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.