When I began writing No One Is Broken I assumed I would be writing about how my wife and I helped our son Sawyer, but I ended up writing a book about how helping Sawyer helped me. Specifically, how helping him taught me what success is and what it isn’t and how not to let my life become undone in the pursuit of it.
This turn surprised me at fist, and I made what is a common mistake with many writers: I resisted where the story wanted to go. My success or lack thereof seemed like such a small story, whereas whether a person could or could not be broken was a very big story. But a good story is stubborn in its direction, and by and by I yielded to the momentum. Once I did, it made perfect sense for this story to be about success, if for no other reason than most of the kids diagnosed on the spectrum are boys. Men’s relationship to success is largely suicidal, by which I mean we will surrender our value and our happiness to something that appears to exist outside of ourselves, some phantom finish line we must cross to know that our life was worth living. Without success, our life becomes a kind of failed experiment, an idea that in the end proved not to be worth pursuing. It is a terrifying view of the world, yet it is so pervasive that men simply do not talk about it. Talking about whether or not we want to succeed would be like talking about whether or not we want to eat. Boys on the spectrum, meanwhile, exhibit behaviors not commonly associated with success, either romantic or professional. Success, after all, appears to have everything to do with the external world, with school, and jobs, and other people, all those things not within us where our imagination and thoughts and emotions dwell. The child on the spectrum seems overly focused within himself. How can anyone have success, and therefore know actual adult, worldly happiness, unless he learns how that world outside of his imagination works? It was a good question, and as I watched Sawyer fail or maybe simply choose not to jump through any of the hoops children his age are expected to jump through, it began to occur to me that children we say are on the spectrum are actually focusing their attention exactly where success exists. There is no success outside of our imaginations—not in anyway. Poll a thousand people and you will be given a thousand definitions of success. We invent the finish line, and then celebrate or mourn when we do or do not cross it. What we have come to call success is nothing but a misnomer for happiness. No one actually wants to succeed, they only want to be happy, just as no one actually wants to be beautiful or married or rich or strong or thin or have a full head of hair. We only want to be happy, to know love from the inside out. There is absolutely nothing else to want. To find what you love and share it is success, but you cannot find what you do not see. To wander the world searching for success, writing book after book, going on date after date, working job after job, is like shopping for a piano that will write its own sonata.
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A couple years ago my son Sawyer decided that he hated all religions. Religions were an example of what was wrong with the world. Religious leaders were always telling people how to live their lives, and people who believed in different religions invariably thought that the best way to settle their differences was to kill one another. My wife and I tried pointing out all the good that religious thought and religious people had brought about in the world—the end of American slavery, for instance, was spearheaded by some of the North’s most fervently religious men and women—but Sawyer would have none of it.
So I decided to go to the source. As a part of our homeschooling we cracked open The Bible, page one, In the beginning. I hadn’t thought of it until rereading the creation story with Sawyer that everything God creates, from the light and the dark to the things the creepeth and crawleth, is good. The whole of creation, top to bottom, day and night, fish and fowl—good. Then we came to Adam and Eve and The Tree. I seemed to recall that The Serpent convinced Eve to eat from The Tree of Knowledge. Growing up in a secular family, this made sense to me, as it mirrored what I perceived as the public debate between scientists, who valued knowledge, and religious people, who valued faith. Yet in the version of The Bible from which Sawyer and I read it was not eating from The Tree of Knowledge that got Adam and Eve booted out of Eden, but The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. This made perfect sense to me. As soon as I divide the world into good and bad I have created a threat from which there is no rational escape. If I divide the world into good and bad, then anything could be bad, including me. Which is exactly what happened when I started seeing Sawyer’s pretending and humming and flapping as a problem. Now this behavior was no longer simply something he was doing, but something bad he was doing. I was out of The Garden, and I hated it. Everything of value grew in The Garden, but nothing grew in the broken world outside of it. All I wanted was to be back where things could grow, including my son. In this way, Sawyer became a kind of portal into what I most wanted in my own life. To judge him was to be excluded; to love him was to return. I am in and out of that garden every day. Meanwhile, I have noticed that Sawyer no longer sees religion as the source of all that is wrong in the world. He has moved on to other issues. For a time both Obama and The Tea Party were the problem. Now it’s ISIS. I don’t know what it will be tomorrow. No matter. He’s looking for his own gate into a world where he need never worry again that what he is doing is wrong. When Sawyer was in elementary school, his teachers often said that he couldn’t focus. While all the other children in the class were giving their attention to their work, his invariably drifted into his imagination. This was true even after he agreed to do the work. The problem was so consistent that it appeared nearly mechanical in nature, as if there were some powerful force within his mind toward which his attention was drawn as surely and as predictably as a nail is drawn to a magnet. I did not like this story of how Sawyer couldn’t focus, but it was hard to disagree with. It is difficult to have a relationship with someone whose attention seems pinned to the walls of his imagination, whether that relationship is between two friends, a teacher and a student, or a father and a son. My attempts to grow my relationship with Sawyer were nearly always thwarted by this magnetic pull that was stronger than my words, and stronger also than my punishments or rewards. It was so tempting in my most frustrated hours to simply lay the blame on this boogieman called Autism. There is no relationship because he can’t have a relationship because he can’t focus. No one is responsible for this non-relationship; only Autism, which cannot be seen or touched or negotiated with, is responsible. Then one Christmas, when he was nearly eight, Sawyer requested a LEGO Spider Space Station as his Big Present. The box was the size of a flat-screen TV and warned that this toy was for ages 12-15. No matter, Christmas morning he took his Spider Space Station to his room and set to work. The instruction manual was as thick as a magazine. Sawyer sat on the floor with the instructions, his box of pieces, and slowly built the space station. He did this for three straight hours. He never flapped or hummed or pretended. He was focused. He was as focused as person could be. It was then I saw the difference between can’t and isn’t. It was never true that Sawyer couldn’t focus; it was only true that he wasn’t focused. The boy who can’t focus is broken; the boy who isn’t focusing simply hasn’t learned how to focus. Moreover, even when we said he wasn’t focused, he actually was focused, only on something other than what we wanted him to focus on. Apparently, he had found something in his imagination more interesting to him than what our relationship was offering at that moment. This is not an easy pill to swallow for anyone – friend, teacher, or father. His inattention seemed to suggest that I wasn’t interesting. As a writer, as a storyteller, as an entertainer, this is a kind of death. A writer’s entire value to his readers is based on how interesting he is. Yet as a writer, I had also learned that I could only lay my attention on a story long enough to tell it interestingly if I was interested in it. Was I interested in Sawyer? Was I interested enough in him to give him my full attention so that I could stop saying I couldn’t have a relationship and start learning how to have a relationship with him? The answer is usually yes. But not always. There are still days where in a kind of parental exhaustion I think, “It is time for him to simply be interested in me!” This thought is nothing but Adult Onset Autism, the impulse to retreat from the world because I believe I can’t relate to it. Sawyer is always interesting when I focus on the window of interest we share, a window that might appear narrow at first, but which grows in breadth and possibility just as his Spider Space Station grew that Christmas. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
The only therapeutic approach we tried with Sawyer besides joining (and we tried many) in which I had any real confidence was The Anat Baniel Method. I met Anat when I interviewed her after the publication of her book Kids Beyond Limits (you can watch that two-part interview here). I liked her immediately. She was passionate and funny and spoke about how all of her work with children with challenges far more profound Sawyer’s was not about fixing them but about teaching them. When I explained Sawyer’s situation, she agreed to see him.
Things definitely began to change for Sawyer after we started visiting Anat. I do believe she helped teach him again what it felt like to be calm, something I am convinced he had forgotten. Her lessons helped awaken that part of his body where calmness is felt, a part that had gone into hibernation when perhaps all it ever felt was panic. Better to go numb. The combination of her lessons and homeschooling helped Sawyer remember who Sawyer actually was. Yet what might have been even more important was what Anat taught me. Sawyer was very nervous during his first lesson with her. He was in a new city, a new building, meeting new people, and, as is the case with everyone, when he was nervous all his behavioral quirks became amplified. One of those quirks was to speak in an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness, his mind leaping from one taboo subject to another. I had never seen this habit as pronounced as it was that afternoon in Anat’s room. He had hardly said hello and he was rambling about homosexuality and murder and wanting to know if she was divorced and how old she was. Normally, this is where I’d intervene, but I was with A Master, and I wanted to see how she would respond. She didn’t. Everything he said seemed to pass by her like strangers on the street. That was when it hit me: she wasn’t afraid of him. I did not understand until that moment that I had become afraid of Sawyer. I was afraid not of what he would say or do to me, but of what his behavior meant about me—and not me his father, but me a person. What if there was some threshold we could cross from which there was no return? What if it was possible to wander so far from home that the way back not only couldn’t be found, but simply didn’t exist anymore, as if we could be left on the moon by the last rocket ever launched? That was the life I feared most. Sometimes the world seemed filled with people stranded on the moon, but it was easy to avoid them. They were strangers, living their stranded lives in faraway places, feeling more like characters in a play to me than actual people. But no one could be closer to me than my own son, I could not avoid him, and on that day he could not have sounded more lost. Yet there was Anat, fearless and indifferent, unafraid because she perceived nothing from which she needed protection. In that moment, her fearlessness became mine as well. My job is not to be afraid, I thought to myself. It was the perfect job for me because it is all I have ever wanted. Fearlessness is the space where love waits for us. Every question I have ever asked was answered there and nowhere else, for there actually is nowhere else. There is only love and my dreams of desolate moons. Strangely, I traveled to the moon because it was where I thought I’d find everyone else, only to discover I was alone and looking for a way home. A friend who reads this column recently pointed out to me that I sometimes represent myself as possessing Buddha-like compassion. She expressed distress that she usually does not feel about her two sons the way I appear to feel about mine. A mother’s guilt can be profound enough every time she loses her temper or thinks, “I wish they would just act normally!” but add to this the idea that someone you know is doing it better, and so in this world of comparison your feelings of failure are now empirically justified, and you might wonder why you bother getting up in the morning.
I was both disappointed and relieved to hear this. Disappointed because I never want to misrepresent myself. I am, in fact, not Jesus. I have a temper, and no one in my life has been a greater recipient of that temper than my youngest son, Sawyer. Not my parents or my brother or sister; not my wife or my oldest son; not a coworker or neighbor or boss. Without question, I have never been angrier than I have been with Sawyer. Sawyer’s greatest strength is that he does not want to do anything simply to please other people. I applaud this in theory, but in practice it makes the job of parenting stupendously challenging. How I want him to just stop or start doing something because I said so, because I’ve been on the planet longer than him, because I am certain that if he would just do what I told him his life and most importantly my life would go better. That would be the simplest thing. It is simple to know what I want; it is more or less impossible to know what other people want. It has never, ever worked, this telling him what to do. It didn’t work when he was six and I was telling him to stop humming and flapping and talking to himself because normal people don’t do such things and how can I have a relationship with someone who is always humming and flapping and talking to himself; and it doesn’t work now when I tell him to stop playing video games and take a shower. After all these years I am still affronted when he tells me to leave him alone. After all these years this hot, violent thought still spikes in my mind: I cannot leave you alone because only I know what is right. That’s usually when the yelling starts. I say horrible things to him, he says equally horrible things to me, until we exhaust ourselves of our respective horribleness and there we are. And where we are is where I actually wish to be. Which is why I was also relieved. The only thing that has ever worked with Sawyer is compassion. Not yelling or rewards, not therapies, really—only compassion. Everything else is just a tortured and complicated road back to compassion. Compassion, however, is not a point on the map. I have only ever understood that what is mine is yours, that what I think of others I think of myself, that your good is my good and my good is your good as a feeling. Here at my desk, alone and away from the lights and circus of life, I can find and stay with that feeling more easily and so write from it. To feel it and to write it and to read it is to remember it, and to remember it is to practice it. There is no other way to unlearn the idea that someone is better than another one or that a person could possibly be born not knowing what is right for himself. |
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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