Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie Read Free Book Online

considered her son and our daughter, she shook her head and uttered one prophetic statement: “The public schools aren’t for everyone.”
    Those are mighty depressing words to hear at a first-grade parent-teacher conference when eleven years of public education loom in the future. In our small town, there are few alternatives to the public system. The only private school in Lexington, Virginia, is a tiny Christian academy; all other options require hoursof driving up and down the local interstate—a truck-ridden hazard. For most families in our area, “private” education means homeschooling, something I was not yet ready to consider. But in the coming years, whenever Julia struggled with her classroom routine, I would recall Mrs. Hennis’s words: “The public schools aren’t for everyone.”
    Meanwhile, we tried to carve out strategies to help Julia function in a traditional classroom. Mrs. Hennis taped an index card to Julia’s desk, reminding her of tasks that were automatic for other children. Hang up your coat and backpack. Put your lunch away. Write your name on all work. Listen to the teacher. I posted a similar checklist at home. Have you finished your homework? Is it packed in your backpack? Do you know where your shoes are?
    I also decided to have Julia’s hearing checked, since children with poor hearing often tune out the group and withdraw into themselves. I visited our small-town doctor’s office, which boasted the only physician within a thirty-mile radius with a background in pediatrics, and I spoke privately with this man before bringing Julia in to see him.
    â€œShe seems to inhabit her own world,” I explained to the doctor. “She’s wonderfully creative and artistic, and has a special love of visual patterns. She’s always arranging objects into symmetrical designs. She’s also got an almost obsessive power of concentration on subjects that interest her, but she tunes out her first-grade classroom for hours at a time and shows little interest in other children.”
    The doctor spoke the words that I had been avoiding for months. “Do you think she might be autistic?”
    Yes, the idea had crossed my mind. Not autistic in a disabling sense, but in its mildest variety. On an autism spectrum of one to ten, Julia might fall somewhere around two.
    The doctor called her into the room and tested her hearing,which seemed normal. Then he gave her a brief checkup and spoke to her for several minutes about her interests, her artwork, and her ideas.
    When she left, the doctor turned to me and smiled. “She’s not autistic. She’s just doing her own thing.”
    Since then, I’ve often wondered if that answer was too simple. Years later, when reading Songs of the Gorilla Nation , by Dawn Prince-Hughes, I marveled at the small similarities between Julia and this author who struggled with Asperger’s syndrome. It was as if Prince-Hughes was a distant cousin, twice removed. Julia has never demonstrated the more debilitating symptoms of Asperger’s: exaggerated tactile sensitivity, avoidance of eye contact, responding to stress by locking her muscles into repeated gestures. But Julia did share Prince-Hughes’s obsessive love of symmetry, the tendency to connect with animals more readily than humans, a constant disregard for hair brushing and table manners, and an odd verbal habit of occasionally repeating one syllable of a word several times, as if she had her own built-in echo. Above all, Prince-Hughes’s hatred of change sounded like an intense version of Julia’s feelings:
    I would feel like I was dying—my heart would pound, my ears would ring, and my whole consciousness would go hollow—if something changed. I remember instances of buildings being torn down, trees being cut, new roads going in, and two building fires happening along my routes. It took weeks for me to recover from these things. I