2006, McMinnville, Oregon

By Jenn Brewer

I sit on the park bench, a magazine unattended in my lap, and watch. Across the expanse of wood shavings, my 8-year-old son lurches side-to-side – arms loose, brow furrowed – as he struggles to keep up with the other children who dart from bridge to bars to slide with ease. He pauses for a moment, concentrating on learning the rules to this irrational activity they call “play.”

A child stops near him, out of breath, and Alex starts in. “What kind of gaming system do you have?”

The boy glances over at him, shrugs.

Xbox? No. Playstation 2? No. Gameboy?

“Yes. Yes, I have a Gameboy.”

They’ve found a connection. I know in a few minutes the other boy will wander off, bored with a topic that consumes my son’s interest, but for now – for a few brief moments – he has a friend.

Could it be? I wonder as I watch them chat, my son pacing back and forth on the hanging bridge so that his voice comes to me in waves. Could it be that I have done this to him?

I have read all the theories tossed around the Internet like so many life preservers scattered on a stormy sea. I lunge for them, trying to grab on to one that makes sense, one that can give me some kind of answer as to why my son has been constrained to struggle through life with autism.

Could it be the Pitocen I was given when, weary of being pregnant, I begged the doctor for an induction? Could it be the vaccinations I let the nurse give him – the next day, the next month, and on through his toddler years – wanting only to protect my precious child? My doctor says no. Most scientists say no. But still I wonder….

Maybe it was something more out of my control, a gene that sealed his fate before I even knew he existed. He was born into a blending of two families stocked with brilliant but tormented people whose brains work on overdrive, the pathways often unclear to the rest of the world. Autism clusters, some experts say, in families with schizophrenia, MS, manic depression. Between his father’s clan and mine, we can claim them all.

Maybe fate played a hand. I think of his birth, when his 10-pound body stuck in my pelvis, and the doctor and nurses had to struggle to pull him to freedom. A few short months later, I awoke in the gray of night to find his little body still and knew that life had fled until finally minutes (no, merely seconds, a few eternal seconds) later he stirred – and breathed. Were those few moments enough to change the mechanics of his tiny brain forever? Will I ever know?

Now, approaching a decade later, I watch as my son follows his new companion across the bridge. His voice floats back to me, softly slurred, still not quite caught up with the verbal skills of his peers.

“On level five,” he is saying, “when you go down into the pit….”

Across the playground, a friend spies me. I wave, and she comes to sit beside me.

“He’s doing so well today,” I say, my heart swelling with an emotion even I could not name, something like joy, relief, hope.

“He doesn’t look autistic,” she comments, perhaps to comfort me, but her words set me on edge. This isn’t the first time I’ve wondered if things would be easier for him if he had a disorder that manifest itself in his features. True, it would be like a seal on his forehead, unavoidable, inescapable. But maybe, when he’s so keyed up that he’s taken to pacing the floor, unable to stop, or when he’s truly agitated and he starts wagging his hands, or when, huge as he is, he clings to me, his hands in all the wrong places … perhaps if he didn’t look like any other child, people would understand and merely glance away.

“He seems pretty smart though,” says my friend, and I want to scream but simply smile instead.

“Yes,” I say, “he’s actually very smart.”

I think of the tests we ran last year, the series of questions that revealed my son’s true mental aptitude, his ability to comprehend math and logic well beyond his years.

I can picture him grown up. His broad shoulders are hunched over a keyboard, those sky blue eyes squinting at a computer program he is designing, gibberish to all but a few of the most brilliant among us. Or perhaps he will be peering through a microscope, employing his dogged determination in the annihilation of cancer. Or perhaps he will be sitting behind the controls of a rocket ship, coordinates set for the stars.

Or perhaps he will decide to be a professor. He will need a wide space in front of the classroom to pace while he shares his wisdom, and every once in awhile a student, bolder than the rest, will raise a hand and say, “Excuse me, sir? We can’t understand you when you face away from us.” And he will turn, put on that lopsided smile, and say, “Yes, yes, of course.” And he will briefly remember his mother, who told him the same thing a thousand times, and go on about his lecture, content.

In the back of the room, the door will open. A woman will step in and settle in the back row, their child on her knee. He will see her but not acknowledge her – yet. To everything its time and place. Right now, it’s teaching time, but she won’t mind. It took him years, but at last he found a woman who sees his mannerisms simply as an offshoot of his overactive brain, who understands that his abrupt manner is merely a need for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

But for now, for today, my son has enlightened one more child on the complexities of gaming. He is happy. I am happy. Life moves on.

To access Jenn Brewer’s blog, go to http://diamondsandrust-jenn.blogspot.com. For information on her writing service, see http://dot-the-i-writingservice.com/default.aspx.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, April 30th, 2007 | Email This Post

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