The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (10 page)

The “math people” in our lives found Jake fascinating. One day I was having a cup of coffee with my aunt, a high school geometry teacher, while Jake sat at our feet, playing with a cereal box and a bunch of Styrofoam balls I’d gotten from a craft store so that the daycare kids could make snowmen. He was putting the balls into the box, taking them out, and then doing it again, and it sounded as if he was counting. My aunt wondered aloud what he was doing.

Jake didn’t look up. “Nineteen spheres make a parallelepiped,” he said.

I had no idea what a parallelepiped was; it sounded like a made-up word to me. In fact, it’s a three-dimensional figure made up of six parallelograms. Jake had learned the word from a visual dictionary we had in the house. And yes, you can make one out of a cereal box. My aunt was shocked, less by the fancy word than by the sophisticated mathematical concept behind it.

“That’s an
equation
, Kristine,” she said. “He’s telling us that it takes nineteen of those balls to fill a cereal box.” I still didn’t understand the importance of what he was doing until she explained to me that an equation was a concept that she saw kids in her tenth-grade class struggling with every day.

Jake’s capacity to learn certain types of things astonished us. He
seemed curious about chess, so we taught him how the pieces move, and soon he was beating the adults in our family, some of them quite competent players.

We bought him a set of plastic alphabet tiles, the kind of toy he’d always loved. As usual, he took them to bed with him. The next day at breakfast, I noticed that he was fooling around with his Cheerios, arranging them in patterns. I didn’t get it until I put him down for his nap and noticed that the new tiles featured a series of small raised dots at the bottom of each one. Jake had taught himself Braille.

Maps were another great passion of Jake’s at that stage. He could barely contain himself when Dora the Explorer sang the character Map’s special song. He loved nothing more than to trace the intertwined roads and train tracks on a gigantic state map with his finger. This particular interest of Jake’s was useful. By age four, he’d memorized a driving atlas of the United States, so if you asked him how to get from Indianapolis to Chicago, he would tell you to take I-65 North until you hit I-90 West, including all the little access roads and connections you’d need to make.

In a city, his skills were particularly invaluable. Mike’s family is from Chicago, so we went there often. I’m not ashamed to admit that I completely relied on Jake to navigate the maze of downtown. He knew all the buildings and every one of the shortcuts. What four-year-old directs his parents through traffic in downtown Chicago? But Jake loved telling us where to go, earning him the nickname “JPS,” for “Jake Positioning System.” Long before GPS became standard in many cars, JPS was standard in ours.

Michael and I marveled at the evidence of his precocity, but in truth the new normal was still hard. In particular, we weren’t making much progress on real conversation. He was talking again, and for that we were grateful. But reeling off numbers and store names and answering questions are different from engaging in conversation. Jake still didn’t understand language as a way to make a connection with other people. He could tell me how many dark blue cars we’d seen on the trip to Starbucks, but he couldn’t say how his day had been, and I was always searching for common ground.

Also, Jake’s extraordinary academic abilities wouldn’t really help us to mainstream him into public school. Simply put, social skills are more important than academics in kindergarten. Kids in kindergarten have a lot of playtime. They have to interact with their classmates, they have to follow simple directions, and they have to share. If Jake spent the whole day in the corner, even if he was teaching himself the periodic table, they’d send him right back to special ed.

It was imperative that Jake learn to function well in a group. Of course, he was around the kids in daycare every day, but Melanie thought it might be easier for him if there were other autistic kids in the group as well. With her help, I sent an email out to the parents in our community, hoping some of them might want to join.

My call for participation was the first real clue that there was an autism epidemic. I was hoping for five or six responses. Instead, I got hundreds, from parents of children of all ages. I was stunned by the level of desperation in the emails. These were people, just like me, who could see that what they were doing wasn’t helping their children. Many of them had run out of options within the system. There wasn’t anyplace left that would work with them or their kids. In most cases, I was the port of last resort. “Please help us,” one mother wrote. “You’re our last hope.”

That was a huge turning point for me. I looked at my flooded inbox and thought,
I’m not going to turn any of you away. You can all come
. Jake was going to learn what he’d need to get into kindergarten, and we were going to take as many kids with us as we possibly could. Nor would we leave the older or lower-functioning kids behind.
We are going to build a community
, I thought.
We are going to believe in our kids, and in each other’s kids, and we are going to do this together
.

“K
ristine, there appears to be a live llama in our living room.”

Michael’s tone was resigned. Two years after we’d pulled Jake out of Life Skills, my husband had become accustomed to the scope and scale of my schemes, but nothing had quite prepared him for this. Of course, the llama wasn’t supposed to be in the living room. She was
supposed
to be in the finished garage we’d converted to house my daycare, a space that was now also moonlighting twice a week as a highly unorthodox kindergarten boot camp I’d set up for autistic kids. Whatever Michael had been expecting when I’d told him I was determined to mainstream Jake into kindergarten, it wasn’t this.

Receiving that flood of emails from those desperate parents had been an eye-opening experience for me. In response, I had decided that in addition to my daycare, I’d start a new program, a series of evening classes for autistic children and their families with the goal of helping the kids to be mainstreamed into public school. Melanie Laws, thankfully, once again agreed to help, and she suggested that I register the program as a charity, because I was determined not to charge anything for it. I couldn’t bear the thought that a family might not be able to afford to come, or that they’d have to skip another therapy to do so.

So every morning, I’d open the daycare as usual and work a full nine-hour day there. But twice a week, after the daycare children went home, I’d vacuum the room and set up a mock kindergarten for autistic kids. I called the program Little Light.

From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to approach autism differently.
Typical therapy focused on the lowest skills. Most of the parents who came to Little Light had spent years trying to get their kids to hop up to the next skill on the ladder, usually without much success. I had seen my share of these sessions, hours spent trying to get a kid to put three rings on a post or to feed a cookie to a puppet, all to no avail. I’d watched my own son nod off in a session, still holding a therapy putty ball. So instead of hammering away at all the tasks these kids
couldn’t
do, I thought we’d start with what they
wanted
to do.

This approach was far from standard practice. Most therapists would move a beloved toy or puzzle off the table so that a child could concentrate on
their
therapy goals; some would go so far as to hide it. We’d done the same thing with Jake’s alphabet magnets during his evaluation. Just as Jake’s whole body had strained toward his magnets and away from the task at hand, I saw many a therapy hour pass with a child too distracted by a missing toy to make even a tiny bit of progress that day.

Harnessing the children’s passions may not have been the conventional way to work with them, but it was very much the way I’d always worked with my daycare kids. I believe this approach had a lot to do with the way my sister, Stephanie, and I grew up. Stephanie, younger than me by just fourteen months, was an art prodigy as a child. At age three, her art looked like work done by an adult. By the time she was six, she had the skills of a professional.

Stephanie’s talent opened up huge creative worlds for both of us. We had store-bought toys, but we rarely played with them. We were far more interested in the toys Stephanie made. The paper dolls and the hundreds of intricately colored outfits she crafted for them while she was still in preschool were better than anything we could buy. I’d invent elaborate scenarios, and Stephanie would paint fully realized, detailed backgrounds to go along with my stories: enchanted castles, book-lined libraries, lush jungles. When I wanted a dollhouse, I didn’t tell my mother; I told Stephanie.

Unfortunately, Stephanie’s extraordinary art skills didn’t help her much in school. She did poorly in all her classes except for art, and she
had very few friends. Mostly, she was comfortable when she was alone or with me.

Remarkably, my mother never tried to turn around Stephanie’s dismal academic performance. She wasn’t in denial about the problem (Stephanie was barely passing, so denial really wasn’t an option), but she stayed upbeat. “If you can’t do art, nobody cares. But if you can’t do math, everyone’s up in arms,” she remarked once to me. “Why is that?” I found the comment a little surprising, given that she was an accountant and loved numbers herself. But she knew Stephanie.

In third grade, Stephanie took one look at the questions on a reading comprehension test and realized immediately that she was out of her depth. She drew a little frowny face on the front of the paper, right where the teacher would put her grade, turned the test over, and spent the remainder of the hour drawing a beautifully shaded landscape on the back. When my mother found out what Steph had done, she laughed.

I was perplexed by my mother’s response. How could she take this so lightly? “Because your brain works this way,” she said, pointing to the reading comprehension questions, “and Stephanie’s brain works
this
way.” She flipped the test over to show the landscape drawing. “And you know what? You’re both going to be fine.”

Of course, at the time I had no idea there was anything remarkable about my mother’s reaction to Stephanie’s differences. It was just the way things were. But I believe it was from her example I learned that
everyone
has an intrinsic talent, a contribution to make, even if it comes in an unexpected form. And I began to believe that each person’s potential to achieve great things depends on tapping into that talent as a child.

Maybe my mother would have been more worried if Stephanie’s gifts had been less pronounced or less immediately apparent. As it was, the beauty of my sister’s work awed adults, more than once bringing a casual observer to tears. In any case, instead of browbeating Stephanie over her failings, my mother focused instead on her gifts, choosing to do what she could to nurture Stephanie’s passion. My
grandparents were generous, but not ones to splurge, so we didn’t have a lot of money to spare. Yet Stephanie didn’t have just one paintbrush; she had ten, of every size and thickness and type, as well as an enormous box of expensive European colored pencils.

When Stephanie turned eight, my mother had some kitchen cabinets installed in the laundry room at the back of the house, and that became Stephanie’s studio, an area where she could store her art supplies and draw and paint to her heart’s content. Most important, these gifts were given freely, without any expectations. Stephanie never felt that she had to churn out masterpieces in her studio; my mother was simply giving her a place to be herself.

Stephanie is an artist today, and she teaches the subject for a living. Her portraits of my children are among my most treasured possessions. My mother’s approach to Stephanie’s challenges showed me how viewing a situation that seems bleak under a different lens can reveal a gift and a calling.

I had always encouraged the children in my daycare to lean into their passions, and over the years I saw how astonishing the results could be when they had the opportunity and resources to do so. When I noticed Elliott, one of my daycare kids, putting his fingers into the screw holes at the back of Michael’s brand-new television, I drove straight over to the nearest electronics repair store (remember those?) and told the guy behind the counter that I’d take all his hopeless cases—all the radios and televisions he couldn’t fix. “As long as it’s not radioactive or broken in a truly dangerous way, I’ll take it,” I said. What looked like a gigantic pile of junk to most people became hours of fun for Elliott, especially when I presented him with the brand-spanking-new, candy-apple-red, six-head screwdriver he’d need to take everything apart.

My foraging habit turned into a family joke. By the time I’d been running the daycare for a couple of years, everyone knew that I couldn’t pass by a garage sale or a thrift store without finding some present for the kids. Michael would roll his eyes and pull over before I’d even ask. At the Salvation Army, I found old alarm clocks for Elliott
to take apart and fix and an expensive but never-used watercolor set for artistic Claire.

I’d seen the attention the kids in the daycare gave to the activities they loved and the way they flourished when they were given the time and space to pursue those interests, so it was never a surprise years later to field calls with updates from grateful moms. That was how I learned that so many of the daycare kids had flourished as they’d grown older. Claire, for instance, moved on to art classes and a probable internship at a museum in Indianapolis. Elliott began building computers from scratch at age ten and spent high school “hackintoshing” in his parents’ garage, using PC parts to build hybrid machines that ran the Apple operating system. During an internship at a clinic in our community, he designed a piece of specialized medical equipment that is still used by the doctors there today. He did all this before leaving high school.