brother’s keeper
I finish braiding Riley’s hair for school; she likes one thick rope down her back, the elastics double tightened, and I smile because already tiny errant curls have begun to escape around her face. Already, the freer part of her has begun to defy strict boundaries. Sometimes when she feels overwhelmed, she pushes those rebels back down with both hands, as though mastering them will reassert some more comfortable boundaries.
“Okay, Adam,” she says, “let me see that wild hair of yours.” Wild is probably not the word Adam would choose. If he had a mind to say, he would say undisturbed. But with the help Riley so gratefully received from me, she immediately determines to help her brother, though he would probably not call this help. At first, Adam says nothing, just stops pacing and twists a little on his feet, standing in that spot where Riley bobs up on her tiptoes and, in order to make her assessment more careful, squints a little at his forehead.
“Yep, it’s looking pretty crazy today, Adam, pret-ty crazy. Let me brush it just a little for you, just real quick.” I smile over the seriousness implied in repetition, in bumping up to two syllables.
Silently, Adam inclines toward her, his own expression one of practiced patience. He appreciates the attention, interpreting it appropriately as love, I can see that, but at the same time he half winces over the sight of the hairbrush in her outstretched hand. I wonder sometimes what hairbrushing feels like to him; he’s always seemed more sensitive to sensations than the rest of us. As a little boy, Adam struggled with phobia about food textures, revolted by the feel of things most of us don’t hesitate to eat. At the dentist, I had lay on top of him, had to help two other technicians keep him still so the hygenist could clean his teeth. He avoids hugs, created a new expression of love for this reason, and when he allows them, his body always bows away in a rebellious curve. He cried, tears rolling down his cheeks, when we took precautionary COVID tests before travel just this spring, and I didn’t understand his extreme reaction until Zoe said, maybe for him it actually is very painful. Varying disorders of the central nervous system are definitive for Autistic people, whose challenges arise from neurological anomalies, but really, the rest of us are not so different. Our brokenness expresses itself in flashes of pain that can be mysterious to people who don’t share the same way of thinking.
Riley, for her part and also because of Autism, exhibits numbness to the same sensations for which Adam feels high sensitivity. She never winces when I tug a comb through the knots in her hair, but in fact loves any kind of tactile attention. She has never struggled with textures, has never been afraid of the dentist. She has trouble recognizing her body’s signals that she’s full after a meal and only recognizes that she’s tired when she yawns. Riley’s muted reception of sensory information from her central nervous system means she has a high threshold for pain, even missing small injuries and minor pains. For months, she walked around in shoes that were too small because she didn’t notice the pain in her feet. While Adam avoids stimulation, Riley constantly seeks more. She seeks attention; He avoids eye contact. She craves touch; He moves away. In the Autism community, we like to say that when you know one person with Autism, you know one person with Autism, and my two prove this true. In Autism, as in every other collective descriptor of people, there are no useful stereotypes.
“All finished,” Adam says hopefully, shrinking away from the hairbrush, the last word not rising like a question but falling implicitly final. I watch his body tense and wonder if it hurts when we brush his hair. Maybe for him it actually is very painful. I’ve experienced that sensation only once, and I don’t know why, maybe only as a lesson in compassion for my son. I ran my fingers through my hair that day and felt pain, like dozens of tiny needles. It felt so intense that I actually winced and exclaimed in surprise. I watch now as Adam leans and bends; it looks as though it takes all of his self-control not to slide out from under that brush.
Gently, slowly, Riley drags his long bangs down straight, then brushes them back, away from his forehead, his eyes, those sharp, angular cheeks. She’s soft curves; He’s strong lines. “Just a minute, just a minute,” she says patiently, softly, as though without having ever felt his sensitivity, having no understanding at all of either of his feelings or his reluctance over them, she can somehow appreciate and acknowledge that this is not easy for him as it is for her, that he needs everything restrained except compassion, and that this alone he needs generously. She does not need to understand him to accept him. She speaks to him in soothing tones while fraction by fraction he angles further away from her.
“Not right now,” Adam says abruptly, ungratefully, the words slicing and jabbing back in pain, but she neither winces nor bruises over his brusque dismissal. She moves around him to the back of his head, even more gently, lightly tidying with the brush.
“I’m almost done, I promise,” she says, taking no offense. He lashes; she soothes.
And I watch, thinking how it will always be that we humans come at life from different, sometimes opposite directions, how instead of arguing over the right to feel pain we could acknowledge it in each other with gentleness; how we could patiently bend and lean toward each other even when our anguish makes us want to tilt away; how even without understanding each other, we could choose to be kind. Adam shows so much restraint just being there with her, just staying when it hurts and he desperately wants to walk away, and Riley, without making any of this about herself, carefully channels all of her passion into compassion. That word, compassion, from the Latin means to suffer with. So that is what I’m seeing now, I realize; that is what God’s teaching me, that this is compassion on every side, when we decide, even with all our differences, to stay, to be patient, to be gentle with each other.
