in the book.)

It’s true that parenthood changes us and even more true when we are parenting children on the spectrum because we are brought into a world that is not typical, not what we imagined or expected. There are difficulties and frustrations, yes, but as Bruce writes beautifully in this glimpse of life with Jacob almost fourteen years after the time of Flood Plain, “we know this immense love that comes from living so intensely together amid our different ways of knowing.”

In the other room, I hear Jacob sorting through his videos.  It is early Sunday morning, my wife Mary is away to be help with her brother’s recovery from surgery, and I have let Jacob break the 8 am rule by having “TV freetime” earlier on Sunday.  My daughter is sleeping in the other room, getting the last home rest of spring break before heading back to the University of Michigan.  In a couple hours, we will frantically gather all her washed clothes, negotiate with Jacob about his necessities for the trip, and drive her back to Ann Arbor.

As I let our dog, Gypsy, out for the morning, I note that last night, my daughter Sarah must have slipped Jacob’s many, many videos back in their boxes and gathered and stacked his many, many drawings, lists, and print-outs of Disney or Universal characters.  In the kitchen, the counter is clear of the dirty dishes—which she loaded into the dishwasher some time in the early hours of Sunday morning.  As I write, I feel that twinge of already missing her, of feeling that I did not have enough time to visit with her over the last two days when Mary was gone.  Last night, after watching Jacob’s Mary Kate and Ashley movie, we started Wall-E, but I could not stay awake.  To say that I have learned to accommodate this sense of sadness over the years is not to say that I feel it less.

Jacob will be eighteen in one week.  Much has changed since the Croyden days.  He is a junior in high school, developing work skills, going to Art and Computer classes, participating in gym, and always looking forward to Common Bond events, the program that helps foster friendships with neurotypical peers.

Much has not changed.  The frustrations are different but, at times, still worked out physically.  My son is now two hundred twenty pounds.  Mary and I literally absorb his inability to apply the right “coping skills” for an unexpected change (like a snow day that cancels a Common Bond excursion).  We now have new strategies for how to provide space; we bring Gypsy with us to the garage and sit without speaking in our car.

And we know this immense love that comes from living so intensely together amid our different ways of knowing.  In this story that is our lives, after all, there are many ways that we are touched.  Last night, when taking Gypsy out for a walk, Jacob put his hand on my shoulder.  It was a kind of tether, a cord that enabled him to walk while still looking at his “papers” beneath the intersecting glow of the street lights.  But, in the end, I felt that he was the one leading me home.

Bruce Mills teaches literature at Kalamazoo College. In his field, he has authored two books, including, most recently, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (2005). In the last few years, he has turned to creative nonfiction, which has been published in The Georgia Review and New England Review. He and Deb Cumberland of Winona State University have co-edited a book on siblings and autism to be published by Jessica Kingsley Press in the fall.

Bruce is active in his local autism society and presently serves as a board member on The Gray Center for Social Learning and Understanding. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife, Mary Holtapp, daughter Sarah, and son Jacob.

Every piece in Gravity has nuggets of wisdom, sentences and phrases I could carry in my back pocket, words to live by, words that confer clarity, courage.

Carolyn Walker’s essay “Evolution of a Fairy” has many such nuggets. This one popped out at me this morning: ”When it is impossible for a child to change, a mother must, I discovered. It is the only way to keep the heart whole.”

From “Evolution of a Fairy”:

I have felt the lure of fairies, and all the implications of that word, for most of Christian’s life. By the time he was a toddler, it was easy to observe his tendencies—to hear his slight lisp, see the lilt in his walk and the way he floated his hands. What was much better hidden was his Asperger syndrome: That quirky little part of him that cannot . . . well, that cannot discern the quirky little part of him. Even as he enters adulthood, he asks me as he has so many times in the past, “What is it, Mom? What do people see in me? I don’t get it.”

The I-don’t-get-its have presented some particularly devilish conundrums for my son. When he was a child, he didn’t get why other boys wanted to play street hockey or football when he wanted to draw big red lips on the driveway, over and over. And when he was a teenager he didn’t get why it was just a little weird for him to want to trick-or-treat as an Egyptian goddess.

Later, when he was twenty, in the incident that most unnerved me, he didn’t get why it wasn’t okay for him to chase after the man who mugged him . . . his one-hundred-and-five pounds of skin and bones motivating themselves across a parking lot and up a street, in the bitter cold, in his shirtsleeves, on New Year’s Eve, at three in the morning.

“I’ve had it, Mom,” he told me the day after the mugging, right after he burst through the front door, broken necklace in hand, jolting me out of my reading material with, “Well, your worst fears have come true.” He sliced his hand through the air to emphasize his point. “I’ve had it. I decided that I wasn’t leaving until I got my money and my necklace back. I’m done being a victim.”

In Christian’s reality, he has been on the receiving end of more taunting and harassment than any human being should have to bear, his androgynous Aspie persona having for years presented itself as something impossibly confounding to members of the public. On New Year’s Eve he had reached his threshold. The fact that his perpetrator might have had a gun or a knife or a gang of thugs waiting in the shadows did not concern him. In fact, he seemed renewed, empowered by his own actions as he reported them to me. I watched while he sat more erect, more confident. I watched his eyes transform into beads under his scowl.

(The essay continues in the book.)

Carolyn update is especially heartening to me as the mother of an aspie boy who is one of the great questioners of the century:

When my son Christian was a small boy, long before I learned he has Asperger’s syndrome, he would regale me with questions. Hundreds of them, which I began writing down and using for fodder in my newspaper column. For this mother-cum-journalist, his questions were manna from heaven. Cramming a tight deadline into my busy life, I knew that, with his imagination prodding mine on a daily basis, I would never be at a loss for ideas – something that is an ever-present worry for most columnists.

A lot of his questions were funny, as well as being testimonies to the fact that he had a hugely optimistic faith in my wealth of knowledge. He put me on the spot with things like, “Do you know how many skin cells it takes to make a wrinkle?” and “Mom, can you ride a kangaroo?”

My personal favorite was, “Will anything happen if I eat this pimento?”

I remember the day he asked me that one. He peered up at me with his earnest little face, a green olive posed in the air between his forefinger and thumb, the red pimento taunting him like an out-thrust tongue. When I answered no, I thought about the fact that only a few days prior he had attempted to ride his sled off the second story balcony of our neighbor’s home. His curiosity seemed curious to me. He wasn’t afraid of a twenty-foot fall – but oh, the dangers he imagined to be lurking in a pimento!

Sometimes his questions were pensive and thought provoking, and other times downright impossible, and I worried that I wouldn’t know the answers – or, if I did, that I wouldn’t be able to articulate them in a way that would satisfy him. He wanted to know how chemists make shampoo from flowers, who invented the colors of the rainbow, and why God didn’t just simplify things by providing Adam and Eve with clothes.

Oftentimes he wondered about the meanings of words: “What does the word hatred mean?” “What is rigor mortis?” “What is abandon?” “What does he mean by nudist?”

His brows used to knit intensely over his brown eyes and his mouth would screw up on an angle while he awaited my answers.

I loved my role as enlightener, but hated the fact that I sometimes had to divulge meanings that were painful or complicated. Who wants to tell her four year old about rigor mortis? I tried always to be honest – recognizing that my credibility as a mother was at stake; and, generally speaking, he accepted my answers in the same way he accepted my love: whole-heartedly and without, er, question.

Looking back, I realize how innocent and beautiful these exchanges were. In our pre-diagnosis minds, we were simply mother and son enjoying each other’s company and the give-and-take pleasure of learning. We weren’t yet an Aspie and worried mother because no authority had pronounced us so. I’m not sure which of us, Christian or myself, was the more naïve.

I know now that while I was romanticizing his peculiar form of genius – I was certain he was a burgeoning philosopher, a philosophy prodigy, as it were – Christian was trying to make sense of a great puzzling world in which he took every word literally – literalism being a hallmark of Asperger’s. Everyday conversation must have done more than mystify him. It must, at least sometimes, have frightened him.

Think of how confounded he surely was when he asked, “What do butterflies feel like in your stomach?” Or “What do they mean by breakouts on the skin?” Or “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘My heart feels heavy?’” Or “What is a baby shower, anyway?”

I look back on these questions, within the context of his diagnosis, made around age twelve, and imagine what he must have believed to be true: that butterflies could invade a person, and rebellions could be fought on the skin. That hearts could weigh a body down, and that babies could rain from the sky.

Finally, one of his hardest questions presented itself as it necessarily had to, with the onset of puberty, when it became clear to just about everybody but Christian – who still reveled in his naivete – that he is not only autistic but gay. His question was born of the inevitable taunting that adolescents such as my son receive.

“Mom,” he asked. “What do people see in me?”

What they saw, I tried to explain, was their own fear of what they didn’t understand.

Christian is now twenty-two. He  listens when I consider a few of his questions out loud for this blog, thinks about the twists and turns his mind used to make. “I was a strange child,” he concedes. And then he smiles, appreciatively. A writer, a dancer, an artist, comfortable at long last in his own skin, he’s beginning to realize that he doesn’t have to be like everyone else, that his strangeness is not the burden others would have him believe, but a gift. It is the container for his creativity.

What I know from experience, and other people are finally beginning to see is, it is his very strangeness that makes him shine. I find that even more than enjoying my role as his enlightener, I love basking in his glow.

Carolyn Walker is an essayist, memoirist, poet, journalist, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Encore. She has authored a memoir about the life of her developmentally disabled daughter, called Every Least Sparrow. A graduate of the Vermont College Master of Fine Arts in Writing program, she is married and the mother of three children. She lives in Michigan.

One of the many things I loved about reading the submissions for Gravity was seeing a reflection of my own experience. It didn’t have to line up exactly for it to cut to my core.

I wasn’t a single mom and my son wasn’t in the school system, but Susan Segal’s second-person essay, “Sometimes, Never“, captured the urgency and black humor I felt as I scrambled to understand what was going on for my son without losing hold of myself.  The line, ‘Your boy is your religion now.’ says it perfectly.

One of your best friends works at the preschool. She’s the mother you wanted to be. She never says no to her two angels. You do it like this, she says: Instead of saying No standing on the furniture you say Feet on the floor please. Instead of saying No hitting you say It hurts when you hit. Your friend’s biggest family issue is the fact that she has no interest in sex and as a result her husband engages in various passive-aggressive behaviors like starving the dog and using the last roll of toilet paper.

I am not the mother I wanted to be, you tell her.

She says something that at first strikes you as wise and then floods you with so much guilt that you are struck dumb with failure.

She says: He is not the child you wanted him to be.

When your ex-husband comes to pick up The Baby you tell him that the director of the preschool recommended that The Baby get tested. He snorts. Tested for what? he says. The kid is four.

You nod. You have to agree. There was a time when you, too, were a rational person. When you read and approved of articles about overly medicated children and reviews of books about how modern society pathologizes boys. Now you are one of the converted. Your boy is your religion now.

You need to relax, your ex-husband says. Get in the car, already, he says crisply to The Baby and The Baby does, just like that.

You blink. I am relaxing, you say.

You call your doctor’s office. What is it regarding, the officious nurse asks.

I need to relax, you say.

Uh huh, the nurse says.

Tentatively, you say, I’m interested in medication.

What kind? she says.

Something slams into your buttocks and you wheel around. It’s The Baby’s head.

I’m hungry, he growls. I’m Chewbacca, and I want some MEAT

I’ll have to call you back, you say to the nurse.

(The essay continues in the book)

We leave the narrator in “Sometimes, Never” as she fills out assessment forms. But for many of our kids, the path to diagnosis isn’t a straight-forward one as this update from Susan shows:

By the time he was at the end of second grade, my son was on the verge of being expelled from our school district.  The only thing that saved him from that fate was, ironically enough, his diagnosis.  The obsession with a boy who had led him to the edge of a lethal cliff from which he had lifted one foot over the abyss, was deemed to have been a “manifestation” of his Asperger’s diagnosis. He was pulled back from the edge, as terrified and humbled as I was.

An irony:  He didn’t have Asperger’s.

That was the diagnosis when the terrible events of second grade occurred.  That was the diagnosis that saved him.

That was the low point.

He already had weekly OT, Social Skills, therapy with the doctor who had diagnosed him.  Days before the incident at school, the Social Skills teacher, who came to our house because she didn’t think him able to work in a group yet (and foolish me, I didn’t see this as an omen) told me she thought something was off with him.  More than usual, I said?  And she said, Yes, more than usual.

After the incident we switched therapists.  Then we switched schools.  My son was given the aide I’d been begging for since first grade (school districts get very generous when they realize they’ve dodged a major legal bullet).  The new therapist changed the diagnosis, which I knew had never fit, to PDD NOS, which, in its broad interpretation of symptoms, gathered him into its fold like a lost lamb.

Most important, my son seemed to wake up from the long dream-slash-nightmare he’d been having since the day of his birth.   He was more than remorseful about what had happened, he was devastated.

And he began to get better.

By fifth grade, he was getting his very first birthday party invitations from kids in his class.  He had become an ace baseball player.  He took up tennis and started calling the boys he played with at school by their last names.  I could drop him at a friend’s house and leave him there without anticipating disaster.

I look at him now, a pre-adolescent who has his first “girlfriend,” who plays the trumpet, and whom kids call to from across the playground to say hi, and I wonder at the mystery of it all.  Did all that intense therapy actually bring him to this place?  Or was he somehow “scared straight” by the “dark time,” as he calls it?  Or did he outgrow something?

But we know you don’t outgrow autism.  And though he now looks typical he is no longer a “typical” person with PDD NOS. He still goes to the computer every single morning to study the pro tennis standings so he can recite them to me ad nauseum later; He still thinks I can read his mind and falls apart when I indicate that I can’t; he still can’t stand to be contradicted even when he’s patently wrong. And so on and so on.

But our lives have substantially shifted – his and mine.  Last year was the first year since his infancy when I felt he was stable enough so I could go out on a date.  I went back to work on my second book in a serious way.  With the approval of the therapists, we exited Social Skills and cut back on therapy.

For so long my son was his diagnosis.  For so long I was the mother of his diagnosis.  Both of us are grateful for what we learned and are still learning because of that.  And we are moving on.

Susan Segal is the author of the novel, Aria, and numerous award-winning short stories. She is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California and an editor of Coast Magazine in Orange County, CA, where she lives with her son. She is at work on her second book, a collection of short stories.

I am in awe of the poet’s ability to capture both a specific moment in time and the gestalt of an entire experience. The poems in Gravity do that for me. Anjie Kokan’s poem, “17 Sounds of a Boy with Autism featured at Your Daily Poem does that for me.

As does the gem, “Watching My Son Watch Sleeping Beauty.” There is a purity in the child’s delight and in the surrender of a mother’s love:

Watching My Son Watch Sleeping Beauty

“Red mouth,” he says to the mirror after he draws a jagged outline ‘round his small and serious lips with his sister’s cherry-scented marker. He’s in love with a cartooned blonde who dances barefoot to “Once Upon a Dream.”

“Red mouth, red mouth,” he shows me as he subtly licks the animated smile on his TV. Next he puts his two index fingers together to make the sign for “feet.” He must rewind back to the close-up feet scene a couple of more times before he will join the next step of this dance.

He laughs among the animated woods without borders, where jackrabbits hop in old boots, and the wild gold-eyed owl, centered in a cloak, sways with the winged beat of whistling blue birds. All the animals are happy, and the girl is happy, too, as grass tickles her leaping feet and her lovely red mouth sings of things that are seldom what they seem.

My boy’s small feet are barefoot as well, with their own dancing song, and a red, red mouth that holds kisses just for me. Tell me, tell me, how can I not dance, too?

From Anjie:

There is no doubt about it, autism, like any other disability, has its ups and downs.  I try to capture little moments in my writing to remind me of life’s blessings and keep me on the up.

“Watching My Son Watch Sleeping Beauty” highlights my son’s innocence and delight, for he has crushes on all the Disney princesses and has had an obsession with feet since infancy.   Therefore, the clip of Sleeping Beauty dancing barefoot in the forest was sure four-star hit with him. What I had hoped to capture was a celebration both of my son being his true, authentic self and of a mom who decides to dance along.

Anjie Kokan, formerly Greene-Martin, loves facilitating writing workshops for all ages and abilities for community groups and schools.  She is an award-winning writer who publishes poetry and prose.  Her work has appeared or is up-coming in publications such as The Upper Room, Toward the Light, BEST of Mamazine, Mezzo Cammin and YourDailyPoem.com.  Anjie enjoys a colorful life filled with laughter and drama with her husband and two children in Wisconsin where she teaches ESL through Gateway Technical College. She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and a founding member of Grace River Poets.

Kimberly Farrar’s poem, “How to Talk to an Autistic Child”, pulled me into its orbit immediately. It echoed everything I believed and tried to practice in my interactions with Fluffy. To me, it was lyrical RDI (Relationship Development Intervention).

How to Talk to an Autistic Child

First, be still. Sit within her orbit.

Observe the way she leans into her

floppy run.

Wait.

The autistic child looks down, but sees everything:

Every glimmer in the sidewalk, every strand

of your blonde hair.

Do something physical and silent.

Make a surprised face, open your mouth

and widen your eyes.

You could nod your head or dance

a little, maybe spin slowly.

When she looks at you,

do it again.

You could try blowing

in your soda bottle to make

a deep jug sound. Be gentle.

Sit on the floor and toss a pillow.

Toss softly and say somthing

simple like, “Fun” or “Oh boy” or “Try again.”

She may repeat what you say or stop.

If you have gotten this far, you have had

a communication. When she runs away,

let her.

I think we can get cramped when we talk about talk. What someone doesn’t say, what someone does do, these are powerful ways to voice, too. Kimberly shared the following in a recent email:

I wrote this poem thinking about how communication with my autistic daughter has completely different parameters when compared to ‘typical’ communication.  Since words are difficult for her, they are often not the best route for forming a path, a connection.

It’s alternative communication. Physical movement and slightly exaggerated expressions have always caught my daughter’s attention, but it has to be honest and a little entertaining.

I wanted to tell people that the small connections–a smile, an approach, or a glance, are the beginnings of a relationship. Even when she runs away, it is a message and not necessarily a negative one.  She may be excited, or need a break to run back in later.

I think people can sometimes be upset or bewildered by autism. This poem was a way of saying, “Just try something else, and see.”  It is all ‘talk’.

Kimberly K. Farrar is a writer and teacher currently living in Astoria, New York. She has a B.S. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and an M.A. in TESOL from Hunter College. She teaches in her community. Her work has been published in Long Shot, Lullwater Review, Mudfish, The Ledge, Voices of Autism, and other literary journals.