When I worked as a church secretary, the treasurer received jokes via email from his friends across the country, and often shared them with me.
Our favorites were the “church bulletin bloopers.” Maybe you’ve seen this collection in one form or another: “For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery down stairs.” “The Rev. Merriweather spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.”
And the all-time winner: “Low self-esteem support group meets Wednesdays at 7 pm in Fellowship Hall. Please use rear entrance.”
That unfortunate blooper came to mind one evening at my own support group, which I’d formed to address the emotional impact on parents raising special needs children.
A young woman had recently joined the group, having come to the US from Japan just a few years earlier. She hadn’t said much during our meetings yet, content to listen, comforted, it seemed, to be among other parents who understood the challenges she faced her with her six-year-old son on the autism spectrum. She had a story to tell that night, though, and described, in halting, beautifully accented English, what had happened at her son’s school the week before.
Morning drop-off, apparently, was a noisy, boisterous confusion of jostling and commotion as the students greeted each other at the school’s entrance each day. Overwhelmed and overstimulated, her son typically became agitated, shrieking and covering his ears, trying to shut out the sensory overload assaulting him from every direction. Getting him inside the building was a daily battle, a poor start to an already challenging school experience.
The teacher and school principal had come up with a solution, however. They asked my new friend to drive around behind the school each morning and deliver her son to the the back door, where he would not be disturbed by the other student’s behavior. “We think he’ll do better that way,” they’d told her, smiling reassuringly.
She held her head down while telling us her story, staring at her hands while plucking at a thread on her jeans. “I understand,” she said quietly. “The kids — they are just being natural.” And her son didn’t care, she said; he didn’t even realize he was being singled out for special treatment, treatment another child may consider punishment.
“He does not mind,” she told us, looking up then. “But I….” She paused, searching for the words in English to describe the anguish written on her face. “I hurt,” she concluded softly. “It hurts me.”
The insulation protecting her son could not also protect his mother.
Rationally, my friend knew her son was unperturbed by the school’s pragmatic response to the disruption his behavior caused. She understood the school’s responsibility to balance the needs of all their students with the exceptional needs of her son, and acknowledged that her son did fare better with a calmer start to his day. Perhaps she’d begun to recognize that this would be one of many compromises made necessary by her son’s autism, that greater losses than not entering school through the front door like a “normal” student may lie ahead.
No slight was intended, no suggestion made that her son was any less deserving of respect than the other children. She knew this. She even acknowledged that there was nothing inherently wrong with his entering the school by the back door, that the implications of his being asked to do so were in her mind, not his.
But it haunted her. It hurt.
I hope it helped her to tell us her story that evening. I know it helped us to listen.
