Susan Senator

Here’s why I hate competitive sports. In the end, it is all about winning. Winning by definition means somebody loses. Oh, right, so that next time they’ll try harder to be the one who doesn’t lose.

Except when you’ve got a person who only just recently figured out how to play a game, and why it’s a good thing to throw a ball away, so that it lands in one particular place as opposed to another. It turns out you have to do something with that ball if you catch it. Push it out of your hands, and everyone around you cheers. Get it to go into the basket, and they cheer even more. Plus, if you do that, you get to stay where you can run with your friends, rather than sitting still on the bench.

No problem, thinks Nat, or some facsimile thereof. For once in his life outside of classroom schedules and routines, he has figured out the gigantic puzzle of what people do together. (We think we are dealing with a puzzle, but let me tell you, the puzzle Nat has to put together of how things work makes our autism puzzle look like a four-piecer.)

But things must move forward, taking shape in one way and then, when that shape no longer fits its surrounding circumstances, breaking up and reforming. And so the Boston College Bobcats will no longer exist; now the entire team is being moved closer to Nat’s House because everyone on that team is actually from the House and not from around here. The rest of the Boston College team, the Cougars, which are Nat’s social group friends, will stay at BC, because they are from right here, Nat’s hometown.

But it is more convenient for the Bobcats to be a team close the where they live, near the House. The first problem with this is that we would have to bring Nat back to the House one day early for his practice; he usually stays with us until Sunday after lunch. Now he’d have to go back Saturday late morning.

The second problem is the real problem. In terms of skill, Nat belongs more with the Bobcats. Yet, Nat could conceivably stay and be a Cougar at Boston College with his social group friends. But wait: those guys are “higher functioning.” Would he be bringing the team down? And while functioning levels don’t matter when you’re going out together on a Friday night to mini golf and pizza, when it comes to Sports — well, let’s just say that the guy who only just learned, after three years, what to do with the ball — he maybe should be on a team of guys of “similar functioning levels” to him.

Knowing Nat, he will just go and play wherever he is sent. One more thing he has no control over, and yet one more thing he will most likely transition to with grace and smiles. I think it is exactly that which makes me feel that pierce of pain, which goes in through my throat and spreads into my belly. That right there is the disability: this passiveness, this inability to master your own fate, and the mute acceptance of what is done to you.

Maybe it bothers me more than it bothers him. This is also where I don’t know where I begin and where Nat begins. His disability binds him to me way beyond teenage rebellion years. I am told to let him go, but the fact is, he must always be somewhat attached to me, a thin, invisible umbilical cord that stretches across city borders and basketball courts.

The disability is also manifested by all the doors that close, heavily or quietly, in your face or over time. That preschool has no one-on one; time to find a special classroom. That classroom is academic, not vocational, but he can’t do academics anymore. Time is running out. He needs to learn pragmatics. No more history or science. Well, who needs that anyway…

Or — that team is inconveniently located, and besides, the kids are at a different level. Slam, move to the next doorway. Pick up the ball and run with it, run to where they will cheer. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how — or where — you play the game.