The Mighty Logo

Autism Is a Funny Little Bird

The most helpful emails in health
Browse our free newsletters

Autism is a funny little bird. He hopped in through a window I hadn’t meant to open. When I turned around, he was looking at me with unsmiling eyes.

I was so afraid.

I tried to shoo him away, asked him to leave 400 times. I was stern. I was pretty f*cking rude. But he wouldn’t leave. He didn’t know how to fly. I prayed to the sky, looming gray above the roof of my house, for that little bird to leave. I made deals with voices I shouldn’t have heard, voices that spoke in tongues I didn’t understand.

But the little bird still stayed. He flapped around the rooms of my house, made sounds like a screeching owl and fluttered around my head fast like hummingbird wings. He made his nest near my boy and settled in for a long stay.

The bird was horrible at first. He asked me to do things I didn’t think I could do, things I wouldn’t have ever wanted to do. He did not care if I was tired or hurting. You, the collective you, would laugh when I brought it with me to the supermarket. You weren’t being mean, but it was funny to see me chasing my bird around the store. Sometimes I admit, I laughed too. I sat right down on the dirty floor in the cereal aisle, and I laughed.  Like a mad woman laughs at the gnomes that dance on her back porch. I laughed because my bird was strange and devastatingly beautiful. I laughed because I was broken up on the inside, and you were staring at me, and the bird was chirping for cookies in his little autistic chirps. I laughed to suffocate the sobs climbing up my throat.

The bird stayed. He grew up in fits and spurts with my boy, and I tried to teach him to fly (and ride a bicycle and eat with chopsticks), but he didn’t seem to really want to learn. He didn’t ask for much. I fed him cookies, and he chirped happy chirps, and I figured out how to make him smile. I decided not to suffocate the sobs when they came, and when I did that, I found they came less and less.

The bird stays. He stays, and I still wish he would go. I wish I could see a boy without a bird nearby. I wish it like you, the collective you, wishes for a million dollars to fall from the sky. I wish it less and less though.

The bird stays. He stays because he can’t fly, and even though he never may, it’s up to me to help him try.

4835_1084259236219_3745856_n

This post originally appeared on Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game.

Want to end the stigma around disability? Like us on Facebook.

And sign up for what we hope will be your favorite thing to read at night.

Originally published: March 6, 2015
Want more of The Mighty?
You can find even more stories on our Home page. There, you’ll also find thoughts and questions by our community.
Take Me Home