Screaming

There was a time in my life when the only way I knew how to express the depth of my pain was to scream. It's a special kind of scream. Kind of like when you're in labor. It comes from deep in your gut, fills up your chest and your head, and doesn't just come out your mouth, but your ears and your hands, and the only thing you can think of that would give you relief would be to dig your fingers into your chest and pull it open until you could expose your heart to the air. I imagine that if I ever lost a child, this is the anguished cry that would come out.

The last time it came out, it was because I thought I had, in effect, lost my little boy. Everything I thought he might be was gone--a little t-ball player, one of twenty little guys and girls quietly sitting in his kindergarten classroom finishing a worksheet, a participant in someone's birthday party sleepover, one of the boys playing hockey on rollerblades on a suburban street, in a relationship as a teenager that we'd try to talk him out of. All of it, gone. We held on to a sliver of hope that that boy would find us someday, and we still hold on to that, but it's not something that we can assume out of our life together the way anyone else would.

Today was another rare day I wanted to scream like that again.

Yahoo! news reported on a letter that had gone viral today. Some coward of a mother slipped the most hateful letter I have ever seen under the door of a grandmother to an autistic boy. The boy was scaring her "normal children" with his noises as he played outside. She hates people who think that just because their child has special needs, they deserve special treatment. The family should "euthanize" the boy--he's no good to anyone anyway, just donate his parts to science.

Oh. My. God.

I can't help it--I think of this letter, and I think of my boy. I look at him, and I'm like, how could anyone not see what I see? He's perfect! I mean, he's not normal, but he's perfect. I've never seen a child with the capacity to love another human being the way he does. How could anyone see what he is and proceed to find him anything but endearing? I don't know. And I'll never know or understand. But someday, as this letter reminds me, someone will. And I know this. Someday, someone will be so inhumanly cruel to him and it will destroy his perfect innocence, and as his mother, I have no idea how I'm supposed to endure it. I have no idea how he's supposed to endure intolerable cruelty, and probably more of it than most of us neurotypicals ever will.

What do we do with this problem of cruelty? It is obviously a problem of being trapped inside one's own head and having no interest in or understanding of someone else's suffering, but that makes it worse in trying to deal with it. I can't do anything to control that. I could homeschool him at the expense of his desperately-needed daily interaction with peers (not the same as the need for this in a neurotypical child), or I could willfully put him in a situation that I know he can't escape unscathed. And even if I did homeschool, we're not immune, as we can see from the woman who received this letter, who did nothing more than allow her child to go outside their home and into their own yard.

It is news like this that causes me to soberly assess all the victories and the breakthroughs we've had over the past 2 1/2 years, and I am reminded that, as far as he's come, and as much as everyone loves him while he's still little, the suffering is not over. It will morph and pop through in ways that surprise us continually.

This is autism. Oh, God, have mercy. And world, please have mercy. I beg of you--see my son and understand him.