I took the kids to the Children’s Museum on Friday, which was, incidentally, the second three-day weekend in under a week. If you are asking yourself how that’s even possible, well, it’s because our school district is run by Rahm Emanuel Satan's minion.
But anyway. The Children's Museum.
They have a new exhibit there, a rather ingenious room dedicated to building forts. It’s filled with furniture that has been outfitted with all kinds of knobs, and sheets that have elastic sewn on to the corners. The kids can go nuts hooking elastics around knobs, creating all manner of elaborate fort structures.
There was a group of boys close in age to Kai that had built a two-story fort that they turned into a castle, with the keep on the upper story and the dungeon down below. Kai tried to join the boys in the upper story, but they weren’t interested bringing anyone else into their playscheme, I guess, because they rejected Kai in short order and continued playing castle, looking for prisoners to shackle in the dungeon.
I drifted over in their direction when I heard one of the boys loudly refer to Kai as “that kid,” recognizing the possibility that I should redirect Kai to another part of the exhibit, and, sure enough, by the time I got there, Kai was in the act of destroying the fort that the boys had built. Kai thought this was hilarious, of course, not because he was getting revenge on the boys, but because he was playing, getting the boys to interact with him on a level where he could actually compete.
The boys, however, were pissed at Kai for wrecking their fort.
I suggested that Kai find another place to play.
One of the boys began to put the fort back together.
“I’m fixing the dungeon,” he called up to his friends, “that weird kid wrecked it.”
:::
Sometimes, well-meaning people will meet Kai and say, “What autism?”
They intend this as a compliment or a reassurance. I appreciate what they are trying to say, that Kai is, in many ways, just a regular kid wearing rainbow loom bracelets and playing tag on the playground.
But it drives me a little crazy, too. What autism? The autism that keeps him up all night. The autism that keeps him from regulating his body or organzing his thoughts. The autism that prevents him from walking into a room of neurotypical boys and making friends.
That autism.
Kai was in a social skills group last fall. It was all boys, kids Kai’s age who fell on the spectrum somewhere. They made a book that detailed everyone in the class. This is Justin. He likes pizza. His favorite toy is his iPad. This is Kai. He likes ice cream. His favorite toy is his iPad.
Justin has occupational therapy in the same room as Kai. But after 16 weeks of facilitated social interaction, Justin and Kai do not acknowledge each other during OT. They can’t even remember each other’s names.
“That’s Justin,” Emily might say. “Can you say ‘hi?’”
Ryan, by contrast, plays with Justin’s little sister in the sibling playroom during OT. They play house and pizza parlor and smoothie shop, a constant fluid and fluent exchange of words and ideas as natural to the girls as it is unnatural to the boys.
This is not to say that Kai doesn’t have friends. He does. I’ve written about them. I’ve visited his classroom and seen other kids interacting with Kai. Kai had a friend over at our house last weekend, in fact. Kai took him upstairs to his room.
I was puttering around in the kitchen when I noticed that Kai had come back downstairs and was playing Cut the Rope on the iPad.
“Where’s Chuckie?” I asked.
“Upstairs.”
“Go entertain your friend,” I urged him. “This playdate was your idea.”
I took the iPad away and chivvied him back upstairs.
Chuckie was being given a tour of the house by Ryan. “This is my mommy’s room,” she was saying. “And this is the bathroom, and this is my towel. What color are your eyes? Mine are blue.”
I saw why Kai had come downstairs. Ryan had taken over the playdate.
Later, all three kids were in the back seat of my car. Ryan kept a running dialog with Chuckie as we drove to Monkey Island.
Kai stared out the window.
He was being left in the social dust by a four-year-old.
:::
Rage spiked in my bloodstream at the little boy who called Kai “weird,” the same kind you get when someone flips you off in traffic, and I had to work to keep from doing anything rash.
The kid’s mother called him over to her. I don’t know what she said, but she no doubt told her son that it wasn’t polite to call someone weird. She apparently did not suggest he apologize.
I ducked into the fort.
“What’s your name?” I asked the kid.
“Henry,” he said.
“Henry, this is Kai.”
Kai was grabbing at something Henry was holding. It looked like a journal.
“Kai, Henry is using that,” I said, and I pried his fingers off of the book.
“Is that your journal?” I asked Henry.
“It belongs to the museum. It’s to draw plans for your fort.”
“Henry, Kai’s brain works differently than yours does,” I said. “He may not be able to use his words all of the time.”
Henry looked contemplative, and not in an asshole-ish way.
“Can Kai write in the journal when you’re done?”
Henry said that Kai could.
After that conversation, I immediately started thinking about a blog post, about a kid calling Kai weird, about me schooling a little jerk on neurodiversity, of the kind of parent who doesn’t make her child apologize, but it lacked triumph, and after Henry was chastened by his mother and agreed to share, it lacked a villain, too.
The fact is that Kai is different, that those differences can come off as weird. He is, as I type this, wearing five sweaters, a tie, and rollerskates just to sit on the couch and watch Dragon Tails. To a certain extent, if you’re going to do things like that, you’re going to have to be comfortable with people thinking that you’re a little out there.
:::
I was running off to teach yoga one morning over winter break. I was late, yanking on sweatpants and scrambling to find a matching pair of gloves.
“Mommy,” Kai said. “I’m different.”
I froze, work forgotten.
I kneeled down in front of him and folded him into my arms.
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s what makes you different that also makes you so very awesome.”
“Aww,” he said, hugging me back.
I waited for a moment, to see if there was anything else he wanted to say, but, apparently comforted, he went back to watching the iPad.
And, seeing that we were all good, at least for now, I went to work.
I used that conversation as a theme for class that day—honoring the things that make us different. But this is easy to do in a room full of adults, and easier still in the context of the flexibility of our hamstrings.
Childhood is another matter entirely.