It’s all about unfoldment. You know. Life—that is….
The spark for this post was an art exhibit last night. Unlike the dozens of exhibits before, this one wasn’t for Grace. I’ve started creating my own visual art again, after 40+ years of shuttering that section of my soul. I’ve finally given myself permission to make the time. Twice a month. Other artists laugh at that. They don’t get my life. It’s a commitment to make and find the time in the juggling act of raising an adult daughter with autism and the many, resulting extremely complicated aspects of our lives. (I won’t name the various balls juggled at this time.) I’ve chosen the art form about which I’ve dreamed: collage.
Last night was the third Nashville Collage Collective annual show in which I’ve shown one of my pieces. (<— Note the linked page’s address is wrong. Google Turnip Green Creative Reuse for correct version.) This time, instead of taking Grace to one of her solo shows, or to a group show in which she’s featured, I brought her to mine. What unfolded was beautiful and surprising and demonstrated just how life unfolds and the many layers of unfoldment in hers and in my life.
It took more than four decades for me to get back to my art and allow myself to heal the messages from my well-meaning depression-era parents who deemed art an unworthy pursuit. Unfoldment teaches us that we hold the keys to our healing. Mother and Daddy are dead. I get choose how their words affect me as an adult. End of story.
But the magic occurred, last night, not only in taking Grace to see my work, but to have her actually *see* my work and that of every artist there. You see, I’ve exposed Grace to other artists’ work throughout the years, but she’s shown no interest. She’s 25 now, and reaching new levels of development. Perhaps the “joint-attention” thing is truly just now catching on. This is about the third art crawl I’ve taken her to in the last three years where she’s finally engaging with the art. She looked at every piece and even pointed to one. Pointing is one of those things we take for granted in development, but it doesn’t come naturally in autism.
Joint attention means two people, together, focus on the same object/thing. It’s something we all do, but it doesn’t come natural to people with autism. They have to be taught it and to develop it. It’s kinda essential as it’s how we communicate with other humans….As we’ve learned, development does happen, it just can sometimes take years. Decades, even. Pointing is another joint attention feature. It was a joy to see her engaged and then to point to something to engage me with her, indicating that she liked it. It was a small, colorful collage by Sari Hoke.
A friend once said at near-end of her son’s IEP years that just because a person with a developmental disAbility doesn’t meet a milestone on time or when they are children doesn’t mean they don’t continue to grow and meet milestones later in life. (Too often therapeutic and education systems just close the books on those possibilities at a certain point. It certainly happened to us and even I threw out certain aims after so many years of trying.) Now that Grace is a young woman—a quarter of a century old—wow—I’m beginning to cash in on the wisdom of my friend’s statement. She’s right. Some things have been. painfully. slow. in coming. But they are coming. Yeah, there’s a lot of things that will never come, but I sent those expectations down the trash chute decades ago and made peace with them. (I found really good mentors who modeled how.) I decided I wanted to embrace this journey with positivity.
…How I chose to handle those expectations was a key ingredient of the disAbility journey. Our expectations of how life is supposed to be sets us up for failure and disappointment. “Resentments waiting to happen,” according to the AA folks. Some of the best advice I ever got about the autism journey was via Jim Sinclair—an autism rights activist: the dreams you had for a typically developing child are just that—dreams….You got something different instead. I’m so glad I decided to discover and celebrate and find the joy on this journey. It’s there. At every turn. It’s often little. But, then, like those minute milestones, it’s also pretty big. And when joy blossoms in my heart, it feels pretty groovy.
