Who Our Friends Are
I walk into Charlie’s after school program to pick him up at least three times a week. I pass a woman who regularly rushes back to her car, kids in tow, muttering something sarcastic and horribly inappropriate about how “great” it is to have to see her kids which I find odd (dummy, why did you have kids?) but utterly beside the point.
Sometimes Charlie is playing alone on the playground, other times he’s doing arts & crafts with the other kids. There are a few who have grown fond of his company, and though he doesn’t always reciprocate “goodbye” he’s always met with a chorus of kids telling him goodbye as he beams toward me, his heavy backpack bobbing on his back.
We drive home listening to Bruno Mars while Charlie sings along to the chorus and occasionally I can get him to engage in a round of “who did you play with today” in which he recalls a few names that have become a common cast over the last year.
Today is Valentine’s Day, which means I spent yesterday in the throws of unemployment assembling goody gift bags for his classmates because between job searching and dicking around on my guitar there isn’t much to do at a stage in my life where I in fact have no life, but again beside the point.
I didn’t want to exclude any of his friends, so while he was painting with his new therapist I took the opportunity to ask her to give me a list of the friends he hangs out with when she’s supporting his after school activities. It was a practical question but also a test — has she connected with him well enough to know his friends?
She responded “he doesn’t have any friends”. Point blank.
We can unpack all that is shitty about saying a kid doesn’t have any friends whilst sitting beside them painting Valentine hearts and how that probably made Charlie feel bad. Personally, it was one of those autism parent moments that feels like having your soul suddenly steeped in ice water, but again utterly beside the point.
It is a factually untrue statement, and I wonder if the pervasive myth of the “socially averse autist” has become self-fulfilling stigma when we expect human engagement as needing to be a certain way to achieve a certain result. I have hundreds of friends via social media whose acquaintance exists as vessels of status passing in a digital night. Others I talk to every day. But it got me thinking…
Do I know who my friends are? Does anyone? Mostly “friendship” is a loose term applied to guesswork. Often accurate, but occasionally one in which you find yourself not invited to a wedding or some other special event and it hits you that you were wrong about what you thought you “had” with another person. Other times you go a decade without seeing someone then pick up exactly where you left off.
Charlie has children he knows. They do things together presumably because they enjoy each other’s company in some capacity. I suppose they share things, be it secrets or moments or the need to waste away an afternoon in an after school program while their parents work shitty jobs (or don’t lol), but why does the fact that the child doesn’t always say goodbye, doesn’t always appear engaged, and doesn’t always turn all that friendship input into some output we expect negate the ability for somebody to observe a child and think “he must have nobody that likes him”?
I won’t begrudge the therapist, who is very young, very new, and quite frankly looked like a deer in headlights when I asked the question. Allies make mistakes often times not knowing that they did. But I’ve talked a lot in this blog about the concept of “the maze” of understanding autism and what I’ve concluded is the only way to get to the center is to ask questions that challenge your basic assumptions of the way things are. Does Charlie have friends isn’t the question. But do you know who your friends are?
I find it possible that whatever Charlie may or may not believe he “has” in friendships is likely as accurate or not as anything we would perceive for ourselves and those we consider friends.
