Silence is not the same as Inactivity

The minds of most people are confounding if you have not known them and spent time with them over the years. The mind of a child is especially confounding. The older of my children, the one with ASD (Asperger’s) had two writing assignments last night. One was to type a poem. Secondly he was to write out a fictional letter from his last English teacher to his current English teacher talking about the attributes of the student (my son) now coming into her class.

Handwritten the faux teacher to teacher note was a nightmare of grammatical errors. The content was fine. Penmanship? It bordered on the unreadable. Motor skills, fine motor skills are not the ASD child's strong suit. Hey most of you have seen my writing and know that I am not the person to offer aid and assistance on this issue.

The poem on the other hand was amazing. It was to be a description of what lay outside a window. In a style that was sparse and clean he described the flora and sensory components that lay outside his room. My understanding is that motor skills are tough for children like my son. The imagination part of the poem however just took me to a completely different place in understanding exactly what he perceives in the world around himself and what he is assigning meaning to. Understand some of the references to the window do mean something other that what it would seem at first. The window has a broken child proof lock, thus to open the window you have to unlatch it at the midpoint, raise the window and that snap it back into place at the point you want it opened to.

Here is the poem….

Through my Portal

As I look out my window
I see my kingdom
Covered in ivy
I see an old tree stump
Cut down when dead
I see my lamp post
I see my street

I pull my window
Out and up the only
Way to open it
I smell my neighbors
Barbecuing steak
I smell ivy and lavender

I pull my window down
To open it
I reach out to grab a
Branch of my tree
Wet with dew
Through my portal