Any other few allies our family might have are unrelated by blood. Blood may be thicker than water but we cannot brush our teeth with it. (That would be for vampires, if vampires brushed their teeth.)
An uncle of mine was once kind enough to say to my mother, ‘You are blessed and fortunate to have him as your son. With his condition, he walks the earth free from vice and wrongdoing. You will not have to worry for him in that sense.’
We greatly appreciated his words. We need to hear these things once in a while. It helps to remember that I am face to face with a blessed and special child when Jan has just turned the contents of my book cabinet inside out. (I am very serious about this.)
This uncle’s own toddler had nearly been diagnosed as a special needs child. My cousin Anna had been a typhoon of a tot with an alarmingly short attention span. She did not sound out words till she was about three or four years old. Anna looked no one in the face and was either unwilling or unable to interact well with others. I do not know if she even asked for food when she was hungry. Her parents had all but resigned themselves to the fact she was a special child.
She got better somehow. I am not quite sure what happened, as I had not been able to observe her closely at the time. All I knew was that one day, we got news of her talking and being able to stay seated where she was supposed to. Anna is now doing well in secondary school.
‘Jan can be better too,’ my determined aunt had said.
She encouraged us to follow what they did with my cousin. Not in a bossy kind of way, but with a gentle, sincere wish that Jan would be bestowed a miracle as well.
They had done all kinds of spiritual things. We did spiritual things for Jan too. But perhaps my family has a different lot of miracles in our bag. The most important part in doing spiritual things is having faith.
It made me wonder about the notion of fixing autism. It is not as though a person can simply pop a tablet to make autism go away. Just imagine such a thing.
‘Have him take two pills three times a day after food,’ the clever doctor would say. ‘It will stop the autism. Just let me know if he develops a rash.’
Autism is not a disease. Regular folks squash individuals with autism into places meant for common folks. It is like trying to cram lumps of dough into a jar filled with square biscuits. The dough can be forced into different shapes, but too much of it in the jar and the biscuits would break. Their sharp edges too would stick in the dough.
I know there are groups out there cheerleading for what they call “neurodiversity”. Neurodiversity is a bit like racial tolerance, only it is not about skin colours but different types of minds and brains.
Perhaps those who cannot tolerate autism would be called, not racists, but “mindists”. That is because they mind a lot of things.
These advocates of neurodiversity say that people with different minds should be treated equally. They declare they should be allowed equal opportunities at work and in education, and in their social lives. Autistic individuals should have the right not to be treated as if they are sick. They take offense at the idea that some folks are looking for ways to “remedy” them.
I do not really know what to think about “cures”. Perhaps I do not really like it. Jan has always been Jan. Autism is just a part of him. Now, if we just upped and took a chunk of him away, made it vanish, what would my brother be? He may not be Jan anymore. He may even lose his liking for lasagna.
One supposes the idea of “curing” means that the autistic person would end up “normal”. If Jan should end up as normal as the racists or mindists, I would not be in such a hurry to cure him.
I have not involved myself much with these neurodiversity movements. They certainly have the right to campaign, and I probably would have joined them if things had been slightly different.
It would be difficult for for me to argue for Jan to be treated like a completely regular person, yet at the same time ask for him to be excused from National Service or search for a special school or sheltered training centre with room to enrol him. This question is a puzzle box I have not yet solved. I have kept it on my shelf to look at, but will probably not open it for some time yet.
Still, would we opt for an “autism cure” for Jan, if one existed? Our father says there is no point in worrying about things that are not there. He thinks it is a waste of time.
Mother is a little more keen though. She might not mind a little something that can help, unless it involved taking Jan’s brain out, sloshing it in pickled herring juice and dipping it in tears of newt before putting it back in.
‘I would not ask for him to be a rocket scientist,’ she says (although I think he is closer to being a rocket scientist as he is now than if he were a regular boy). ‘I would be happy if he could just mind his toileting. And be able to tell us a little more about what bothers him sometimes.’
There is also the question of marriage. It seems the best thing one can do to be normal is to get married. There are stories of individuals with autism who get married, of course. They live happily ever after, even more so than regular people sometimes. My parents do not take the
