23 March, 2015

...in your head...

"I'm not good at getting things out of my head."

That's what my son woke me up somewhere around 3am to tell me.  
He shook me awake and whispered the statement, then promptly rolled over and went right back to sleep, leaving me to ponder over his words in the pre-dawn. 

By the time the sun and son finally rose, I had figured out no less than a hundred possible explanations for his mid-night awakening.  Each of which, it turned out, was wrong. 

Over the course of the day, it all came together in dribs and drabs and here and there… 

He's not good at getting things out of his head. 

He's brilliant.
He's creative.
His mind is positively whirring with thoughts. 

But he's usually silent. 

He's a straight A student.  But he rarely raises his hand.  If called on, he'll answer, but usually so quietly that his para-professional aide will have to repeat it for him. 

He has autism. 
He has autism and sensory processing disorder, and a whole slew of other diagnoses and quirks as well. 

And they all add up to one true thing. 

He's not good at getting things out of his head.

In the early years of his diagnosis, when he had no speech, he and I developed our own nonverbal communication.  Call it teamwork or mother's intuition... 99.9% of the time I could figure out what he was trying to tell me without words.  And as his speech slowly began to develop, I remained the sole person who could decipher his stilted speech patterns and finish his sentences.  In many ways, I had learned to anticipate his needs so well that I could preemptively fulfill them.  To this very day, I'm still the only one who can always figure out what he's trying to say and what it ties into when he utters seemingly tangential statements. 

But there will come a day, all too soon, when having me as his "Autism to Real World" translator won't be a possibility, and he will need to communicate effectively with a whole wide world of people who simply speak a different language than he does. 

And that terrifies me.

Because I have been, and am his translator.  Because I am the mouthpiece he uses to take things out of his head and share them with others.  Because so far, I'm the only one who's 100% effective 100% of the time, at drawing him out of the shell of autism.  

He's not good at getting things out of his head. 

And that terrifies me.

Because he's brilliant, and creative and whirring with thoughts.
  
And he needs to share that.
He needs to be able to get those things out...
and design and create and change...

and live...

All the potential...trapped inside his head.


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