The Voice - Edit an Essay! in Dancing on a Blade (September 2019)

So, there’s a conference for the English honor society I’m in, and our theme is “finding our voice.” I suspect they mean the edity thing where you develop a style of your own as you go, but my brain bounced in and pointed out that finding your voice is advocacy and sadly, advocacy is my jam. I didn’t know I needed to do it for myself for ages, but shit’s been getting real in that arena of late, and I want to talk about it.

You’re cheaper than therapy. Also, more available. :)

Hack. Slash. Create edits. Feel free. I need to clean it up and extend it out and then chop it down til it’s concise, but the theme is that I found my voice by being someone elses’. (Yes, I mean the plural.) I’d be sorry it’s so feminist, but hey, you guys, the man in my life fucking sucks. I’m okay with pitching him under the bus a little, because this is the remix, and I am a fucking phoenix. Some days.

I learned to speak in a doctor’s office. I learned words I could never forget. I said them, these words of amazing power, and in the limited world of early childhood education, mountains rose and seas parted. I learned even more words of power, and I could make sense of my daughter. For twelve years, I was her voice. And along the way, I learned how to speak for myself.

It’s strange-sounding, I suppose, but entirely true. Of course, I had a physical voice long before my daughter was born: I was twenty three when she was born. A lot of talk happens in twenty-three years. What doesn’t always happen, though, is that you find your voice. Twenty-three year old me might have been married and a mother of two, more or less, but twenty-three year old me was voiceless. I didn’t speak up. I prided myself on accommodation. I could go with any flow. Surely, that was a strength?

And then I had a baby with high-functioning autism. Let me clarify that I do not mean the briefly extant Asperger’s syndrome, which has normal to high IQ as a prerequisite. I mean high-functioning autism. I mean that my daughter communicated mostly through gestures and interpretive dance for four years. My position in her life was a constant state of flux: did I support her? Did I punish her, for her amazing willfulness? Was she normal at all? She could do x and y - why not Z? I had run across autism as a potential cause for her problems several times, but her first pediatrician smirked at me and said, “Little girls don’t get autism. She’ll catch up.”

But she didn’t. And then she was three, and she still hadn’t. I stood in the antechamber of the Head Start office, and heard words that couldn’t be true. I frowned and I shook my head, and then, I said the last words I would ever say without having a voice: “Her doctor says she can’t have autism, because she’s a girl.”

Well, it turns out that little girls can get autism. And it turns out, as well, that teaching three girls with autism spectrum disorders teaches you to have a voice. You learn the value of advocacy. You learn to stand your ground. You learn to respect passion whereever it shows up, even if passion happens to be in the form of Sonic the Hedgehog for seven years. Concern for the future teaches you to be explicit in your demands and you get yelled at for having a voice, but it’s your greatest weapon. You can’t give it up and find a happy future for your special-needs children.

But we’re here to hear about my voice - the voice I gained from learning to speak for my daughters. That voice made me look around at the life we had, and realize that it wasn’t what they deserved, and it wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t all there was of me, that stay-at-home mother thing. Being afraid to take chances - that wasn’t me. It was a long battle, but I finally won a victory in it, and I enrolled in school.

And then I took on my husband’s determination to keep me out of the driver’s seat - literally. He means well, I’m sure, but he had the kind of mother who was happy to stay at home and the kind of father who made sure she could. Amazingly, I am not my mother in law. (Who knew?) I got a job and I paid into a savings account for Driver’s Ed. When I had earned enough, I cashed that account out and I took a taxi - a taxi! - to Driver’s Ed. I took a taxi twice a week for six weeks. The only car I had access to was the school’s. It’s a miracle I passed. Pass I did, though. When my husband refused to give me the keys to the Nissan we owned, I took one more taxi, and I bought a car.

It was my first major purchase, actually, and it was terrifying. Normal women get to do that with their parents at sixteen or seventeen. Trust me to be a late bloomer!

But I’m not voiceless. Not anymore. I can fight for my daughters, and I’m going to make a career out of fighting for people like them, but the first battles I have to win with this voice are mine.

It’s a start. If it can be tightened up, it might even work out. But for now it’s a godawful jumble. Hang on to it, I suppose, and I’ll see if I can bulk it up and butcher it down.