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Community Corner

Just Off Main Street: What Is Normal?

There are some questions that neither Merriam nor Webster can answer for you.

My seven-year-old daughter has autism and is my only child, so I’m not very in tune with the typical ages and stages of childhood development. I know that there is a phase in there somewhere when a child is constantly asking his parents to label anything and everything. 

“Whazzat?” or just “Zat?” they say as they point their chubby little finger at the giant dust bunny that is stuck to the Velcro of their shoe. “That, my love, is some homespun Irish lace that Mommy made just for you.”  Who needs them knowing terminology that they could later humiliate you with?  I’m looking at you, parents who start talking genitalia when they’re eighteen-months old.

Although my daughter is verbal, she had never once asked me to label something or define a word for her. That is, until recently. It started with her using words, mostly adjectives, that she clearly did not have a handle on. She would talk about “unhealthy ringtones” or “famous nightgowns”, or say things like “Let’s get creative and polite!”

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I could have jumped in and created one of those teachable moments that I’ve heard so much about, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around how to explain where she’d gone wrong. And in her defense, my “Drop It Like It’s Hot” ringtone is probably not doing me any favors.

Now she has started to ask me for the meaning of certain words. “What does creative mean?” was her first inquiry. I’m sure that parents of typical children have honed this skill over the years, but for me it’s tapping into a brain muscle that has never been exercised. I was quickly indoctrinated into the parental art of making crap up, which for me came in four phases:

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1.  Define a word by using the word itself: “It means you’re really good at being creative.”

2.  Define a word that they don’t know the meaning of with more words that they don’t know the meaning of: “It means that you are super innovative and have a really fertile imagination.”

3.  Over-correct by dumbing it way down: “It’s like when you draw a pretty picture!”

4.  Try your hand at an idiom, but get it confused with a fast food slogan: “It means that you think outside the bun.”

If I couldn’t even define creative for her, there was no hope for me to nail her subsequent inquiry.

“Mom, what is normal?” she asked.

Uh oh. 

“What does normal mean?” she pressed. 

Can we go back to creative? 

After I collected myself, I said “It means regular or ordinary. You know, not special.”

Looking up the literal definition of “normal”, I find things like “conforming to an accepted standard” and “free from disease, disorder, or malformation”, which give the word a generally positive connotation. I guess it’s no accident that I instead gravitated to the non-special interpretation in defining it for my special needs child.

As if that question wasn’t disconcerting enough, she followed it up with “Do you love you?” She has difficulty with pronoun confusion so I knew that this could mean either “Do I love you?” or “Do you love me?” with the latter being more likely. 

Really? She wants to know what normal means and then asks if I love her? Could that be a coincidence? Because if not, I’m going to bust out the ugly cry.

I decided to answer her question exactly as it was asked.

“Do you love you?”

“Meh. I love you more.”

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