There’s nothing like a two-hour car journey to create the perfect space for mother-son bonding. Particularly when the son hates maintaining eye contact but loves a captive audience of one. Perfect.
So my regular Monday morning trip to Somerset with Corin is the weekly setting for topical exploration that ranges from consideration of the qualities of a V8 engine, wondering what exactly do Qinetic make in their super-secret weapons base on Salisbury plain, whether cows would enjoy having caterpillar tracks instead of legs, and our latest, why we hate the euphemism “special”.
Corin goes to a Special school. It’s an Asperger school run by the Priory Group, and on the sign outside its attractive gravelled driveway, the school is subtitled ” A Priory Special School”. Our conversation began by Corin telling me with considerable amusement how one of the boys had got into trouble for defacing the sign. He was apparently protesting about the use of particular language, and had changed the word ‘special’ to ‘freak’.
“Isn’t that worse, though?” I asked, “surely a ‘special school’ is a better way of describing your college than ‘freak school’?”
“No, of course not,” Corin replied, “It’s just saying things how they actually are, unlike saying ridiculous things like ‘special’”.
“Why’s ‘special’ ridiculous then? Isn’t it a good way of looking at Aspergers Syndrome?”
“No. It’s crap.”
I then start a rather unconvincing explanation of why people use the word special to describe anyone else with a disability, in what, at the time, I think is a calming tone of voice, but is actually just me trying to say all the usual old rubbish. Corin quickly deflates me with his riposte:
“You see, Mum, now you’re doing it too. Probably what happened was one day a child was told they had some disability or other, got really upset, and then their mum said, ‘don’t worry darling, it means you’re really special’ and they believed it. And it probably was quite a nice thing to say. Just once. But not any more. ‘Special’ is no better than ‘retard’ frankly. So you might as well say freak, because I don’t mind ‘freak’. It’s just patronising to have someone say you’re special when really they think you’re a weirdo. Because then ‘special’ really just means ‘weirdo’.”
How true. And this set me thinking. When someone happily, as a neurotypical individual describes someone on the autistic spectrum, or anyone else who has any kind of disability as ‘special’, it is really only to make themselves feel better as humans: they can imagine themselves to be people who truly understand. The person with a disability has no need of the label to feel singled out for specialness, as they undoubtedly feel singled out already. But even so, I know that I do it too. And I hate that I do it. I hate it too, when my twelve-year-old points out that I am being facile and actually, slightly dishonest with him. But he’s right, and I admire his ability to see through the fluff of what we say to one another.
So we continued our journey across Salisbury Plain, over the hills, laughing like drains at all the different and inappropriate moments when we could swap the word ‘special’ for ‘freak’. One of my favourites was Corin’s suggestion that the ‘special forces’ become the ‘freak forces’: well we said, who would mess with them? ‘Special Policemen’ become just that bit more interesting, as does the SAS (do they have helpers, we wondered), and in our favourite coffee shop, the staff were clearly puzzled by our hysterical inability to speak without snorting when confronted by the ‘specials’ board.
This ‘special’ conversation of ours crops up at odd and random moments, often and usually inappropriately timed, which gives us regular cause for a fit of the giggles. I wonder if I should be steering Corin in a more acceptable euphemistic direction, as his mother? Some would say so.
And I suppose I shouldn’t really approve – we should spare a thought for all the freaks out there. But then I count myself in that number. And, you know what? I don’t freakin’ mind.
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