Claire Scovell LaZebnik writes a beautiful piece today about her teenage son, who has autism.  He is starting to discover his  sexuality but his disability – even though it has not stopped his education – seems to make it impossible for him to connect with the girls he is attracted to.  LaZebnik wonders if he will ever find love outside his family and if he will ever experience that love through sex.  She can love him with his autism (though, I imagine, she hates the disability itself), but can others love him as he is?

 I want the girls he meets to know that just because he speaks a little
oddly and sometimes struggles to understand what they’re saying doesn’t
mean he wouldn’t make a great boyfriend. I want them to see what a good
heart he has, how he would never manipulate or hurt them, how he would
be grateful, obliging and loyal. But how many girls will be able to get
past the frustrations of his disabilities to appreciate that part of
him?

     This makes me think of Aidan and the many different ways that disability is expressed and the extraordinary diversity of human experience.

      Disability comes in myriad forms.  LaZebnik’s son seems to have accomplished quite a bit: graduating with his class in elementary school and moving on to middle school.  Autism, of course, is a famously complex and multifaceted condition; so, some kids may get through classes fairly well, while others may struggle mightily and never quite connect.  Yet for all of the good in her life (and she could, no doubt, tell many stories of painful difficulties), LaZebnik confronts sadness at another level.  He can do a lot of things, but can he inspire others to love him romantically?

    This question never really enters my mind when I think about Aidan and his future.  His limitations are so profound that I cannot conceive of him romantically or sexually involved with someone.  He cannot walk, talk or see; his mental capacities are those of an infant.  Just today, as I was trying to write this post, he had an unusual series of seizures (seizures are an everyday event; just this particular form was unusual) that interrupted his morning physical therapy routine.  That is how I gauge a good or a bad day: was he comfortable or was he complaining about something we could only guess at, since he cannot tell us what he feels. 

    I do not mean to pull a "we’re more disabled than you" snobbishness toward LaZebnik.  She is clearly a marvelously loving mother who, despite her son’s victories, is still worried for his future.  Rather, the contrast between our situations raises a question: even if a disability can be "overcome" to some degree (that is, if the disabled person can find ways of connecting with and integrating into abled society), if there are still some significant things that remain out of reach, is the disabled person somehow incomplete?

    I think a lot about this sort of question, because Aidan is unable to experience so much of what I experience.  But I have come to see that he is just as complete a person as I am.  That is what I mean by the "extraordinary diversity of human experience."  If LaZebnik’s son never has sex with a girl he desires, he is still as much of a person as any of us.  While many people have sex, some do not (the various versions of celibacy in the world).  While some people have lots of sex with many people, some (most?) have less with few, perhaps even one. 

     And this is true for every human trait.  There is no one ideal form of human experience that defines us.  We are what we are.  As long as we are alive and breathing and creating a presence, we are human.  If you pressed me for something more beyond that, I would say, as long as we have experienced the love of our family, we have lived the most important facet of our humanity.   And LaZebnik’s son obviously feels, and returns, that love.  So, does Aidan.

     My inspiration on this point is Chuang Tzu:

…the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things.  There’s nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.
     Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange – in Tao they all move as one and the same.  In difference there is the whole; in wholeness is the broken.  Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again. (23).

    Whatever he does or does not do, whatever he becomes, LaZebnik’s son is always real and sufficient unto himself.  In his difference from others is his wholeness.  He is not missing out on some critical element of humanity because all of the unique forms of humanity move as one and the same.