This is the first of a two-part series of stories on autism. Part two will run Friday, April 27.
It’s hard to tell how he’s going to react. The good days are very good, but the bad days are so awful she wants to crawl in bed and cry.
Ashley Birckbichler peered tentatively into the dining room at Umi’s Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi Bar Thursday night in Columbus. The last time she brought her six-year-old son, Elisha, to the restaurant, he loved the great, whooshing fire, as the hibachi chef set the grill ablaze and slung rice onto the sizzling surface. But it was crowded Thursday, bright and noisy. She ran her fingers through his straight blonde hair and thought maybe he would be okay.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates one in every 88 children in the United States is autistic, like Elisha. Since 2002, the number of affected children has risen 78 percent. Autistic characters now frequently appear on popular television shows, like NBC’s “Parenthood” and the CBS drama, “Criminal Minds.”
The Autism Society, since the 1970s, has set aside April as National Autism Awareness Month to help people understand the developmental disorder and the broad spectrum of behaviors which make up the world of an autistic child.
Birckbichler wears a blue, rubber bracelet emblazoned with the words, “I love someone with autism.” She hopes it will catch people’s attention and make them stop to ask her more, so she can help them understand what she tells Elisha all the time: He’s not mentally-impaired — in fact, he’s exceptionally intelligent — but his brain is “wired” differently, making social interaction and communication difficult. He still gives, wants and deserves love.
‘It’s very, very hard’
This isn’t going well. At Umi, a rowdy sports team celebrated a victory at the table behind Birckbichler and Elisha. The din increased, and she searched through her purse for headphones, which enable him to tune out sound. But she left them in her van. Elisha slid beneath the table, with his red Nintendo 3DS.
Within minutes, he was lying on his back, tucked between his mother’s legs and the chair legs, playing Super Mario from his protective cocoon, lost in his own world.
“It’s very, very hard, probably the hardest thing you will ever deal with,” she said. “But a lot of the beautiful things about him come from his autism. He lives inside his own world, and we’re just in it. We have to try our best to enter his world.”
He can become intensely focused on certain subjects and he enjoys taking things apart and putting them back together. His attention to detail allows him to see beauty other people miss, she explained.
“He looks up at the clouds; he loves the stars; he loves butterflies; he points things out to me all the time that make me just stop and say, ‘Wow.'” Birckbichler said.
And he has a mischievous bent. A few weeks ago, he hacked into her email and changed her password, just to be funny. She still doesn’t know how he did it. But when she asked for the new password, he gave it to her. She put a password on her iPhone to lock it, so he couldn’t play with it. Within 30 seconds, he held it up triumphantly, having broken the code.
But though he’s smart, he has no empathy, she noted. He knows what the word ‘tired’ means in the dictionary, but it means nothing concrete to him. When she becomes exasperated and tells him she’s tired, it doesn’t register. He has feelings, but he doesn’t understand those of others.
As a toddler, he sat in his car seat as she drove, screaming “The sun, the sun, it hurts my eyes!”
He can’t bear to have some clothes touch his skin, and unusual smells sometimes bother him. He doesn’t like people to look at him, because, he says, their eyes hurt him. And when people point or stare, he doesn’t understand it’s about him.
They don’t know he’s autistic, she says, they just think she’s a bad parent. She feels their eyes on her, and it hurts her as well. But it hurts her for reasons Elisha will never understand.
She looked under the table to check on him. He was no longer playing his game, but was facedown on the floor, curled in a ball of misery.
“We’re going to have to go soon,” she said.
A few minutes later, he buried his head in her lap, and clutched his ears, begging to leave. The chicken and shrimp she ordered had not arrived, but she wouldn’t make him endure the sensory overload overwhelming him. He may melt down into a head-banging, screaming tantrum, she said, but mostly, it’s not fair. For him, the bright, crowded, noisy place was torture.
She and her husband, Andrew, haven’t had a date in years. No one wants to keep Elisha.
‘Will he always be alone?’
An hour later, at McDonald’s, Elisha played happily in the children’s area, alone. A family was seated nearby, and his mother worried when he walked up to their children. He loves babies, she said, but you never know how he or the adults will react.
“Other parents, they don’t understand,” she said. “They don’t want their children around ‘the bad kid.'”
They tell her she’s a bad parent. They call him spoiled. They tell her she should spank him.
As for other children, they either love him or hate him. When the children at McDonald’s ignored him, he softly padded away, squeezed into the seat next to his mother and resumed playing his video game.
Children and adults can be so cruel, Ashley Birckbichler said, adding the worst call him “retard.”
She mouthed the word, so he didn’t have to hear it. She likes it when people ask her questions, because it gives her the chance to educate them.
“This is our life,” she said. “We eat, sleep and breathe autism.”
Elisha crouched over his game and mumbled something.
“What did you say?” she asks.
“I don’t want to be autistic,” he said. “I don’t want to have Asperger’s. It’s so boring.”
Birckbichler looked as though she would cry.
“I know how it feels for a parent to live this life,” she said. “I want people, especially in this town, to be more educated about it. This is a growing epidemic, and it’s not going away. Before I knew, I was clueless, helpless, scared. I want to help people, and I want to help my child. If I can reach 10 people and those 10 reach 10 more, then eventually, people will be more sympathetic.”
“When I’m gone, will he always be alone?” she asked of Elisha.
Elisha tugged at her sleeve and pointed at the McDonald’s jungle gym.
He told her he will build a house like it, for her, and he will build himself a little place at the very top, where he can look down and watch over her. He promised he will take care of her.
She smiled, because she had heard this before. But her eyes glistened when he let her step into his world for a moment and see how he thinks.
“You won’t be alone,” he said. “But I will.”
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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