As a boy, an 11-year-old boy, and all the ages of boy and baby he has been up until now, I know my son in the same way I know how to read a lyric essay. Perhaps you don’t know how to read a lyric essay. If you had met him, perhaps you would not have known quite how to read my son either.

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To begin with, he sits upside down inside my body, and I mean that he is positioned to listen in on my murmured heartbeats. When I was a child and again during my pregnancies, doctors detected a heart murmur that could not be traced at other times. It murmurs to him before his birth as his form forms. His tiny ear leans in close to my heart, listening—he is a breech baby. Though we don’t know this fact until the night of his arrival when the gynaecologist on duty at the hospital performs an internal examination that reveals not the hardness of a descending head, but the tenderness of a scrotum[1].

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A lyric essay is usually made up of fragments, vignettes of written text separated by gaps of white space so you can try to read things that are not explicitly stated, things that have not or cannot be written, or perhaps even known,

                                                   like the thoughts inside the head of a person who doesn’t know how to speak or have enough powers of verbal expression to convey that information. A lyric essay ‘essays’ poetically and meanders as it goes, moving discursively in the same way a conversation might.

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Before the fact, I didn’t know a thing about lyric essays, or neurodivergence, or I didn’t know enough to recognise what I knew as intrinsic.

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To try to learn, you must first surrender yourself to a dance of lyric, the beauty of writing into the unknown, every story and sentence and word and voice that falls into all that white, a tangle curled as if an animal pack, sleeping there, unseen but held. You must also decipher it this way, piece it together.

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You don’t know yourself as a mother before you become one. You lean into the unfurling days as if into a sudden wind that might fold you in half, your newborn cradled close to your heart (beat).

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When he was a baby, my son didn’t make eye contact while breastfeeding. He had this funny way of moving his hands when he was upset, clenching and unclenching them, waving fingers like sea anemones. These things could have been something or nothing. The GP laughed at me as though I was a silly little mother when I mentioned the possibility of autism at my son’s 12-month check-up.

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Something that the lyric essay relies upon is the use of repetition or motif threaded throughout the telling of a narrative. A lyric essay will bring together and aggregate small fragments and images into a larger mosaicked meaning. Repetition brings resonance to meaning. A fulsomeness.

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I see children of all ages stare at my son, noticing him as we pass on the street. They look in a not unkind but frankly wondering manner when they see how he moves his body, how he speaks—the ways he is him—immediately recognisable as not-like-them. He is not easily, instantly decodable to another person in a world of instant gratification. Though when he smiles or laughs, he does it in the same way as any other child you know.

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When people ask if my son is verbal or non-verbal, I find it difficult to describe the non-binary nature of his relationship with language. I can use the word echolalia, which the dictionary defines as ‘meaningless repetition of words just spoken by another person, occurring as a symptom of mental conditions’, but it’s not an accurate or fair description of the hard-won way my son uses found language. The dictionary definition is how many people understand the way he speaks—it flags him as autistic, intellectually disabled, as Other. My son’s repetitions—gestalt phrases lifted from his favourite television shows—often form paths to understanding, doors into and out of him—they become functional language, bridges to communication. For instance, my son learned from Thomas the Tank Engine, Oh dear! which he uses contextually, and Bananas in Pyjamas taught him that Rat’s go-to phrase of Cheese and whiskers! works in real life to signal trouble. 

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Any old thing can be included within the scope of a lyric essay: a photo, a line of recalled dialogue or incident, archival traces, snatches of song, musical notes, a history of telegraph poles[2], anything really. A lyric essay accretes via the constituent parts of its fragment and uses association to make meaning from piece to piece. A lyric essay might tell by under-telling, leaving a reader to come to their own conclusions.

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He can play some music by ear; he has taught himself to read in certain instances. But I don’t want you to think of this as some kind of placeholder, a token held up to argue his worth. It’s ok for him just to be. It’s so easy to underestimate him, and people constantly do, and will. He refused or was unable to perform any of the tasks asked of him for his pre-school cognitive testing, so his IQ score was estimated, but I want to say to you—no estimation can take all of him into account—no one will ever really know the fullness and breadth of his mind. Including me.

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A spectrum is not a line where one can be a ‘little bit autistic’ at one end and like my son at the other. That is not what a spectrum looks like. Think of a colour wheel and put conventions of autism in the wedges like degrees or shades or levels, then imagine each part of the spectrum filled differently according to each autistic person. Add their personality, their talents, likes and dislikes, mix in an intellectual disability, or dyspraxia, apraxia, or sensory processing disorders, and then add or subtract verbal or non-verbal, and ‘behavioural’ issues.

Understand that being on the autistic spectrum is to be wholly rendered, that every shade of you is inarguably coloured autistic.  

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One of the signifiers for autism in small children is playing with toys in unusual ways—spinning the wheels of a wooden truck, or lining items up, categorising them by colour or shape—rather than interacting with objects in a more conventional iteration. My son didn’t do these things, though he didn’t quite know what he was supposed to do with toys. He loved singing. Loves singing. He has a high, clear voice, with perfect pitch. He likes to listen to classical compositions, as well as Neil Young, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and music from Play School and The Wiggles. Is there anything so ‘special’ about these interests?

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In a lyric essay, meaning might be attained via reading between the lines. You can learn as much by what isn’t written as what is. In this way, the lyric essay is the perfect vessel for writing about what is not just unknown, but unknowable.

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Though my son has little idea of how language works as a system, language matters. When he was a toddler, largely non-verbal, he once gave a gentle nudge to a younger boy sitting too long at the top of a slide. The mother said ‘Hey! No pushing!’ and I explained to her that he was autistic. She answered ‘Oh, is he?’ as if nothing excused the tiny push. I was left pondering the chasm between what I meant to convey, and what she understood.

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When he was eight years old, in grade three at his old specialist developmental school, the teacher wrote one day in his school diary that my son—who has a known hypersensitivity to noise—had laid down on top of a screeching little girl. The teacher said he had tried to ‘smother’ the other child, not that he did what he could to stop the assault upon him that no one else had bothered to address. Another day his teacher wrote that he had ‘spat’ at the teachers when he didn’t want to do what they asked of him. To this day my son doesn’t have the oral motor skills to ‘spit’, though he can ‘splutter’ with his tongue, to effectively blow a raspberry. When a person can’t make an account of themselves, and their teacher puts in writing that they have tried to ‘smother’ another child, that they ‘spit’ at their teachers, what account will people make of them? What does it mean to layer language in this way, against a child who is unable to offer a word in their own defence? To use language against him in this way is to collage versions of a child in opposition to their true nature. These versions might be lined up like soldiers, not with him but against him.

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When Deborah Tall and John D’Agata coined the term ‘the lyric essay’ in The Seneca Review in 1997 as a call out for the nature of work they wanted to read, they said that this kind of writing valued artfulness over veracity. I am writing a story about my son as faithfully and lovingly as I can, but you must remember that my son might tell it differently if he could write a lyric essay, and not just be the subject of one. Or he might inscribe his story between the words on the page, in white.

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Australia has one of the largest rates of autism diagnoses in the world, a fact that has recently been attributed to the existence of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the resources it makes available, but my son would never have gone without a ‘definition’, at whatever period he had been born. The names doctors would have attached to him would have been less specific. There are historical words still in colloquial use that were once formally diagnostic. Words like:

‘Idiot’

‘Imbecile’

‘Feeble’

‘Moron’,

And other words we throw around as though they are only slightly sharp edged, as though they were never wounds inflicted on people, used to other and damage them.

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Words like these might historically have led doctors to putting my son into an institution and telling us to forget he was ever born, as happened to so many children like him in the past.

Those darling babes,

T h r o w n   t o   t h e   w o l v e s.

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Read that white space, but cover your eyes, cover your ears—guard and gird your heart—who could bear to look, to know those histories? We can never fathom the fears or the tears or the stricken faces of people without voices to tell what was done to them, those atrocities we cannot read, because others wrote the accounts—the suffering lives only in the unwritten pieces, broken, scattered between papers and policies and the rhetoric of the day.

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I lived in Sydney for three years in my early 30s. For some of that time, I lived and worked in Bondi. To get to work, I walked down the steep slope of Wellington Street. My mother bought me a book by Mark Tedeschi that came out when I lived there. Tedeschi writes of the infamous kidnapping for ransom and subsequent murder of eight-year-old Graeme Thorne in 1960. Graeme and his family lived in the street that I also later lived in, and he was kidnapped from Wellington Street. Reading this book, one of the most haunting details—mentioned only briefly—was that of the eldest sibling in the Thorne family, an intellectually disabled child (see lexicon above), who in the common ‘wisdom’ of the day had been relinquished into institutional care as a young child. The parents had then been advised not to visit their daughter. They were told to forget her. This terrible disappearance was a foreshadowing of the second, but from where I’m sitting, the disappearance of the elder sister is as horrifying and tragic as that of her brother.

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The lyric essay relies on gaps and silences but is also contingent on readerly participation vis-à-vis meaning making. A reader must try to read what isn’t there. Or who isn’t there, or what there are no words for.

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I read to my son last night before sleep. When I finished the book, as I leaned in to kiss his forehead, I was momentarily horrified by the detection of uncanny movement in the hair covering his forehead. I quickly discerned the silvery wings of a tiny moth and flicked it gently away. The wings reminded me of the colours his hair held when he was younger, yellow, bronze and gold entwined. He has not noticed the incursion, but he doesn’t have the words for that conversation, anyway. The previous night, a helicopter had flown disturbingly low over the house just after his bedtime, and I had stared at the ceiling muttering ‘What is that?’ My son had burst from his bedroom in excitement shouting, it’s a helicopter! as if in answer to my question, as if that was something that happens often. He is always surprising us.

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He will grow to be over six feet tall. Aged 11, he is already head and shoulders taller than me. Though I still call him my little boy. For now, he is still a little boy. But yes, he will be tall, a big man—like my husband, like my male relatives—yet he will be among society’s most vulnerable, especially if he is big. The world will always be dangerous for him, though he will be susceptible to being perceived as a source of danger to others. One of my deepest fears for him when he is grown into the skin of a tall man, is that he will be shot or otherwise hurt by an under-trained police officer. That, like so many other autistic, intellectually disabled men, he will end up in gaol, because of the white spaces between his actions and how they are perceived.

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Life is made up of fragments. Memory is recalled in this way, and forgetfulness—and all the things we tuck away or don’t want to know, the thoughts we chase from our heads at 3AM. Fears for the future. And hope too comes in fragments that we piece together.

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One morning, I spy my son sitting cross legged on the dining table that doubles as my writing desk, eating his vegemite toast, wearing noise cancelling headphones. I snap a photo and post it on social media with the caption ‘Apparently this is how you eat breakfast.’ I note that he looks particularly beautiful in the photograph and think that’s what people will see. Many people react positively to the post, but one person comments ‘How sad’, accompanied by a weeping emoji. I think for a moment that she has commented on the wrong post before the knowledge settles in. She considers him lost in some way. Less. It occurs to me that perhaps this is what people truly think. That they pity him, and us. Not recognising the smart and funny and sweet-tempered kid we love; they see him as broken.

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Maybe the person who commented ‘How sad’ just doesn’t know how to read a child in this way. Perhaps she digests the fragments of the known and then makes the wrong leaps of association. She is incapable of reading the spaces between the words, the unwritten child.

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I would never call my son a boy with autism, as if his autism is something aside from him, apart from him. As if it is not innate and doesn’t inform everything about him. Is this not partly a language for self? I keep thinking of how inescapable it is that it must form part of the language of myself, though I don’t have money or need for affirmation.

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If you think about it this way, my son’s arrival in the world as undeniably autistic—the kind of child who would never have eluded being significantly othered, a child who might have been stolen away if he had been born in a different time—heralds him as a beacon to who and what the rest of us are or might be. Knowing him, within my family, we are closer to knowing ourselves.

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He illuminates us.

He lights us up.

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Before the term ‘lyric essay’ was coined and codified, there were still works that could be read in this way. Just ask John D’Agata. Or don’t. The genre of lyric essay is not without its controversies, some say it’s just another branch of creative nonfiction. Similarly, there are people who claim that there was no such thing as autism when they were at school, that kids today just need a bit of discipline[3].

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Part of what separates my son from others—even from me, his mother—is lack of insight to his interiority. Inaccessibility to functional language isolates him. But isn’t that at the heart of our humanity—the locus of loneliness, and love, and terror, and struggles, not to mention why we write—that we remain inaccessible to each other, that we are not transparent?

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Maybe we could just read my son as a boy and believe in him and respect him and be careful in our accounts.

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My mother calls him the magic boy. She says he is the best boy there ever was. This is a language he understands well, these words of love, of visibility and belief in him as always capable of being himself.

AUTHOR NOTES
[1] Born with a thumb-shaped bruise imprinted on it.
[2] See Eula Biss, 2008, ‘Time and Distance Overcome’.
[3] The same is true for ADHD.