"Mother, Am I Normal?"

Yesterday my eighteen-year-old son with autism was wiping off the kitchen counter. He stopped, blinked a few times and said, “Mother, am I normal?”

I looked up from my laptop, surprised. He’d never asked me such a thing before. We made eye contact. I scanned my brain files for the correct response.

“I mean, what does normal mean?” he asked. “Does it mean medium? Or good? Regular? Or average? Or ordinary?”

One of his favorite things to do is to search for the meaning of words . He’ll frequently ask me for definitions, and is especially interested in classifying words with similar connotations.

But this was a profound question he was asking. What DOES normal mean, anyway?

“I suppose normal means regular or ordinary. Average," I said.

I thought about my son in his early childhood. He would scream in frustration at his inability to communicate his wants and feelings. In those days, I was an overwhelmed young mother with small children, trying to deal with what felt like his crushing diagnosis of autism. I thought I wanted him to be “normal.” I couldn’t take him to a store without him having a terrible tantrum. People would stare in disgust, because his disability was not obvious from his appearance. To strangers, he was a disobedient child and I was his inefficient mother. I had to be trained by autism experts in how to manage the tantrums and to promote his language development. It was painful in those days to think of how his disability would impact his life.

Then I thought about how far he has come. Today, standing just under six feet tall, he is happy, kind, and immaculately groomed, friendly to everyone he meets. He grins to himself at his own little amusements, sometimes clapping and bounding across the room. Compared to my other children that the world might call “normal,” he is the most responsible, dependable, and tender-hearted. He’s an example to his younger siblings. I love each of my children immensely, beyond words. But there is something so special and profound about the child who struggled the most and--against the odds--came into his own respectable place in the world.

I continued, “But if normal means ordinary and average, then no, you are not normal. You are extraordinary. You are special. You are a miracle. You are SO much better than normal.”

And as I said it, I wondered if any of us should strive to be normal. Don’t we all aspire to somehow stand apart?

My son tilted his head and looked upward, rubbing his hands together happily. There was satisfaction in my answer. “Extraordinary,” he said.