Every Saturday, my wife and I alternate taking Sawyer to a nearby Petco as volunteers for Purrfect Pals, a cat rescue and adoption organization that borrows space from the pet store to showcase a few of its many cats in need of homes. Though he often gets nervous before he goes to Purrfect Pals, and though he is always deep in the middle of a video game when it is time to leave for our shift, Sawyer has never once complained about going or asked to skip it. It is his best chance to mix it up with the rest of humanity, an experience he both craves and dreads, but in the end mostly craves. On our last shift we were visited by The Wander. She was an older woman whom on first glance I thought might be homeless. She walked with a cane whose foam handle was eaten away to the stalk on half the grip, her right shoe was patched with duct tape, her pants were frayed at the hem, she appeared to be missing most of her teeth, and her cheeks had that wind-burned look I associate with panhandlers. I let her in past the gate we use to contain the cats when they’re out of their cages, and she headed straight for Sawyer, who was sitting on a bench at the far end of our area resting a broom between his knees and staring gloomily at the floor. Sawyer was often gloomy these days. Conversations could turn quickly into a series of complaints about the world – the bad movies, the bad video games, the social injustices, the school system. “I understand you don’t like any of those things,” I’d say, “but what do you like? You’ve got to start focusing on what you want instead of what you don’t want.” Unfortunately, being his father, I know I often sounded to him like the adults in Peanuts cartoons. “Don’t beat no cats with that broom!” The Wanderer said as she approached Sawyer. For a moment, protective thoughts crossed my mind. What reason would she have to head straight for this fifteen year-old boy whom she has never met? These thoughts were replaced by something else as I saw Sawyer nodding and listening to her talk. Normally I worried about Sawyer and what personal questions he might ask strangers. I had no such worries with The Wanderer. Her lesson complete, she found and began petting a cat curled in a cat tree near the gate. Sawyer followed her and shared some of her story with me. He told me how she had had forty-nine operations on her back and how she still had seven more to go. He told me how some strangers had beaten her up. The Wander smiled as Sawyer told her story. “When I was born,” she continued, “my grandparents on both sides told my mom to get rid of me because I had a harelip and cleft pallet.” I could see the scar now from the operation. “Said get rid of me because I was punishment for my mom for breaking one of God’s Ten Commandments. She’s 85, and I’ve been punishing her for 62 years.” She laughed. Sawyer was outraged that anyone would beat up an old woman, and that The Wanderer’s grandparents had wanted her mother to get rid of her. The Wanderer smiled and winked at me. Sawyer returned to his station at the rear of our area, and our new friend turned to go. She paused at the gate and lowered her voice. “What’s his diagnosis?” “Autism,” I said. “It’s the only word they had. It doesn’t mean anything.” She nodded. “They said I was mentally retarded when I was two because I wasn’t keeping up with my twin.” She shook her head, and then glanced once more toward Sawyer. “I told him stay positive or I’ll come back and kick his butt.” She winked at me again. “Stay positive,” she called out, and then was gone. If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.
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Like all parents, having a child was a journey I was born prepared to take. I did not know this at the time, however. In fact, like most parents, I felt wholly unprepared. When I held my first son in my arms, it seemed possible that some mistake had been made. At thirty, I still felt much like a child myself – a thing curious and learning and quite willing to shirk dull responsibility for a bit of pleasure. This little fellow needed an adult through-and-through, not a man-child adroit at imitation. Trying to teach yourself to do something you already know how to do when you have simply forgotten that you know how to do it leads to some contorted lessons. Sometimes I would hear myself barking out instructions or reprimands and wonder why I sounded so much unlike myself. Was this what adult Bill sounded like? I hoped not; I didn’t like him. Part of the problem is that my children came along right when I needed them most, meaning, as I was very busy unlearning what I had been born knowing. I did not think I was unlearning anything; rather I felt I was learning how the world worked. I had to figure out how it worked so that something I planted would grow, so that something I built would stand. I would stare and stare and stare at the world, at all its pieces, the vast machinery of it, believing that somewhere in that glittering and tarnished and rusting heap of stuff was a great pot of gold waiting for me if I could just learn how to untie the complicated knot of the world as my eyes beheld it. Then came Sawyer, the most stubborn person I had ever met. His demand upon us – my wife and I – was this: I must be all right as I am. Flapping and humming in the grocery store must be all right. Talking to myself in public must be all right. Not taking tests at school must be all right. In fact, not succeeding at anything must be all right. My world is within me, he said. The machinery you wish to master means nothing to me. He spoke to us in the truest language he knew – his attention. When we thought he was all right, he gave us his attention; when we thought he wasn’t, he withheld it. As I said, he was very stubborn. His demand that we love him no matter what he did or did not do was infuriatingly non-negotiable. When you get used to being contorted, you call discomfort normal. When you get used to being contorted, you mistake effortlessness for laziness. It cannot be that everything, including me, is as it should be. The world my eyes beheld, the loud and violent machinery, appeared anything but. Yet that is exactly where the journey I was born to take would lead me, with a little boy who talked to himself as we walked ahead of me on the path. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
A couple I know has a son who was recently diagnosed with Turrets Syndrome due to certain behavioral ticks he developed over the last few years. At a Fourth of July barbeque, the father described to me with noticeable relief a conversation he’d had with his son’s neurologist. The neurologist explained that no one really understood why children developed these ticks nor why these ticks often abated; he explained the predictable pattern of symptomatic evolution, how the symptoms begin around age five, increased in severity through preteen-hood, and then usually taper off around age fifteen. As an afterthought, he added that anxiety likely plays a part in the onset of the syndrome as much as any chemical or neurological factors. I am not a doctor, but I would suggest that anxiety had everything to do with the onset of this syndrome, that anxiety, in one form or another, is at the root of all odd human behavior. It is certainly true for me, and I came to understand it was true for my son Sawyer. Sawyer was prone to some odd behavior, all of which was the product of him trying, in his young way, to cope with anxiety. When, as parents, we stopped focusing on the behavior and started focusing on the anxiety, the behavior—albeit very, very gradually—began to change naturally. Yet it wasn’t until recently, as I looked more closely at my own anxiety, that I came to see that all anxiety is simply the belief in or the attempt to solve problems that don’t exist. The human mind is incredibly resourceful. It can turn anything into a problem. It can turn rain into a problem and sunshine into a problem. It can turn sex into problem and it can turn abstinence into a problem. And by a problem I mean a circumstance that I believe stands between me and happiness. I cannot be happy if my son keeps talking to himself and so it is a problem. I cannot be happy unless I sell this book and so not selling it is a problem. I cannot be happy unless everyone at this party admires me or thinks I am attractive. The list is quite literally endless. As I describe in No One Is Broken, being Sawyer’s father taught me that nothing actually stands between me and happiness. Love and happiness are one and the same, and love is always unconditional. No event or circumstance can cast a shadow across the light of love, only the story I tell about those events or circumstances. The doctor changed the story my friend had been telling about his son, and he – the father – was no longer anxious himself for his son’s ticks were no longer a problem, just a process of life. So it goes. I would like to tell you that, having come to this understanding, I have stopped telling shadowy stories about life. Unfortunately, I tell them daily. No matter. I am a storyteller by nature, and every story contains by necessity a little shadow so that it’s light is that much clearer. I become anxious when I believe my story has ended in shadow, that I am condemned to dwell forever in a valley. There in the darkness, full of bitterness and disappointment, I try to manufacture light with the meaningless pieces of the world. It is only when I have exhausted these that I decide to travel on anyway, despite what I had called an end, drawn by a light I cannot actually see but only remember—until remembering and seeing are the same. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
About five years ago I stopped writing fiction and began writing only about my own life, writing which took the form of the memoir that this website supports as well as a daily column for Author magazine. I have had the pleasure of interviewing many memoirists, like Wild author Cheryl Strayed and Townie author Andre Dubus III. I have also begun teaching memoir writing. I have learned much from all this storytelling, but two things stand out to me now. First, if I am going to tell a story about my own life, I must ask: Why would this be of use to someone else? Why would someone who isn’t me or has never heard of me care about what happened to me? To answer this question is to find the true gift the story wants to offer. Now my suffering—which every story I have ever told includes—is not just some crap I went through, but is the course by which I arrived at an understanding greater than my own victory and defeat. Now my life is in service to life. Second, whenever I read someone else’s story, I become that person. I was Cheryl Strayed while reading Wild and I was also Andre Dubus while reading Townie. I always become the narrator, whether that narrator is a middle-aged man like myself, or twenty-something year-old woman like Strayed. The story is always about me. I am the hero of every story ever told. This yin and yang of storyteller and audience, of self and selflessness, is identical to the balance necessary for parenting, particularly parenting children with special needs. To have a child, to hold a newborn in your arms, is to understand immediately, instinctively, and irrefutably that life is always calling us to serve life. My life, it turns out, is not just some meaningless game I needed to win, but is a portal through life both appears and is sustained. To hold an infant in your arms is to understand, if only for a moment, the absurdity of all victory and loss. And yet every single experience I have ever had is for me. Every gift I have ever given, every meal I have ever shared, every story I have ever told was for my benefit. In helping Sawyer learn to communicate, I learned to communicate; in helping Sawyer learn to listen, I had to learn to listen. I cannot give any gift until I have first received it. All this parenting, all this helping, all this teaching, required me to summon life to me so that I might share it with someone I love. Moreover, the value of helping Sawyer, of summoning all this life energy to me to help him, will be measured in how much I have grown, not in how much he has grown. He will grow as he summons life to himself. That is his job, not mine. I cannot do that for him, no matter how much I love him. Nor would I want to do that for him. To summon his life for him would be to deny him his greatest and really only pleasure, would be to forget that the flower loves to grow as much as the gardener loves to water it. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
This blog and this website the book it supports exist in many ways because I heard a story one day. A woman who ran a school for children with special needs described learning that the reason her son was literally banging his head against walls was because he had “sensory issues.” When she explained this to him and how there were steps they could take to help him, he said, “So you mean I’m not broken?” I loved this story so much I kept telling it to myself over and over like a song I couldn’t stop singing. Eventually I heard the words, “No one is broken.” I knew immediately this was true. I knew it was true because to merely think it was to be released of the impossible responsibility of fixing anyone, myself most definitely included. To merely think it was to see a world without enemies, these broken men and women bent on harming others for no reason other than their own broken wickedness. In thinking those four words I felt more like myself than when I didn’t think them, for to think them meant I was already and always had been correct. Except I could not prove that no one was broken. This was no small intellectual hurdle for me to clear. Though I was a creative writer who toiled daily in the subjective realm of taste and feeling, I lived in a world that at times seemed dominated by science, law, academics, and journalism, a world where something was only true when it could be proven. Proof, I had learned, was a highly democratic and civilized means of deciding “the truth.” Gone were the days of some king naming truths from his throne; in the modern world, evidence is king, for it has no birthright, skin color, or religion. Evidence may be king in the courtroom and laboratory, but in the human heart nothing is known without trust. I would never be able to prove that I loved anyone, and that no one was broken was merely another way of saying that love is unconditional. The more I trusted that no one was broken, the more evidence I saw that this was true. Seeing, it appeared, was not actually believing. It was just the other way around. Nothing can be done until we first believe it is at least possible to do it. In this way, belief precedes not only accomplishment, but evidence itself. Before I receive evidence that something can be done, I must first believe I can. I stop doing something the moment I believe it is impossible to do it, and I resume doing that same thing the moment I believe in its possibility. In this way, I choose the reality in which I wish to live, because without belief nothing in life would ever begin. We would all stand around waiting for reality to tell us what we can and cannot do, while reality waited patiently for us to choose the world we wished to create. I welcome feedback and questions. Feel free to post any comments or questions below, or contact me directly.
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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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