The Power of Not Being A Jerk
My son was so happy all day because of it
Sometimes you don’t have to go out of your way to be affirmatively kind. Sometimes it’s enough just to not to be affirmatively mean. OK, maybe that’s an oversimplification, but this story is about the boys who made my son really happy the other day. It wasn’t because they went out of their way to be nice. They just weren’t jerks. They were sort of neutral, in a common decency kind of way, but it really made his day!
My son Hugh is 21, non-verbal, and on the autism spectrum. He’s out of school, so he spends his weekdays with a care-giver who takes him to various activities and appointments, such as his biofeedback sessions, and meet-ups with his young adult's group. When they’re not doing those kinds of things, Hugh and Angie often hang out at her house, working on puzzles or social goals. Sometimes one or more of Angie’s three kids are also there.
The girls are in college, but her son Evan is 17 and still in high school. He's a tall, athletic-looking guy who plays on the football team. All Angie’s kids treat Hugh as if he were their cousin, and Evan, in particular, is close to him. He sometimes tells people that Hugh is his brother, which warms the heart of this mom of a quirky special-needs child like you wouldn’t believe.
One time Angie took Hugh and Evan to a furniture store to look for a desk. She was walking ahead of them when she heard Evan whisper, “Mom, mom…. he’s holding my hand.”
“Well, hold his hand then,” was what Angie told him in reply.
To his credit, that’s just what Evan did. Hugh loves to hold hands with people he feels really connected to, and because he has no societal hang-ups about that, he just expresses his affection that way sometimes. In other words, Evan is a truly good guy, who really cares about Hugh and accepts him as he is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all his friends do, right?
Yesterday, Hugh came home just smiling ear to ear. In fact, he was in a particularly great mood all evening. “What’s that about,” I wondered to myself, not that I was complaining. Hugh has very sensitive hearing, picks up other people’s emotions and feels them in his own body, and is easily thrown off course by things that we don’t always understand.
A few weeks ago he was completely distraught, crying huge sobbing tears, and all that we could get out of him was that it had something to do with somebody singing The Star-Spangled Banner. He loves that song, so perhaps it was something about the way that it was sung. We never did find out exactly what happened.
Although Hugh is non-verbal, he is able to communicate using sign language and also a voice-output program on his iPod. This helps a lot, but he’s still a visual thinker and trying to put tough emotions into words doesn’t always translate. A lot of times when he comes home at the end of the day, Hugh is a bit agitated about something because he’s been dealing with difficult stimuli all day. Most of the time, we don’t really know what.
It was truly a joy to have him arrive home so happy and relaxed. When I asked Angie what they’d done that day, she mentioned the appointments they’d gone to, and that Evan had had a bunch of school friends over. They were just hanging out so she decided to put them to work taking down the Christmas tree and putting away the ornaments and other decorations.
Hugh loves Christmas and does not look forward to putting the decorations away. My husband James and I typically do it when he’s out of the house because it just makes everything a lot easier. Clearly, it wasn’t the activity itself that made Hugh so happy.
“I really think he just liked being with the other boys,” Angie said when I asked her about it this morning. “They don’t pay him a lot of special attention, but they do just treat him like a person. It’s really nice to see.”
So many people, most of them adults, are not sure how to act with Hugh. The fact that he’s non-verbal only compounds this. Sometimes they speak loudly and slowly as if he doesn’t hear or understand well. Sometimes they talk over him as if he were a small child or not there at all. We’ve had to tell more than one medical professional to just interact with him as you would any young man his age.
Hugh isn’t just like any other young man his age. He does have certain things that sometimes need to be adjusted to accommodate him, but we always let people know if that is the case. Just because he has some special needs doesn’t mean that he wants to be treated as “other.”
And that was the gift that those boys gave Hugh yesterday. They didn’t expect him to be exactly like them, but they also didn’t call attention to that. Yesterday, he got to experience what it was like to just be another one of Evan’s friends, hanging out with the group and working on a project together.
They didn’t need to make him the center of attention or perform any special gestures. They simply treated him as another human being. And although I am incredibly touched by that and grateful for it, in truth, that’s not being nice. It’s exhibiting basic human decency. And although that is something that often appears to be in short supply in the world, it was well in evidence at Angie’s house yesterday.
These boys weren’t doing anything special. They just weren’t being jerks. And that’s all it took to help my son have one of the happiest days he’s had in years. It’s kind of a shame that something so fundamental should be so noteworthy, but I am nonetheless very appreciative of those young men and how they treated my son.