Magic
On the way to school this morning, The Kid told me and Little Brother about how people in his class have been replacing a-words like artistic and acoustic with autistic. Real high-level, NASA-worthy thinking on display, as always and through the years with this type of person—this type of person we have all likely been at one time or another—the type who, rather than confronting the discomfort that different makes them feel, choose to ridicule it instead, sacrificing curiosity on the altar of perceived belonging.
I think we need to be loving our children better.
And I am a prime example. Only recently have I truly been coming to terms with the way I let different irritate me; the thousand tiny ways I sign off on treating different with disdain or allow it to be my excuse for impatience. I remember several years ago, when someone was watching the boys while I was nearby writing, and when I returned to them and TK was crying, the sitter shrugged and said, “We were just getting on each other’s nerves.”
I was horrified, mainly because I’m the only one I’ve given permission to feel that way.
I’ve let different be a reason and receptacle for my disgust. I’ve written it off and tried to correct it, make it less of what it is and shrinking down the space it can be given in my world. I’ve ridiculed and critiqued it, allowed it to inspire everything from microaggressions to full-blown ire. And this is both before and after I gave birth to different.
We’ve been going back to church lately, letting that hour a week be whatever it is instead of what we’d hoped it might be, and it was in that space recently where grace tapped me on the shoulder of my heart (that’s how you know it’s grace: it never yells, unlike some of us) and gently showed me how I’ve been less than graceful with the beautiful different in my life. How I’ve embraced expedience rather than acceptance, criticism rather than curiosity, outrage rather than openness.
I’ve got to do better—for my own children’s sake. But I can’t, because life, and I’m always so tired. Which is where grace comes in, opening doors and gently jerking my ass through them.
“I don’t think the kids in my class like me because of my autism, but they do try to hide it at least,” TK continued in the car this morning, and that was when I got to tell them a story, even as my heart was breaking.
I got to quote one of my favorite communicators, who recently talked about how “profoundly unimaginative” people can be. I got to talk about two types of people in these situations—and how I’ve been both—the profoundly unimaginative who are afraid of the different and therefore ridicule it, and the ones who look with curiosity on that which is different and make space to understand it because they know how loved they are and this gives them the courage—and grace—to feel some discomfort now and then.
I harbor no illusions that I haven’t been among the least accepting, the most annoyed, the most easily outraged, or that I’ve completely left that territory for good with no chance of returning. Like later tonight, around bedtime. But what I do know is that the grace that has led me out of there—and keeps taking me by the hand every time I try to venture back—is what whispers to me in sanctuaries of its choosing about how to love my children more fully, and myself in the process. It’s the grace that took me from one side of the country to another, then one side of the world to another, and from one career that felt all wrong to another, in my mid-forties, that feels tailor-made and allows me to use words in the pursuit of real change.
We took the boys to see In the Heights last weekend, and at a pivotal moment, someone sings about a character, “She sang the praise of things we ignored.” And it’s the ignoring that’s a cousin of the outrage: the way we can make invisible that which we don’t understand; how we can just pretend it’s not there and erase its existence to make our own easier, rather than approaching it with the expectation that magic could happen.
We just have to realize that magic can look like an inconvenience, another way of speaking or eating or sounding, a more intense reaction due to more intense feelings, a step toward all that we dislike about ourselves so that we—and everyone around us—can heal. In other words, different.