Texts From My Brother
My little brother C.J. has always been extraordinary.
He is funny, kind, obsessed with movies and cares deeply about his friends and family. He also happens to be on the Autism spectrum.
Around the time he was two years old, we started to notice that C.J.’s speech wasn’t developing like other kids his age and he was highly uncomfortable in new or very social environments.
I have a big, close-knit family on my Dad’s side and growing up, we’d get together for holidays, birthdays and sometimes just Tuesdays. But C.J., the youngest grandchild at the time — would really struggle for the first hour of arriving to a family member’s house. He’d scream and cry and fuss as if he had never been there before, as if everyone around him were strangers. He didn’t want to be touched or held by anyone and when he would calm down, he’d stay by my dad’s side at all times. Naturally, we would comfort him or give him his space, but were confused as to why this was always happening.
Once C.J. received the A.S.D. (Autism Spectrum Disorder) diagnosis, things didn’t get any easier, but they did start to make sense — and after years of the dedicated attention, research and love of my incredible father, my superhuman stepmom (who often spends late nights helping him with his homework after a full work day) and C.J.’s mother things actually got better.
At 13 years old, C.J. is now what you would call ‘high-functioning’ on the spectrum. He plays sports (winning gold in his class of the Special Olympics for skating), goes to summer camp and sings in the choir at church. And earlier when I said he was obsessed with movies, I wasn’t kidding. He has a habit of memorizing entire films. We can be in middle of completely different conversation and he’ll blurt out “Buddy the Elf! What’s your favorite color? Put that down. Hello? Hello?” and not because he doesn’t understand what he’s saying, but because he think’s it’s hilarious. And he’s right.
Like other little brothers, C.J. gets annoyed by how mushy his big sister is. Because I live in New York, I now only see him and my other siblings once or twice a year. So wether I’m talking to him on the phone or I’m home with him for the holidays, I’m constantly telling him I love him. So much so, that he even asked my dad one day out of confused frustration,
“Why does Marah always got to say I love you so much?”
And when I’m not unabashedly assaulting him with my annoying love, we are having conversations about how his day went. Typically he gives me brief responses (more than one word but less than a few sentences) to cover all things from how school is going to which of the TMNTs is favorite. I’ve always assumed that’s just the way that C.J. preferred to communicate. Of course, I knew I was probably getting an even more abbreviated version of things because we were talking on the phone, or during a yearly visit that may have felt high-pressure to someone with ASD — as they typically struggle to communicate in unstructured social situations.
Recently, thanks to an iPod — I learned that I was wrong.
It all started with a confused me, thinking that my dad was texting me from his email address saying things like “Do you ever want to zoo.”
When I realized that it was in fact, my little brother texted me from the iPod he just got for his birthday — I got so excited. I didn’t even know he texted.
From there we started having more conversations. Me, testing the waters, trying to understand what and how much to communicate so as not to confuse or overwhelm him and and C.J., testing the waters of text messaging.
Many of his first texts were about music, because he also had a playlist on his iPod. He would say what songs he was listening to and ask me if I’ve heard of them. It didn’t take long for a conversation about Lady Gaga to make me cry.
It was such a simple moment, but a huge inflection point for me. After a text conversation in which C.J. realized that I liked Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, he said 7 words that stopped me in my tracks at the farmers market in Union Square — “We have the same taste in music.”
This mattered because:
- I had never heard him make an observation like this. As previously mentioned, our conversations were brief, concise and straight-forward, very A to B. This was the first time things naturally went from A to B to C, with C.J. taking the lead in elevating the conversation with a logical observation.
- I knew this was the beginning of us getting to know each other on another level. No longer were the barriers of unstructured, fast-paced, in-person social interactions a problem. C.J. could think about what he was going to say in his own time, and then write it out without trying to conform to a certain way of communicating. Through text messaging, we were talking about music and learning what we had in common! I couldn’t wait for all of the other subjects we could tackle via text.
And here are few of my other favorite gems:
Since all this began, I’ve discovered that using text messaging as a way to build the communication skills of people with ASD is beginning to be researched.
Although I’m no Autism expert, I can only share my story and rejoice in the fact that my relationship with my little brother has completely evolved and deepened now that we are able to communicate via text. We talk almost every day about all kinds of things, and I’m learning more and more about who he is as a person.
C.J. still takes things very literally (One day, after a missed Facetime, I texted him to tell him to call me back in a minute because I was at work. I received a Facetime exactly 59 seconds later.), is still brief and very direct and he definitely still calls me out on saying I love him too much — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
