Unseen Giants

I wrote a Father's Day piece for my friends over at BridgingApps. They're great people and I'm honored that they're featuring my words.

Happy Father's Day to all my fellow dads of the world. I hope you get a nice tie.

Excerpt: 

If you asked me that oft-repeated but generally useless question, whether or not I'd take my daughter's disability away from her if i could, I won't lie to you. My answer now, as always, would be yes, without hesitation.

Should we want to take away our child's disabling condition? It's a hotly contested question, but it misses the point. The thing we come to learn as special needs fathers is that it doesn't actually matter how we answer. No one is ever going to ask that question as the prelude to a miracle.

We can't fix, but we can see. We can look and really see our kids, and come to understand that their disabilities are a part of their construction, threads that run deep and true in their tapestry. We become caregivers, and we become champions. We learn to fight and we learn to nurture, in ways that the fathers of typical kids might never have to do. We don't allow ourselves to become Homer Simpson because our worlds won't work with that character.

Flygirl

Today at Support for Special Needs:

I don't think there's anything wrong with letting your kid dream past their disability. If it involves a small lie, I think it's not much different from the Santa story (SPOILER...) or the "anyone can be president" fib. (Watch Fox News for a few minutes, until your eyes begin to bleed, to see how the exception probably illustrates the rule.) Our kids are learning a great deal during their early years. That learning process involves more than finding alternate paths through the world. Kids like Schuyler are figuring out who they are, and how their disability can shape them even as they reject the idea that it should define who they are.

A Simpler Season

Today, at Support for Special Needs:

Many of us with special needs kids make noises of outward exasperation at the onset of summer, and we mean it, too. But at the same time, when pressed, I suspect many would admit that we're relieved, too. The schools will be giving us back our kids. Whether those schools have gotten it mostly right or mostly wrong, when we get our kids back for the summer, we leave a great deal behind. We're done, for the time being, with all the complications of negotiating school policy and modified curriculum and imperfect behavioral plans and all the modification required to make our beloved square pegs fit into those educational round holes.

Insufficient Instrument

Today at Support for Special Needs:

For a guy who's not too smart, I think I do a reasonably good job of navigating the chaos around me. And yet, it is in respect to the most important part of my world where I think I know the least. Schuyler has always been, and remains today, the central mystery of my life. I think I made peace with that years ago, mostly because it is in the journey to understand her mystery that I've grown the most as a person, and found my closest approximation to lasting happiness. I've accepted that as lucky as I am to have Schuyler in my life, I'm mostly not going to get her.

It's beginning to occur to me that I'm not the only one.

American Poison

You're probably reading this on Sunday or Monday ("Happy" Memorial Day seems like a weird thing to say), but I'm writing this on Saturday night, in the middle of the media coverage of another horrific mass killing in America. It's at that stage where we're just now getting enough information to begin to understand what happened, and the justified outrage is building up steam, but there's still a lot we don't know. Worse revelations are no doubt still to come. Even at this early stage, though, it feels like a quintessentially American story.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of what happened. I'm not going to name the killer because, well, fuck that guy. He doesn't deserve his new-found, posthumous fame. I'm not going to name the town where it happened, either, because that community doesn't deserve the notoriety that will no doubt follow the event for years to come. If you're reading this the day or the week it was posted, you know it all anyway. If you're reading it months or years from now, I suspect some other terrible but interchangeable thing will have replaced it in the news. If you miss one mass murder in this country, you'll never have to wait long for another. My own feelings about the event are pretty straightforward. As a pacifist, I'm horrified. As a man, I'm ashamed. But as a father, and the father of a daughter, I'm particularly moved, and troubled.

Once again, the media is reporting that the accused shooter is mentally ill, a "madman", according to the first reports from local law enforcement. He's also been identified by the family attorney as having been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, specifically Aspergers syndrome.

For some, it's easy, even comforting, to blame something like this on mental illness or a neurological disability. "That's awful," one might think. "It's a good thing my own kids aren't mentally ill or intellectually disabled."

Separation gives us a sense of safety. "Terrible acts are committed by monsters," we tell ourselves, "and I don't know any monsters." We've been taught our whole lives on some level, perhaps not always directly but with the subtle stain of common vocabulary and social narrative, to fear the mentally ill or neurologically disabled.

Those of us who live in a world of mental illnesses or neurological imperfections understand a deeper truth. People with mental illnesses aren't prone to kill, and persons with disabilities are far more likely to be victims of violence and sexual assault than they are to be perpetrators. And as we're not defined by our afflictions, neither are those who share them but who commit atrocious acts. Mental illness, emotional difficulties, neurological differences, these are part of the tapestry of who we are. Sometimes they are woven in the tapestry of very bad people, too.

"That guy was fucking crazy" feels comfortable, but in this case, as in so many cases, there's a deep and disturbing well of misogyny from which the shooter drew his anger. And like it or not, we need to face the fact that his philosophy, while twisted, did not appear in a void. Even tonight, just a day after the shooting, there's an ugly subculture out there expressing understanding for his rage. This feels significant to me; I don't remember the Newtown massacre bringing out messages of support from people who just don't like kids. But then, hating children isn't acceptable in this country. Hating women is.

The shooter blamed women for the tragedy that he unleashed, and of course this is entirely false. The knee-jerk response of so many is to blame mental illness or a neurological disability for his horrific actions, and this is also wrong, simply a grotesque oversimplification. The responsibility for the murderer's actions fall squarely on him, but with an asterisk. We live in a culture where poison flows in rivers just under the surface. "Fear the fool and the madman. And she was asking for it."

As the father of a teenaged girl with an intellectual disability, my own fears are simple and clear. Schuyler is growing up in a society in which she is devalued twice over. And that fills me with a deep, enduring sadness.

Not just because I can't always be there to protect her. But also because I shouldn't have to be.

The Thin Line Between Wrong and Wrong

Today at Support for Special Needs:

But perhaps more importantly, for special needs parents, it's not always as simply the choice between right and wrong. Sometimes, you just have to shoot for the choices that will probably turn out to be wrong, but just perhaps a little less wrong than others. Less damage to undo, fewer apologies, maybe even marginally more restful nights.

"...and my heart is closing like a fist."

Schuyler and I are at a quiet burger place. We're having a late lunch after working on a homework project most of the afternoon, and there are only a few other people here. The burgers are good, and they have wi-fi and milkshakes. She's on her iPad watching Netflix, and I'm on my laptop catching up on some work. It's not perfect, but it might be close.

The doors open, and a high school cheerleading squad enters like a tsunami, followed by their parents and friends. The parents are almost comically loud, and the boys are posturing and preening with a forced casualness. The girls are energetic and interchangeable, matching uniforms and identical hair and high wattage smiles. They have quintessential Texas suburban names like Brooke and Madison.

The noise is intense, that much more so for the contrast with the near silence only a few minutes before. I hunker down like a curmudgeon, but Schuyler simply ignores the swirl and noise at first. She's engrossed in whatever movie she's watching. It occurs to me that five days a week, she occupies a world full of teenage chaos. She's unflappable.

Eventually Schuyler begins to watch the kids as they run around, groups forming and breaking up and reforming minutes later. I realize as I watch that this is how I'd hoped Schuyler's cheer squad would behave this year. All my misgivings about Schuyler becoming a cheerleader had been balanced by this idea of a bond between girls, a protective group dynamic. I can see it in this group, in ways that I never saw it in Schuyler's squad. Here there are no outliers, no girl trying to fit in, attempting to join the discussions before finally sitting apart.

There's no Schuyler in this squad.

I can't imagine what Schuyler is thinking, although it is clear that she's very deep in thought. I sneak a few photos of her, trying to catch the reverie in her eyes. I think I manage. When I show her the photo I like the most, she smiles. I ask if I can post it, as I always do, and she says yes.

"Does this remind you of your cheer squad?" I ask her.

"A little," she says. "They're having fun. I wish we had fun."

She watches the girls a bit longer, and her face isn't sad so much as resigned, perhaps. The day before, she and Julie went on a trip with Schuyler's middle school band to a local water park, and the report back from Julie was reminiscent of the year before, and the year before that. It was a repeated sequence, Schuyler trying to break into a group of friends and running with them for a short while before being left behind. Schuyler can be a hard kid to be friends with, I understand. She's excitable and handsy, in that way that many nonverbal kids can be even after they grow older and develop speech. Crucial early childhood years with no expressive language have trained her to communicate with a kind of physicality that can be awkward now that she's a teenager.

Now, the next day, she has withdrawn into herself, not morosely but with a kind of sigh. This is the cycle of Schuyler. She tries to integrate socially, she succeeds at first but all too soon falls out into solitude, and spends some time regrouping before going back into the fray. It's not all because of her disability, I know, because I function in much the same way, and today, Schuyler and I are both turtles pulled into our shells.

Seated in the middle of this cacophony, we've got our walls up. And it's okay. It's not ideal, but it's what we need.

Borrowed Happy

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be." 

- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

This is one of those posts I might not actually publish, or that I might think better of and delete after posting it. If you're reading this, you're either Johnny-on-the-Spot, or perhaps I decided not to give the going rate of two shits and left it up. This might be one of those cases where just writing this is cathartic enough to shake me out of my mood and send me on my merry way.

I've been thinking about happiness lately.

(Because of privacy rules, this paragraph is going to be vague. Sorry, I know that's irritating.) I recently embarked on a venture of sorts, one that I thought might lead me down a new path, one that would make me genuinely happy. It ultimately didn't, and I'm taking that failure particularly hard, I won't lie. I feel foolish, and I feel disposable, and if there's a worse way to feel, I'm not sure what it might be. I aspired to something, and my wax wings melted pretty quickly.

The thing is, and I think this is significant, I can't remember the last time I did feel authentic happiness. I know it's been a very long time. If the idea of being truly content with my place in the world is so elusive that I can't even tell you how long it's been, I guess maybe that's an issue. I thought I could see the path until this week. I can't, though.

It's important to note that I'm not some sad mopey bastard with not an ounce of happiness in my life. I think rather the opposite. And when I find my confidence again, as I will shortly, I'll be fine. But it's an undeniable truth that the true satisfaction I find myself feeling is almost always a result of Schuyler's happiness. It comes in things large from time to time, but it's mostly the small joys. A monster movie well-realized. A trip to a comic book store that neither of us expected until we found ourselves standing outside. A joke we've told each other a thousand times. ("Knock knock!" "Come in!")

Schuyler experiences joy, and as a result, I feel some of that reflected warmth as well. I suppose, like a lot of parents (Julie very much included), my own happiness has probably become too caught up in my kid's. I've become dependent on the borrowed happiness I get from her.

If that sounds desperate or sad, I guess perhaps it is. But as I stand here at the end of a shaky week, it might just have to be enough, at least for now.

Advocacy, with Heart

Today at Support for Special Needs:

There's a balance to be struck, I imagine. We don't want hysterical, emotional professionals (as entertaining as that might sound), nor do we want dispassion. Experience matters, not so much as a driver of curriculum and the approaches taken with individual kids, because the idea that every kid is a unique snowflake takes on a very different and important meaning when it comes to teaching and treating individuals with disabilities. But personal experience makes us better listeners. It makes us more flexible, and it enables us to think on our feet and, perhaps more importantly, to use our intuition to guide us.

On Early Intervention

Today at Support for Special Needs:

When Schuyler was born fourteen years ago, she was (perhaps irresponsibly) placed into the hands of two people who lacked even the most basic experience with a baby. To make matters worse, at least one of those people was an idiot. (SPOILER: It was me.) I shouldn't admit how many times I looked at Schuyler and simply said to myself, "Oh my god, I have a baby and she's still alive. This is one lucky damn baby."

This Is Only a Test

Today at Support for Special Needs:

In Texas, our kids take the STAAR test, which replaces the TAKS test, which was probably preceded by the CRAAPS test and the BUUG test. I have no idea what STAAR stands for, and I refuse to go look. It stands for "The Test That Will Take Hours and Days of Actual Instruction Away From Your Kid, Stress Them Out In Ways You'll Probably Not Grasp Until They Go Into Therapy or Rehab or End Up on the News With Helicopters Circling Your House, and Provide Politicians With a Way to Sound Like They Care About Education But Most Assuredly Do Not."

Stumbles

It was a rough week. I won't lie. It was rough for me, and it was even worse for Schuyler. One thing I can say for certain about this week, however, is that if bad days offer the chance for learning, I feel like we all had some graduate level education going on. I feel like we should be wearing those little flat hats and robes and jabbering in Latin.

Most of all, we learned that the structures we come to depend on can be unreliable at best. We were reminded that in the end, we can depend on each other, and sometimes that's all.

There are a lot of very individual stories I could tell about last week, but they wouldn't be of much help to anyone reading. Schuyler and I were both actually threatened, individually and in unrelated circumstances, in ways that left us both a little twitchy. That doesn't actually happen very often, to either of us, which is obviously a good thing, but I'm not sure either of us knew exactly how to respond. We didn't fight back, either of us. For that, I'm proud of her and ashamed of myself.

Without getting into details that are not entirely ours to share, I'll simply say that Schuyler learned how friends can be very unfriendly indeed, and perhaps that her own sense of what true friendship looks like needs some new layers of subtlety that don't come easy to her. I think Schuyler learned that school isn't always a place of fairness, and that sometimes she might find her sense of justice bruised by the "path of least resistance" decisions made by the adults around her. As far as important lessons for adult life go, I suspect that's an important one, but I hate watching her learn it.

I learned some of the same lessons, perhaps. As special needs parents, we become accustomed to the idea that the teachers and administrators and therapists who work with our kids stand on certain principles of behavior. We forget, until we're very dramatically reminded, that those professionals are also human beings. They have insecurities and they have tempers and they have blind spots where they cannot gaze for long with an objective eye. They can do solid work but still stumble.

That doesn't make them bad at what they do. If it did, I would be run out of proverbial town on a proverbial rail. Mine is a most personal kind of writing, and my reactions to the world around me are rarely divorced from my emotional responses. That can be hard for parent advocates, but I also believe it's what gives our work a unique kind of value. Professionals work hard for our kids, but they're also invested deeply in their reputations; parents are invested in not screwing up our kids. Unfortunately, that's probably sometimes at odds with our commitment to being correct in our approach. Our strengths can be our weaknesses; our love can make us stumble, too.

This week, I learned most of all how very human we all are, and how that humanity can be the root of so much failure when it comes to doing our work. Schuyler learned that lesson, too, although for her, I suspect it felt like a lesson in the smallness of those of us who profess to, and occasionally even manage to, work to make her life and the lives of her friends better, richer, more fair, more MORE.

Schuyler ended the week owed more apologies than she received, and as her father, that's hard to bear. I made choices for myself that were about peace rather than justice, but I at least fought similar decisions made in her life. I can at least say that. And thanks to a very dedicated teacher who listened to our concerns and went way beyond what she was required to do in order to address those concerns, and on a Saturday night, no less, we were reminded that there are a great many professionals out there who do this work for the best of reasons, and they do it better than I could ever hope to.

It was not a bad way to end a week that went on far, far too long.

The Things We Know

Today at Support for Special Needs:

The challenging aspects of being the parent of a special needs kid aren’t always the things you don’t know, although believe me when I say those are bad ones, like "stay up late and start drinking early" bad ones. Sometimes a greater source of parental frustration comes from truly knowing your child, in a way that is simply impossible for a doctor or a teacher or even a family member, and having to work tirelessly to be taken seriously.

The Exquisite Joy of Nothing

This week at Support for Special Needs:

This week, we didn’t struggle to understand her, we didn’t have to manage seizures, and there were no bullies to deal with. The Internet wasn’t buzzing with an unusual amount of outrage, and despair felt far away. It was a week where nothing of particular note occurred in relation to Schuyler’s disability. For families of kids with special needs, this can be a rare treat. A week without an easy blog topic is itself worthy of note.

The Long-Abandoned Path

Today at Support for Special Needs:

Returning to New England has given me the opportunity to think back on the last 10 years, and to reconsider all the choices that we’ve made, and the paths that we have chosen. That is a foolish endeavor, I know. But just lately, as we prepare for Schuyler to enter high school next year, we are more aware now than ever that the paths we walked down with her did not necessarily lead to unqualified success. It’s hard not to wonder if we could’ve done better for her, which is of course the question that occupies far too much of my mind as it is.

Archipelago

Today at Support for Special Needs:

We're already on islands, many of us, but not in a vacation wonderland kind of a way. Our islands aren't floating in a remote blue tropical sea. They exist in plain sight, in the middle of your towns and workplaces and schools. Most of our territories are invisible; you can barely see the fences unless you look closely. And most people don't look that closely.

Twenty-four years ago today

It's still complicated.

A Genuine Advocate and a Frank Conversation at SXSW

Today at Support for Special Needs:

I’d never heard anyone come out and admit that their company had been spooked by the internal divisions of the disability community and the enthusiasm with which we seem to embrace the concept of the circular firing squad. But it was also deeply depressing to be reminded that the world is watching.

Great Expectations

Today at Support for Special Needs:

I’m writing about what I’m feeling here because I think it might be almost as common among special needs parents as that early grieving process. When we buy into a Way That Things Shall Be, it can be hard to let that Way go. Harder than even we realize, because there are so few narratives on which we may depend, and when they disappear, blown away like morning fog, there’s not much in our reserves to take their place. The Way was important, and the Way didn’t work out.

Hunting Monsters at SXSW

Today at Support for Special Needs, for those attending SXSW this week and next:

If you were paying close attention back at the top, you saw that I mentioned Schuyler's presence. Yes, Schuyler will be attending both panels, and both conferences. (Only one of them will involve missing any school, in case you were getting ready to deliver a good scolding. A half-scolding will suffice.) Now that she's getting older, when I speak about Schuyler and larger disability issues as well, it feels strange now when she's not there, and not part of that conversation.