We ran an errand today, and my kids, 7 and 6, had a lovely cheerful moment on the way there.
“Summer, you have so many ideas because you have a DHD brain,” my son Apollo enthused, somewhat out of nowhere, with his iteration of the vocabulary we’ve been explaining and discussing over and over lately.
“Yeah,” Summer said kindly. “My brain is fast and yours is slow. But I’m going to slow it down like you because you’re my brother. And your brain is slow, right?”
“My brain is *deep*,” Apollo corrected, drawing on the one-word descriptor I’ve been trying to distill his whole neurotype into for him. “My brain is austistisc. Mine’s deep and yours is fast.”
“Well, I’ll make my brain a little tiny bit deep like yours!”
“Okay, Summer.”
It’s been years of gentle explaining and advocating, but in the last couple of months they’ve really seized on understanding as much language to describe themselves, their experiences, as they could. And now I get to hear echoes of it come back out between the two of them like this.
On the way back home, the golden moment was over (that’s how it goes, right?) Summer wanted to sing along with songs and Apollo, who had been singing with her before, was suddenly done. They argued, he escalated, he hit her, I yelled at him.
We got home and I got Summer inside, then went and sat in the car with Apollo. At first he didn’t want me to even be in the car with him, so I sat in a chair next to the car in the garage. (Salient info: it’s winter here; nobody was hot.) Eventually he tolerated me getting back into the car but didn’t want me to talk to him.
Finally I could talk.
“Summer’s brain likes sounds. And your brain doesn’t like sounds,” was all I said.
He sobbed “I don’t even want to be her sisterrrrrrrr.”
“It’s hard to have different brains. It’s a hard problem,” I agreed, climbing into the backseat to cuddle him while we talked.
“I just don’t like her to sing,” he managed.
“I know. It’s a hard problem. We can try to solve the problem…but we can’t just punch people who have different brains. Everybody in the world would just be punching all the time.”
He cried some more. I said, “It’s hard work to solve differences in people’s brains and it’s REALLY hard when you’re only 7. You don’t have to solve it all by yourself.”
Then we went inside and he cried some more about various other things and we cuddled on the couch for awhile. Summer danced wordlessly into the room to deposit two granola bars next to him, and then danced away. He then eventually moved on.
A few hours later both kids were sitting in different rooms of the house, both making the same noises in different rooms and both complaining that the other one was making random noises. (Sigh.) I mediated between the two of them. I put in my own earplugs. They yelled at one another. I separated them and wouldn’t let Summer go follow Apollo around bugging him. Finally she came up with a plan to go play outside.
She scootched along the floor on her back through the house until she got to the door (grumpy proprioception-seeking; okay whatever kid) and then got up and ran out to play. Apollo was sitting there with his headphones on by now.
“When people is annoying you can go away from them,” he announced through a mouthful of yogurt.
“Yep, that’s one thing you can do. There are lots,” I agreed.
He thought about it. “When people is annoying you can just ignore them.”
“That is another thing you can do.”
“When people is annoying you can wear headphones,” he offered.
“That’s true.”
We haven’t arrived. (Will we ever?) But we keep trying to make a world where we understand and respect and make space for one another, and the whole world starts here in our car and in our kitchen.