Child Abuse: Why?

I have little kids who are still learning how to communicate.  It's exciting to hear them finally express themselves verbally, to hear what they are noticing and thinking and what is important to them.  It's also really cool when they finally answer my questions.  Who hit you?  (Winston) Where did you get that?  (from your closet) What's in your mouth?  (that candy you were trying to hide) But then I ask WHY? and they are still not sure how to answer that.  (Winston, WHY did you hit her? To make the little girl cry.  Really? Because that's kind of psycho.  We need to work on that, buddy.)  And it is a daily frustration to get some of the information, but still have this nagging WHY that goes unanswered.

Child abuse is like that.  We can say What happened.  We can prosecute Who did it.  We can avoid returning to Where it happened.  But many of us are left with this question: Why?  My very young brain tried so hard to answer this question in the silence.  If I had reported it, maybe some adult would have helped me figure it out, but I didn't speak of it, and so I tried to make sense of it on my own.  Was there something wrong with me?  Something that made him target me?  Was it luck, or, more accurately, a lack thereof?  As I got older, the world unknowingly provided other possible answers.  Was I asking for it?  Was I doing something unconsciously that drew his attention?  Maybe if I had fought or yelled, would he have left me alone?

Here's what I've come to realize in the past few years, although maybe the Why can never be completely put to rest...it happened because I was little and he was big.  It happened because we were alone, probably by design.  It happened because he was pretty sure I wouldn't tell.  Maybe he tested me in other ways beforehand, pushing the limits, seeing if bit him and ran off screaming or became still and quiet.  It happened because this world that we live in feasts on the souls of children, and there aren't enough good people to stand up and defend them.  It happened because there is darkness all around.

This can't be how it goes.  Do you know how to get rid of darkness?  SHINE A LIGHT.  That's something else I've learned recently.  So here's a new question, a much more relevant one than Why?  We need to ask How?  How do I shine my light?  How do I stand between a child and someone who means them harm?  Start by being the safe person.  Don't hurt kids.  Remember when you speak to them and look at them and care for them that they are PRECIOUS.  Ask yourself if you would be doing this if someone else were with you.  I started with the two children I gave birth to.  I vowed to be their safe place.  That expanded to another son who joined our family through adoption, and a girl who lives with us through foster care.  Then we added some kids in our neighborhood.  Now it pretty much includes every kid whose name I know, whose path crosses mine.

Our little girl told me last week about a fight she witnessed, about a man hurting a woman, even though the woman yelled stop.  She said, "He has strong arms, so he punched her."  But that's not okay, I told her.  Just because he could doesn't mean he should.  Do you understand? (please tell me you understand, please tell me that you won't let someone treat you that way someday, please let this one thing be what you remember from your time with our family)  And she said, "My daddy  (Chris) has strong arms, but he swings me around.  I like that."  Yes!  Not all men hit.  Strength shouldn't be used to oppress, it should be used to protect.  I'm so glad that she made that connection.  I'm so glad my husband can show her what a good man looks like.  And I hope she can realize Why.  Why he chooses to use his arms to hug and hold and embrace and defend.  Because Jesus did it first.

Making Memories

James and I lay snuggled inside a blanket on the grass.  The sunlight filtered through the fabric to illuminate our faces.  I looked at him and saw, not the tall slender six year old he has become, with long fingers and big knuckles, adult teeth crowding the tiny baby teeth in his mouth, but the chubby cheeks and big, watchful eyes of my baby.  They're still in there, although that face is growing and changing and becoming more mature.  When I look at him, I remember.  I remember long nights and quiet cries that seemed to fill our entire half of the duplex.  I remember awkward steps and cuts and bruises and even louder cries that turned into determination to master the new skills.  I remember the clinging hugs during evaluations and the reports and forms that attempted to quantify this child who refuses to fit on a piece of paper. 

I wonder what he will remember of these years.  Will he remember when I was there or the times I wasn't?  Will he remember love and gentle touches, or will he remember anger and red marks on his bottom?  Will he remember looking at me through tear-filled eyes, and will the image be calm and steady or irritated and unpredictable?  Will he remember the trips we take, whether down the street to the playground or across the country on a plane?  Will he remember the stories we read?  Will he remember the early mornings and the middle of the night cuddles?  Will he remember when we brought home babies and called them brothers?  Will he remember the summer nights when we lay on the lawn and watched the stars in the sky?

Will his memories be full of love that sustains him through the difficulties of life, and will they remind him that there is always a place where he is welcome and safe?  Will he share them with others, will he seek to experience them again from the role of a parent?  Will Mother's Day and Father's Day be a time when he thinks fondly of his childhood and calls up special memories, or will it be a time to avoid us?

I think we all hope that the good outweighs the bad, and the children grow up to be healthy and stable and secure.  That they tell others about the wonderful people who raised them, and sing our praises, and even the moments of discipline and consequences are looked at with appreciation.  And I hope that I can remember snuggling inside a blanket as the sunlight filters through the fabric.

This I Believe

" And we are not perfect.  We say the wrong thing.  We grow and we change and the words we spoke in the past are words of which we now repent, but that is the nature of sanctification and there is no one exempt from that process."  -Fabs Harford

I believe that words are important.  I believe that what we say and what we write can affect people, and it is our choice to encourage and build people up, or tear others down with our negativity.  So often, as I was growing up, my parents would admonish me to THINK before I spoke, usually as a follow-up to something insensitive or inappropriate that had just come out of my mouth.  I would sigh in exasperation, because the challenge to evaluate all spoken words before enunciating them, and discarding the unnecessary ones, seemed too much for me.  I didn't want to stop long enough to consider my words, I wanted to get them out, to share them with others and join in.  People gave me labels: I was cynical, sarcastic, jaded.

I often wrote as I grew up, I filled notebooks with thoughts and observations.  I still wonder if anyone is ever going to read those words or if they will get thrown away at some point, without being seen by the world.  I want to have influence, I want to share my mind and my feelings, but I lack the confidence that I have anything worth saying.  Then I started a blog.  I began not knowing what to write, and the first year I think I wrote 3 entries.  My husband was the only one to read them.  The next year I posted just once. 

It was surreal to find myself, this lover of words, the mother of a non-verbal child.  I yearned for the day I would hear him speak, when we could converse and share our words and learn more about each other.  It didn't come.  The doctors and the speech therapists and the educators all told me the same word: autism.  They gave other words and phrases, like developmental delay and no imaginative play and isolated and early intervention.  We started therapy and preschool and while he struggled to find his voice, I did too.  I couldn't figure out how to tell people what I was coming to terms with, the reality of having a son with a "disability".  I found myself dropping out of the mom-petition, avoiding playdates and birthday parties and listening with jealousy as the other moms compared their children's milestones.  I wondered if my child would ever use a toilet, make a friend, learn to read or write his name, much less play on a basketball team, speak Spanish, or write a play for his third grade class to perform.

I was scared for my son to receive an official diagnosis.  I was afraid of that word, afraid of what being associated with that word might mean for him.  Would he become a target of bullies?  What other words would they call him, when they saw him riding the "short bus" that is no longer short?  How many times had I made jokes at others' expense, how many times had I declared something "retarded" in my adolescent speaking-before-thinking phase?

But I came to realize its not a word spoken by a doctor in a white coat that I am afraid of.  Its what we are teaching all of our kids about words and about how we treat people who are different from us.  And that's when I found my voice.  I began sharing my opinions and stories and family with the internet, simultaneously afraid that no one would read and afraid that everyone would.  I found, through blogging, that I could form my words, gather my thoughts, and take the time to present an idea without being offensive, hurtful, thoughtless.  Although it can often be a place where people comment without any regard for the fact that a person is on the other end, reading their words, for me, the internet is the place where I finally learned to think before speaking.  I can look at a person's profile picture, I read about their struggles and hopes, and I take my time forming a response.  My hope is that what comes out is different, so that people perceive me differently.  So that they use words like "loving" and "encouraging" to describe me.

Another benefit of speaking boldly for my son and others like him, is that he is now finding his voice.  He is speaking and learning to read; he is expressing his needs and communicating to others.  One of his favorite stories is The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.  I love to hear him loudly proclaim, "I am the Lorax...I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues."  Where I once saw myself as speaking for my silent son, now I wonder what voiceless, invisible group he will speak for. 

Accepting the Autism

Three years ago, my family traveled to Children's Hospital.  It was the final stop on our journey, our quest to find an answer.  Why didn't my almost-three-year-old son talk?  I knew what they were thinking, the direction the other experts were leaning as they evaluated his speech, his motor skills, his ability to follow directions.  But I so desperately didn't want that answer.  I didn't want to hear the dreaded A-word.  I did so much research, so much preparation for our meeting with the Pediatric Neurologist.  I noted all the ways my son did not fit the descriptions (and ignored all the ways that he did).  But there we sat, in that small exam room, and that smug doctor said, "Your son has autism."  I argued with him for a while.  I presented my case.  Chris took James to the waiting room to look at the aquarium because he couldn't wait in that space any longer.  Finally, the smug doctor said, "I can tell you're very intelligent and you've read alot on this subject, but I've been doing this for 30 years and have yet to be wrong."  Oh, I wanted to smack him.  He didn't understand what he was doing to us.  He didn't understand how grave his words were.  I gathered my papers and left.

Until then, my experience with autism had been very limited: a one-time viewing of Rainman, the strange boy from my high school who flapped his hands as he walked down the hall, and Andrew, the 11 year old boy I babysat.  None of these instances reminded me of James.  For one thing, they were all verbal.  James only said a handful of words, and he hadn't added any new ones for more than 6 months.  Most of my denial rested on Andrew, the one I had the most direct interaction with.  I watched him every Saturday morning for more than a year, and I'm pretty sure he never learned my name or even noticed when I stopped coming.  He would sit, rocking, and recite the TV guide.  Rarely did anything actually happening in his general vicinity show up in his speech, nor did his tone ever fluctuate with emotion.  We never conversed.  On the other hand, my darling son, with whom I spent every day, was cuddly, affectionate, and happy to see the people he loved.  He cried whenever we left him, or if his Nana and Grandpa were headed out the door.  I never noticed him doing any odd "stereotyped" behaviors, like flapping, rocking, spinning.  Most importantly, he looked at me.  In the eye.  Sometimes he sat on my lap and we stared at each other.  The autism community has many helpful phrases, one of which is "If you've met one autistic person, then you've met one autistic person."  In other words, despite having the same diagnosis, each individual experiences it differently, unlike the time four of us had strep throat, and we all had red tonsils and took antibiotics.

My biggest fear in receiving the autism diagnosis was its permanence.  I knew enough to realize that it wouldn't go away.  It wouldn't be cured.  It would be with us forever, and there was no way to predict how severely it would affect not just James, but our entire family.  I had more concerns when I read the doctor's folder of information a few days after our visit.  People with autism do not feel empathy.  They lack imagination.  They can't show emotion.  If there were ever to be a basic list of what I want for my children, at the very top would be that they would feel love and would care for not just themselves, but the people around them.  That they would know the wonder and joy of the human imagination, where there are no limits.  And these pamphlets threatened to prevent my darling child from experiencing any of that.

So for a while, I struggled.  We followed the experts' advice: we enrolled James in an early intervention preschool, and that summer we began private speech therapy.  I kept hoping that somewhere along the way, someone would correct this mistake.  They would look at James, really engage him, and say incredulously, "Your son doesn't have autism!  He's just ----."  And whatever that ---- was would have a clear and simple solution.  If he would just start talking, he could explain to them all how wrong they were!  I became more intentional at home, reading more books and using more words to describe what we were doing.  I made flash cards and posters.  James wasn't too interested; I usually ended up with just 1 year old Winston filling the place his older brother had vacated.  I also spent nights beating myself up.  I just couldn't imagine that this wasn't all the result of some terrible failure of mine.  I would go over and over my pregnancy, my delivery, his first few years.  What could I have done so wrong that my child didn't develop the way all his peers seemed to?

The only thing that seemed to help me face what I was denying was time.  As the days and months and years went by, and James met more and more people, and none of them ever said those magnificent words.  As I spent more and more time finding out about Autism, meeting other parents and children who faced it.  It became harder and harder to ignore what was there.  My son is autistic.

The truly amazing thing happened once I accepted the diagnosis.  Once I said it out loud, and believed it in my heart.  That's when I started to let myself off the hook.  That's when I started to look for the hidden blessings in this new reality, the abilities in my son's disability.  And that's when I realized that James isn't Autism.  James is a boy who loves to play Angry Birds, whether on the iPhone, with his plush birds and some blocks, or those tiny rubber Angry Birds.  James is an older brother who gets territorial when the younger ones try to mess up his stuff, who kisses the baby when he cries, who hugs fiercely when he gets home from school after being away from them all day.  James is an affectionate and empathetic person, who gets distressed when others are upset, who smiles expectantly and wants to know the joke when people around him laugh, who gives kisses and high fives to the people he knows well.  And most importantly, he's my son, my cuddle buddy, my special boy.  I couldn't separate him from Autism any more than I could make him be outgoing, or suddenly make him Asian.  But all of his characteristics and personality and neurological differences add up to the awesome person who is my James.

Tomorrow morning, we're heading back to Children's.  James will be evaluated to be given an official "diagnosis", a place on the spectrum.  I'm not fighting the experts this time, I'm not even hoping someone will say, "He's not autistic!" (because, Good Lord, what do we do with that?!)  But I also don't really care too much what the results say.  If his school, his doctors, his teachers and therapists need to classify him to make their jobs easier, if they need to call it something, then so be it.  But to me, he was, is, and will always be my son, and I will call him James.