how he said
“I said ‘no’!” Adam says, pushing back against his chair just as worship ends. We have only just stopped singing, the sound of our voices only just fades away, diffusing like light in thin spaces, like sweetness carried on the wind. His brow furrows, his hair, which has lately grown long, flips out in response to the force of backward motion. “I said no!” He closes his eyes, squeezes them tight and wrinkled in a squint, as though in prayer, or maybe, in an attempt to hide in plain sight.
My first mistake is responding to the words as though he’s chosen them specifically, interpreting as I would had it been anyone else shouting out a protest I cannot remember. It helps to remember what you know about a person, and Adam’s first language isn’t words, it’s sound.
We all begin communicating through sound. Baby wails wake mamas and daddies from their sleep; the sounds moving our limbs before our brains catch up. Of all my babies, Adam’s cries were most articulate. From birth, he not only cried, he squealed, or at least, that’s how we described it. His was a keening sound, shrill, but not grieving, like a meaningful note, held in the throat that seemed to say, I am. But I have spiritual amnesia; I do not remember this.
“You said ‘no’ about what?” I ask, leaning forward so I can see him. His words accuse; they insult; they rage and riot. For a moment, I feel so caught off guard by those words, how they jerk and collide, how they seem to suggest we didn’t listen, that I forget what I know about Adam, including the way that worship shatters him.
Adam looks at me now and then tears his eyes away, mumbles something I can’t quite hear, quietly, under his breath. He does not answer my question.
“You said ‘no’ about what?” I repeat, though I have enough history with such conversations not to expect a different response. Adam looks at me again, makes a derisive sound, as though wishing he could reel back his earlier explosion, but still, he says nothing. I wonder if he even understands what I’ve asked.
I watch Adam’s face and think about that sound. He recognizes my displeasure, I can see that in the particular way he cranes his neck, the way he looks at me and then closes his eyes halfway. I once heard an articulate autistic adult explain why eye contact presents such a challenge for a lot of people with autism. The man said that while he has little intuition for social cues, he experiences high sensitivity to feelings. “I see too many feelings in your eyes,” he told the interviewer. “I can’t bear it.”
I remember something a wise friend said recently about the need to separate what someone says from how they say it and to respond separately to both aspects of communication. Within that how fall all the nonverbal cues—the body language, the eyes, the tone, all the emotion we can see and hear that may or may not fit the spoken words. Something about those thoughts my friend shared becomes immediately clarifying. Autism makes ours an upside-down home: In Adam’s case, it’s important to begin interpretation with how he sounds instead of what he says.
When Adam was a child, he taught me this. If I led with emotion, if I let anger boil over in my flushed face, my quaking arms, my clenched fists, my demanding tone, Adam had no chance to understand my words at all. He always responded first to how I said, not what I said. Autism meant that as Adam was learning communication, he found it easier to assign meaning and outcomes to tones of voice, because for a much longer while than is typical for most, he found my words almost entirely incomprehensible. So Adam learned to memorize words with the way people said them. He adopted meaningless phrases and applied them in communication by sound, and often, these “recorded” comments actually fit, if somewhat awkwardly, the thing Adam meant to express. He might, in a stolen sisterly voice exclaim, “Stop doing that!” when he saw something scary on TV, or respond in announcer voice with “It’s a world record!” whenever he heard we’d be eating one of his favorite foods for supper. Over time, his choices became more nuanced. Somewhere along the way, Adam learned the sound of frustration, which he somewhat sloppily generalized as negativity. “This is ridiculous,” said with a practiced incredulousness and impatience, became a way he said “I don’t want to,” and “No, thank you,” and even, “I can’t handle this.”
The way Adam communicates now has everything to do with the way he learned to circumnavigate challenges in the beginning, and that understanding moves me now with compassion. So I drop the words; I let them fall; I let them drift away like dust. When I consider how he said instead of what he said, I hear only pain, the raw-hearted response to more feelings than Adam can bear, the shattering weight of glory. All through scripture, when people see God, they fall on their faces. Isaiah yelled, “Woe is me!” Suddenly I recognize that explosive “I said ‘no’” as only Adam’s ill attempt to express the same sort of thing, even though the words are all wrong. Suddenly I know that on top of everything else, I’ve left my son more perplexed than ever about what to do with the overwhelm that worship induces in his tender heart, and I can’t help but wonder how many other times in other conversations with other people I’ve misinterpreted the present because I’ve forgotten or been ignorant to the past. How we communicate now has everything to do with how we learned–as individuals, as communities–to confront challenges in the past.
“You okay?” I ask, softening. I walk over to Adam’s chair, bend down to read his eyes more closely, lean close so he can see the love in mine. He reaches up and flicks my ears. He never has liked hugs, so he found another way, a less painful way, to be affectionate.
“Time to go,” he says, a soft, thin whisper, a reluctant goodbye he has clipped from another moment, and I nod, understanding, stepping back so that he can slip away, so that he can run quickly up the stairs to be alone.
