Dislodging the Phone
On creativity and neurodivergence
Photo by cottonbro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-a-pink-rotary-phone-10600743/
Author’s note: This piece was first written as a Facebook post, which you may have already read. In this slightly expanded version, aside from revising it for a general audience (who may not know me personally), I also inserted a related thought about my own creative journey.
Yesterday, I found my three-year-old Joaquin picking up the phone, punching on the numbers, and talking like someone’s on the other end of the line.
No, he didn’t call someone. I teared up a bit because, finally, he was role playing.
I can’t tell whether it was because of the occupational therapy we’d begun a couple of weeks ago. Or whether he was going to do it anyway, with or without therapy.
When we had Joaquin diagnosed a month ago, it wasn’t his delayed speech (among other things) that raised the flag for autism. It was his utter lack of interest in mimicry. When we began therapy, the therapist astutely observed that Joaquin’s attitude towards mimicry wasn’t mere disinterest. The therapist thus independently confirmed what I’d felt all long was a quirk in my son: a stubborn, passionate resistance to doing what someone else is doing.
Like many newbies to therapy, Joaquin would go from whimper to cryfest and back, which I (and his therapist) attributed to, perhaps, discomfort in an environment he’s not used to, or overstimulation in the midst of so many toys and children. As therapy slugged along through tears (my son’s and mine, with my own efforts at soothing and comforting him failing me, too, sometimes), it became apparent that Joaquin would especially move heaven and earth with a fit whenever he was being taught to do something, to imitate something, even something as simple as stacking rings.
My son’s preferred way of stacking rings. Snapshot by author.
He’d cry insisting on doing what he wants — or what stabilizes his rigidly ordered world of lined up things, dislodged phone, pillows on the floor rather than on the bed, toy cars upside-down with their wheels exposed for his pleasure with their spinning.
Every day since his diagnosis — and in the process of my accepting it as his parent and primary advocate, even my embracing it —the fog lifts little by little, with revelation after revelation of what his mental world might be like. And how to not just forcibly shape it to meet the norm, or to turn him into a “desirably” compliant child. More profoundly, appreciatively: how to nurture and love this difference as he grows in self-awareness to an external world of rules.
It’s getting clearer to me, for example, why instead of stacking rings appropriately, he’d stubbornly insist on stacking them up in reverse.
He sees the world as it is and what it could be should you flip it, turn it sideways, or set it askew. I was initially bothered by Joaquin’s habit of looking sideways at an object, even if he could maintain eye contact. We are yet to run comprehensive vision and hearing tests, but for now with his senses appearing normal (according to a doctor), he seems to be particularly joyful when holding an object he delights in, and looking at it at all its sides, and from all his sides.
Yesterday, however, instead of dislodging the phone every time he sees it (as though it messes him up, or it itches him to disrupt a settled state of things, whenever he sees the handset where it should be, or the pillows on the bed where they should be, or cars in upright positions like how they should be), he picked up the phone and did with it what we regular folks do with it.
Afterwards, he replaced the handset but left it still dislodged.
And I think that’s okay.
Sometimes you comply, sometimes you don’t, and then you see where it goes. My son, in sharing his world to me, is helping me break my own mental and creative confines.
As I slug it out through my own blocks, as I navigate my life anew not just as a parent to a neuro-divergent child, but as a human capable of breaking out of conventional molds to be more empathetic of others, to be more accepting of difference (mine and others), I’m feeling a creative rebirth coming — thanks to Joaquin, my son.
This version of the piece first appeared on Medium. Here’s the link.