{"id":1707,"date":"2010-08-31T07:23:34","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T11:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/?p=1707"},"modified":"2010-08-31T07:23:34","modified_gmt":"2010-08-31T11:23:34","slug":"in-my-mind-im-going-to-carolina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/in-my-mind-im-going-to-carolina\/","title":{"rendered":"In My Mind I’m Going to Carolina"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ain’t it just like a friend of mine,<\/em><\/p>\n

To hit me from behind.<\/em><\/p>\n

–JT<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the best friends I’ve ever had is someone I met in childbirth class, while pregnant with Nat.\u00a0 Merle was the second Southerner I’d met in my sheltered New England life, but I had never met anyone like her.\u00a0 Merle had a lot of knowledge stored up, about babies, but also about family, health, people, religion, organizations; you name it, she had something to say that would make me think.\u00a0 I didn’t always agree, but I did think.\u00a0 It seemed as if an entire structure of World View — (sorry to geek out here, but I mean in the Schopenhauerian, Weltanshauung<\/a> sense of world view, our inner, indestructible, and immutable perception and value system) —\u00a0 had been built around her, like a library of good sense and information. Whether it was particular to her family culture or had to do more with growing up in a small town in South Carolina, or just how Merle is, she could always match what was happening to a reference in her mental stacks.<\/p>\n

I was always surprised by her certainty.\u00a0 I was never certain about anything.\u00a0 And when our two babies came along (Quin and Nat), I was even less so.\u00a0 I had read Leach and Brazelton, but still I knew nothing.\u00a0 It was as if I were inventing motherhood.\u00a0 Merle, on the other hand, had only read Spock, but she knew right away about things like allergies, thrush, possible ear infections, and subtle shifts in behavior.\u00a0 Merle was the first one in my circle who mentioned a concern about Nat and how quiet and withdrawn he could be.\u00a0 When we found Nat hiding in the bathroom from Quin one day when they were around two, Merle told me she was worried.\u00a0 When I protested that Quin was just too noisy for him, and that our pediatrician was not concerned about all the other things about Nat, Merle’s response was, “Well, you are.”<\/p>\n

She knew that I was worried, and didn’t make a big deal out of it, even though it was a very big deal.\u00a0 Nat’s behavior, to her, fit right into an area of her wisdom, called, “The Doctor Needs to Do Something About This.”\u00a0 No value judgment, just certainty.<\/p>\n

I got angry at her.\u00a0 She backed off, but she was unfazed.\u00a0 All the while that I churned the idea in my head that we would no longer be friends because she just could not deal with her out-of-control kid who terrorized tiny Nat, and because of her cornball Southern Common Sense, Merle just eased off and continued to be my friend, just a little more quietly.<\/p>\n

I don’t actually remember how she responded to the news of our diagnosis.\u00a0 We just kept being friends.\u00a0 I do remember telling her a lot about my own relationship with my parents, which was very strained, on and off, at the time, and that Merle would listen with furrowed brow, and always say, at the end, “Yes but they’re your family, and they love you, so…”\u00a0 Another bottom line.\u00a0 Infuriating, and yet, when you found yourself in Merle’s orbit, it was very easy to find a place and go with the flow.<\/p>\n

I gave a talk the other day in North Carolina, for Autism Services of Mecklenberg County<\/a>, and there I met another Southerner, Ann,\u00a0 the organizer of my talk, who possessed a similar solid scaffold of wisdom.\u00a0 Just having lunch with her, I was blown away by the way she could dip into her stores of experience\/philosophy\/knowledge. She told me about how her son, who has Asperger’s, was once asked by fellow students, “Are you a snob, or just a retard?”\u00a0 because he did not talk to any of them.\u00a0 His response was “neither.”\u00a0 Ann told me that when she heard this, she told him how he had missed a teaching opportunity.\u00a0 He could have explained Asperger’s to them, enlightened them about how it is difficult for him to converse the way they did.\u00a0 She said (and I’m paraphrasing awkwardly here) “everyone gets one more chance, to be good.\u00a0 You explain, inform, enlighten, and maybe they’ll be sorry, or next time they’ll think.\u00a0 After that, if they do it again, they’re bad.”<\/p>\n

No dithering around with bullying and teasing theories, no wailing about the lack of adults present, no throwing up of hands.\u00a0 Ann could really think on her feet, and grab onto the teachable moment, while at the same time, treating her son as the responsible individual.\u00a0 And in doing so, this is what he has become.\u00a0 He just got back from a year in Americorps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ann seemed familiar to me while we sat there and ate and exchanged stories of our adult sons, even though we’d never met before Friday.\u00a0 I felt an odd ease and comfort with her, that feeling that I was being challenged and embraced at the same time.\u00a0 I realized at some point later that she reminded me of Merle.<\/p>\n

Quin and Nat are all grown up, and I talked to Merle the other day for the first time in a while.\u00a0 I don’t know why we lost touch.\u00a0 She told me how Quin was probably going to take a gap year from college, and how she thought that was a good idea, give him a little more time to grow up.\u00a0 She told me what her worries were, and what she would do about them.\u00a0 She listened to mine.\u00a0 My problems were not bigger or worse or anything, even though we have autism going on.\u00a0 When I brought that time up recently, when she’d told me what was what about Nat, she merely shrugged and said something like, “Well, I just knew he was too quiet.”\u00a0 Just like always, Merle knew what was what, and went on from there.\u00a0 I could feel my place in the universe, talking with her like we used to.\u00a0 Things fit softly together, and made inexplicable sense.\u00a0 Surrounded by her solid walls, I found I could really enjoy the view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ain’t it just like a friend of mine, To hit me from behind. –JT One of the best friends I’ve ever had is someone I met in childbirth class, while pregnant with Nat.\u00a0 Merle was the second Southerner I’d met in my sheltered New England life, but I had never met anyone like her.\u00a0 Merle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-rx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1707"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1710,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions\/1710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}