Hi all,
I hope this story proved both entertaining and educational. I'd like to dedicate it to my son, who was the inspiration for Todd. Like Todd, Andy numbers among his special interests lights and pumpkins. (The interest in Superman is all my own.) Todd is quite similar to Andy in other respects as well, such as in the ways he displays his emotions and in the fact that he uses echolalia.
But Todd is definitely NOT Andy. Andy, for example, uses echolalia in a more limited, but more communicative, fashion. Unfortunately, Andy's speech is so poorly articulated that people who do not know him well would never be able to understand him. We are working on having him use the iPad app Proloquo2Go to communicate. He has been making nice progress with it. Also, Andy's meltdowns are mercifully few these days. Andy has never shown any desire to take a pumpkin outside of the house, although he does want a plastic pumpkin to remain in our bay window year round. And although Andy did have a time in his life where the only hugs he liked were the 'stealth hugs' he gave, those days are past. He enjoys being given hugs now.
A few odds and ends that I couldn't fit into the story: Everything I mentioned about autism in the story is true to the best of my knowledge, including how some children use echolalia as their pathway into communicative speech. The ending, however, did not reflect a typical first use of communicative speech. Much more typical is to use speech to 'mand' (i.e., to make requests/demands/commands). What Todd apparently used his speech for at the end was for a social function of speech which would in real life have likely come much later in his development, if it came at all. So now you, as a reader of the story, have a choice: Either accept that Todd's development did not follow that of a typical child with autism* or else interpret the story ending as something more depressing: Todd may have just been spouting his usual non-communicative echolalia and Jerome may have been indulging in wishful thinking and just read much more into it than Todd had intended. I, personally, prefer the former interpretation, but I purposely left the story open to the latter interpretation for the sake of realism.
*Then again, a 'typical child with autism' is a bit of an oxymoron. There is a saying within the autism community: If you've met one child with autism, you've met -- ONE child with autism. People on the spectrum are at least as varied as those not on it. Take this story as describing one person on the spectrum, but please do not assume that all people with autism are like Todd, any more than you would assume that every neurotypical human is like Lois or every Kryptonian like Clark.
Oh, and in case you were wondering what the English assignment was that resulted in the opening essay, Mrs. Nelson gave the class the following prompt: Write an essay about someone you know. Describe the person vividly enough to make the readers feel as if they know him or her as well. Suppose you could change one thing about that person; what would it be?
As always, all feedback welcomed. Also welcomed are any questions you may have about autism or what it is like being the Mom of a child with autism.
Joy,
Lynn
