When I started studying special education, I realized, everyone is special. i also realized how special I am, and how there will be no accommodations for the handicap of Humanity. When I learned about neurodivergence, I realized, or I already knew that everyone is neurodivergent. People are in different states or levels of sleeping or awake.
Whether I spend 3 and a half or 7 and a half hours with Will, it feels timeless. It feels long, but also tolerable. This job fits with my broken down state of depression. I don’t have to plan, organize, promote, or try to sell anything.
I don’t have to pretend I’m professional, bourgeoisie, cultured, or motivated.
The main crisis in teaching for me arose by realizing that like the students in my class, I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to set fake goals for them, and monitor their goal progress. I don’t want to plan lessons. I don’t have anything fun or cute in mind. I don’t have any school spirit. I don’t care about holidays. I don’t even care about technical birthdays. Every day is the same to me.
Any day can be Christmas. Christmas isn’t real. Any day can be Halloween or Easter, just pick the right kind of candy. I’ll buy candy for kids. I’ll buy them shit, but I won’t be on the board of PBIS or plan or attend special events.
Every day is the same to me, and I want it that way, partially to match the kids, the people with Autism, for whom nearly every minute is the same, or could be, or should be, and age ain’t nothin’ but a number, like Aaliyah sang.
For the first hour or two I spent with Will today, we watched kids songs with “movement.” I forced myself to sing softly, do the motions, and get in the “fun kid mode” with him. I started thinking, Is this what everything’s come to? Me dancing to Elmo? But I know that on every basic level, I need to breathe deeper and move my body. So this makes me do that. So I told myself, tomorrow isn’t real. No one knows if civilization will last even 10 more minutes. Just be present, breathe, move your body, use your intuitive-communication with Will. Make today real for him, or with him, because tomorrow is a black hole or a bright neon light to him and always will be.
So I sang as many nursery rhymes as I could. But negative thoughts pestered. I remembered my repeater dreams where friends from high school point out that I can’t sing beautifully anymore. And I thought, I bet even Will’s parent noticed that I sound like a smoker. I keep coughing. They’ll pretend to believe me if I say it’s a cold or allergies, but they’re very smart people.
I helped Will eat (I fed him, fork to mouth, or fingers to mouth). He floated in and out of scripted worlds. But later he created novel sentences (nonsensical on the surface) which means they weren’t from any tv show or song. He talked about CHERRY TREES. It turned into a Berenstain Bears script, but at first, it was novel.
I think it had to do with his happiness that someone’s finally washing his parts. I’m serious. He’s never used his hands to wash anything other than the left hand washes the right one, with a mechanical squishing sound, as he scripts into the mirror. My flatmate also makes that horrible sound while washing her hands. Hers is a little different, it’s fast and slimy.
Nobody has ever washed Will’s parts, which means, they’ve never been washed other than with the swishing of bath water. For a few reasons, his presentation has no sexuality, but puberty inflated his size and covered him with hair. I cleaned out his belly button, full of lint.
I use the soapy washcloth to get in the folds of things at the mid-range. And I can tell Will anticipates it with positive nervousness, and says like “woah!” and then starts jumping happily (once he’s out of the bath). I scrub him down with the towel (also no one’s done that for him). They usually just dress him while he’s still half wet. I have enough sensory issues that I’m almost incapable of doing that to him. It seems cruel. And I’m paranoid about all kinds of mold and the smells that result.
So I scrub him down with the big towel (that kind of stinks… I’m not in charge of the laundry but would like to be), especially his big, hairy legs. But I also scrub his hairy chest and belly and the patch of hair over his area, which is still pretty new to his body.
Then he likes to walk to his room naked and jump in place or in the mirror, scripting from movies and tv shows and saying, “Will. AT THE MIRROR!” And smiling and saying, “That’s a great one” or “1, 2, 3, Say cheeeeese.” These are favorite scripts. I’ve probably done 1, 2, 3, Cheese over a hundred times (at least) with him.
The skill I have really boils down to mimicry. I can translate other’s mimicry and perform it. When I thought I was a great, child singer, no one said to me: You’re just a good mimic. Which is good because that would have been rude. It takes decades to put sorrow into your voice, and to know what you do and don’t believe.
One time at an economics summer camp that I attended in the 11th grade of high school at a local MN college, for some reason (probably my bragging) I was singing His Eye is On The Sparrow for a group of peers in our “cabin,” and while I tended painstakingly to technique, at the end of the plain looking girls asked me, “And do you believe that?” Or, “Do you believe that?” (his eye is on the sparrow)?
I forgot my answer but she definitely called me out. I would throw all that paternal individualistic religion hoo-ha in the compost bin. There’s no individual, invisible, male spirit with his “eye on me.” The only thing with its eye on me is my superior-self, the dream-self that negotates meaning between the sleeping, dead, past, the present (hopes and fears, plus sensory and mental blossoming), and even knows the future based on trajectory, memory of past lives, and intuition. The manager of the house, my body, my behavior, the one who secretly loves me unconditionally.