Susan Senator

Life is not a bowl of cherries, but you might be able to get a lot out of a bowl of strawberries. I’m sure you don’t know what I mean, but you will.

I am a writer, a word person, and an idea person, so I am obsessed with the way people say things and know things. Also, I am a mother deeply connected to my sons; put it all together and I am fascinated with what they know and how they express it. They are all three young men by now and so I have the added challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on with them while not seeing them all the time.

Most of the time I write about Nat, because it feels like Max and Ben, who are typically developing, are much more in need of boundaries and privacy.  Nat, who has intense autism, inhabits a different kind of territory, and appears not to be aware of what I am writing about him. I may be dead wrong about this stuff, however. Sometimes I explain to him about a book I’ve written or a television or radio program I’ve been on because of him, but I am not sure how to talk about with him in a meaningful way to him. I say stuff like, “Mommy is talking on the radio about you, Nat, because you have autism and you’ve learned so many great things so other people with autism want to hear about it. Like how you talk sometimes, and how you do Facebook, and how well you ride your bike. Or how you work at Shaws. A lot of people with autism can’t do that. So people want to hear about you. It’s because you do a good job,” I say, rounding it out, distilling the message in case I’ve said too much.

The questions I often ask are what does Nat know, what does he understand of the things going on around him? But today I was thinking, “Why now, and not then?” By this I mean, why is he showing understanding of that right now, but not all those other times? What happens in his mind that makes these circuits switch on? The people that believe in Applied Behavioral Analysis — and I believe in pieces of it, which in itself might nullify ABA which is an entire system, a stack of concepts and trials layered intricately one upon the other, built in a particular order so that if you work on only this part or that, you end up pulling out blocks as if in a big Jenga tower — the ABA-ists would say that Nat knows because of the repetition over the years. But I am not so sure. I of the Rube Goldberg-type junkyard mind, like to pick from this and that, the scrap heaps of ideas and creations, and find pretty things I can use in some way or another.

My mind works in great loops, with trains of thought broken, derailed, and then reuniting at the very end of the line. So how does Nat’s mind work? In the distant past I have imagined a radio with static, an impossible place filled with distracting noise, where you try to listen to the song but you just know it’s going to get knocked out again in the next moment. So you not only have a fractured song, you also have the tension of waiting for the interruption.

Lately I’ve been seeing Nat’s mind as being more like mine, maybe the way mine works in therapy. I’ve been in therapy for a very long time, on and off, mostly on, and the way it works for me is I keep learning the same things over and over, but each time deeper and clearer. So I wonder if it’s that way for Nat, where rather than a staticky radio — which implies just kind of a jumble of stuff in his head — it’s more like spiraling tunnels through the earth, mines and mine shafts that collapse sometimes. But each time he comes back up to the surface, he knows more.

I was thinking of this today that led me to consider Nat’s learning process. This morning, I gave him a bowl of strawberries. When he was younger I sprinkled sugar over them because — why not? But later, I kind of stopped because if he could eat them without sugar, then why not? And he never asked for sugar unless I offered it, and well, I just kind of stopped offering it, figuring it was probably better without all that sugar.

So he was eating the strawberries and looking up at me ever few seconds. But I was busy with something so I ignored him. I didn’t mean to. Then suddenly he got up from his chair and stood in front of me at the counter. He bent towards the sugar bowl but then stood up straight again, looking at me. “What, Nat?” I asked, really not knowing what.

“Sugar, want sugar please!” (I think he said please.)

“Oh, wow, Nat, that’s great that you told me! Wow, great!” I said, dumping a pile of sugar on his strawberries.

So why now and not all these other years? What does he suddenly know, that he asked for something like that?

I sure as hell don’t know.