Ginger HawthorneI’d like to tell a story. If you already know me, you know where this is headed. If not, I invite you come along and experience a glimpse into my life.
This is the start of a series, so the length of the article you see here is misleading. There’s more. So much more.
I’ll do this a lot.
If you’re reading this, you were probably around for the COVID-19 pandemic, just as I was. If this is far enough in the future that you didn’t live through the year 2020, I’ll briefly set the stage. In a global pandemic, people reacted fairly quickly to try to limit the spread of an infection tat we didn’t fully understand. We stayed home, and if we had to go out, we wore masks. We stayed home and ordered everything we could online, including dinner and groceries. We stayed home and washed everything we brought into the house, every chance we could, not knowing what might get us sick. We stayed home and tried our best to survive. But mostly, those of us who could stay home, stayed home. We stayed home a lot.
Social distancing wasn’t as big of a disruption for us as it was for others, since I had been working from home for 6 years before the pandemic, my wife (we’ll call her “N”) hasn’t been able to work for many years due to disability, and our only child had been too young for school when everything started. But unknown to us at the time, we’re all autistic in our own ways, and the change to routine certainly caused us a lot of anxiety beyond all the obvious. We started picking up routines that we could control. N and I went on a diet (that I will not recommend, so please don’t ask!), we started walking every morning and evening, and we ended up losing about 130 pounds between us. We had to buy smaller clothes, and liking our bodies a bit more helped us both care a bit more about what we wore and how we presented ourselves. Even if we had nobody to show it to, we started to feel better about ourselves.
Our kiddo (I’ll call them “E”) started kindergarten in the fall of 2020, completely online. It was hard for an age that depends largely on social development, especially for a kid who had just been diagnosed as autistic early in the year. It was so important to the doctors who performed the diagnosis that they talked us out of home-schooling, specifically so E could be around other kids at school. So in January 2021 the school building re-opened and everybody went back to in-person classes. Or for E and the other kindergarteners, for the first time ever. There was a lot to look forward to.
With E spending five days a week inside the germ factory that is an elementary school, we got even more careful about cleaning and hygiene, but we also realized that we couldn’t do much to limit our exposure to potential COVID carriers anymore. Given our recent change in view of our bodies, N wanted to get her hair colored and her nails painted. We had made a relatively new friend who had just gotten started doing nail art out of her home when everything went down, so every few weeks we’d all go out to see her, hang out and watch N get her nails painted. E and I loved seeing the designs they’d come up with and happy she was to see art on her nails. In fact, I’d say E was completely enamored by them.
Now it’s the start of first grade, and the kids are starting to settle into a proper school routine. They’ve got full-day school, more unstructured time at recess, and they’re starting to develop more concrete personalities and social groups. They’re carrying backpacks and lunchboxes, having more say in the clothes they pick out, telling jokes and making friends. Basically, everybody’s starting to establish who they are in the little microcosm of society that is elementary school, and E was no different. They love dinosaurs, so naturally they ended up with a dinosaur backpack, dinosaur lunchbox, dinosaur pencil case, dinosaur t-shirts, on and on it went.
But E brought one other thing to school that most of the other kids didn’t. You see, E loved N’s nails so much that she eventually asked if E would want their nails done as well. E enthusiastically agreed, and they got a set of solid colors and they were so excited about it. They couldn’t stop gushing about them all weekend, and they were so excited to go back to school on Monday.
You can already see where this is going.
At recess, a few of the boys on the playground cornered E and started picking on them about their nails. They didn’t get physical about it, but the more they upset E, the more they laughed about it. And when E tried to get away from the situation, they started a chant of “Look at E!” that got everybodoy in the playground involved. Most of them didn’t even know what started it, but they joined in anyway, which just made everything all the worse.
E came home bawling their eyes out, and they ended up crying themselves to sleep that night, while scraping at their nails under the blankets so we couldn’t see. Sure enough, when they got up in the morning, their nails were completely bare.
Until this point, I hadn’t thought much about E’s nails. I was happy to see them happy, but it was mostly just a thing that N and E could share, and I just enjoyed their happiness from a distance. But now I had a mission. While N started making the rounds on Facebook to try to figure out who bullied our child and what they had to say for themselves, I decided to embrace my role as parent and role model. Next time we went out to get N’s nails done, I’d get mine done too. E needed to see that it was okay to express themselves. That it was the bullies who needed to leave us alone, rather than us needing to appease the bullies.
But that would be weeks away. I didn’t want to wait that long, and there was a nagging idea in the back of my mind that was finally working its way to the surface.
Continue to part 2: the egg tooth