Ston Addy

Santa descended upon us and much to M's delight, left only presents, and no lumps of coal.

But before we sprinkled the St. Nicholas dust and set out cookies and milk for the man in red, we went to a Christmas Eve celebration at the loft of some dear friends, Claire and Jerri. As the grown-ups gathered in the living room to talk and sing and nosh and drink and dance, Jerri set-up a DVD of Frosty the Snowman in their bedroom for M. and another little girl to watch. The other little girl soon joined the grown-ups to be with her mummy, but M. was happy amusing herself in their bedroom.

I wandered into the kitchen with Jerri to get some snacks, and peeked in on M., who was, to my amazement sitting in the center of the bed, cross-legged, and hands in a prayer position, obviously meditating. She'd placed a large quartz crystal that Claire and Jerri had on their dresser onto of a small pillow in the middle of the bed. As we watched from the kitchen, she began doing prostrations in front of this quartz crystal.

We were stunned. Where did she learn this? What is this about? I'd be just about the last person on the planet to buy into the indigo children hypothesis, but I have to say, I couldn't believe my eyes. We don't do yoga meditation at home with M. around. We don't have any crystals and candles set on altars at home. And yet here she was, deeply engaged in some kind of sacred practice.

I've asked her about it twice since then and she says, with great resolve, "Mama, I don't want to talk about it."

When M. was about four years old we were at the local supermarket check out paying for our groceries, and she suddenly got all panicked, as though she'd forgotten something.

"Fwow-wer," she'd said, "Fwow-wer."

She was agitated, so I let her take the lead. "Fowwer fowwer," she said with great urgency.

She led me back to the entrance of the store, and plucked a daisy from a mixed bouquet.

"Fowwer for ston addy. Fowwer for ston addy."

We hurried back to the cashier, and I thought she was going to give the flower to the cashier.

I said, "Did you want to give that to the lady?"

"NOOOOOOO . . . For ston addy ston addy ston addy," she started to lose it.

"Okay, okay, for ston addy," I said, not having the slightest idea what she or I were saying.

When we walked back home with our bag of groceries, I wanted to turn onto Thompson Street and take the shortcut across the playground, but she was adamant that we continue along Houston Street.

"No no no." She was tugging at my arm, dragging me along Houston toward Sullivan.

We rounded the corner, and she insisted on crossing the street.

"Ston addy ston addy," she said.

And there was the stone lady, a stone statue of the Virgin Mary outside the rectory of the Church of St. Anthony that marks the top of the block.

"Ston addy ston addy," she said, as she presented her purloined daisy to the ston addy.

I was dazzled. I don't know what to do with this sort of reverence—how to honor her spirituality and foster her spirit?

Coal and Other Currencies

Ho-ho-ho and a lump of coal. This year Sweet M. has gotten the idea that if she isn't good that Santa will bring her a stocking full of coal.

Although we are not proponents of the coal myth, we have encouraged the belief in Santa, patriarchal though it is . . . [patriarchal because all of Mom's hidden elfish work is attributed to a jolly old white guy from the North Pole.] We're assuming that she got the coal section of the story from a cartoon, because it's not a part of the story we emphasize.

Anyway, the coal story has proven to be a remarkable behavior modifier. As soon as she got the idea into her head, she was going out of her way to be helpful and sweet. One night she even brought me a plate of cookies and milk and said, "Here, I've gotta be good so that Santa will come."

But the Santa-coal story is cutting both ways this year. The year is an unusually tight one for us. [More on that in a future post on the hidden costs of having an autie child.] In the midst of my financial tightrope walk, I held-off on ordering from Amazon and eToys until there was cash in the account to cover them. Although we made the cut-off date for standard shipping, the gifts still aren't here and I'm waiting anxiously. Because this year, if her list to Santa doesn't make it, it will mean something: she'll think she was bad.

And that's the problem with this myth, of course. It's a myth that says if you don't get what you wished for that you're bad. It's a myth that says if you're not well paid and always gainfully employed, you're bad. It's a myth that has me wondering, when I look at my bank balance, are we bad?

Austin Powers, Autism Powers

When you have a language-impaired or speech-delayed child, you find that you want to reward any appropriate use of language, but sometimes that takes you down a road that's even more difficult than simply insulting someone's ugly dog.

Last Wednesday I had an interview to lead a project that I'd be very interested in doing (yes, the job search continues). I was, as might be expected, decked out in interview drag . . . suit, hose, pumps, the full hope-to-offend-no-one interview look. I looked considerably more turned out than Sweet M. is accustomed to seeing me.

When I got home and took off my coat, she looked me up and down and said, "Ooooo, hubba hubba!"

In a similar vein, about eight or nine months ago I was watching on the close-circuit TV at the speech language lab at NYU, where M. has speech-therapy twice a week. The student clinician asked M. if she'd like her to read a story, and M. replied, with the full prosody of Austin Powers repartee:

"Oooo, yeah ba-by, that's what I'm talking about."

The student clinician blushed at least two shades and I nearly fell off my chair laughing.

For the next couple of months, any question that could be answered in the affirmative would, as likely as not, get the full "Ooooo, yeah, shag me baby" tone. I started to tell her that just a "yes" would be a better answer, but the Autisn Power prosody continued.

M. seems to be learning English the way I learn a foreign language. She learns set phrases, complete with inflection, and then deploys them as appropriately as she can. So it's almost as though she's a foreigner, prone to all the blunders and faux paux any tourist might make. I'm not sure where she heard Austin Powers--maybe she saw a TV commercial--but this acoustic mimicry is one of her autism powers.

The trouble, of course, from a parent's point of view, is how to avoid having an already seductive-looking child speak in terms that are dripping with sexual innuendo that she can't possibly yet understand, while, at the same time, encouraging her to communicate.

What Do We Know?

This blog entry is posted in gratitude to Kristina Chew, whose dazzling account of her life with her son Charlie, informed by a keen knowledge of Classical Greece, has accelerated my own thinking about autism and authorship.

Back in late September a friend who had just moved to Texas to take a tenure-track academic appointment came into to town to avoid the advance of Hurricane Rita. She and I were going out to get a coffee and talk about the vicissitudes of new academic jobs (hers) and academic job searches (mine).

Sweet M. wanted to come with us to the coffee place, but as soon as we got there was restless and roaming, even disappearing for a few minutes, ducking into the yarn store next door, giving me that moment of panic—where could she be, where has she gone—that parents know only too well.

This coffee shop idea was not going to work. The weather was fine, so we got our coffee to-go and headed to the grungy playground across the street from the apartment building where we live.

Just before we rounded the gate into the playground, a woman with a large, brown dog walked by. My M. is terrified of dogs. Although we no longer need to cross the street when we encounter someone walking a dog, we still have to navigate to the other side of the sidewalk whenever possible.

But today was different. Today M. just said, “Look Mama, brown dog. Ugly brown dog,” she remarked.

“Yes, honey, it’s a brown dog.”

I am thrilled of course, because not only is she having a bit of conversational interaction—not typical for her—but she’s strung two adjectives together.

The woman walking the dog glares up at me. “You should teach that child some manners.”

I don’t say anything, and we round the bend into the playground and sit down at the chess tables next to the chain link fence that separates the playground from the sidewalk and the dangers of the street beyond.

The woman with the dog does not give up. She approaches us, but she is on the other side of the fence from us now since dogs are not permitted in the playground.

“You know,” she says, with a faintly British accent, “you should really teach that girl some manners.”

“And, you,” I say, “Should grow up.”

“Geez,” my friend says, “It’s amazing what you have to put up with.”

But this is a small social disjunction—it didn’t rise to the level of social catastrophe, such as our airport terminal disaster. But since I have no official diagnosis of autism for M., I have been, until recently, reluctant to just say, “I’m sorry if my child offended you. She has autism, a neurobiological condition that makes navigating the social world more challenging than for most people.” I did not yet know about the informational cards prepared by Autism Link for just this purpose. I had not yet read Kristina Chew’s dazzling blog, with her reflections about being out about being aut.

Yesterday afternoon I was on my way to the post office and the probably British woman with the brown dog—perhaps it is an ugly brown dog, I’m not much on canine aesthetics—was standing on the corner talking with someone.

Buoyed by the response to my talk on Wednesday night, and by the solidarity of the autism mom blogs, I approached her and said, “Excuse me, I just wanted to introduce myself, and apologize. A month or so ago my daughter offended you by calling your dog ugly, and I just wanted to apologize now. My daughter has autism, and I didn’t want to just announce that to you and the world with her there, but I wanted you to know that I didn’t think I handled it very well, and I wished I’d been able to share more with you then.”

“Oh,” she said. “Your daughter didn’t say ugly, she said, she said shitty.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I don’t think she knows the word shitty. But whatever she said, I’m sorry if she offended you.”

I actually don't know if M. knows the word shitty—I'm inclined to doubt it since that's not one of our favorite household expletives. Back when she was in her echolalic stage we switched to cursing in French—merde alors—just to be on the safe side. This is inconvenient if we're in Quebec, but it leaves me fairly confident that shitty is not in her vocabulary.

“Oh,” she said, “I don't know either. Does your daughter play chess? Miriam here," she gestures to her friend, "teaches chess.” And soon we three are off and running—talking about chess, and autism, and the chess team at M.’s school. Suddenly woman with the brown dog stops, and apologizes. “You know, I’m so sorry, I must have been in an grouchy mood that day. I just didn’t know.”

And how could she, really, when even M’s doctors don’t really know . . . when even I don’t know, five years into this process. We are still searching for a diagnosis, from the Greek dia (through) and gnosis (knowledge). We need more knowledge.

She went on to tell me about her chemotherapy, and how a friend’s learning disabled child had grabbed at her scarf, pulled it away, and then laughed at the bald head that was revealed. She went on to tell me about her own son, with triple-bypass surgery. She went on to tell me her name.

How little we know about each other. But at least she and I are on the same side of the fence now.

Terminal Disasters and Social Catastrophes

This post is dedicated to the memory of Rigoberto Alpizar, the American Airlines passenger who was shot by air marshalls who misunderstood his anxiety as a terrorist threat.

• • •

In the public and professional part of my life, as a sociologist and cultural critic, I sometimes find myself speaking on panels or giving lectures. On Wednesday night, just shortly after Rigoberto Alpizar was gunned down in an airport skywalk when air marshalls misunderstood his frantic bipolar behavior as a sign of a terrorist threat, I was giving a talk about violence and representation. Completely by coincidence, my talk included another story of an airport terminal disaster, though admittedly on a much smaller scale.

In spite of my usual practice of keeping a firewall between my personal and professional work, I had decided to talk about the sorts of social catastrophes that those of us who have children on or near the spectrum are well-acquainted with: those public meltdowns that look so violent, but have within them so many microinteractions of interpersonal violence and an enormous backdrop of institutional violence. In memory of Rigoberto Alpizar, this is the text of that talk, annotated and edited for the blog. May such a fate never befall another person.

Trauma and Violence Talk
The Drawing Center, December 7, 2005
Sponsored by the NYU Institute for the Humanities and
Research in Trauma and Violence
Organized by Shireen R.K. Patell, moderated by Avital Ronnell

Thank you, Shireen and Avital, for inviting me to be part of this panel. Looking around the room at this exhibition, and listening to the remarks Luiz and Patrick made, I am reminded that violence and trauma come in all shapes and sizes. There are massive traumatic events that we typically call catastrophes—the war in Vietnam, so movingly represented in this exhibition, the current the siege of Iraq, the disasters of Katrina and last year’s New Year’s tsunami, the events of September 11th, 2001.

At the risk of doing exactly what Patrick has warned us about—of indulging in the displacing metaphor of everyday life as a battlefield, of making equivalences between everyday personal disasters and the wholesale slaughter of war—my remarks this evening will be focused on a somewhat smaller scale, on a more intimate set of concerns, on what those of us who have family members with neurological differences have come to understand as “social catastrophes.” My use of the word “social” is not academic. I am not using this word in the social science sense as “in contrast to natural or economic.” Rather I am using “social” in a more vernacular sense: "social" in terms of the incapacity to conform to social conventions, and all that that can precipitate.

I’ll offer an example of a social catastrophe in the form of a story. The story involves a 4-year-old girl, her mother, a map, a telephone, an airport baggage claim area, and the numerous people who circulate through such a space, including, but not limited to the police, other passengers, taxi dispatchers, and local tourism officials.

The mother of this story is me, and the four-year-old girl is my daughter in the year 2002.

It was August and we were exhausted from months of navigating through the disaster assistance bureaucracies associated with the events of September 11th and the educational and therapeutic bureaucracies involved in caring for a child like sweet M. My doctor, only half joking, prescribed a vacation in lieu of inpatient care at Bellevue. So we found ourselves in the airport in St. Thomas after a long set of flights that had been many times delayed. We were tired and hot, and waiting for luggage that seemed to be even more delayed than we were.

Sweet M. watched with rapt attention as each piece of luggage appeared from behind the rubbery black slats that separate the St. Thomas tarmac from the sweltering terminal and the conveyer belt that snakes through it.

She was counting each bag. We were well into the twenties and our bags had still not appeared. Soon she was reaching out to touch each new piece of luggage as it slipped by. Touch, count, touch, her own personal blessing.

Our bags were nowhere in sight, and with each touch she was leaning closer and closer to being swept onto the conveyor belt, lost as she was in the rhythm of the bags and their magical appearances—the-now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t of Freud’s fort-da, only here it was automated, to her complete delight.

Her father was anxious that she’d be pulled onto the belt; he motioned me to move her back.

A hurried passenger grabbed for a piece of luggage and bumped into her. I glare at the passenger. Watch out, I’m thinking. For Christ’s sake. Watch out. You might imagine that this thought was simply one of maternal protection—don’t knock my kid over—but I’m worried about more than that.

“Come on, honey. Let’s go get a map,” I say.

“No-no-no. Bags, mama. Bags.” I could see her starting. She has many fewer words that your average four-year-old and, perhaps as a consequence, she also has what her neurologist calls “poor frustration tolerance.”

“Come on, bunny. Let’s get a MAP.” Although she is four, I pronounce “map” with the utter enthusiasm one uses for coaxing a two-year-old. I act as if a map were the best thing ever—something that would rival her other favorites: vanilla ice cream or the g-forces of an amusement park ride.

I take her hand. “MAP, I say, map.” She reluctantly agrees.

I realize at once that I may have made a mistake. In the management self-help books that I know so well from my other research, readers are told to manage expectations--to “under- promise and over-deliver.” I fear I may have overpromised. I think now that this map thing had better be good . . .

Across the small terminal there is a visitor’s center—a cubicle where a tall, white, middle-aged man wearing aviator glasses sits perched on a stool, ready to hand out maps and tourist information.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“Yes. Can we get a ferry schedule and a map?”

“Sure,” he says, and starts to hand me a map.

M. suddenly looks panicked.

“I want a map, I wanna map,” she exclaims in that excruciating voice that makes adult wince.

The man stands up to his full height, towering above her, and brings his thumbs to his ears, wiggling his fingers like the antlers of an elk or moose engaged in a display of dominance. “I wanna map, I wanna map,” he mimicks her.

With this, she unravels.

“I wanna map, I wanna a map,” she screams back at him. The sound pierces the terminal. She has a scream that will sear the myelin sheaths off the nerve-endings of any hearing person in a quarter mile radius. When we’d first left the hospital of her birth, the nurse had said— portentously as it turned out—“Good luck, you’ve got a screamer.”

“I wanna map, I wanna map,” the tourism representative continues his mimicry. We have been working for a full year in speech therapy to un-do M.’s own tendencies to echolaliac speech, but there is little I can do about this man, goading her on.

“Just give her the map,” I say, my voice slow and low, nearly a growl.

The man sitting under the Welcome to the US Virgin Islands sign flashes me a look that telegraphs “Get your spoiled brat out of here.” But he hands her a map. I thank him and we hurry out of the visitor’s center. M. is clutching her map, methodically tearing it into tiny pieces that leave a trail behind us through the terminal.

F. is still waiting for the luggage to appear. I signal him that we’re going to the snack bar. I’ll get her a Sprite, I think. A Sprite and popcorn. Clear food, and white food, are the only things she will eat, not just at this snack bar, but anywhere. The luggage eventually arrives. F. somehow manages to stack it all on our luggage caddy and joins us at the snack bar.

“You stay with her,” I say, “I’ll call the hotel.” I turn to M. and say, “I’ll be right back.”

She looks bereft and starts again: “I wanna go I wanna go.”

“Okay,” I say. “Come on then.”

The pay phone isn’t far from the snack bar. M. loves phones, pay phones in particular. In fact one might say that she is obsessed with them. When we walk along the streets of the city, she stops at each one, picks up the handset and carefully selects her numbers. She doesn’t speak, but listens intently to whatever the recording tells her: that her call cannot be completed as dialed or that she should please deposit 25 cents to make a call.

Here, at the pay phone in the St. Thomas airport, however, there is another problem. The payphone is at the height of an average standing adult. Apparently the Americans with Disabilities Act hasn’t yet inspired them—or required them—to lower it to the height of wheelchair users and four-year-olds. She can’t reach the phone and she’s starting to lose it again.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I say, “We’ll get a chair . . . CHAIR.” I motion to the snack bar, and she and I retrieve a chair. She climbs up, visibly relieved that she can reach.

I let her put the coins into phone. She listens with satisfaction as each one drops, then I start to dial the number.

“I wanna do it,” she says.

“ Okay, okay,” I say. One by one I read her the digits of the hotel’s phone number and she slowly and carefully selects each one.

She is holding the receiver. I can hear the line is ringing and someone answers.

“Honey, Mama needs to talk on the phone.” I reach for the receiver.

“No no no,” she screams. “I wanna talk. I wanna talk.” She bangs the handset against the phone’s housing.

At this, a uniformed man, short and squat, charges toward us, shouting, “Woman, control your child. Control your child right now. WU-MAN, control your child or I will call the police.”

One of the things that M.’s psychologist Monica has told me is that when children with autism and related disabilities panic and tantrum that it is important to think about them as terrified mammals, and to give them space. Don’t startle them. Stay close, but not too close. If you are too close, she says, it boosts their adrenaline production, and increases their panic.

But it is much too late for safe spaces. She is now in a full panic, startled by the rush of this man shouting at me and at her. By now she is screaming and flailing. I pick her up to carry her away from the phone, away from the airport guard yelling at me, at her, at us. F. has gathered the luggage and moved toward the taxi stand. We have to leave. We have to leave now.

She’s screaming, “Let me go let me go let me go”—writhing in my arms as though she is seized by some spirit. She screams, “Help me, help me, somebody, help me, help me, anybody, help me.” I think it must look as though I am abducting her. She scratches at my face and draws blood as I navigate my way to the taxi stand. A bystander yells, “Hit her, just hit her.” The taxi dispatcher shouts “Just hit her.”

I can’t hit her. I don’t hit her.

A woman sitting on a bench says, “Lady, your kid got somethin’ not right with her?”

If it were today, and not 2002, which was early in our adventures with M., I would reach into my pocket and take a small card that says:

What you are witnessing is a child with autism. This child is not a brat, does not need discipline, and we are not bad parents. Autism is a neurobiological disorder that makes children behave in ways that most people don't understand. People with autism are often confused and upset and react in ways that are socially inappropriate, such as a tantrum. Please be patient while we teach our child how to function appropriately in the community.

Such a card does actually exist—it is sold by Autism Link, a group that advocates for autistic individuals and their families. Of course offering this label in M.’s case would not be technically accurate. Despite having many features of children in the spectrum, M. has never qualified for a full-fledged autism diagnosis. (See My Kid: Autie or Not.) But accurate or not, such a label can go a long way toward quelling the squall of the social catastrophe. The bystanders can walk away, perhaps they will be shaking their heads, but they can walk away, confident that there is a category to contain what they have just encountered.

Much has been written about the violence of naming, as well as about the social construction of diagnostic categories, so I will not rehearse those arguments here. You know the names and the arguments: Levinas, Derrida, Delueze, Foucault and our own Avital Ronnell among them. Rather, I will propose that the diagnostic category, while it produces all sorts of violence, also attempts to frame and contain eruptions that, while not always in themselves violent, as this one appeared to be, are nonetheless deeply disturbing. Declaring that someone is autistic is a sort of social remedy . . . while it may be a disservice to the complexity of that person’s experience and neurological particularities, it is also a palliative . . . a remedy for the discomfort of difference.

In English the words that are most frequently deployed to contain such eruptions begin with the letter D. One is diseased-disordered-disabled-disturbed-demented-deranged-or, in the case of our daughter, developmentally-delayed. One is diagnosed, and, it is hoped that, through and across (dia=Greek for through and across) this knowledge, this gnosis, the person and/or their symptoms, can be contained and often constrained.

But M.’s symptoms have defied containment, and she has often refused to be constrainted. Instead of one diagnosis, she has eleven, each of which describes a features of her behavior and disposition. Indeed, her psychiatrist—who is as fine a physician as any in the city—was once pushed to offer a Dx of autism, and deflected it by calling her “spectrumy.” Not a technical term, to be sure, but certainly an excellent volley.

Why would one want to deflect a diagnosis of autism, if it were accurate? The answer is simple. When this medical term is transposed into the world of education and social services, it has implications for how one will be seen and served. I am told by the social worker and advocate who has helped in our school search that in the New York City school system, a label of autistic assumes severe cognitive impairment, what we formerly have called retardation. Although this is inaccurate—autistic individuals are often remarkably intelligent and insightful—a diagnosis of autism could, even today, consign her to a warehouse rather than an education. On the other hand, I am told by autie activists parents, that should she require Social Security Disability because of the challenges that such a neurological disposition presents, she would be be ineligible for such assistance without the autism Dx. Accepting a label for a child, in these worlds, becomes an occasion not only for managing expectations, but also for limiting possibilities.

And for those of us who are interested in fostering tolerance for neurodiversity—involved in the emerging movement of activists advocating for social acceptance and reasonable accomodations for those with neurological differences—there is the question of whether and when one should be “out” about being “aut.” [See Kristina Chew's dazzling reflection on being "aut."] To claim the name displaces the stigma—as in other social justice movements—for example, the LBGT movement, with its embrace of tranny or, at earlier moments, dyke. If enough people are out about being autie or aspie (the autistic community’s self-naming for persons Dx’d with Asperger’s Syndrome), then there is the possibility that the practices of warehousing, exorcising, or sedating autistic children with neuroleptic medications will rapidly become obsolete.

Autistic adults (for example, Temple Grandin and Donna Williams) who have written about their own perceptions, describe their thinking processes as lacking in the capacity to generalize. While they may have a full array of particular images in mind that are tagged with a single label, for example, with the label “chair,” for the autistic individual there is no generic chair, no general principle of “chairness.” It seems that for autistic individuals that there is no Platonic ideal, of “chair,” or of anything else. Grandin has a remarkable passage in her book Thinking in Pictures where she describes her process of designing a cattle processing plant as one of sorting through hundreds of thousands of images that she has in her memory and then putting the pieces together to create a new blueprint.

For autistic thinkers, it seems, all the world, and everything in it, is particular. This would, in part, explain the autistic person’s need for routine and order, and the autistic tendency to become easily overwhelmed by new sensory information. If, for example, every time you came into a room you encountered that room and everything within the room as perceptual information, rather than as phenomena subsumed into general categories, life would be extraordinarily overwhelming, however beautiful, terrifying, and dangerous.

There is a violence in naming, and an even greater violence in generalizing, as those of us who are neurotypical are prone to do. Tonight, at some risk of appearing idiosyncratic and personal, I have tried to move from the particular to the general, to find the whole of the world in a single aspect, as the sociologist Georg Simmel would urge us to do. One can hope that if one is precise and particular enough, that one can move toward theory that is well-grounded enough to honor and encompass the particular, the peculiar, and the rare, in both neurology and elsewhere.

The Four D's . . .

Damaged—diseased—disabled—different.

These are the four d's that dominate the thinking about kids like mine, kids like sweet M.

If they are damaged—poisoned by some environmental toxin—then someone is to blame, someone has to pay, and something must be done.

If they are diseased—whether by the aforementioned damage, or by virtue of some genetic glitch—then they ought to be helped, they ought to be treated, we must search for a cure.

If they are disabled—unable to function as "normal" folks do—then we may seek reasonable accommodations.

And if they are different, simply different, there is space for the other four d's that I prefer: daring, determined, delightful, darling . . .

Cure Quest: A Maternal Reading Emergency

Last week I read David Kirby's Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy and had my own reading emergency.

I'd been postponing reading Kirby's book because I was afraid that it would throw me in paroxysms of panic about poisoning and send me on what I call "cure quest." And sure enough, that's what happened. Well, that's almost what happened . . .

I was about 1/4 of the way through the book when I finally couldn't stop myself from digging out sweet M's vaccination record to calculate her mercury exposure. I haven't ever seriously thought that M's language delays are a consequence of mercury poisoning, but reading Kirby's narrative really got me going. That's what muckracking journalism is meant to do, and Kirby has done it very very well. I even phoned M's doctor to get the brandnames of the vaccines from her chart so I could calculate her Hg load at each appointment in the first three years. Her doctor seemed to think I'd lost my mind, but begrudgingly pulled that info from her chart.

For several days I was back to entertaining the idea that there really might be an autism epidemic—all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding—and that M. might really be suffering from mercury poisoning. Afterall, I thought, what about that study that correlates mercury emissions from powerplants with neurological disorders?

And, of course, this is the hook for parents: What if . . . what if . . . what if . . . her neurological challenges really are a result of mercury poisoning and I could have done something to help her and didn't?

Damaged—diseased—disabled—different: these are the four d's that dominate the thinking about sweet M. More on them shortly.