Limitations and Impairments, and Potential

Limitation and impairment. These are two words that I like to handle with care when talking about my son and about autism and disability.

The times that I find myself most using these terms quite a lot is at IEP meetings; times when Jim and I are in full advocacy mode and seeking to represent Charlie as best as we might. During these meetings, we always seem to find ourselves dancing back and forth between noting his strengths---his willingness to learn, his love of being in motion, his liking for being around people---and his difficulties---the everlasting struggle to communicate, to concentrate, to keep calm and carry on through anxiety. Not being as straightforward and clear about, well, limitations and impairments, can impede creating a curriculum appropriate for Charlie, but focusing only on those can also mean that the curriculum does not sufficiently acknowledge what he is capable of.

Being Charlie's mother has certainly made me aware of my limitations.

One that has tended to have a rather significant impact on my "level of functioning" (a term addressed on the Controversies page under #5, the "autism spectrum") is parking my car and, in particular, parallel parking it.

It's been only fairly recently that I've been able to parallel park our car; I still never seem able to drive in precisely between the two long white lines of the parking spaces in a parking lot. My first lesson in parallel parking was some 14 years ago under the watchful eyes of Jim, in front of a St. Louis pizza place, in front of a few tables of outdoor diners (some of whom, I am quite sure, were the owners of the cars I was trying not to bump into, or not too hard).

What changed the whole parallel-parking-phobia, and my refusal to drive my car into what looked like a way too tight space, was my getting my current job, at a small college in Jersey City. Our campus occupies something more than one city block and there is a chronic lack of parking, whether in lots or on the street (and Jersey City is a place where, as one former resident writes, "Fixing parking tickets is as much a fixture ........ as the New York skyline or the new Jersey City skyline"). I now have a place where I regularly park in front of an old house where my office is, but the driveway is frequently blocked by someone who has quite disregarded (or just really could care less about) the "DRIVEWAY NO PARKING" painted on the street (granted, the words "DRIVEWAY" and "NO" are quite faded, especially the "NO"). Indeed, sometimes the driveway is blocked when my car is parked in the driveway, requiring me to attempt creative maneuvers to get the car out (without scratching it on a cement divider, or the other car), all on a one-way street on a hill going down.

The first year I had to deal with this (while already anxious about getting home to meet Charlie's schoolbus), I panicked quite a bit. Gradually though, I slowly became somewhat adept at squeezing a stationwagon through a really small space, diagonally. (Necessity is the mother of invention, and of parking in Jersey City, I guess you could say.) As a result, the chances of my parking my car, running into my office and running off to teach in good order---of functioning much more efficiently on a work day---have significantly increased (though the car's taken a bit of beating after being driven over sidewalks and thisclose to someone's rusty bumper). And, really, if you'd told me ten years ago that I'd be driving daily over the bridge in this photo (which people do not drive, as the article says, at 45 mph---that would be considered rather slow), I'd have assured you, I can't do that. No, nope, n-o w-a-y.

If we don't note what Charlie cannot yet do----and that "yet" is key, because really, there's no telling what he might be able to do. Believe me, the "team of experts" who diagnosed Charlie in 1999 would not have predicted that he'd be outracing Jim on his bike through the streets of New Jersey. Hence, "potential" is a word I've often used in reference to Charlie's learning, as it has connotations of possibility and of some existing, but not yet tapped ability. Within the word---within its etymology (being a Classics professor, if I'm able to do one thing, it's to explain Latin and Greek roots of words and grammar)---is the Latin word for "can, be able," possum, posse, potui. "Potential" is from an adjective related to possum, and so means "being able," and also gives us the English word "potential."

So if "limitation" and "impairments" are words that describe what someone "can't" do, "potential" expresses what he or she could do; has the possibility of doing. It's a word that, to me, leaves the door open----because you just never know what's going to happen once you go up into the skyway.