Nat keeps sounding tiny and spacey on the phone when he calls from the House. The staff told me that the only decent phone is in the livingroom, where there is a lot of noise. I keep forgetting to go and look at the phone setup when I’m there. When I bring this up to Ned, he talks about buying the House a really great phone, one which could be moved to a quiet room. That would be a solution to the specific problem of being able to hear Nat better, and get him into a quiet space. But to me there is a bigger problem: the way that I feel when I hear Nat’s little, spaced-out voice, which then makes me wonder how he is feeling.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m projecting, you might be thinking: You are layering onto these conversations your own feelings of missing him and self-doubt.<\/span> You would be partly right; how could I help but project? A friend told me recently that I always have at least one other conversation going on in my head, in addition to the “real” one in front of me. I had never thought of it in just that way before, but it is true: I will be talking to someone and hearing their words, processing and responding to them, but inside I will be imagining all kinds of other words, things I could say back but I am censoring, that might feel rude to ask, that might sound flippant, disrespectful, and all kinds of mean and nasty<\/a>. Irrelevant stuff, inaccurate stuff. I have learned over time to sort out what can be said and what should be thought, but I still do not get it right very often, as you can see by what I write on my blog. People ask me, “How can you put stuff like that out there?” And I feel a little proud but also a little hurt by it, because there is this implication that I’m maybe freakish somehow by being so — “brave,” they say — but what do they really think? (There I go again with my alternate conversation.)<\/p>\n Nevertheless, I wonder. People say, “Your heart will tell you what the right thing is.” I always feel frustrated by that one, as well. I listen to my heart, but with my ears which are connected to my brain. My brain interprets my heart; my heart can’t do anything but send out feelings (and blood and all kinds of warm and lovely). How exactly to you “listen to your heart?” That’s fucked. I think that to listen to your heart, you have to look at all the evidence in front of you — all of it — and<\/span> you also have to figure out why you always feel a certain way when confronted with this issue. You have to pay attention to both conversations going on, in other words.<\/p>\n So while all around me there is evidence of Nat thriving in the House: ability to converse mostly on his own (sometimes) on the phone, no outbursts, utter willingness to work, play, attend school, learn, and care for himself, there are also the things I see and feel here and there that are the other conversation in my head\/heart. I mean things like the spaciness of his conversation at times, the spaciness I see when he’s at home, the je ne sais quoi<\/span> I still need to hear about his day. The staff does everything right<\/span> in reporting to me: school day, goals accomplished, demeanor at different times, etc.<\/p>\n But then there is the feeling I have that I am not getting what I need here. There is something I am still not knowing, and then that ends up meaning that I don’t know what Nat is feeling about the whole thing. That, of course, is the puzzle piece I deal with these days. Not the “mystery of autism,” or the “need to solve the puzzle,” but the question of “how does Nat feel <\/span>about being in the Residences?”<\/p>\n What if the “evidence” everyone presents is just others’ interpretations, others’ attempts to draw a conclusion of success, and yet is not accurate in terms of how Nat is feeling?<\/p>\n <\/span>And the real question is: how do Ned and I weigh the benefits of Nat’s living outside our home (for there are many) with all of the unresolved, unknown doubts and feelings?<\/p>\n How do you resolve these kinds of Big Questions? How do you give credence to\/dismiss the other conversation in your head? Nat keeps sounding tiny and spacey on the phone when he calls from the House. The staff told me that the only decent phone is in the livingroom, where there is a lot of noise. I keep forgetting to go and look at the phone setup when I’m there. When I bring this up to […]<\/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-358","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-5M","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","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=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"