Susan Senator

I just had an experience which only underscores what I have always believed E.N. (Era of Nat. Prior to Nat, I was W.C., Without a Clue). Beware of dogma. I am not referring to religious dogma; I am referring to life dogma.

I have come to understand that in this life, there are no hard-and-fast rules, except the obvious Ten Commandment sort (don’t kill, don’t make people suffer, particularly your parents, don’t order take-out when you have a perfectly wonderful husband menu at home, even when they offer free delivery, etc. ). While my pay-your-dues parents taught me that you had to follow certain prescribed tracks to get anywhere in life, they also taught me that I could do anything I set my mind to. When I was unhappy at college in my freshman year — (I went to Trinity in Hartford; what was I thinking? Only that it was pink and green, blonde and blue-eyed, so beautiful to behold, I must have thought: sign me up for one of those yummy preppy boys! Only to find that they were only interested in dating me at night, if you catch my drift. I was not at all like their Mummies, or their sisters named Muffy or SuSu, so there would be no bringing ethnic old me to the fraternity dance. I think I realized my mistake at last when one young man turned to me at a party and asked, “What does your father do?”
What does my father do? Hello? Why would a fellow 18-year-old want to know something boring like that?
“He’s a high school principal,” I answered. The boy turned back around and did not talk to me the rest of the party. Wrong answer, I guess. ) — I told Mom how sick I was of the loneliness and the snobby people. I wanted friends, a boyfriend, a group of boys and girls who go get pizza together and stay up all hours in their p.j.s discussing Marx. Why didn’t I have that?
“So transfer,” she said.
And I did. That spring vacation I took the train down to Penn and stayed in a high school friend’s dorm room. I looked at College Green, strewn with all types: hippies, princesses, frat boys, internationals. It was like a mini city. I fell in love. I wrote my essay on the train ride home and was accepted a few weeks later.

You don’t like something? Change it. You don’t know how? Find out. Many things are possible in this crazy and wonderful world of ours.

I learned E.N. that rigid beliefs in how the world works are your obstacles. Take the example of writing my book. I had no formal training as a writer. I am not a journalist by background. I am an essayist who has learned how to write what newspapers want (sometimes). I know what I want to write and I find a way to get a newspaper interested. Those are the only rules.

In autism there is a lot of dogma. A lot of people will believe that there is only one real way to teach a kid, and that if you don’t follow that to a T, you will not succeed. Some letters to the editor in yesterday’s Worcester Telegram made that point about me. This mom said that I did not try Nat on The Diet, so therefore I cannot say that it would not help him/cure him. True. I never gave The Diet a fullblown try. I did some of it. Nat’s behavior did not change. In my heart of hearts, I do not believe that it is his diet that is making him behave autistically. I think it is the way the nerve cells grow in his head, the particular deficits of serotonin, etc., that affect his ability to make connections about things he experiences. Maybe if I didn’t believe that so rigidly, I would see an improvement in Nat’s abilities through diet. Maybe. But I have to make choices and I can’t do everything that holds out remote possibilities. That is my own dogma, and it may be that it is a pitfall for Nat. But maybe it isn’t.

Worse dogma is the practitioners who can’t see the forest for the trees. One such therapist practically forced me to buy a DVD player for the therapy room so that Nat could take mini breaks watching DVDs. I told her, “He won’t want to do that. He likes to watch DVDs by himself, when he’s all finished. He doesn’t want minibreaks.” But she insisted that we get Nat to do this her way, that it would be so much better to have him watch a little and it would be a great opportunity for him to learn how to comment on what he sees on t.v.
“He won’t want to do that,” I said, hating to be a wet blanket, “He hates talking during a show.”
But she insisted we try it.

Of course it failed. Nat insisted that he “finish work” before watching anything. He used wonderful language, trying to force the therapist to take the DVD out and put it away! His favorite DVDs, too!

Other practitioners have insisted on one thing or another with Nat, simply because he is autistic and we all know autistic people all respond one way to certain things, right? Like the way some of them insist on visuals for Nat. He is not visual. He listens. He is a listener to noises. He memorizes songs, inflections. He gets distracted by the least little sound. If one more practitioner insists on Mayer-Johnson this or that for Nat …! He can read, for God’s sake. He doesn’t need a stick figure drawing of a bathroom, thank you very much!

But other kids do. So I would never say, “Oh, that visual stuff is crap.” It isn’t for some.

If Nat needs to learn flexibility and fluidity to get along in this world, so do the rest of us. It is only fair.

Please: Curb your Dogma!!