Susan Senator

On New Year’s Eve, my son Nat drank some spiked lemonade and passed out after midnight — from exhaustion. His roommate John texted me the next day to tell me. I don’t know if there’s ever been a time in Nat’s 26 years of life when I have not been worried about him, but when I heard about Nat drinking, I was not. In fact, I was happy. This felt like a rite of passage. Nat partied with friends on New Year’s Eve.

I am not as odd as I sound. Nat has fairly complex autism, and so his social development has been hard-won. So even a night of drinking might actually be cause for celebration in my family.

Most of the time I need to read Nat without words,  through a combination of watching his body language, and listening to his very quiet unintelligible self-talking. When those strings of Nat-words first emerged in early childhood, they seemed to loop and coil in the air, playful, joyful, and we called it “silly talk” — a deceptively lighthearted term for something I actually feared like a disease. Surely this was a sign of deep disability, far worse than we had realized when he was first diagnosed. And it was a call to arms for me. I had to get rid of it, or he would never be okay.

This began the long hard era of battling autism. Nat’s teachers at the time exhorted us to engage him, as much as we possibly could, fight for him, keep the dragon at bay. Interrupt, channel, redirect these impulses of his, dam up the ever-opening tributaries of aberrant, abnormal behavior. Our kid had to be forced into normal, or else he would be lost.

And so, raising Nat was exhausting, debilitating — for me, but far worse, for him.  What is a child to make of always being given the message that he is off somehow, that every sound that comes out of his mouth had to be caught by watchful Mommy, and pummeled into something else?

I don’t know when the light went on in me, and I realized I could stop. “It” wasn’t working, anyway. Silly talk will out. And what a relief it was to finally understand that, and to let go of all the fighting. Suddenly I knew in my core that yes, my job as Nat’s mother was to help him be the best he could be, to educate him about how to act in the world, but my main purpose was to let him be who he was.  One way that I could help him do that was to arrange for him to live away from me. Since the age of 17 Nat has had roommates and caregivers, and I have been a visitor in his life. His teachers and caregivers took over from me the work of teaching him independence.  This positive development has been heartbreaking to me, though, because a part of me still fears that I am doing wrong, that I have to be the one in charge of who Nat is.

Every now and then, though, I understand that the truth is, I don’t. When I get happy news from John, who is also his caregiver, I realize that with or without “normal” words, Nat is his own man. I’ll drink to that.