too shiny

More and more often I think about when he’s older.

His dad and I were talking at lunch the other day about it. Not really about it, I guess, not directly. Coming at it sideways. Talking about stories in the press that bring the toughness of it home, that arrange our vague worries about the future into grim, specific lines. Like Walker Hughes and his parents, a story that did the social media rounds a bit as a heartwarming clickbait piece, and sure there’s heartwarming stuff in it — an autistic man is brought into hospital and treated kindly and with awareness instead of with brute force — but my main emotion, as E’s mom, my main emotion reading it was vicarious relief, thinking about how his parents must have felt.

Cause that’s one time, you know, one visit out of a whole lots of visits. (‘He sits in the back seat of the car and sometimes he’ll grab the mom’s eyes when she’s sitting in the front,’ I say, over a chicken salad sandwich, ‘it’s like E,’ and it’s partly, it’s almost, it’s sort of a happy remark — there are other sons like him, there are people like him in the world, it’s not that we’ve done something wrong — but it’s also, you know, it’s also what do we do.)

Then there’s Arnaldo Rios, the autistic man in Florida who in 2017 sat down in the middle of a street — sat cross-legged, settled, holding the toy I imagine must’ve been his current favourite, a shiny silver toy car — and as his carer was trying to coax him to stand up and come off the street, police showed up and yelled at him and ended up shooting his carer in the thigh.

I was shooting at the guy with the gun, was the policeman’s defense in court. He had shot at the autistic man with the toy and he had missed.

I don’t know if there’s a way to explain just how this hits unless you’ve seen it, unless it’s part of your daily landscape, unless you’ve dropped your kid off at school and exchanged rueful smiles with teachers and parents, whatcha gonna do, over the three or four kids who every single day sit themselves down on the pavement of the parking lot and just refuse to budge, off in their own happy places, holding a toy or languidly rolling around or taking off their socks to feel the warm cement. At school they’re surrounded by teachers who coax them with toys or with PEC cards or who sing them songs or blow bubbles, try to distract them, get them back on their feet. But — what? Fast forward 10 years and the same kids will be aged out of the system, 100 pounds bigger, sitting on pavements to feel the warm cement, and someone will come and yell at them and maybe try to shoot them.

What gets me the most, today, I guess, is two things.

One is what I’d forgotten, until I went back and reread the piece about Rios this morning. I’d forgotten that he wasn’t having a meltdown, when all this happened, when his carer was shot in the thigh. He wasn’t presenting as physically threatening even to someone who didn’t know anything about him. He was sitting on the ground, holding his toy. In other words, what put him at risk wasn’t some misunderstood escalation of violent behaviours. It was simply the assumption that he was verbal, that he was intellectually abled, that he understood the situation.

The other thing is that Em was more violent this morning than he’s been in awhile. I don’t know why. He got up and ate his toast and watched his cartoon, asked me for his blanket, seemed fine. But when it was time to get dressed for school he melted down, hard. He’s just — taken over with fury, like some sort of violent spring storm, the kind with hail and enough rain in five minutes to fill all the rainboots left on the porch and then just as sudden it’s gone. But god, for those five minutes he’s anger incarnate and it’s all directed at you, because you’re there, and you try to be calm and protect your eyes and grab his arms and you try to bear hug him but he’s almost stronger than you and you keep saying E, E, please, what’s the matter, and at some point you scream back because your whole body is one big tired defensive reflex and —

Well, there’s that. Today he was shorter than me, and it happened before we left the house. What about when he’s 5'10" and it happens out in public, when something sets him off and he starts yelling and trying to hit me, when he’s not even, not just a man sitting in the street with a toy that’s too silver and too shiny but a man who looks like he’s physically assaulting someone?

What do you do? How can I protect him? How can I protect him from a whole entire world that will make assumptions about him?

I used to make cynical jokes when he was tiny about parents who put stickers on their kids’ tshirts. “I’m autistic” or “please be patient with me” or “I don’t talk”. Some days, these days, I goddamn wish I could put a giant neon sign over his head for the rest of his life. He’s just scared, it would blink. Just let him calm down, he doesn’t understand you, he can’t talk, he doesn’t know what you mean, please don’t hurt him.

Please don’t hurt him.