March 16th, 2006 by Jemaleddin Cole

I haven’t posted a lot about autism here on my site, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing how big a part of our life it is. Part of that is that I don’t want this page to become a pity party because no matter what it seems like, Jared’s autism is the least of my prob­lems. I’ve got a girl becom­ing a teenager here, people!

But seri­ously, the dif­fi­cul­ties we face from Jared’s autism are incred­i­bly minor com­pared to the joy he brings us. I’m not big on crying, but think­ing back to the first time he sang “Twin­kle Twinkle” to us (well, “Minkle Minkle” anyway) still gets me misty. And for a kid who is sup­pos­edly facing a lan­guage delay, he finds ways to use words sur­pris­ingly well. Example:

The other day I decided I wanted to read Joss Whedon’s Aston­ish­ing X-Men series, so I took Jared with me to a local comic books shop. I spent some time look­ing at the early readers’ books, but couldn’t find any comics Jared would get into. So as I’m making my pur­chase and get­ting ready to leave, Jared says, “They don’t have books for kids?”

Now this is Jared’s way of asking, “aren’t you going to buy me anything?” And since the answer to that was no, and they didn’t really have any­thing for kids at his read­ing level, I said, “No, it’s for grown-ups.”

Jared thinks about this for a moment and says loudly, “Yeah, they’re for grown-​ups. Who are kids.” Ow!

I looked at the guy behind the counter who was bag­ging my comics and we both decided that we were going to pre­tend that we hadn’t heard him. Some things are just too painful to rec­og­nize. And no matter how well trained you are at defend­ing your comics addic­tion to other adults (“What, you didn’t like Road to Perdi­tion? What about From Hell?”), there’s noth­ing you can do when a 6-year-old calls you out for read­ing pic­ture books.

In any case, when you wonder what Jared got from his mother after seeing his red hair and fair skin and iden­ti­cal hands, feet and ears to his dad, the answer is: the uncanny abil­ity to put his father in his place.

Which is all a long way of get­ting to: I feel like I need to apol­o­gize to those people who reg­u­larly read this blog. I have this whole side of my life that I haven’t been talk­ing about that I’m real­iz­ing is ter­ri­bly impor­tant. There are things going on in the autism com­mu­nity that need to get out to the rest of the world. More impor­tantly, there are lessons we can learn from autis­tic people that we can’t learn from any­where else.

So hope­fully, I’ll find some time to blog about all of this in the near future. You know, in my copi­ous spare time.

If you’re some­body who is already involved in the autism com­mu­nity, you prob­a­bly need to read Amanda’s Ques­tions for Neu­rotyp­i­cals on Bal­la­sex­is­tenz. I don’t have the time to explain what that all means to the rest of the world, but if you’ve seen the way that autis­tics are treated, you’ll def­i­nitely get some­thing out of it.

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