"More. like. you.than.not!"
-Larry Bissonnette, "Wretches & Jabberers"
The counselor mumbled, "it's amazing." "What is going on?" I snapped, really disturbed by now. My psych professor said, "You've tested over two standard deviations above the mean." "We think you should test out of your general educational requirements and take the 400-level psych courses we're offering next term." They went on to say I could handle an additional 3 semester hours a term with no issues. I expressed concern that I was trying to hold down a job and did not want to risk my scholarship and BASIC (what would later become Pell) Grant with a subsequent poor performance if I could not manage the additional course load. They were more confident about my ability to manage the added coursework than I was. The following semester, I was approved to take Child Psychology and Animal Behavior, senior-level psychology classes.
What I will never forget about that incident was the three men staring the entire time we spoke. I felt like a zoo exhibit throughout the interview. They stared as if they suddenly realized I was a creature from another solar system.
I was 18. I learned a new, painful lesson; how people react emotionally when they learn a person is more than two standard deviations above a western societal construct called 'average intelligence.' Measured by a testing instrument with eugenic origins. I learned how one newly aquired societal label changed how the entire world views a person. I was never treated in the same causally friendly way by faculty and staff again.
Twenty-eight years later, I sat in a pediatric neurologist's office as he explained our son's comprehensive evaluation results in a flat, cold voice. All I could remember were groups of words slapping consciousness painfully: global developmental delays, nonspeaking autism, intellectual disability so 'severe' there was no measurable baseline. He threw out a rough estimate of 'mental age.' I thought, here it is. A deadly new label. "is he saying my baby is at least two standard deviations below their idea of an intelligence mean?"
We were told there was nothing we could do. The future was grim for our son. Over two standard deviations from the mean. Now, why was that familiar? At that moment, I couldn't catch the thought thread and reel in why it might be important.
Mu's father is a brilliant man. The term 'genius' has been used by those who know the minutiae of his creations. The test of eugenic origins has not been used to add a number to that label. We had plans for our son. Turkish math courses, a coding school, and robot building. The day we got that diagnosis, we began thinking after we moved past tears and shock. We called his adult sister. She stood in the middle of her workplace, crying, and all her coworkers rushed to her side, knowing something was wrong but not understanding why silent tears were flowing. Our family's collective ability to think and think well helped us push past the trauma of how this diagnosis was delivered to our son and us. We held hands with our son and spoke together softly, saying we had to regroup. Now the plan was to show our son how much we loved him. And to find out how our son could manage on his own.
Mu's father is a brilliant man. The term 'genius' has been used by those who know the minutiae of his creations. The test of eugenic origins has not been used to add a number to that label. We had plans for our son. Turkish math courses, a coding school, and robot building. The day we got that diagnosis, we began thinking after we moved past tears and shock. We called his adult sister. She stood in the middle of her workplace, crying, and all her coworkers rushed to her side, knowing something was wrong but not understanding why silent tears were flowing. Our family's collective ability to think and think well helped us push past the trauma of how this diagnosis was delivered to our son and us. We held hands with our son and spoke together softly, saying we had to regroup. Now the plan was to show our son how much we loved him. And to find out how our son could manage on his own.
The new question was, could someone carrying the label of intellectual disability more than two standard deviations below this biased intelligence mean command his own life? Had anyone with our son's diagnosis accomplished this? Thanks to my husband, we approached that question as a series of engineering problems. We have been navigating and recalculating solution arrays on the fly ever since.
The connecting thread of experience caught me after an incident at the playground with my son. Someone said something awful about him right to his face. I corrected them. I told them he understood exactly what they said. I did the "what is autism" speech. The child, much older than my son, apologized to me. "No," I said. "Apologize to him." A hesitant apology came. The playground had become an unwelcome place for us again. As I settled my boy in his adaptive stroller and turned us toward home, the silent, persistent staring followed, and I felt that sense of vertigo that sometimes accompanies flashbacks.
The realization came, and that thread of memory yanked itself to our moment on the playground. I was back in time looking at three men who had met me a lifetime ago, who once spoke with relaxed ease to me when exchanging social pleasantries in the school halls. Looking at how they changed when they held in their hands the knowledge that the same student they conversed with and encouraged was labeled more than two standard deviations from the biased 'intelligence' mean. And the looks were precisely the same. It was the same type of horrible, distancing stare. Like the child bully and her friends at the playground, staring as if my son could not be like them.
My son and I are equidistant from the mean in society's perceptions of measured intelligence. We are both somewhere beyond two standard deviations from that fabricated mean. Neither of us is labeled mean/typical/average intelligence. We are both neurodivergent. Those two lines eventually meet, and the moment of that intersectional meeting point makes us oddly equal.
The connecting thread of experience caught me after an incident at the playground with my son. Someone said something awful about him right to his face. I corrected them. I told them he understood exactly what they said. I did the "what is autism" speech. The child, much older than my son, apologized to me. "No," I said. "Apologize to him." A hesitant apology came. The playground had become an unwelcome place for us again. As I settled my boy in his adaptive stroller and turned us toward home, the silent, persistent staring followed, and I felt that sense of vertigo that sometimes accompanies flashbacks.
The realization came, and that thread of memory yanked itself to our moment on the playground. I was back in time looking at three men who had met me a lifetime ago, who once spoke with relaxed ease to me when exchanging social pleasantries in the school halls. Looking at how they changed when they held in their hands the knowledge that the same student they conversed with and encouraged was labeled more than two standard deviations from the biased 'intelligence' mean. And the looks were precisely the same. It was the same type of horrible, distancing stare. Like the child bully and her friends at the playground, staring as if my son could not be like them.
My son and I are equidistant from the mean in society's perceptions of measured intelligence. We are both somewhere beyond two standard deviations from that fabricated mean. Neither of us is labeled mean/typical/average intelligence. We are both neurodivergent. Those two lines eventually meet, and the moment of that intersectional meeting point makes us oddly equal.
That additional strange fact, when linked to all the knotted ties that bind me to our son, makes blaming him for being different impossible. I can't play that mind game some other parents play when they hear their offspring are autistic. He is not different. Not from the wrong planet. He is very much my son.
I decided genuine respect and acceptance meant understanding that part of those unique characteristics that make our son diverse are from the same genetic soup that floated together to create us, his parents. I understood that day on the way back from that playground that our equidistance from the mean was a sign I needed to move beyond simply accepting him and presume his competence. As my husband put it, the problem was not our son. It was an environment not engineered to accommodate his needs. The point of intersection was love. That love moved us through time and space to this moment, when our son, despite diagnoses, forecasts of doom, and failed attempts to use intelligence tools that have no way of measuring his intelligence or his value as a human being to chain him to series of labels, has thrived.
More.like.me.than.not
I decided genuine respect and acceptance meant understanding that part of those unique characteristics that make our son diverse are from the same genetic soup that floated together to create us, his parents. I understood that day on the way back from that playground that our equidistance from the mean was a sign I needed to move beyond simply accepting him and presume his competence. As my husband put it, the problem was not our son. It was an environment not engineered to accommodate his needs. The point of intersection was love. That love moved us through time and space to this moment, when our son, despite diagnoses, forecasts of doom, and failed attempts to use intelligence tools that have no way of measuring his intelligence or his value as a human being to chain him to series of labels, has thrived.
More.like.me.than.not
Beautiful> Thank you Kerima!
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading it!
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