Yeah, I'm Not Normal, Too

More than a few parents, on learning that their child is on the autism spectrum, have realized that they are too. Having thought about this quite a bit, I've concluded that, while I'm not on the spectrum, there's a little autism in all of us and I am not, too, "normal."

This is me:

.... the weirdo, quirky mom with the quirky kids, the mom nobody tells the gossip to because she doesn’t quite get it, the mom nobody asks to carpool because, with her distracted manner and written-on palms, she doesn’t quite inspire confidence.

I'm also: The mom who always forgets it's Picture Day so my child wears a faded t-shirt while everyone else is in fancy threads. The mom who sends in weird lunches with sushi and home-cooked containers of rice and shrimp stir-fry. The mom with the handmade bag in a town where Moms Carry A Certain Brand (or knock-offs). The mom who's grading papers written in some foreign alphabet while waiting in the school office prior to an IEP meeting.

The paragraph about the "weirdo, quirky mom" is by writer Judith Warner, from her February 12th New York Times column, My Kind of Normal. Warner reflects on her seventh-grade daughter being "different enough," from the Ugg-wearing, Miley Cyrus-adoring, girls of her age and notes that she, too, is "different":

What lessons am I teaching my child? I am not normal. She will never fit in.

Having finally realized that I am weird, my whole sense of self has been decentered. I am now trying, as I did when I was 12 or 13, to figure out where I fit. I am not a normal 43-year-old woman, with a nice manicure and a well-run home. But neither am I one of those out-there moms – those sort I remember from Greenwich Village in the ’70s – who don’t care about appearances at all.

Or am I? Have I looked in a mirror lately?

Of course, the ways in which my son is "quirky" can be said to far exceed movie and book preferences and fashion choices (Charlie doesn't stand out in the crowd in any way in this regard though he did once have a pair of frog-faced rubber rainboots of the sort Warner says her seventh grader still likes). Charlie's around the same age as Warner's daughter as he's in the sixth grade. While he attends the (large) public middle school in our suburban town, he's definitely, indelibly different. Charlie is never unaccompanied by a teacher or aide; he's the kid in the special ed room who sometimes stands still for no apparent reason in the middle of the hallway, seemingly unaware of people trying to push past him. He's the kid whose voice changes from one phrase to the next from something deep and low to his familiar voice (which I know will disappear soon). He and his classmates take the little yellow schoolbus with the bus matron.

To be honest, I've never been "normal."

California is a very diverse---ethnically, racially---place now, but I was always the only Asian kid in my classroom when I was in elementary school. Nobody else called their grandparents Ngin-ngin and Yeh-Yeh and nobody else's grandmother cooked pig stomach soup and sewed piecework for I.Magnin; no dolls ever looked like me and nobody had my last name. Jim, too, was aware of being "different" and distinct in a cultural sense: His parents were sternly, devoutly, insistently, Catholic. They became "middle class almost overnight" after decades of poverty in America, and never quite adjusted. Jim's great-grandfather had drowned while digging the Panama Canal and left a young daughter and a pregnant wife who'd just immigrated from Ireland to Brooklyn; Jim's grandmother "never described her upbringing in heartwarming terms," as Jim recalls.

I knew Charlie was going to be "different" before he was born, and not because his parents had their own ADHD and anxiety and OCD-ness. I knew Charlie was going to be a dark-haired dark-eyed boy whose last name is Fisher. 

And in a funny kind of way, because Charlie's "different" in ways beyond anything I would have planned, I've been able to just be me, quirks and all, more than I might have if he hadn't been on the autism spectrum. Life with Charlie---a kid who struggles just to pronounce single words correctly, to remember what things are called, and to not lose it when he wants to put watermelon in his lunchbox for the next day and we don't have any---has taught me, to focus on the essentials and, also, to learn to love and accept what's there right in front of you, and to find out that you can love a lot more broadly than you had ever thought.

It's because of Charlie's educational needs that we live in the Moms Carry A Certain Brand suburban Jersey enclave. Jim and I would be far happier in an urban setting with fewer (or no) McMansions and traffic (pedestrian and otherwise). While Charlie seems to like the deep quiet where we live, he certainly adores walking around Jersey City and Manhattan, where every corner has another storefront, another restaurant, another source of interesting delights and possibility.

But doing what's best for your kid---that's the norm around here for sure, easily.

It was Valentine's Day yesterday---and isn't true love loving someone not for what you wish they would be, but because they're just the way they are?

Photo by Ben+Sam.