you do; we help
After dinner, gathered around the blessing-table, our emptied, sopped-up plates abandoned like islands, our bodies weary from the day, we feast on family.
“We should play a game,” Kevin says, and I get up to look in the cabinet where we keep them. Adam follows, towering behind me, swaying like a pendulum. For Adam, stillness rarely means anything other than sick or sleeping. “Nerts,” he says, bobbing, casting his vote. He used to hate playing games; now, he anticipates them. My children who have Autism live from opposite ends of the spectrum: Riley defaults to yes, of course, Adam to no, but thank you. Adam never knows from the first what he will enjoy at last. In some ways, I’m like that too.
Hearing him, Zoe sighs audibly. “Of course he says ‘Nerts,'” she laments, “it’s all he ever wants to play.” I smile, still scanning the games, because that hasn’t always been so.
“Nerts,” Adam reiterates behind me, with a little more emphasis.
I glance at him, and he holds my gaze. “I hear you,” I say.
“Nerts, please,” he says quietly, dropping his voice, and I envision him trying to play Nerts that first time, hands flat, mixing cards on the table the way I had made mud pies as a child, fingers lifted slightly out of the muck.
Sometimes we fumble teaching complicated things because of our limited shared vocabulary. In our attempts to teach Adam to play this game, we had first tried him out as Kevin’s assistant. Given Adam’s intelligence, we had hoped a little helping and a whole lot of observation would be all he needed for success. But Nerts isn’t really a game to play with a partner, and Adam’s early enthusiasm for the effort deteriorated after only a few rounds. Distracted, he sat beside Kevin entertaining himself with songs and scripts and mostly succeeded in hiding the cards from view. Finally, Kevin suggested that we give Adam some cards and see how much he had learned. And so Adam sat mixing, occasionally stopping to swiftly and deftly move a few cards to another part of the mess. Adam had learned our movements and the pace. He knew what playing looked like, at least from his perspective, but not actually how to play.
“Oh, whatever, we can play Nerts,” Zoe concedes now, relenting.
“Okay,” I say, grinning, gliding a gentle hand over Adam’s cheek before turning to reach for the cards, “we can play Nerts.”
“Nerts, okaayy, let’s go,” Adam says in announcer voice, turning synchronously with me toward the table.
That first day teaching Adam the game, I had suddenly conjured a thousand hands-on lessons little girl me had learned because someone had taken the time to teach me. I remembered cooking lessons, standing on a stool, sloshing flour from a mixing bowl all over my shirt; learning to clean with a scrub brush in my own small, gloved hands. Even Bible study my mom taught by having me read and work through the answers to my own questions. More than words, those lessons had been practice, and still more, the empowering understanding that my parents found me capable.
“Woa, woa, woa, everybody pause a minute,” I had interjected that day, putting down my cards, heart heavy with confession: I had been too busy playing to teach him properly. “Let’s start over,” I’d said, moving my own chair beside Adam’s, “I’ll help Adam for a while.”
And so, I had gathered Adam’s smear of cards and shuffled them anew while Kevin sketched the game out on paper, using simple words to talk Adam through the steps. As I set up, Kevin gestured back and forth from his drawing to the cards I laid out, repetitively and slowly reiterating the basic rules. As the game began, I sat beside Adam and carefully demonstrated how to turn the cards before placing them in Adam’s hands so that he could practice the movements himself. “Look, you can move this here,” I had said, gesturing with my fingers. “Okay, now move that there.” I led, but Adam, following me, took the steps. After a few more rounds, a slow grin began to spread across Adam’s face as his expression softened with comprehension, and in just that way, Adam’s love for Nerts was born.
I read somewhere that critical mentoring follows a simple pattern: I do, you watch. I do, you help. You do, I help. You do, I watch. In the very middle of the process rests the bridge from learning information to developing skills. Settling back into my chair that first day, I remembered this and acknowledged the truth of it, that mentoring is critical and worth our time, and that without those last two steps, our teaching will always fall short.
Beside me now, Adam shuffles his cards, piling them into an electric shuffler. Ptttrrr, pttrrr. His cards make the same sound as mine, just at the push of a button. He grins, taking on an industrious air as he sets up his game, pausing with cards in hand to wait for our go. Speed has been the last skill to develop, but finally now, we’re reaching the end of the days when we choose slower on purpose. Every so often now, Adam wins.
