For most of us, our children are where we first remember what it is to love something unconditionally. And by unconditionally I mean loving someone without one single because. We do not love that person because they are beautiful or because they are kind or because they are successful or flatter us or like the same things we do. When we love someone unconditionally we love them simply because they are.
This is particularly so with newborns. The newborn offers us nothing to love but their presence. The infant cannot tell a joke or dance a jig; the newborn cannot offer us advice or listen to our problems; in fact, the newborn will not even return our smile. The newborn can breathe, eat, cry, and generate volumes of dirty diapers. And yet we love that newborn. We love that newborn for no reason whatsoever. It is a love without proof or explanation or profit. It is love for love’s sake, and in that moment we hold the newborn in our arms, we understand, if only for that moment, how this is actually enough. In an ideal world, in a Garden of Eden world, our relationship to our children, and our friends, and strangers, and ourselves would go unchanged. In an ideal world we would all continue to love ourselves and everyone around us simply for love’s sake. But by and by we all start doing stuff. We start walking and talking and making choices and expressing preferences. All the things we do create new conditions and we are not always happy with those conditions. Sometimes we don’t like the conditions we’ve created, and often we don’t like the conditions that other people have created. What to do, what to do? Sometimes the best answer seems to be to withhold love for the offending creator, even and particularly if we ourselves are that offender. That’ll teach us. This is why the children we say are on the autism spectrum are such great teachers. Most of these children do not, cannot, or maybe will not behave the way we believe a person should behave. They do things they shouldn’t – like hum and flap – or they don’t do things they should – like answer to their names. Fortunately, most of these children begin misbehaving, so to speak, at such a young age that it is hard for us, at least as parents, to throw them under the bus of withheld love. But what to do? By the time we are old enough to have children we have slowly and consistently trained ourselves to believe that love, for some reason, must be earned. The answer, of course, is obvious but not so easy. It is not so easy to undo the belief that love must be earned, that it is in fact quite conditional. “I won’t be treated this way!” we say. Or, “Show me you love me!” Such thoughts feel like a declaration of independence. They are quite the opposite. To love someone, whether that someone is your child on the autism spectrum or not on the autism spectrum, whether that someone is your lover or your neighbor, whether that someone is a stranger or yourself, means to see past the meaningless pantomime of behavior. Often, I confess, I do not see past this pantomime. I can become hypnotized into believing someone is an enemy by his behavior. But every time I have succeeded in seeing past the veil of behavior I have beheld the same presence I perceived in a newborn’s still, unsmiling, unfrowning face. That perception is my only freedom. It is the way out of Hell, an unreal world where every moment I am required to re-grow a garden that is already thriving around me.
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Many of the adult writing clients I work with suffer from the same challenge both my sons encountered when they were first given schoolwork: It’s hard to do something when you think you don’t want to do it. It’s understandable. Human beings are built to seek pleasure and avoid pain. We want to feel good. If we make ourselves do something we don’t want to do, we won’t feel good, and so we usually find reasons not to do it. It’s almost mathematical.
It took me a while to understand what was happening with my clients. They had sought me out because they had a book they wanted to write. When I asked them about their book, they would become animated. This book had their attention. It was a bright, interesting, delicious idea they wanted to share with other people. And yet they couldn’t seem to bring themselves to write. They were lazy, they’d say. Not disciplined. Scattered. None of this was true. These people are never broken; rather, they made writing the book a chore rather than a pleasure. They turned a new passion into something they should do or must do. My job as their coach was to help them understand that the pleasure in the doing is enough to motivate us to do it regularly. In fact, it won’t even be motivation; it’ll simply be what we want to do, the way we want to eat when we are hungry. Adults often have trouble believing this. We’ve taught ourselves to work, to chop wood because we’re cold not because we feel like swinging an axe, and to do the dishes because we need something clean to eat off of not because we want to put our hands in soapy water. Indeed, the daily business of being a successful adult human can sometimes feel like a triumph of duty of desire. When we lay down on our deathbed we can look back with satisfaction knowing we spent our lives doing what we were supposed to, not what we wanted to. In this way, I have to teach adults to think like children, who arrive on the planet knowing – as everyone once did – that the best reason in the world to do something is because it’s fun to do it. Unfortunately, schoolwork does not look like much fun to most kids, certainly not my boys when they were younger. And so they were being asked to do something against their best and most creative impulse, and they rightly rebelled. As Sawyer’s father and now teacher my job has been to help him find the pleasure in what often appears pleasure-less. This was not easy for me at first because I too have long believed that certain things are fun and certain things simply aren’t. But, being a responsible adult, I made myself do those pleasure-less things because they needed doing. This was a meager and dishonest view of my life. Pleasure exists within me independent of what I am doing. I need only find how that pleasure expresses itself in whatever I am doing, and lo! I am enjoying it. Teaching someone how to find pleasure in something that appears boring is a delicate business. No force can be applied; no carrot or stick should be insinuated. The pleasure must be allowed to appear effortlessly and naturally. Often, my best strategy is to do nothing at all, but instead to find the pleasure in watching Sawyer find his own way in to whatever he’s doing. The moment I stop enjoying this experience is the moment I cease to teach him anything; the moment I resume is when I learn again what he has come here to teach me. Standing on the brink of age fifty, I have never been happier with the work I am doing and the life I am living. But if you had told me when I turned forty that in ten years I would be writing a blog called No One Is Broken, and that I would be coaching clients and interviewing writers and editing a magazine and homeschooling my son, I would have thought you were describing the life of some strange Bill Kenower lookalike. At that time I still had one plan and one plan only – to become a novelist. I had been preparing diligently for that job since I was twenty-five. Having a firm and dedicated plan, it seemed to me, is how one made his way in the adult world.
Yet here I am. The path I have traveled over the last decade has been anything but direct, and has unfurled step-by-step as all my myriad plans came and went. What has surprised me most about where I am now is not the content of what I am writing, nor that I am homeschooling my youngest son, nor that I have clients, but that all the while I was living life as I thought it should be lived, life itself was preparing me for the life I would most want to live. My hours spent wondering idly about what makes me human prepared me for this blog; my early frustration with traditional schooling prepared me for homeschooling; and my lifelong preference for the confessional intimacy of one-on-one conversation prepared me for coaching. I do not think there is anything unique about my story. In fact, I think it is the only story. A human could no more meaningfully plan his life than a gardener could construct a flower molecule by molecule. The movement of life and the gravitational pull of love operate independently of any nearsighted human plans. This is a particularly poignant truth for parents whose children have been diagnosed on the spectrum. In many ways, our fears for these children are a reflection of the scripts we have unconsciously written for their future and our inability to perceive how the life we imagine for them can be reached from where they are now. But how exactly am I supposed to know what Sawyer’s life as he is living it right now is preparing him for the life he will lead if I could not know what my own life was preparing me for? All I know as I look at him is that the organizational properties of love, the constant and faithful guidance of preference and curiosity, are as operative in him as they are in me. Life excludes no one. Life abandons no one. This is not an indifferent game won or lost by the toss of some genetic dice. Which is to say, in those cramped and dark hours when I begin to worry because I do not know how he will be okay somewhere out beyond the limited horizon of my perception, I must remind myself that it was never my job to know how he would be okay but that he already is okay. This I can always see if I choose to look for it. It comes disguised as whatever’s happening at exactly that moment, life so ordinary it is easily unrecognizable for what it always is. Our decision to homeschool Sawyer was the singularly biggest change my wife and I instituted in his life. To be clear, the middle school Sawyer was attending at the time we pulled him out was doing everything possible to support him. The teachers cared deeply for him and were willing to make at times startling accommodations. It did not matter. The social environment of school coupled with the logistics of a few adults overseeing a crowd of children became too challenging to ignore. I mention this because I do not believe it would have been impossible for Sawyer to find his grounding at school. I do not believe it is impossible for anyone to find their grounding, find their calm and their voice and their willpower, in any single environment. But it is certainly more challenging in certain environments than others. It is easier to feel at peace while at home sitting in your most comfortable chair talking to the ones you love than hiding in a ditch in the middle of a warzone. School, for a variety of reasons, had become a kind of warzone for Sawyer, and so we brought the soldier home. Gradually, this change of environment had a settling effect on him. It was the first time I perceived that my greatest influence in Sawyer’s life, the one thing I could actually do, was adjust the environment in which he lived, to make it friendlier, calmer, and more inviting. He was not a car whose hood I could lift to adjust the wiring and change the plugs. His thoughts and feelings remained entirely and absolutely his own, a lesson I continue to learn every day. The environment, meanwhile, belonged to all of us. Of course, as soon as I recognized this I began looking for other environmental changes. Should I buy a drum set to encourage him back into music? Should I buy him a new computer or simply remove all computers? Should I paint his room, make him more smoothies, sign him up for a social group? All decent enough questions, and all the answers would have their own minor effects. Yet none of these changes to Sawyer’s physical environment, including pulling him out of school, would have as significant an effect on him as the changes I made to the environment within myself. I am not Sawyer’s whole world, but I am wholly responsible for my relationship with him. To love him without worrying about him, without requiring him to behave this way or that way, is to enter the very environment we are all seeking to create. What we call autism is nothing but a search for love. It is very easy to mistake it for something else, to call it a problem or even a disease. What a common misperception. Even war is a frustrated expression of our search for love, a belief that if only we killed everyone who disagreed with us, who challenged us, who looked or prayed or thought different than us, we would know peace, love’s resting position. I must admit that there are times I resent Sawyer for requiring such unconditional love. I don’t always feel up to it. Just drink the damn smoothie and be okay. Yet I have never been anything but grateful for those moments when I have found unconditional love within myself. To find it is to end, if only temporarily, my ongoing war with life, to find allies where there had been enemies, to find acceptance, in fact, for all that there is, including me. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
If you’re raising a kid on the spectrum, it is probably a good idea to take a moment tomorrow (Thanksgiving, 2014) and acknowledge how thankful you are for them, quirks and challenges and all. In fact, you should probably be thankful specifically for those quirks and challenges, though I am sure there have been many, many days and nights when you, like I, have thought, “My life would be immeasurably simpler if only he would just do what everyone else does.”
But when I think of Sawyer in this way I’m reminded of the hundreds of rejections letters I received during the twenty or so years I spent writing novels I could not sell. At the time, I was not thankful for any of those rejection letters. In fact, I hated them. Because of them, my life was incomplete; because of them, I had failed at the one thing at which I most wanted to succeed. Except were it not for those letters, I do not know that I would be doing what I am doing now. I love what I am doing now, which is writing and talking about doing what you love instead of doing what you don’t love or even what you sort of love. Spending twenty years writing novels you don’t fully love is a great way to learn why it is so important to write what you do love to write. Those rejection letters spoke to me in the only language I could hear, and gradually guided me to where I am now. The same is true of Sawyer. What has made Sawyer’s life so challenging is his intense desire not to do something simply because someone else wants him to. I share this desire, but it is more acute within him than it has ever been within me. It would be a lot easier, I suppose, if Sawyer would just treat his mother and me like the captains of this domestic ship, but he has been mutinous from day one by asking over and over, in both word and action, “What’s in it for me?” If this sounds selfish, it is often is, and I have hated that selfishness with the same ferocity with which I hated the rejection letters. But that selfishness is only an expression of his and my and everyone’s confusion. It has always been easy for me to step over some invisible line and begin to appease or imitate or conform, slipping into a search for acceptance rather than connection. Once you I accepted myself, connection occurs immediately. The moment I reject myself, all my connection to life is lost. So yes, I am thankful for Sawyer and his stubborn desire to know what’s in it for him. If you want to learn something, go teach to it to someone else. The line between rejection and acceptance is thin, but the results are as defined as life and death. As Eckhart Tolle pointed out, death is the opposite of birth, not life. Life has no opposite. To be thankful for rejection letters and the spectrum and all things unwanted is to acknowledge life as it is instead of what I believe it should be. In that moment, the battle with life is over, and like every exhausted soldier I am grateful that I can return home to a warm meal with those I love. |
William Kenower
I am the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence, and Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. Learn more here. Archives
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