{"id":568,"date":"2008-04-03T21:38:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T21:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog2\/2008\/04\/jenny-a-new-form-of-mccarthyism\/"},"modified":"2008-04-03T21:38:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T21:38:00","slug":"jenny-a-new-form-of-mccarthyism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/jenny-a-new-form-of-mccarthyism\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenny: A New Form of McCarthyism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I only saw a few of the clips from Larry King’s Jenny McCarthy\/autism show<\/a>. My thoughts and responses were popping and bubbling like a freshly opened can of Sprite.<\/p>\n

I understand that Jenny’s child improved in terms of his measurable skills. I am happy for her, and for the other children who finally do well in school and with peers. It makes your heart fill with joy to imagine that breathtaking moment when you realize that this is not going to be as bad as you thought.<\/p>\n

I know, because I have felt that swell of happiness for my own children. Just yesterday Ned came upon the shower curtain, completely twisted, wet, and mostly detached from the rod. Nat had been the last to take a shower. Something irritating clearly had happened during Nat’s shower, and there was evidence of some struggle. But there had been no screaming, no biting, no jumping. No outburst at all. All Ned found was the curtain hooks jumbled but put back in some attempt to fix it. Ned was touched by this fumbling effort, and by Nat’s self-control and independence. He asked Nat, “what happened in your shower?” And Nat answered, “Shower curtain is tangled.” Ned and I both felt our hearts jump up to our throats at this beautiful, complicated sentence. <\/p>\n

Oh, how Nat has grown and improved over the years! I have so many to thank: teachers who tirelessly teach him how to communicate his feelings, his thoughts. ABA for teaching us how to isolate occurrences and behaviors so that we can stay neutral and effective; Floortime for teaching us how to unite occurrences and behaviors so that we can stay connected to Nat; our families who love us and Nat and want only our happiness; a public school system that has paid top dollar for Nat’s education and never forced us to sue them; doctors for keeping track and titrating his meds to get them just right; Father Time, who has healed me in so many ways and answered so many questions I’ve had.<\/p>\n

Not that it’s a competition, but I would go head-to-head with Ms. McCarthy any day to illustrate the growth and wonder that is Nat’s life of eighteen years. I would not measure his success with standardized tests, academic grades, number of vocabulary words, or reading level, however. I would, instead, go by the goals and dreams I have developed over the years for Nat, and see which have come to fruition. You see, that is one of the big differences between Ms. McCarthy and me: Nat is almost all grown, and we have come to understand so much about him and autism in this time. Her child is young. There is so much more life to life, God willing. Children grow and develop so much, in a matter of days, or years. We never really know what causes a burst in development. Was it the food he ate or didn’t eat? Was it a new medication or removal of that medication? Was it your new attitude of hope? Was it winter turning to spring, a shift in the light? Was it joining a team for the first time and understanding what friendship is all about? How do any of us really know? Take it from an old mother: we don’t, and it doesn’t even matter what it was, only what it is.<\/p>\n

I and perhaps many other parents in the autism community do not think it is at all productive to fault, even by implication, parents who do not subscribe to the vaccine\/mercury theories. Or whose autistic children have not “recovered.” If that is what Ms. McCarthy is doing, then that feels to me like a new form of McCarthyism, a la Senator Joe<\/a>, or a new way of blaming parents, which is actually nothing new<\/a>. (Thanks to Stacey Levin for pointing out this irony.)<\/p>\n

It does not give me hope to read a book about such things; it makes my heart sink. Some kids do not “de-auticize,” NancyBea Miller’s<\/a> wonderful word. Perhaps some original diagnoses were too mild, or too intense. My theory is that many of the kids who appear more typical as they get older may not have been as complicated as the docs originally thought. And vice-versa. As Nat grew older, the doctors kept adjusting his diagnosis to more and more autistic.<\/p>\n

Ned and I have learned that growth is subjective, individual. That looking at your child as a sick person when what he has is a neurological disability was not helpful in our family. In fact, the moment that I let go of my sadness and fears about what was wrong with Nat<\/span>, many things came right. Things were tangled. And now they’re not as much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I only saw a few of the clips from Larry King’s Jenny McCarthy\/autism show. My thoughts and responses were popping and bubbling like a freshly opened can of Sprite. I understand that Jenny’s child improved in terms of his measurable skills. I am happy for her, and for the other children who finally do well […]<\/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-568","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-9a","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568","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=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}