I teach a birth class, so I get to see all of the hope and promise of the world bottled in one small classroom every week. Young couples on the verge of becoming new families, all so completely unaware of the dramatic change about to take place in their lives. And though some of those changes are big and do happen overnight, most do not. They sneak up on you.
One of those moments might tiptoe in one day years later when you find yourself in a little room with one-way mirrors, watching your child being tested for one thing or another while you wait for a doctor to come in and give you news that will officially shift your (and your child's) life direction permanently. It comes quietly in the door and tickles the back of your neck, makes you look at your spouse across the room and laugh, for lack of any better response, and mouth, "how the hell did we get here?" How did those twentysomethings who just liked a good beer and sitting in the front yard listening to music get into this room? Surely someone has made a mistake to put us in charge of another human being, and especially this particular one.
So, when I go to my class each week and see all of their bright and nervous expressions, I can't help but think... suckers.
I had one of these moments at the end of the summer, when I happened to be alone with Truman, so I couldn't even look at Jim and say, "holy shit!" or anything. We were invited by the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center's TRIAD program to participate in a study in which the ADOS was administered to Truman in order to train psychologists and other professionals in the use of the test. If you are a kid who is anxious and/or gets singled out for not-so-great things often, having something good in your arsenal like smarts is always a good confidence booster, so he generally likes to do tests like this. They're just puzzles and games and thinking and interacting one-on-one with a person who is very interested in him and his smarts to him.
I expected that we would be in a small room with maybe a few people and an administrator. But what we found when we arrived was a 2 day symposium in progress. It's a gathering of school psych professionals who are learning to administer the ADOS as a standardized way of testing for autism. It was on break when we arrived, but I quickly realized that we were going to be in front of at least 100 people doing this testing. On the way to the testing, Truman got a headache, which usually means vomit eventually. I had rifled my purse while driving, found a lint-y Tylenol, and when we arrived, we ran for the nearest vending machine to get a Coke to wash it down and let the caffeine do its magic to speed the process. God help us if he vomits on stage.
While we waited, I tried to explain that we would be in front of lots of people. The woman from TRIAD who was escorting us asked if he was nervous.
"No."
"Not even a little?"
"No. Can we got to the Adventure Science Center after this?"
The participants began to filter back into the room with their bagels and coffee. They put a microphone on Truman and seated him at a table at the front of the room with the doctor who, coincidentally, had been the one to give us his diagnosis the previous year in that little one-way mirror room.
Dr. Hunley is a very sweet and gentle woman, and he likes her, so he was quite ready to perform for her. The first modules were all imaginary play related; take this group of toys and just kind of play with them to make a story, that kind of thing. This is something that he's never been great at. If he does do any sort of imaginary play it's very limited to specific subjects, like getting things from A to B and not relationships or people. He was stumped. And so Dr. Hunley stepped in to facilitate the play.
She picked up a girl Barbie dressed in a space outfit. "Oh, hi. I'm an astronaut and I'm lost. I can't find my way back to space. Can you help?"
Truman picked up the male doll. "Sure."
Silence.
"Here's a book. I think there are maps in here to space. Could you read them for me?"
Truman picked up the tiny blank book and looked at it for a beat. "Actually this is an instruction manual for your spaceship and it says that you did not use your flaps in takeoff and so your climb was too fast. Also you should know that your ailerons are connected so that when one goes down the other goes up and when that one goes down the other one goes up."
Well, that ends imaginary play. Scribble scribble scribble. The room is writing things down. Not just one person in the room, but the whole room. What the hell are they writing down?
Next came questions about relationships.
"Do you know what being married is?"
"I don't know. Well, I think it means that you live with someone and you have babies? But I don't know. You just have to be a woman to have a baby, so you really don't even need to have the man part I don't think."
"Would you like to be married one day?"
"I don't know."
"How about a roommate? What's a roommate?"
"I don't know."
"It's someone that you live with. Do you think you would like to live with someone one day?"
"I don't know."
"Do you have friends?"
"I don't know. Well, John and Tom and Joe."
"Good! Have you seen John and Tom and Joe this summer?"
"Hmmm. I don't know." Editor's note: John and Tom and Joe are the neighbor boys and we have seen them approximately one jillion times this summer.
"Do you know what a bully is?"
"I think it is someone who is mean to you?"
"Has anyone ever been a bully to you?"
"I don't know."
"What about a special friend - like a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Do you have one of those?"
"No. Well, just my mom."
The room tries not to laugh. Then they all look down and scribble. What are they writing? I look down at my foot and see the tattoo I got when I was 23 years old. I got it because I was 23, and I knew I was never going to be 23 again, and if I got a tattoo when I was 40, it would be much sillier than if I got it when I was 23. Whenever I look at it, it reminds me that I was once 23, and for that moment, I can kind of see my 23 year old self. How the hell did I get here again? I want to text that to Jim since he's not here, but I don't want to be the weirdo mom texting in the middle of her kid's evaluation, so I just watch everyone scribble.
To decipher this whole relationship Q and A, you have to know the definitions of his responses. In Trumanland:
No = no
Yes = yes
I don't know = I don't know and it confuses me. And sometimes, depending on the circumstances, it might mean no.
Hmmm = I don't know, and I really don't want to think about it anymore, so you should just move on.
Suffice it to say, relationship questions are one big "I don't know."
When it was all over, the room gave him a round of applause. He was un-mic'd and led outside, where our TRIAD representative presented him with a $25 Target gift card for his time. This kid, the one who had sat straight faced through testing in a room full of 100 people, who had not changed expression when attempting imaginative play or changed his tone of voice in talking about relationships, might as well have suddenly been in a Gilbert and Sullivan show. He did a happy dance. Oh, joy! Oh, rapture unforeseen!
So, my stomach unclenched and we moved on to Target, followed by The Adventure Science Center (he did have on his "Science Rocks" shirt that day, so how could I deny him?). And I thought about my sweet students and their parenting experiences yet-to-come. Labor and birth? Pah.
Later, I asked if he had fun. He said, "I guess. But it was kind of weird that an adult would want to play toys like that with me. Especially when she used the pretend voice."
I would love for him to talk to you all about this, but he doesn't care. He might even say, "Hmmm."
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