Puck

Our Common Enemy

If we can begin to consider hatred as the enemy, as your and my enemy, then we can begin to transform our anger into compassion. That will be how we can take advantage of an unfortunate and tragic situation.

- Nawang Gehlek Rimpoche, "The Real Enemy"

The above quote suits what I am currently writing quite well.  I view hatred as a more aggressive form of ignorance and I (and my family and my son in particular) have been fighting ignorance for years.  Some of the ignorance was on our part.  Some of the ignorance was on the part of people who should have known better.  Still if by writing I can give someone, anyone a tool with which to fight ignorance I have carried out a moral act.

Today, well actually yesterday, I began writing a piece on what it means to have a son who is on the autism spectrum make a high school varsity sports team.  Next weekend we (the team and the parents) are travelling to a multi-day hockey tournament. For my part I am savoring my son’s riding on the team bus as a varsity player as a senior. 

What spurred me to write about this is something I have noticed over time, the lack of recognition of ordinary people addressing very difficult issues. I always see pieces in the local news media about the athlete of the week who has overcome a broken home, a childhood illness or who has always excelled reaching for the stars in academia or sports and who through sheer force of will has never stumbled.  One time in a thousand you will see a cloying piece that usually drips with pity about a team that includes on their roster the amputee or the kid from Somalia that has no idea where his family is.  You don’t get stories about kids with autism striving to be part of a team and then making the team.

There are a couple of reasons for dearth of autistic kids on high school sports teams.  Kids with autism have difficulty negotiating the very specific social norms and cues that varsity athletes operate under. Normally you aren’t even in the race to make the team if you don’t the code and the language.  Secondly many autistic kids do not care about teams; it isn’t what they focus on. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the literature implies there is a high degree of self focus and often a lack of empathy for others in autistic youth.  Third, autistic kids can be clumsy.  My son broke his nose twice before he was five because his brain and his body did not communicate to tell him to put you arms out when you trip forward so as not to hit your face.

While it is a long shot making a high school team is possible if the right circumstances exist for a person on the autism spectrum. There is a website that lists the following as some positive characteristics of Aspergers/High Functioning Autism.

1. Attention to detail – sometimes with painstaking perfection.

 2. Focus and diligence – has an ability to focus on tasks for a long period of time without needing supervision or incentive is legendary.

3. Higher fluid intelligence – scientists in Japan have recently discovered that Aspergers kids have a higher “fluid intelligence” than non-Aspergers kids. Fluid intelligence is the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems. It is the ability to draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge. Experts say that those with Aspergers have a higher than average general IQ as well.

4. Honesty – the value of being able to say “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

5. Independent, unique thinking – people with Aspergers tend to spend a lot of time alone and will likely have developed their own unique thoughts as opposed to a ‘herd’ mentality.

6. Internal motivation – as opposed to being motivated by praise, money, bills or acceptance. This ensures a job done with conscience, with personal pride.

7. Logic over emotion – although people with Aspergers are very emotional at times, they spend so much time ‘computing’ in our minds that they get quite good at it. They can be very logical in their approach to problem-solving.

8. Visual, three-dimensional thinking – some with Aspergers are very visual in their thought processes, which lends itself to countless useful and creative applications.

The site where I got this list seems pretty good.  There are many sites but I am not a plagiarist and this is the one I used so here is their link. http://www.myaspergerschild.com/2011/01/list-of-aspergers-characteristics.html

 

From the moment my son put skates on the first time at about 4 ½ years old he wanted to skate fast and hard.  He had that internal motivation.  Something about speeding around a rink made him come alive.  You could see his eyes flash when he headed out to do laps.  He surged he went full bore he just rocketing around that oval.

We initially tried figure skating. However the cost versus benefit (physicality, team activity, camaraderie with other families) tipped us toward hockey after about 18 months of ice skating shows.  From the time he put on pads he loved hockey.  For the first few years he was horrible at it.  As I said autism spectrum kids can be pretty damn clumsy.  But he was focused.  He listened to what his coaches said.  He was diligent and did the drills as he was directed.

Primus struggled with the locker room interactions.  Over the years there have been fights both with other teams on the ice and with his own team members in the locker room. Undiagnosed as autism spectrum until seventh grade there were a couple of coaches who treated him like a pariah because he was different. Hey I didn’t know what to tell them.  It was only when my wife was reviewing a request for research on the increasing prevalence of autism in teen boys that she looked up the symptoms and saw our son described to a tee right there on the all knowing interweb.

But Primus stuck with it and he stuck with his core teammates, a group that as a whole got shafted any number of times by our local league and by organized hockey in Michigan.  (That is a whole other story but the abuse built camaraderie and a sense of black humor). But there were league representatives and coaches who embodied the spirit of amateur athletics who made sure my son got his shifts on the ice and that he got help in developing his skills.  It wasn’t an easy road but it has been a rewarding road. Diligence, attention to detail, single mindedness and the internal motivation to make the high school team they have all lead to this year.

When I started the actual piece I keep finding myself going back to cues that I missed because I didn’t have an idea that autism was anything other than what I had seen in movies or books.  You know the images children locked in their own silent world.  As I went back to events at preschool, at 2^nd grade and throughout the years I became emotional because of trained professionals who must have known but did not speak up.  If they knew then they were worse than negligent, their behaviors could easily be called malpractice.  

What started as a three page piece will probably end up being twenty.  But I will write it and I will post it here. Count small victories and share them that is what I say.