Charlie, as I have written before, is not mainstreamed. Indeed, mainstreaming and education in an inclusive setting are not among our goals for Charlie right now: Reading, writing, talking in clearer and longer sentences are. Charlie’s experiences in inclusive settings were not positive (in part, I think, due to poor planning and training of staff at one of his former schools). We would certainly be very glad to consider inclusion again for Charlie—-provided that the right supports and settings are in place—-but for the time being, he attends a self-contained special education, an autism, classroom, and he has never been so eager and peaceful-easy to go to school.

And while Charlie spends his schoolday not with the majority of the children in the school, he certainly is a part of a smaller community, that of his classroom—the students, his teacher, the instructors, therapists.

So today, when someone was not having the best of days, Charlie had to deal not only with his own challenges—some difficulty transitioning at the start of the day, for one thing—but with someone else’s. In a previous school, one student was very noisy regularly and Charlie was regularly distressed when the screaming (which happened several times in an hour) got to be too much. His teachers taught him to ask “I needa break” and he was able to go out for a short walk, or to work in a different room. The other student’s screaming did decrease but, whenever he vocalized his being upset, Charlie’s face would freeze in a frown and his shoulders tense, not only from the loudness but also from some deeply-rooted fear that he was the one who was doing what he ought not to.

I am very proud of Charlie today. He did throw a few potato chips at the end of lunch in something of a last-straw gesture when the other student began to get upset again. But he still sat at his desk and did his academic work, and, as I gather, got through a difficult situation better than most of the class. For a boy whose “behavior problems” a year ago had resulted in suggestions such as “maybe he should wear a helmet” and in us removing Charlie from his then-classroom, this is huge.

After a good walk around the neighborhood (during which Charlie got within eight feet of two Cocker Spaniels, which is the closest he has come to a dog in some time), we did one of Charlie’s favorite activities: We went out into the community, and specifically to the grocery store.

Once upon a time, Charlie would run, humming, up and down the aisles and touch every orange and apple Now he knows what he is to do in the store: He pushes the cart. He puts things in the cart. He stays with the cart and behind me and does not wander off. When he wants to look at something, he makes eye contact with me and says something like “I want” (I then give him some more language to say: “I want to go see something”). It happened that what he wanted today was the kind of frozen French fries that have become chained with him putting a dent in the wall of the rental beach house with his head back in August; I said “those gave us trouble! no.” Charlie stared at the glass cass with its rows of blue-bagged frozen potatoes and walked away. He pushed the cart to the check-out line and we waited.

It is true that a grocery store—full of food, colors, smells, so much stuff—-is an environment Charlie is highly motivated to be in; when he waits in line, he knows that he will “get something”—sushi, tonight—for his efforts. But Charlie has been doing equally well waiting at those places that have the patina of “Mom is trying to bore me to pieces”: the post office, the UPS store to send a fax, the non-kid section of the library as I browsed the shelves for a novel.

One hears often of the need to “integrate” autistic children and individuals into society. “Integrate” carries that sense that our children need somehow to “fit themselves into” society, that they have to do just what the “rest of us” do, and not anything inappropriate (like Charlie’s pacing and occasional verbal outbursts). Indeed, if they are at risk of doing too much that is inappopriate (tantrums, for example), they may be considered not yet ready to be “integrated into the community.”

But what about if we, “the community,” instead learned to change ourselves and our attitudes about what is “appropriate”—what if we indeed just let go of that notion of “appropriate” and rather tried to bring our autistic children into “the community” as much as possible, with the hope that others can learn to change? This is what we have done in taking Charlie regularly all over the metropolitan New York/New Jersey area, to Philadelphia and a Phillies game, to church, on cross-country airplane flights.

Charlie goes everywhere.

Earlier today on Autism Vox I noted that autism is everywhere. Indeed: The community has been infiltrated with autistic individuals.

Look and see.