The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (11 page)

Over and over again, I noted how doing what they loved brought all of the children’s other skills up as well. Even as a very little girl, Lauren’s favorite thing to do was to “play house” while at daycare. She’d happily help me fold laundry or put the smaller babies down for their naps, but she wasn’t very interested in what might be considered more academic pursuits, such as reading or counting. Her mother continued to send her to me for after-school babysitting even as Lauren got older, and I began teaching her to make some of the pastries that Stephanie and I had learned to make in my grandmother’s kitchen. We spent hours together measuring and stirring, making more cookies and cakes than we could possibly eat.

Lauren’s mother had the idea to drop some of our extra treats off at a food pantry one day, but it was Lauren’s idea to begin volunteering there. Her mom was understandably worried that the hours of baking and serving in the soup kitchen would get in the way of Lauren’s schoolwork, but I felt confident that her other skills would naturally improve if she was encouraged to do what she loved, and her mother was convinced. By age eleven, Lauren was a fixture at the soup kitchen on weekends and had won a number of community service awards—all
while maintaining straight A’s in school, as well as starring in school plays and in local theater productions.

Mostly, I think the approach was effective because it helped us to build crucial relationships with the children. Long before Little Light, eight-year-old Jenny joined my daycare for the summer. Her mom warned me over the phone that Jenny had trouble paying attention and doing what she was told to do. My daycare was, as usual, the solution of last resort, after two day camps had sent Jenny home.

That first day, Jenny and her mom arrived quite late. Her mom, visibly harried, started right in. “This morning, I sent her to her room to get her sneakers. Half an hour later, down she comes talking some nuttiness about elves and an enchanted ring—and she’s still not wearing any shoes! That’s why we’re late. She doesn’t ever listen.”

That morning, I let Jenny be, but when my daycare assistant was putting the smaller kids down for their nap, I asked Jenny to join me in the living room. Her mom had been very dismissive about Jenny’s storytelling abilities, and I didn’t blame her. It sounded as if it had been a frustrating morning. Still, I knew that this child had an incredibly fertile imagination and once she trusted me with her gift, there’d be no trouble getting her to listen or to be on time.

I showed her an illustration in an old children’s book I’d bought for a nickel at a yard sale. In a sun-dappled forest, a beautiful woman with long, flowing hair held an infant, both of them cradled in the roots of a massive, moss-covered tree. It was a beautiful picture, but more important, it cried out for an explanation. Who was this enigmatic woman, and what on earth was she doing with her baby in this ancient and magical place?

When I showed Jenny the picture, her whole face changed, and she instinctively reached out to touch the page. I handed her the book to hold and closed my eyes. “I wonder if you’d be interested in telling me a story about that lady,” I said.

We sat there for a while in silence, and then Jenny began to talk. I could feel her checking my face, trying to gauge whether I was going to sit up and rein her in. But I kept my eyes closed and a slight smile
on my face, and as she built up steam and the story began to twist and turn, she forgot to worry about what I thought.

The story Jenny spun for me was filled with magic and monsters, wild adventures and terrible misfortunes. There were double-crossing villains, misunderstandings with dreadful consequences, and, of course, true love. In ten minutes, Jenny created a world so elaborately fantastic and yet so convincing that it was almost a shock to open my eyes and find myself back in my own living room, with CNN on mute and Michael’s cold toast still on the sideboard.

I had been recording Jenny’s story on my phone, and that night I typed it into the computer. Before I hit Print, I went into the craft closet and found a few sheets of creamy, luxurious heavyweight bond paper I was saving for a special occasion. I wrote Jenny’s name on the cover page in calligraphy, punched three holes along one edge, and bound the “book” with gold satin ribbon left over from a Christmas present. The next day, when she came in, I said, “I wanted to thank you for the story you told me yesterday. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I made it into this book.”

I didn’t have any trouble getting Jenny to put her shoes on after that. Each day that summer, I brought her a picture I’d found—a page I’d torn out of a magazine, a photo I’d taken of something I thought might pique her interest, or an illustration from a book—and she’d tell me a story. Her talent blossomed, and after her mother learned to see Jenny’s storytelling as a gift instead of an impediment, there were no more behavioral issues at home. All it took was a little encouragement and the ability to recognize this precious talent for what it was.

Knowing that the parents felt that my humble daycare had had a profound impact on their children’s abilities and accomplishments later in life was really exciting for me. I had believed for years that any child will outperform your expectations if you can find a way to feed his or her passion. Every story like Lauren’s, Elliott’s, Jenny’s, and Claire’s fueled my belief that this approach could have the same impact on kids with special needs as it had on all the typical kids I’d
worked with over the years. Those powerful examples were in my mind as I set out to help the Little Light kids get into mainstream kindergarten.

Every one of the children at Little Light who had been labeled a “lost cause” had some subject area (often quite a few!) that engaged him or her passionately. I just needed to find the proper lens to magnify it, just as I had done with the daycare kids. That concept was the inspiration for the charity’s name. I was going to find the little light inside each of these children, and we were going to let it shine.

Very often these special gifts were the first things the parents said about their child when they brought him or her to Little Light: “Oh, Billy knows the earned run average of every pitcher in the major leagues,” or “I hope you don’t mind if Violet keeps her wings on; she loves butterflies!” But while the parents might have recognized their child’s talent or passion, they didn’t necessarily think of it as a way to connect with him or her or to advance the child’s progress.

Meaghan loved anything that engaged her senses. She’d bury her face in the laundry I pulled out of the dryer and loved to pet the supersoft blanket I kept draped over the couch. How could I use touch to draw her out? I thought of where baking had taken Lauren, and so I led Meaghan into the kitchen. Despite having an IQ of only 50, she’d measure the ingredients for homemade play dough along with me and then play with the huge mass we made while it was still warm to the touch. Then we’d go together to choose a cookie cutter from the two hundred I keep in a deep drawer in my kitchen. She’d choose a color, and we’d mix it into the dough, then we’d add a scent.

“Purple peanut butter penguins! You’ve got to tell me the story behind that,” I’d say. And she would.

Meaghan and I made cinnamon-apple-scented play dough, rosemary-scented play dough, and lavender-scented play dough. I added tiny beads to one batch so that it had an interesting, bumpy texture. We cut out the alphabet together and then made some short words, including both our names and those of the other kids in her Little Light session. We explored how two rectangles can become a square when they’re squished together, or how two stacked triangles
make a star. We used the cookie cutters to make living things such as dogs and people, then contrasted them with inanimate objects such as boats. We worked hard the whole time, but there are worse ways to spend a rainy evening than at a kitchen counter, elbows-deep in warm, lavender-scented play dough.

Every Sunday night, I went out shopping, using what I bought to completely transform the little garage. On Monday night, the Little Light kids (and their parents!) couldn’t wait to see what I’d done in their absence. Michael never knew what he was walking into either. Once it was a full-fledged archaeological dig, complete with different-colored sand to represent different geologic eras, leather-bound journals to record our observations and sketch the artifacts, and buckets of plaster of Paris in the yard so that we could make casts of the dinosaur bones (the bones from a chicken dinner, boiled and bleached) that we’d unearthed. The kids who hadn’t started out crazy about dinosaurs certainly were after that—and the ones who had started out loving them were in heaven.

The over-the-top “muchness” of my schemes was a big part of the way I worked, a holdover, perhaps, from my own childhood. Years before Little Light, I’d had a little boy named Francis in the daycare. Francis loved to play with a set of giant cardboard blocks designed to look like bricks. I soon came to see that he was frustrated by the fact that the set contained only fifteen blocks, which was enough to make a short wall but not any kind of a proper structure.

I instantly understood the problem. In my grandfather’s shop, whatever odds and ends were left over from a woodworking project got sanded and polished and turned into blocks for us grandchildren. These weren’t boring cubes either. We had triangles, arches, half-moons, cylinders, long planks, and chunky rectangles, along with lots of funky, irregular shapes to keep it interesting. Grandpa John also made us architectural accent pieces such as corbels, gables, bay windows, and mullions. By the time the thirteenth grandchild had arrived, the set was quite substantial—all different sizes, ranging from tiny sugar cubes to bricks the size of cinder blocks—and the number of them meant that we could build a structure big enough to go inside.
These weren’t blocks to stack into a little tower. They were blocks to build with, and we played with them long after most other children had outgrown theirs.

I may not have inherited the woodworking gene from my grandfather, but I still thought I could help Francis. I took some money out of the grocery jar and bought seven more sets of those gigantic cardboard blocks—so many that I couldn’t fit them all in my car. When I finally managed to get them home, I immediately knew that I’d done the right thing. Francis finally had enough blocks to work with. He made bridges and pyramids. He built Jenga-style towers straight to the ceiling and experimented with low, cantilevered Frank Lloyd Wright–style longhouses.

Francis was another daycare kid who went on to follow his dreams. Years later, I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about medieval cathedrals and realized that Francis had been “discovering” the flying buttress system by using those blocks in my daycare. On a whim, I emailed his mom to share that tidbit. She emailed back to let me know that he’d just spent the summer in a highly competitive, prestigious architecture internship program in England.

Just as it had been in the daycare, “muchness” became a hallmark of Little Light. It just made sense to me. How could a petting zoo possibly have the same impact on an animal-loving child as a real live llama, borrowed from a nearby farm, standing right next to the table where she usually had her snack?

The only thing I asked of the Little Light parents was that one of them stay and work with their child during each session. Showing a child that you take his or her passion seriously and want to share in it is the most powerful catalyst in the world. It was crucial for us to work with the family as a whole so that the parents could learn to recognize their child’s unique talents.

Many children with autism spectrum disorders are deeply focused on specific subject areas, but because the rest of the world isn’t interested in, say, license plate numbers or the geologic history of Indiana’s cave system, they don’t get a lot of credit. Similarly, I believe that autistic kids hear their parents talking about patty-cake or asking for a
hug, but they’re just not interested in those things. Have you ever been trapped at a party with someone who’s talking about something you don’t particularly care about—sports, maybe, or politics or classic cars? I believe that’s what much of life is like for an autistic person. Certainly, people with autism are in our world. They’re just not thinking about the things we want them to think about.

Imagine that you live in a tree house in a beautiful forest, and the only place you feel safe and calm is up in that tree house. But people keep intruding. “Hey, come out of the trees!” they yell up at you. “It’s crazy to live in a tree. You need to come down here.”

Then one day somebody comes into the forest, and she doesn’t yell or try to make you change, but instead climbs into your tree house and shows you that she loves it as much as you do. Wouldn’t you have a completely different relationship with her than you do with anyone else? And when she asks you to come down for a few minutes, because she has something amazing to show
you
, wouldn’t you be more inclined to check it out?

That was the analogy I used to explain what we were doing at Little Light. We met the children where they were in order to get them where they needed to be.

Because we all spent so much time together, the parents working with their kids at Little Light began to build a close, caring community. The moms (and it was mostly moms) started to get to know one another, to confide in one another, and to joke around. Before long, they were looking forward to the weekly sessions as much as their children were. For many of us, the time together was a balm for the fear and isolation we’d experienced since our children had been diagnosed.

That first winter of Little Light is a blur in my memory. I’d open the daycare every morning at 6:30 a.m., work a full day, and close it at 5:30 p.m. I’d give myself half an hour to vacuum and transform the room. Then I’d hold an hour-long Little Light class for five kids, including Jake. I’d take a half-hour break for a quick family dinner, after which Mike would be in charge of Wesley’s bath, and the next five kids would arrive for the second session of Little Light. After everyone
left, I’d read Jake and Wesley a bedtime story, then I’d bathe Jake and put him to bed.