Another great post from author Jeff Stimpson. Please visit his blog at www.jeffslife.tripod.com/alextheboy.
My son Alex (13, PDD-NOS) and I took a long subway ride the other day, on a slow local train through The Bronx. We sat on a hard plastic seat for an hour not looking at other people, studying shoes and pants-legs, either reading something we brought or watching the tunnel lights and the streetscapes drift past the windows.
One big agency here in New York is celebrating something like 75 years of travel training for adults with developmental disabilities. Teaching them safety and how to ride and read people and pants-legs, how to ride in the center of the subway train late at night, how to look over your shoulder when the world is a harder place to understand than it even is normally.
Alex sits, picks a scab, doesn’t pick his nose too much. As the train makes stop after stop after stop I scan shoes and sneakers and pant’s-legs and crotches under the bill of my baseball hat, listening as well for anyone who might get a snicker out of Alex, or, to be fair, who might look at him with that expression that says I work with people like him or My son, too.”
My wife Jill thinks I just have this thing about Alex bothering other people, like when he was younger and would spin around on his seat in the coffee shop and reach and shout toward the people in the booth right behind us. “If this is the worst thing that ever happens to them, they’re having a good life,” Jill used to say. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t so much that I cared if post-toddler Alex bothered people, but that I wanted him to learn that he lived in a world with people and that there were some things you didn’t do. Just like now he has to learn how to ride a subway in a crowded city.
Alex has, mostly, learned that. I no longer have so many nightmares about him bolting out the door at a stop, disappearing down the platform while my hand that lunged for his collar grasping only empty air. (He just got turned down by an afterschool program because of his bolting.)
He spends this hour yawning, coughing – he might be coming down with something; fellow subway riders love that idea – and craning his neck to look out the window behind him. On this train today, a baby starts crying. I look at Alex. Sometimes he starts laughing when a baby cries. But I think he doesn’t mean that the way some people would.
“Alex, cover your mouth when you cough.” “Alex, cover your mouth when you yawn.” You see, he’s autistic but still I’m trying to teach him to be a good citizen. Is anyone even looking at me?
They looked once, I remember. We were headed to Coney Island, another hour-long trip. Alex couldn’t’ stop giggling. A toddler can get away with giggling for half an hour across the traincar aisle from two teenagers; a skinny little kid who needs his first shave, however, can’t. I think I heard teen ask, “What’s so funny?” and also I’m pretty sure I heard the R word. I guess I was supposed to throw them both off the train.
Alex might never travel alone. About the closest he’s come is bolting from a playground a few years ago and winding up in the Central Park Zoo ten blocks south. I know most people aren’t like the teenagers with their R word. I know most people would be kind. I just don’t know if Alex will ever be able to figure out how to travel a road alone.
Jeff Stimpson lives in New York with his wife Jill and two sons. He is the author of Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism(both available on Amazon). He maintains a blog about his family at jeffslife.tripod.com/alextheboy, and is a frequent contributor to various sites and publications on special-needs parenting, such as Autism-Asperger’s Digest, Autism Spectrum News, The Autism Society news blog, and An Anthology of Disability Literature (available on Amazon). He is on LinkedIn under “Jeff Stimpson” and Twitter under “Jeffslife.”
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