As I was about to drive away after dropping a 100%-still-sleepy Charlie off at school (he covered his head with his blue blanket during our cross-town ride), one of his classroom aides came running out. I rolled down the passenger window. “Do you have another pair of shoes for him?” she cried out. Charlie had stepped into what the dog leaves behind and, as the aide said, “we’ve got carpeting.” “How about I come in and scrape it off?” I asked. “Maybe you could get him another pair of shoes from home?” (I mentally calculated that (a) that would take twice as long and (b) I still had to clean off the offending pair of black slip-ons.) “I can just clean them off. It’s fine, really.”

I sequestered myself in the girls’ bathroom (the aide gave me a pair of latex gloves), set to work with paper towels and liquid soap, and handed over the shoes before heading off to Jersey City. (Charlie had left his shoes all night in the black car, and must have stepped into the stuff around the train station? in his grandparents’ yard? in the empty lot where I parked the car across from his school?) I’m sure Charlie smelled it but what might he have or have not tried to say: “Shoe off. Hepp I need help. All done!”

The problem of the dog-smell shoe solved, Charlie had, as his teacher wrote, a good day. Today she began to intersperse discrete trial teaching with verbal behavior techniques and Charlie responded well to this mixture of more structured time at the table and mand training, in which the focus was on him verbally requested various desired objects–”turn on” music, “Farmer in the Dell tape.” Charlie enjoys talking and has always responded well to speech therapists; a big topic of conversation with him of late has been “Farm Fahm-lees! Farm Fahm-lees cow, say moo. Farm Fahn-lees s’eep.” “We don’t have Farm Families any more! Miss Tracy did this summer!” I’m supposed to say this and the result is Charlie’s crackerjack smile. “Mommy! I wahn Farm Fahm-lees. Farm Fahm-less chih-kenn. Buck buck buck.” ‘You’re too old for Farm Families!” “Too old! Too old Granma Granpa air-pane!”

I am hopeful that, with the verbal behavior teaching, Charlie will talk more in his classroom and with his teacher and aides, and have such high-spirited verbalizations. I do believe that it is not that autistic persons “do not want” to communicate but that their physical, neurological, or other make-up makes communication difficult. But the intent to reach out and connect is there as much as for you or me or anyone. If Charlie “withdraws” and does not respond to questions and has tough behaviors, it is to some extent because he is fed up that the world has been disregarding his attempts to get his point across, and that he stops talking or only talks about the things he’s interested in (“Californy!”) and even head-bangs.

I have only arrived at this understanding through too many afternoons and experiences hanging on to a wailing, flailing boy. There is something worse than seeing self-injurious behavior in one’s dear child; everytime I open and close our front door I’m reminded of why we have it, because of the Very Bad Day when Charlie broke the glass of the original with his forehead. There have been days when Charlie has been on the school playground and maybe he said “potty bahth-woom” and it was lost in the children’s clamor; what is sure is that he appeared at the end of the day in different pants than I had dressed him in, and with an odoriferous plastic bag in his backpack. I used to feel terrible that he was just like, well, a baby in diapers. I have come to believe, Charlie does try to tell us–he really does–and it’s an affront to his dignity to have an accident in public.

And so I’ve learned to say, hey, it’s not a problem. It’s a matter of soap, maybe a shower, clean pants, and we get on with it. A few years ago, when we had not been back in Jersey for a year, we had taken Jim’s parents out to celebrate his dad’s birthday. It was a freezing January night and my in-laws’ sedan stalled in the snowy roads. Jim was driving and doing his best to assuage his parents’ nervous words as we all heard the wheels spinning in the snow. While Charlie sat placidly, the tension in the car was rising and I blurted out “it’s not a problem.” My kindly in-laws were more than dubious (and showed it) and it seemed like a lifetime before Jim got the car to roll on.

Most of all, my son with autism is not a boy with a problem, nor himself a problem. He does require a highly specialized education and carefully trained teachers and therapists (like the one who came this afternoon; after all that good teaching, Charlie called for “bedtime” at 9pm). He does require a lot of ultra-positive feedback that he’s on the right track. He needs, most of all, an open mind and open ears to listen to what he has to say, and open arms to confirm how we all need him too.

Autism Children Science Health Parenting