Mr. Sensitive
by
Jeff Stimpson © 2007
Ned has been assigned the memorizing of two words
a day. I steer him words associated with everyday happenings, such
as "dish" or "filter" (dessert and vacuuming the couch) or "peanut"
and "butter" (pleasant cookies after school).
"Teach him words he'll use in school!" says Jill.
So I teach Ned "union" when explaining how Alex's bus driver can
always be late in the morning and still not get fired. I try
teaching Ned "cliché" before I realize that he hasn't been alive
long enough to recognize one.
One word Ned has learned on his own, more or less,
is "sensitive," which he uses to describe Alex. I ask Ned where he
picked that up. "In my sibshop," he says, referring to the
three-Saturday program he attends a few times year with other
school-age brothers and sisters of special-needs kids. Ned says most
of the attendees are boys, their "siblings" sisters. I would've
expected mostly girls attending sibshops because of their brothers,
but you learn something new every day.
"I use that word. It describes Alex," says Ned,
"like, 'My sensitive brother bites.'"
My mother used to sometimes use words this way,
too, words vaguely appropriate yet still indistinct, words that sort
of fit and were comfortable to speak. In my debris-strewn early
twenties, for example, I had once-a-week "counseling" (therapy) with
a psychology grad student at the local community college. Mum called
it my "class." To be fair, my mother was 61 at the time, and Ned is
6.
"Alex doesn't bite you anymore, Ned," I say.
"If I didn't use 'sensitive,' people would think
he's different from me."
"People would think he's different from you?"
Ned glares at me. "Aren't you listening? If I
didn't use 'sensitive,' people would think he's just like me."
"He's sensitive like my brother," Ned said to his
first-grade teacher a few months ago when an autistic teenager from
the special-needs school that's also in Ned's school building
somehow got into Ned's classroom. "He's sensitive," Ned announced
then, "and my brother is very sensitive."
It's hard being the parent of a "sensitive" kid; I
can't walk by a homeless person or anyone babbling on a New York
City sidewalk without wondering if I'm glimpsing a future for Alex
that, when it comes, I'll no longer be alive to prevent. But to be
the brother? I think of my older brother. Thirty-five years ago, he
never bought himself a balsa wood glider without getting one for me;
he took me fishing off a roadside bridge for sunfish when I was
five; in all the time he studied karate in the early 1970s, he never
practiced on me for longer than half an hour. His pet name for me
was often "What a dufus!"
Alex giggles and giggles when asked to turn on the
bath taps for Ned (who still claims he can't do this). Alex rushes
to do this brotherly duty, and just like a typically developing
brother makes the water far too cold. (Wish I'd thought of that for
my brother.) But Alex may never call Ned "dufus," and Ned will
probably have to be the one to buy the gliders for a long time to
come.
In sibshop (Ned's "class?"), he and the other
brothers and sisters draw, paint, make their lunch, eat candy, and
have talks and play games designed to bring out their feelings about
having a sibling with special needs. In the only sibshop game Ned
has actually told us about, the kids sat in a circle and passed
around a potato. Whoever held the "hot potato" at a given moment had
to tell how their siblings made them feel. "Embarrassed, sometimes,"
was all Ned would report having said when he got stuck with the
potato.
"Ned," I ask, "if you didn't use that word
'sensitive' to describe Alex, what word would you use?"
He thinks. "I would use, sort of like,
'autistic,'" he says.
Copyright 2005 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
