by Anne Cushman
One afternoon, I have to separate him and Sonya after she persists in repeatedly interrupting him while he is “focused listening” to music. I invite her to join me and her mom in the kitchen, making cookies. He stays in his playroom, listening to Depeche Mode and intently tracking the exact minute and second that the synthesizers transition to voice.
After ten minutes he rejoins us in the kitchen. “I’m sorry I got mad,” he tells Sonya. “I do love you. I just needed a little time alone.”
I think of all the times those simple words—from me, or from someone I was dating—could have transformed a relationship.
Maybe we all could have used a little more social skills training growing up.
* * *
—
Forest: “How do you spell the number eight?”
Me: “E-I-G-H-T.”
Forest (long pause, before landing on the culprit he’s heard is to blame for all that is wrong in the world): “Did George Bush decide that?”
* * *
—
Two weeks before Forest starts kindergarten at the local public school, Teresa runs a battery of tests and tells us that all his results have normalized—he no longer needs sensory integration training. He is able to sort out foreground and background sounds, she told us. His inner ear has stabilized. His sensory sensitivities are all within the normal range.
Forest also graduates from his social skills group. Instead, his kindergarten offers him an individualized education program that includes social skills training: a couple of times a week he meets with a group of other boys from his class and plays Chutes and Ladders or Candyland.
Wonderfully, reassuringly, no one seems to think his challenges are anything dire or insoluble. The school psychologist writes out goals in specific terms:
Annual Goal: Forest will use “eye gaze” to gain perspective of his communicative partners following a visual/verbal prompt with 80 percent accuracy in 4/5 trials. (My translation: He’ll look at people when he talks to them.)
Annual Goal: Forest will demonstrate his ability to engage in a conversation using his skills of answering and asking questions related to the given topic with peers at 75 percent accuracy in 4/5 trials given minimal adult cues. (My translation: If everyone is talking about what’s for dinner, he won’t start lecturing us about who is currently the tallest person in the world.)
Forest makes a new friend in kindergarten, a little boy named Ethan, who is also passionate about music. At recess they sit in a corner of the playground and talk about space travel and their favorite songs instead of playing on the swings. When Halloween comes, Ethan dresses up as Sheryl Crow and Forest dresses up as a giant pumpkin. They go trick-or-treating together—and I realize with relief that Forest will be able to find his tribe wherever he goes.
Halfway through the year, the psychologist who had first diagnosed him with Asperger’s visits his class to observe him. In her notes she describes his politeness, his eagerness to please, his prodigious memory and vocabulary, his musical abilities. She notes that when the “cleanup” music, a Mozart concerto, began to play, he stopped and stood in the middle of the carpet, transfixed.
“He has outgrown his diagnosis,” she tells me when I meet with her. He no longer fits the criteria for Asperger’s syndrome; instead, she now believes that he is simply “gifted.”
“Gifted kids develop asynchronously,” she tells me. “They are very advanced in some areas while lagging in others. I recommend you do some reading about the unique needs and challenges of raising a gifted child.”
A new label, a new diagnosis, a new set of things to research and fret about. But he is still the same child. The system is just viewing him through a different lens.
Good news? Bad news? Who knows?
There are still challenging moments. For instance, the time I am driving home from the beach after a long day, and Forest starts screaming in the back seat because I take the Sir Frances Drake exit instead of the Central San Rafael exit for our route home, and so we don’t get to drive past the Artworks Downtown banner that stretches over Fourth Street between C and D. He is shouting that we need to do the whole trip home over again—starting all the way back at Muir Beach, forty-five minutes away—so that he can see that banner. “Use your flexible brain,” I say over and over again, the way the occupational therapist taught me. But Forest keeps shrieking until finally I lose it and shout back—“No! We are not going back to Muir Beach! It’s bedtime!” Whereupon he looks stricken, bursts into tears and sobs, “You are supposed to be my friend.”
But these episodes are farther and farther apart.
In the fall of second grade, one of my fellow moms tells me about discipline problems the teacher has reported with her son. He’s been sticking his leg into the aisles to trip people, stealing the cheese puffs out of other kids’ lunches, peering under the doors of the bathroom stalls while other kids pee. “You’re so lucky,” she sighs. “Your boy is so easy.”
* * *
—
Had Forest been misdiagnosed initially? Or had he just fundamentally changed as a result of the interventions he’d received?
One of the central teachings in Buddhism is anatta—generally translated as “no-self,” or, more accurately, “not-self.” It means that the I we perceive as fixed, solid, and permanent is an illusion. It is not an entity—I is simply a convenient term and construct for an ever-shifting phenomenon that emerges moment to moment as part of a complex web of what Buddhism terms causes and conditions—our ancestry, the weather, what we ate for breakfast, what time our parents made us go to bed when we were a child, the countless elements and experiences that make up a life.
As a parent, this can be liberating news: Our child’s identity is not fixed. It’s changing faster than their baby teeth fall out. Their bones and their minds are both growing, shaped by what they do, what they eat, what experiences they have.
They are fluid, like a river.
Every child is a bundle of gifts and weaknesses that are intimately entwined. Sensitive hearing makes a child scream and melt down at a preschooler’s birthday party—and can be the gift that later helps that child compose a symphony. The wild child who won’t sit still in class has the adventurous spirit that may send her deep into the Amazon to work with native healers and bring back their wisdom about plants.
The journey to growing up is not a freeway going from Los Angeles to San Francisco by the fastest route. It’s more like following a meandering back road up the coast, where maybe you’re stuck for miles behind a hippie van painted with flowers and vines. Maybe you decide there’s no hurry after all, and you pull over to picnic on a beach where you pluck wild huckleberries, sweet and tart at the same time.
I do know that at times it is hard to remember the gifts that lie nestled inside our human brokenness, just waiting to be loved awake. But I also know that they are there.
* * *
—
Near the end of second grade, we take Forest to be tested at a school for gifted children. It’s a tiny school—just forty kids from kindergarten through eighth grade. Students are grouped in multi-age homerooms where they can socialize with their age peers but work at their own pace: if a kindergartener is ready to tackle the eighth-grade math book, the teacher helps the child do it.
“Being gifted is not the same as being academically successful,” one of the founders tells Forest’s dad and me. “Gifted kids often do poorly in school because they are bored or lack social skills.” So this school emphasizes collaborative skills and project-based learning, and the teachers understand that different kids develop different parts of their brains at different paces.
Forest’s dad and I watch from the back of the room as the head of the school puts Forest through a battery of tests. She recites a series of numbers to him and asks him to repeat them back in reverse order. (Trying to do it along with him, h
is dad and I find that our ability stops at about six numbers; Forest effortlessly remembers ten or more.) She reads stories aloud to him and asks him to tell them back in his own words—he recounts them back almost verbatim. They teach him a new symbolic alphabet and ask him to read and write short stories in it, which he does with ease, on the spot.
A week later, they invite in his dad and me to give us the results: a grad-school-level capability of cognitive reasoning, near-verbatim ability to recount stories from memory, a stratospheric IQ. “He is profoundly gifted,” says the school founder.
Good news? Bad news? Who knows? A few years earlier, the verdict was that our son’s differences meant that he was probably never going to have friends, might not even be able to live on his own. Now they apparently mean that he is probably going to invent a time machine or save the planet from global warming.
Was our son gifted? Or was he damaged? How about me? How about his dad? Was it good news or bad news that we had gotten married, and then divorced? Are we failing at our lives or succeeding?
Through our journey on the spectrum I was learning that life is far too complicated to fit into the tidy diagnoses we give it.
* * *
—
Here are some of the things I didn’t know as Forest started third grade:
Forest will thrive in his new school. He will fall in love with his teacher, who will wrap him in an acceptance as warm and maternal as her embrace. He will make a new best friend, who will become like a brother to him. Vaughan will come with us on camping trips, ski trips, outings to the beach. They’ll have sleepovers at each other’s houses, with pancake breakfasts in the morning. They will invent their own role-playing game, called Epic Hamster Wars, and spend hours illustrating a card deck for a Pokémon-style game they dub Creature Cubes. Forest will write novels and self-publish them through CreateSpace. He’ll demonstrate Fibonacci’s sequence for a Pi Day celebration. He’ll play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’ll get a black belt in mixed martial arts.
His childhood diagnosis—“on the spectrum”—will slip to the back of our minds and melt away.
As he grows up into a warm, kind, and sociable middle-schooler, I’ll forget that I ever imagined it would go any other way. I won’t hug myself in delight to see him playing in a mountain creek with his best friend, or marvel when he starts playing guitar in a rock band. When he hits high school, it won’t surprise me when he gets his first girlfriend, or is elected class representative to the student council, or writes and directs a one-act play.
I’ll just watch him growing like a plant, or a yoga pose—from the inside out.
And one day when Forest is about eleven, we will sit at our kitchen table looking back on who and how we used to be.
He will say to me, “Some kids are born already understanding what’s going on, what the basic rules are of this planet and this whole game of being a human. I wasn’t like that. It took me a long time to figure it out.”
“Same with me, Forest,” I will tell him. “Same with me.”
SUTRA 9
The Big Questions
• • • • •
“DID THAT CHICKEN want to die?” Forest asks me. He’s five years old. We’re sitting at our kitchen table, and I’m gnawing on a rotisserie chicken drumstick I bought at Good Earth. He’s eating cheese ravioli.
“I don’t think anyone gave it a choice,” I confess.
“What did it think when it saw the farmer coming to kill it? Did it run away?”
“It probably tried to.”
Forest looks at me thoughtfully. “Was its mother sad?”
Forest was three when, waiting in line at the meat department at Whole Foods, he became a vegetarian.
His qualms about flesh eating had started a few days before, when he learned that while soy burgers were made from soybeans, salmon burgers were not, in fact, made from salmon beans. “Not a fish that swims in the sea!” he had laughed in disbelief when I explained what the source material really was. And then, concerned: “How do they get it to stop swimming in the sea and be a burger?”
On our next grocery run, he perched in the basket of a heaped shopping cart, gnawing on a sesame-seed bagel and surveying the items arrayed behind the glass at the meat counter.
“I’d like a pound of ground turkey,” I told the white-aproned clerk. Forest spun around in his seat. The week before we had admired wild turkeys waddling through the tall grass at Spirit Rock Meditation Center—their red wattles, their curved beaks, their drooping tail feathers. “Turkey? Where??” he asked.
“Um…right there.” I gestured, reluctantly, at the heap of shredded raw meat. He leaned over and stared at it, then looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean, ground???” he asked.
These days I cook mainly vegetarian food at home, and until recently Forest has been gracious about my occasional carnivorous moments. But lately he’s been getting in my face about it. Now he presses me for details about how the chicken died.
“Somebody probably cut off its head,” I tell him.
“Didn’t that hurt the chicken’s feelings?” he asks.
I’ve explained to him that life endlessly devours life, that eating usually involves killing another living thing, and that the important thing is to do it with gratitude and respect. I tell him that different people make different decisions about what kind of living creatures they’re willing to eat. Even Buddhists have differing opinions on how to interpret the nonkilling precept, with sincere practitioners, including monks, running the gamut from vegans to omnivores.
“You can eat the fruit of a tree without killing it,” he argues.
Am I going to have a little Jain in my home, living on fruit and nuts and wearing a white mask so he doesn’t inhale any insects?
Even baking bread raises tough questions when he learns that yeast is a living organism that gets killed in the oven. “Does yeast know it exists?” he asks, frowning. “Does it think, I’m yeast! And I don’t want to die!?”
On vacation, he melts down when he sees me smash a giant cockroach with my flip-flop in the bedroom of our beach house. “That cockroach wanted to live!” he sobs. “And now they’re going to put you in prison.”
“Sweetie, they don’t put people in prison for killing cockroaches,” I explain.
“But they put the man who shot John Lennon in prison!”
I clarify that John Lennon was a Beatle, not a cockroach, and that people usually do try to get rid of cockroaches in their homes because they carry germs and could make people sick.
“Does get rid of mean ‘squish’?” he asks.
“Sometimes,” I admit (although I remember that once on a retreat I met a Thai monk who persuaded ants to leave my tent by chanting the Heart Sutra). After thinking for a while, Forest asks, “What does get rid of George Bush mean?”
When it comes to unanswerable questions, chickens and yeast and George Bush are just the beginning. Learning to read and write, Forest insists that we google a question he laboriously types into the computer himself, with me helping him sound out the words: “Why do people kill other people?”
I tell him you can’t find answers to that question on the Internet (although our search does bring up a slew of articles on gun control). In the following months, we revisit the topic of war and violence again and again. We talk about ignorance, and pain, and starvation. We talk about battles to control resources such as food and water. We talk about people who believe that if you’re hurt, hurting someone else will make you feel better; and people whose mommies and daddies weren’t able to teach them that it’s always better to use your words.
But every answer leads to more questions. Why didn’t their mommies teach them? Why don’t we send them food instead of fighting them? “It’s mainly guys who kill people,” he says over dinner one night.
“Why do you think that?” I ask
.
“Because when I see the newspaper and there are pictures of wars, it’s almost always men. Why do men fight wars and women don’t?”
And then there are the questions that cut right to the heart of the mystery of existence itself. Scraping up the last of the ice cream out of his bowl one evening, he asks me cheerfully, “When I’m dead, will I remember me???”
Those megaquestions tend to come at bedtime. “Where did the earth come from?” he asks as we snuggle under his comforter and look up at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on his ceiling. “Where did the very first people come from? Will people still be here to watch the earth when it dies?”
I offer a two-minute summary of evolution and the big bang. “But why did apes start turning into people?” he persists. “And where did all the stuff that was in the big bang come from?” And then a few minutes later: “That explosion—what was it called? The big bang? Is that what made San Rafael?” (This nearby city, though relatively small at sixty thousand people, clearly feels galactic in scope to him.)
When he hears about Forest’s existential queries, my eighty-three-year-old father—a Catholic, retired Army general—sends me an email: “Why not just tell Forest that some people say that God made all things, visible and invisible, and leave it at that? Then he can work out the rest as he goes along.”
Just refer the inquiries up the chain of command to the ultimate Commander in Chief? I resist the idea. But as the questions keep coming, I have to admit defeat. I swim in a sea of mysteries. Every few minutes Forest confronts me with my own ignorance. I do not know how plastic is made. I do not know if the earth always had a moon. I do not know how computers print or how film is developed or whether yeast poops. Many of the things I used to know I no longer remember—how to solve quadratic equations, the reasons for the War of 1812, the difference between mitosis and meiosis. And many of the black-and-white things I used to be sure of—what good people are supposed to eat and not eat, why Forest’s daddy and I are no longer married—have now dissolved into shades of gray.