When you’re born with a syndrome such as Asperger’s, one that won’t be widely accepted, or even heard of for decades, you may live your whole life, never imagining for a moment that there’s something neurologically wrong with you. And no one else is aware of it either. Indeed, how could they be? Those who know you simply accept you as you are. After all, it’s to be expected that some folks are more eccentric than others. What makes them that way is moot. Right?
I’ve had fun over the past year sharing mostly humorous anecdotes on how Asperger Syndrome has expressed itself in my life, and I’ve been writing recently (in this series) about my early childhood and education with that same wink, but I have reached a spot in the narrative where it gets serious. There isn’t much in the next few paragraphs to laugh about, so if you’re hoping for some lighthearted banter, you’re gonna have to wait till next week. But if you’re curious to know what it was really like for me, without all the clever trappings, then this one’s tailor-made for you.
I was nine when I went into the fourth grade. Halfway through the year, I was a nervous wreck. If school had been strenuous up to that point, it had suddenly compounded by 100%. I had learned some rudimentary things thus far. I was able to read, write, and fiddle around with numbers, and I was pretty sure I knew my home address and could spell my name correctly for the police if I ever got kidnapped, but on the whole, I was not prepared to enter the jungle of past participles, gerunds, and fractions that were staring me in the face from a very green “black board.” I couldn’t spell worth a hoot, and I was a sloooowww reader. I was ready to take the knowledge I had acquired and be done with it. I’ve heard of many people who never went past the fourth grade and did very well in life. I was just hoping I might qualify as one of them.
For three years I had struggled to catch up with everyone else, to keep them from disappearing over the next hill ahead of me, and I was exhausted. The only thing I could do well was draw, and most of the time, that didn’t fit into anyone’s agenda but mine. I was chastised constantly for drawing when I was supposed to be writing or listening or reading. And this is a trait that followed me all the way through college and beyond.
My fourth grade teacher’s name was Snodgrass. Now you’d think that two people whose names ended with “grass,” not to mention the letters a-s-s, would have something in common, but that was not the case. It turned out she was a Missus Snodgrass, and had not borne the suffering of having a name like that through adolescence. But somewhere along the way she had successfully embraced the prefix “Snod,” and wore it well. A certain amount of chemistry between student and teacher, that would have been nice at that crucial stage of my life, was simply not in the cards for us.
One day in class (out loud, so that all of my fellow students heard it) I addressed her as “Mommy.” This was the most mortifying thing that had happened to me publicly up till then, and continues to rank high on the list, some fifty years later. Perhaps one could say that it was a Freudian slip, and even I tend to see it as a compelling desire on my part to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb.
It was in those days that I began to get ill. I was chronically upset by the pressures that learning placed upon me. I began to dread each new day, on the evening before. A sickening realization would come over me as the family casually watched the Andy Griffith show, or whatever was on the tube, that tomorrow was looming just around the corner. All I wanted was to stay in bed in the morning and listen to the water run into the tub as my mother would fill it for her morning bath. The sound of the vacuum cleaner as it shoved its way into every corner and under every chair in the house. To enjoy the warm sun as it streamed through the window. To watch dust particles swirl in the light. Anything to put off for another day having to face a world of facts and figures, discipline and humiliation.
At school, I began to live for the bell to ring. For recess to come. For the weekend to arrive. For holiday breaks, and summer vacations. I loved it when we could watch movies in the gym, or on occasion, an art teacher would drop by. I didn’t want to learn any more. I no longer wanted to listen to words that seemed like a foreign language, but whose meanings and sounds I was expected to recall in a pop quiz. And I was tired of being told that I shouldn’t draw during class.
When I got out of school at the end of each day, the last thing I wanted to think about was going back, so I would put it out of my mind until the evening blues set in again. We didn’t have a dog, so I couldn’t blame the lack of homework on anyone but myself. And one day my teacher realized that I was sick, physically and emotionally. That I was sick with fear of doing things that I didn’t understand. So sick that I had begun to miss days at school. Something that I had not done up to that time in my life. And I was not feigning illness. I was truly overcome. Probably on my way to a full-blown ulcer. So disturbed was I, that one day I finally broke down into a puddle of tears right in the middle of class. Oddly enough, as embarrassing as that emotional outburst was, it came as a relief. Like confessing a crime, or releasing a horrible memory that had been suppressed for far too long.
My parents met with the teacher and they discussed the problem. I really don’t know what conclusions they came up with, or if they reached a conclusion at all, but just being able to air the problem helped. And somehow, I made it through the fourth grade, just as I had made it through the previous grades before: by the skin of my teeth.
To dredge up report cards from those days would only be embarrassing to me, and boring for you the reader, as every one of them had a below average assessment of my progress. But I had the best, most creative folders any parent could hope for. This trend continued all the way through sixth grade. At that point in life I had not yet discovered something about myself that I know now: namely, that when I was drawing, I could precisely remember what I was hearing with my ears or seeing with my eyes. What for many years appeared to my mentors as an annoyance, and a distraction to my education, was actually, for me, the key to learning. Who knows what things I might have excelled in if I had been allowed to draw with abandon during the full course of each school day. As it was, even under constant threat of punishment, I compulsively drew on my assignment papers, notebooks, desk tops, hands, even in my study books with the unquenchable thirst of a rarebit fiend. A fact that I credit for any lasting fragments of my early education.
Next week: Part four in the series, “My Life In Pictures.”
