Autism Vox

You Know You Have the Answer

by Kristina Chew, PhD on June 9th, 2008

Charlie kept saying this very phrase—-”You know you have the answer“—over and over as we drove home from the beach last night. He had a big smile on his face; he’d been calling out the name of his teacher and favorite instructor (as aides/paraprofessionals are called in my school district) over and over. It was a squelcher Sunday—over 90 degrees—-but Charlie and Jim had still gone for an hour-plus bike ride (with a stop for sodas in an air-conditioned convenience store), and a trip to the ocean was more than called for.

It was nearing 4pm by the time we had gathered towels and changes of clothes and found the suntan lotion. I urged Charlie to take off his fleece vest and hooded coat, in favor of a lighter blue sweatshirt. “It’s hot today,” I said, looking at Charlie bundled up for the crisp fall day it wasn’t in the backseat of the black car. I reminded him about how he’s been learning about wearing the right clothes for different kinds of weather at school, and pushed my own damp hair off my forehead. Charlie slowly unzipped himself out of two layers of outdoor survival weight fleece. My first thought was to insist he bring the fleece inside but then I thought, what’s the big deal if it’s on the backseat?

And so, the air-conditioning at low-blast, we went south on the Garden State Parkway. A line of cars was headed the opposite way as we drove up to the parking lot; Charlie’s smile was instant the moment he ran from the car and all the way down the sand, pausing only to take off his black suede slip-ons and stuff his socks inside. (He would have left them there in the middle of the sand but I called him to pick them.) He pulled off his shirt, handed it to me, and was in the water.

The ocean was 60 degrees and I took my time walking over the pebbles. Charlie, with his usual perfect timing, ducked down flat and the waves crested over him entirely. Jim jumped just in time; I got wiped out. Charlie grinned and started swimming out to sea. Jim went out with him and then part way and I went as far as I could (until a bigger wave was gathering). With calls of “Charlie, come in closer to the shore” and over-elaborate arm gestures, Jim and I beckoned him in and, taking his time to splash and catch a few more waves, Charlie ventured back in.

Since last summer—when Charlie started to swim the farthest out of all the swimmers on the beach—Jim and I have been thinking about how to teach Charlie that he can swim out far, but not too much, and that he has to come back to the shore when we, or the lifeguards, call him. These aren’t simple and discrete skills to teach like the “non-verbal imitation” and “receptive/expressive” language programs Charlie did when he was 2 1/2 years old and in an intensive ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) home program; they aren’t skills that his current teachers can write a program for.

Again and again Jim and I show him the orange flags that mark the space between which he’s to swim in, but it’s a quite abstract concept to imagine a line demarcating “this is where you swim” from the flags out into the water. And what 11-year-old boy who swims like a fish wants to know there’s a limit on where he can go? It’s a problem and we’ve begun to work on a solution, to find others to swim with Charlie and maybe teach him, too (Charlie had surfing lessons last summer—definitely hope to do those again). (And we’re signed up for Surfers Healing.)

It’s possible (not that I tend to see things this way) to think of life with Charlie, life raising an autistic son, as having to solve one problem after the next, from the moment a daycare teacher said “We have concerns” (winter of 1998 in St. Paul, Minnesota) to the moment a school administrator said “Have you thought of a helmet?” (winter of 2005 in northern New Jersey). Charlie was born in 1997 and diagnosed with autism in 1999; his entire life parallels an explosion—an epidemic, if you will—in treatments, research, and awareness about autism. We’ve tried plenty of treatments (biomedical as well as educational) and settled on making Charlie’s education and schooling the focus—the means to helping him reach his full potential and lead a good, full life.

And the source of the best answers for what to do has been Charlie himself. It’s been my constant lesson as his parent to understand when some goal—”reading from a book”; “mainstreaming without an aide”—is something that I want, but maybe it’s not what Charlie’s ready, or suited for, at the moment. And accepting this discrepancy between my parental idealizations and the reality of Charlie—-my lovely boy, who responded to my “come back to the shore” gesture by turning around, walking towards me, and jumping a few more waves besides some dark-haired boys just about his age—-has been the beginning of truly helping Charlie to grow and thrive.

You know you have the answer.

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POSTED IN: Charlisms, Education, Family, Health, New Jersey, Parenting, Water