Where I last left off in this blog, we had dipped our toes into the world of Facilitated Communication. Nat had gone to two sessions. He’d typed with the therapist’s hand under his wrist, his pointer finger poised at the screen and the stuff that came out was extraordinary, breathtaking.<\/p>\n
But in the end, I just could not believe in it. At the time, I wondered if I was betraying him, if this was his True Self, finally coming out. But the sentences just did not sound like him, other than in one or two instances. Yet I was to believe that just because a therapist (a person he’d only just met) supported his wrist in a particular way, that he was now typing what was in his soul, not simply the usual words shredded by his tongue. Never mind that he types independently on Facebook. No, this new approach was supposed to override all of that, as if all of his previous struggle to speak and communicate with us counted for nothing. The sentences were so long, not his clipped, economic use of only the necessary phrases. The first revelations were about how he loved me and how his brain was all there.<\/p>\n
Rather than making my heart soar, this was what made me have my doubts — not about his brain, or his love, but about Facilitated Communication. Why in the world would Nat think I needed reassurance — about his brain or anything else? Our relationship is healthier than that. We are bonded unalterably. We take our love for granted. No, he does not say “I love you,” of his own volition. So what? Why should I be so vain as to need to hear that from his mouth? Parents are supposed to be there for their kids, not the other way around. My two neurotypical sons rarely just blurt “I love you, Mom,” except maybe on my birthday or if I’ve been sad about something in relation to them. It’s a high when they do. But it’s not my focus. Hearing “I love you, Mom” is definitely soul-satisfying, but the more important thing is how are they doing\/growing?<\/p>\n
And from Nat, who has a hard time speaking: I cannot expect “I love you” out of him, except in echolalia.<\/p>\n
And as far as believing in his intelligence — I have nearly two decades of written evidence that I believe to my best ability that he is indeed competent and comprehending. Original, unique, loving, beloved. I don’t need a typewritten intentional testament to believe in Nat.<\/p>\n
****And if you are using FC and feel good about it, then take that and run with it. ****<\/p>\n
But now I gotta ask, why in the world would I disregard all of his labored utterances as well as his noisy silence out of some need to hear him sound like a Hallmark Card Man? When in fact, Nat is always communicating, always telling everyone what’s on his mind–it’s just that I don’t always know what he’s saying. But if a human being sits there and speaks in sounds that make him smile and laugh, he is indeed sharing with you that something is making him feel happy. If he sits there and then jumps up and starts flailing his arms and walking around really fast, you can assume that something’s on his mind that he needs to express. And so he is.<\/em> Or he needs to express it stronger, so he finds another way. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Okay, we are all works in progress.<\/p>\n There are at least three ways that Nat has always communicated: the tuneless phrases that answer our questions and tell us not to deviate from our promises, our schedule. The singsong self-talk that I believe is compressed or elongated meaningful words that he does not want to say directly, or cannot say directly. (“Mah-ee” is Mommy. “Wheels,” might be wheels, but it might be something else because it always<\/em> makes him laugh.) Finally, there are his physical actions, the way he listens with his whole body when we are talking about events to occur. The way he jumps up to do any favor I ask of him.<\/p>\n I felt so guilty at first for having doubts about FC. Here was Nat, typing sentences, using “you” and “I” correctly, writing about the past, the future. Using metaphors. How could I not support that?<\/p>\n I asked him if he wanted to go back. But after all the wonder we expressed at what he’d written, and all the praise, Nat took no time at all to answer, “NO.”<\/p>\n And that’s a word I can believe.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Where I last left off in this blog, we had dipped our toes into the world of Facilitated Communication. Nat had gone to two sessions. He’d typed with the therapist’s hand under his wrist, his pointer finger poised at the screen and the stuff that came out was extraordinary, breathtaking. But in the end, I […]<\/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-4688","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-1dC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4688","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=4688"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4691,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4688\/revisions\/4691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}