The “R” Word, Breaking Geodes, and Raising an Autistic Tween

“Someone said I’m retarded because I go to a special school.”

The words hit me a lot harder than I expected. My son looked down at the floor, cheeks red, arms folded across his chest. Being eleven-going-on-twelve isn’t easy for most people, and it’s even harder when you’re autistic.

For many years, Liam seemed blissfully unaware of his own social and behavioral challenges. He knew he was different, but as a charismatic, constantly talking (we joke that he’s the opposite of non-verbal — he speaks every thought that comes into his head and seems to process better when he speaks out loud), high energy kid, making friends wasn’t difficult (though keeping friends was sometimes a challenge).

But now he’s approaching his teen years. He’s as tall as his grandmother. People often think he’s at least fourteen or fifteen. Just like I was at his age, people treat him like he’s older but he’s still aching to hang on to childhood. He still plays with Hotwheels the same way he did when he was two. It’s still the only thing he wants to buy with his allowance.

Making connections with neighborhood kids is getting harder and harder. And this is where the R word came in. I’m not sure who said it when, or if it was done in passing or as a joke. But somehow it got around to Liam that kids in the neighborhood, who all go to mainstream school for the most part, got wind that he was “special” and went to a school for kids with mental illness.

Add to that fact, he’s dealing with an ailing grandfather, friends moving away or graduating, and the general tumult of standing on the precipice of those teenaged years. His body is changing, his mind is changing, but he’s got a lot of growth to do emotionally before he can keep up with neurotypical kids his age. But for the first time he’s asking — begging, sometimes, in angry tears — to let him go to public school.

Liam is a very concrete thinker. What worked for me at eleven — books and escapism and the general retreat into fantasy land — won’t work for him. In fact, eleven was when I started writing novel length works. It was a miserable year for me. And while I had panic and anxiety in junior high, and I was a giant among my classmates, not to mention super shy and nerdy, I didn’t have a diagnosis hanging over my head.

As he’s getting older, I’m finding that Liam is opening up to me more, though. Sometimes that’s a bit difficult (“Mom, what’s a pimp?”) but ultimately I consider it a huge deal that he’ll talk with me. I often withheld things from my parents because I didn’t want them to worry and wanted to come across like I didn’t need help. Liam’s different. Where I adored my parents and put them on a pedestal, he’s always treated us like his equals. I was “Natania” until my daughter started calling me “Mommy.” But in the last few years Liam has agreed that I do know what I’m talking about sometimes. Part of that trust, I think, has been in my openness to him. I acknowledge my mistakes and let him know I’m learning all along the way, too.

A Way In

Finding a crack in the door of his mind has been a big part of our growth together, as well. One thing I did love when I was his age was rocks and minerals. I would dig in my back yard, smash rocks, and dream of discovering gold. Turns out, he dreams like I did.

So this year, when I heard about the Tarheel Gem and Mineral Show happening locally, I thought I’d take Liam. As you might know, Liam had a very difficult fall. He’s been enrolled at a residential facility during the week since December 2017. He feels like he’s missing out on his life. His friends at school and in the neighborhood carry on without him during the week. That gulf between “normal” and “Liam” is growing. I wanted to go to the mineral show to help him forget, a little, those frustrations.

I knew the geode station would be his thing. He absolutely loves the mystery of discovering something new. At first he was cautious. Sometimes his excitement gets the better of him and he just avoids a new experience. But then he saw some of the folks opening up their geodes and he just had to have one.

We set a budget and he went hunting. Picking up the geodes, talking out his thought process. He knew that odd shaped ones might have double geodes, and so he picked up a lumpy one.

“Just so you know,” I said, “there’s a chance it won’t look like the other ones.”

“I know,” he said.

Then he found an even lumpier one — it looked like a sweet potato. Flat on the bottom, narrow on the side. I braced myself for the inevitable disappointment.

“This one just spoke to me,” he said proudly, handing it over to the geode slicer.

We watched and waited as the expert geode handlers made a little show of the experience. When he opened it up we were expecting the usual, or maybe a double one.

But instead of an empty chamber rimmed with amethyst, as most of the nearby folks were, it was a crisscross of brilliant calcite angles and smoky quartz bands. The handler was clearly surprised. “Wow, that’s almost entirely calcite. I haven’t seen one like this before…”

At first I thought he was pulling one over on us. I mean, there’s a lot of showmanship in this whole process. But then he asked if he could show some of his colleagues, and they were genuinely surprised at the contents. A blacklight revealed luminescent calcite in dozens of little chambers, dark stripes, and even little red striations.

Letting the Light In

The next few days were not Liam’s best. Transitions have never been his strong suit, and going back to school proved a big challenge emotionally. It had been a while since he’d had a meltdown. But the walls came tumbling down.

Yesterday I visited him for lunch at school. I brought him his favorite food (Philadelphia rolls). The last thing I’d heard on his daily call the night before was, “I hate you! I’m leaving this place!”

Before he even reached me, he was apologizing for his behavior. Which was never something I’d have expected a few months ago. Apologies are not his strong suit. But he was genuinely upset with himself. Sometimes I think his explosions are attempts to push us to our limits, to see if we’ll ever give up on him (we won’t). When he saw me, he smiled shyly. He’s just a few inches shorter than me, so right now he’s perfect hugging height.

We sat down in the little meeting room to eat together and we talked about the geodes.

“You know how cool it was to get that geode?” I asked him.

He lit up. “That was so cool.”

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “That geode was more or less like all the other ones, wasn’t it? Just a little bit out of shape. You knew that there might be something special inside.”

He nodded.

“You’re like that geode, kiddo,” I said. “You’re full of brilliant surprises. You’re not exactly like everyone else, but no one is. You’re one in a million, for sure.”

He’s not an idiot. He’s not retarded. These words he’s used to describe himself recently. I couldn’t say the words to him, but I told him how much I loved and admired him. How brilliant he is.

That seemed to make him smile. It let the light in the geode, just a little. I told him that I was awkward and sad when I was his age, that I moved away from my closest friends, that I felt completely out of place. Now, Liam is generally allergic to anecdotes of any kind, but I think the geode conversation really anchored him. He was engaged, and seemed comforted.

Sometimes I feel like Liam and I are worlds apart. We are so different in the way we see the world. But there are cracks where we let the light in. And a little crack can light a whole room (or that whole geode). He amazes me every day with his passion, his curiosity, and his growing expertise in cars and engineering. If he can harness that passion — and I believe he can — and keep using the tools he’s been given, I know he can dazzle.