Autism Vox

Commencement

by Kristina Chew, PhD on May 18th, 2008

I just got back from Commencement at the college where I teach. We don’t have the facilities to hold the event on campus and it’s held some distance away down the Garden State Parkway. I’ve been teaching at my college for three years now and have gotten to know some students fairly well: So exciting to hear their names called for prizes and to get their degrees, to see them walk (some smiling from ear to ear, some thoughtful at the solemnity of the occasion, some waving wildly to family and friends) across the stage and shake the President’s hand.

A alumnus from the class of 1958 gave the Commencement address and he talked about his grandfather who never grew taller than the podium after being hit by a cart in Jersey City, and became a journalist and editor; the speaker also noted that he himself used to direct Newark Airport and had stepped down a few years ago for another position in an unrelated field. The student Valedictorian (who is from Bulgaria) talked about being an international student and about how professors and fellow students had all shaped his experience at the college,and helped him get ready for the next step—-a doctoral program in computer science.

Commencement. It always strikes me as a curious word. It means “beginning.” College graduation is an end of one phrase of one’s life and the beginning of a new one. It’s an end that heralds the next thing, a new beginning.

It’s an important thought for me as the mother of an autistic boy on the cusp of adolescence. How often have you heard a parent speak of hearing that their child is autistic as an end—of hope, dreams; of the life you’d thought you’d live? (Golfer Ernie Els talks about finding about his son’s autism diagnosis as “saddening,” all while indicating so much deep feeling and love.)

Even though the diagnosis is an “end” of some things, really it can be a launching pad, an untouched field with minerals and nutrients hidden far beneath the surface. It might be the end of the life you thought your child might have but who can really know? I advise freshman college students and very few of them are in the same place—state of mind-wise, sometimes grade-wise, future plan-wise—that they were back in September. That’s why I always see life with Charlie as a journey on a long and winding road: We just never know where we’ll end up.

So when about a study, the LOOKING at Language project, notes that one in four children who are late talkers are still having language problems when they are seven years old, I say to myself, yeah, that’s Charlie. He was a late talker and, at 11, he has lots of difficulties with language and communication. I can remember feeling a sense of dread and terror and sheer worry as I thought, when Charlie was a toddler, what if he never talks? Is this the end for his learning already? What if he never reads the books I loved as a child and had saved for him on a special shelf? What if he can never appreciate the poems and stories I’ve loved and memorized?

And then I remember, the different kind of music, of knowledge, of being I’ve learned from Charlie. Yes, there are doors shut to Charlie, but there are other doors swinging gently on their hinges, doors I had not really seen because I had never bothered to notice; doors I had never been able to open until I had Charlie with me and we just had to.

It was raining while I was at Commencement and Jim and Charlie weren’t able to go out on a planned-for bike ride. Jim—his only instrument is the drums—took out the cello and the music book and the first thing he told me when I called to say I was heading home was that they had practiced. In the background I could hear another familiar voice. “He said ‘mom here’ when the phone rang,” Jim told me.

The doors are open. We just have to take that first step.

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POSTED IN: College, Language, Literature, Parenting, Poetry