Anna Visloukh - A Thunderous Silence. Raising an Autistic child. My True Story

© Anna Visloukh, 2021

ISBN 978-5-0055-8075-7

Создано в интеллектуальной издательской системе Ridero

I often try on other people’s lives. I like to look through the windows. Through other people’s windows. When I sit in a bus travelling through the city in the evening, my eyes follow every window glowing in the dark. What kind of people live there, I wonder, and I come up with stories about them. Just now, a shadow flashes in a window, and I already know that she is a single woman and she has come to draw the curtains. She will now take off her slippers and make herself comfortable in her armchair. She will drink hot tea and read her favorite book. Or perhaps she will watch a movie. An old one, from the Soviet era, or maybe a Hollywood one made before the war. Her apartment is so cozy and quiet as though angels themselves were flying under the ceilings. So what if she is single, who cares? Personally, I envy her…

Oh, Lord, what am I talking about? What if a real lonely woman, who’s cried into her pillow many a night, heard me now! No, I am not being ironic, I am hiding behind these stories. And it’s not their lives I am fantasizing about – it is my own one, so that for a short time, for the few seconds when I see someone’s silhouette there in a window, I could live this invented life so different from mine. I am drifting in the darkness like an ice floe that’s broken away from the mainland. And now someone else’s life is moving away from me, to the other coast…

I also like houses. Not high-rise anthills, but old near-sighted cabins out in the forest. Can you imagine how quiet it would be there? Only the cat purring loudly, and the firewood crackling in the stove. And no struggles at all! Oh please, just let me go there, for a couple of days! But who am I begging? I would never leave, even if I could… It’s just a dream, and that’s all there is to it. Here is the window of our apartment. It is lit up. They are waiting for me there: my husband, my daughter, and my son.

My son swiftly taps away on the keyboard. Perfect lines of English words pop from his fingers and onto the screen, and I don’t understand the half of it. I come up to the window. A dull December night brings snow that is as sparse as if borrowed from a scrooge. I hear late cars parking softly, I see bare tree branches trembling slightly in the icy wind… A new day is about to begin, and so is our life. Our new life.

Ten minutes ago, Jonathan, a curator of Full Sail University, a subsidiary of Universal Studios in the USA, sent us a letter saying that my son had become a student of this famous institution. Well, what’s so special about that? Every year thousands, if not millions, of young people become students, all over the world, and some of them study abroad. The problem is my son is not like others, even if this has ever been my wildest dream… I wished he could have been just like everybody else. An ordinary boy first, and then an ordinary young man: football, college, girls… But my son is a dyslexic boy with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Now resting my hot forehead against the frozen December window glass, I recall running around asking all the psychologists and psychiatrists I could find for a certificate proving my son is dyslexic 1 1 Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities characterized by a specific reading disorder. A person suffering from dyslexia has difficulty learning to read and write. .

Once I heard that while taking exams dyslexic children abroad are given either an extra half point or an amended task taking into account their disability. However, for that to happen they need to be officially diagnosed with dyslexia and have all the supporting paperwork. I clung to this idea like a sailor clings onto the rope after he has fallen overboard in the stormy sea. What if that was possible? But how to get such a certificate? After all, Tim has not been officially diagnosed with dyslexia as a child. At that time, they would call it «cognitive delay» and label a child just like that, without digging into unnecessary details.

For days I went from one specialist to another. Some of them had known my son since childhood and understood his problems, but nobody would give me a certificate. However, the psychoneurological hospital suggested taking him in for a medical examination, and afterwards, maybe there would be a chance… No chance! Go examine yourselves before you get my child!

«We’ll get along without them, will we, Tim?»

I look at him with hope. It is me, not him, who needs support right now, who needs to hear that he is sure he’ll pass the exam even without that darned certificate.

«Well…» Tim hesitates. I see he is at a loss because I have promised him that certificate! I feel powerless, too. Over the years I used to solve so many unsolvable tasks, but this time I have failed.

«If I don’t score enough points in the reading section, I will make up for it in the conversation exam. That has, after all, always been my strong point.» Tim says it again and again calming himself, and me as well.

However, after Tim took the examination, it turned out that this half a point would have been vital; his score just was not enough. Fatigue, stress, what can you say? Exams are exams.

Yet before I learnt the news, I had been standing in St. Nicholas Cathedral praying for a miracle. I begged the saint to help my child who had worked for two years preparing for the English language exam to get into this university. He had been preparing all by himself using his own original system based on every method and technique of learning a language he could find on the Internet. And that was his second attempt.

«Dear Saint Nicholas!» I addressed the saint as the person holding the keys from our future. «Please, do help him, I beg you! He has been working so hard and he really wants to study there! It is his dream. It won’t be any trouble for you, you can do anything! You, too, had a mother once…»

This prayer, so different from the classic one, puts me in a state close to trance. Yet I do not know yet if the Saint has heard my words or what else I could do to make him hear my prayers. A silent scream erupts from my heart, and for a second it hangs up in the air like a tangible cloud, over the icons, beneath the dome of the cathedral. It is just as if I could see my desperate plea fly away to heaven. Somebody must hear it now!

The computer screen glows steadily and seems even friendly. Jonathan reaffirms it that my son has become a student. And as to the missing half a point… my prayer to Saint Nicholas has got through! Oh, the people living there, in that terrifically distant America, are so wonderful. I love them with all my heart, and not just them, everybody on our planet! Looking at my son discussing with Jonathan what documents we need to send to him, I clearly understand that I must write a book about all this.

A book – about what exactly? About my life? Who would be interested in that? How can I help my readers to avoid these absurd twists of fate that over all these years, grinning gloatingly, have been chasing me down tugging at my dress, screaming, «We are not done with you yet, there is so much more fun. Wait!» But the idea that perhaps my stories can help someone never leaves me and would not let go. Gradually, this idea comes together like a neat little parcel labeled «Son». The whole «User’s Guide» can be found inside. Who is it for? For desperate mothers, driven by circumstances, stripped of last hope, just like what I used to be. And so I dare.