The Language We're Still Learning to Speak Together

When we got our son's diagnosis, I had a particular way of framing it for myself: it was like being told that the person you love most speaks a different language. Not worse, not broken, just different. And the question isn't 'how do we fix their French?' The question is: how do we all learn enough of each other's language to meet somewhere in the middle?

For seventeen years, that's been the project.

We've never reached the point where we speak his language fluently. I don't think we ever will, fully. He'll never speak neurotypicality fluently either. I don't ask him to. But we've built enough of a shared vocabulary that the conversations we have now are richer than anything I imagined in the early years.

He's seventeen now. When he was younger and something happened that confused or upset him, he didn't always have words for it. He'd have a reaction, physical, immediate, total, and we'd try to understand it from the outside, which is an imprecise science at best. Now, when he doesn't want to engage with something, he'll say: 'I don't want to answer questions right now.' Clear. Direct. Useful. Not defiant, informative.

He's also learned that when he wants to come and tell me something while I'm watching television, he doesn't just start talking over it. He waits until I slowly pick up the remote. That's the signal. It means: I'm ready, you have my attention. We built that system together, not consciously, but through a thousand repetitions. It works.

“When he was younger, he couldn't name what he needed. Now he just says: 'I don't want to answer questions right now.' Clear. Direct. Not defiant. Informative. That took seventeen years.”

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This is what I want people to understand who are earlier in this journey: the language does develop. It develops slowly, and the development isn't linear, and there will be years that feel like very little progress followed by moments that stop you in your tracks. But it develops.

In the classroom, I think about this all the time. When I sit with a student and they say something in a particular tone that sounds harsh, I try to ask myself: is this their language, or is this distress? Because those sound similar from the outside and they require completely different responses. One needs information. One needs regulation.

The students I work with most closely are the ones who've learned that I'm trying to understand, not manage. And what that creates is extraordinary. They'll tell me things they won't tell their teachers. They'll flag their own level of dysregulation. They'll say 'I need to move' or 'the lights are too much', because they've had enough consistent experience to know that I'll do something useful with that information.

That trust is not built quickly. It's built the way all trust is built, by doing what you said you would do, over and over, until the other person has enough evidence to believe it's safe.

At home and in classrooms, the shift that changes everything is the same: when the other person stops needing to prove that they understand, and starts simply trying to understand. When the relationship is collaborative rather than corrective.

We're not there everywhere. Not in all classrooms, not in all families, not in all systems. But we're further along than we were. And that's enough to keep going.