Susan Senator

The first time we ever gave Nat hot dogs, he was around 8 months old. After eating them, he crawled two quick laps around the kitchen. I remember the fast slap-slap sound of his little fat palms hitting the floor. Ned and I were so impressed by his feat, that we laughed and laughed about it, and we knew that this must mean he loved hot dogs!

The kitchen laps may have also been early stimming, the earliest form of Joyous House Stompies, which is the adult version of Hot Dog Delight. When I realized that, the other day, I had a little shiver, that old familiar, “Huh, little did I know what that sweet little HDD really meant…AUTISM” [cue minor key theme, Beethoven’s 5th or something] I’m such a drama queen! Why does every gorgeous little memory always have to play that particular tape in my head? Who actually gives a shit that this was early stimming? (Well, I do, because it is comforting to connect the dots, to put together images of the Nat I Know with the Baby Nat I Wondered About. But other than that comfort, I have a lot to say about this.)

Yes, it is important to recount those days, those moments, where something profound was happening, where your life changed forever. But it is also important for me to learn how to let that go. It gets to be like a big lump of undissolved sugar at the bottom of my cereal bowl: kind of intriguing and bad-but-good to dive into, but then, totally a downer. If you keep diving into that particular synapse stew, pretty soon that will be the only track your mind can take.

I was watching some of CNN’s Autism: Unraveling the Mystery this morning and I was thinking one thought nearly the entire time: “Can TV ever stop using the cliche of the mystery when it talks about autism?” No, what I was really thinking was for the parents on the show: “Give it time.” I found myself wishing that we could have been on that show — yeah, sure, it was fun being on CNN and the Today Show two years ago with MPWA — but what I really liked about it, was that they used the message of my book, of our family! They did not simply zero in on our grief or our expenses, but they looked at a family being a family, even with great challenge going on at times. (Don’t forget: Just A Family was my title of my book; it was my publisher who changed it to Making Peace With Autism, for better identification as an “autism book.”) For the Today Show segment, we had 15-year-old Nat running at the track, helping me bake cornbread. We had Ben on the computer and Max juggling. We talked about what was hard, and we also talked about how far we’d come — as a family, not as Nat’s Data Takers.

What I want for those young families just getting into the autism game is to understand that growth happens. For all of you. That eventually you will realize that you are a family with concerns other than autism, other than hoping your kid will “catch up” with all the others. There is a certain degree of living in the moment that occurs once you let go of some of that. And it is the living in the moment that gives you your sense of family, of having a life.

As Sigmund Freud may have said(?) “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes a hot dog is just a hot dog.