On School Shootings, As an Autism Sibling

My crazy family. From the left: Cade, me, Dad, Mom,
Kelsey, and Brinn.

I am one of four children. I have two older sisters: Brinn, age twenty-four, and Kelsey, age twenty-two. I'm the third girl in our lineup; Haley, age twenty. My little brother is seventeen and the only one of us still in high school. His legal first name is Kenneth, after my father and his father and his father, but we have always called him by his middle name, Cade. He loves Star Wars, our pets, video games, and Blake Lively. He will graduate with his class in July of 2019.

That is, if he lives long enough.

I love my brother vey much, so much that every time a mass shooting occurs in a United States school, despite how normal and nightmarishly commonplace they are beginning to feel, my heart aches and fractures for the lives that are suddenly cut brutally short. Every time, every place, in another world, they are him. If we do not stop this, it may be him. Cade is not only a high school student, which alone puts him at risk in our current reality, but he also has autism. He is very "high-functioning", as it's often put, fully verbal and fiercely independent, but he is still uniquely vulnerable, and it leaves me paralyzed to imagine what a shooting at his school would entail for him, for me, for our family. He is not lesser in any way than any neurotypical kid his age, but he is at risk in ways this counterpart would not be.

Students are evacuated from their school at Major Stoneman Douglas High
School on February 14th, 2018.

As an autistic person, he is extremely noise-sensitive. Loudness can make his brain go into panic mode, short-circuiting in the face of this perceived violation, and he freezes, shrinks into himself, and is virtually incapacitated until the intrusion stops. Guns are loud. Shootings are loud. People running for their lives and screaming and police shouting at you to put your hands up are ear-splittingly, staggeringly loud. Even if Cade was lucky enough to survive this hypothetical shooting I can only pray never, ever happens, he is so incredibly sensitive to the emotions in his environment. So many people misinterpret autistic people's difficulty expressing themselves as robotic unfeeling, which is entirely inaccurate, especially in my brother's case. He hates arguing, hates tension and bad feelings of any kind, and internalizes these things so much. No person, let alone a child, should ever have to experience such sheer terror, such real peril, and my brother would feel this in raw, hideously hi-definition. The scars would be unimaginable.

As I'm sure happens in every home a school-age child occupies, I watch my baby brother leave in the morning, loping out the door like a gangly baby deer carrying a messy navy blue backpack, and pray he comes home. That I'll hear him singing to himself when he thinks no one can hear him. That he'll use all of my bubble bath all at once and make me royally pissed of at him. I need him to make me laugh and tell me new things about AT-ATs and drive me absolutely crazy. I am so afraid that my family will be forced to live the rest of our lives with a Cade-shaped wound in us.

Cade and me at Disneyland, summer 2015. As you can see,
he really enjoys hugs. 

I pray that he will not become another candlelight vigil, another school portrait on the news instead of in a yearbook, another life filled with unknown potential stolen by gun violence.

This has got to stop. This isn't about the left or the right or any ridiculous party lines, it is about precious human lives. Please do not let the discourse and policy changes and call for action brought up by the most recent act of senseless violence die, just to repeat the tired cycle the next time it happens.

The next time, it could be your brother, or mine. It could be your cousin or son or neighbor or another stranger who does not matter any less than any of these people. It could even be you. Please. Please. Let us work until we can do all we can to prevent there ever being a next time. Let's trade "next time" for "Never Again", thoughts and prayers for real action and real change. We will not survive without it. We have to do this.

For Columbine. For Sandy Hook. For Major Stoneman Douglas.

For Cade.

Poem: And So We Made A Liar of Lady Liberty

And So We Made A Liar of Lady Liberty

By Haley Ruth Spencer

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

-Emma Lazurus, ‘The New Colossus'

I was built

For more than beauty.

For more than bored tourist

Feet shuffling begrudgingly around inside my head,

Stopping only to take a picture of themselves with an elongated black plastic rod,

False white smiles spread across their empty faces, to offer up as proof to their friends

That they have laid flippant eyes on me,

When in fact,

They have not seen me.

I was created to be a colossus, an unmistakable beacon,

A David the size of Goliath,

So that everyone who would see

My right hand raised in the air, torching the azure sky,

Would know that I was leading them

Home, to safety and tolerance and

Fairness above all.

I was meant to symbolize

Everything good in

This country born from renegades

And radicals who rebelled,

poured tea into the same ocean

I stand in, who risked it all

And bled and fought and sacrificed

To declare that  “all men are created equal.”

And I have stood as a guardian

Of justice and equality for one hundred and thirty one years.

I have seen generations born and laid

To rest in the belly of the earth.

My once brilliantly copper skin

Is frosted in patina, and I have never

Lowered my torch,

Or put down my tablet, emblazoned with

The birthdate of the Declaration of Independence,

And my call out to those in need of shelter

Has never been pried from

Me.

So how is it

How is it that I feel the breaking heartbeats of our brothers and sisters

Turned away, being shown bars where there should be open arms,

Simply because of the direction and name they pray to, and the language their

Tongues were born to speak.

How is it that a lifeless little boy

Laid face down in the surf meant to

Bring him to safety isn’t playing

Somewhere, secure inside the country

That I gaze over?

I hear their wails and pleading voices, and the

Book cradled in my left hand feels heavy,

Dragging me down to the ocean floor, and I creak and grow old at the lie

Written on the pedestal I am bound to.

The torch in my clenched fist

Begins to burn my palm,

But I am bound to keep it aloft,

However heavy it may become,

However useless,

However much of a false promise.

For they have called me

‘Mother of Exiles’

And my children are suffering,

And my children are bleeding,

And my children are dying.

And I must look on

Onto a country

Who has forgotten where they

Came from

And who cannot hear me remind them

Anymore.

Stop It.

If you have any form of social media, then you have most likely recently come across a picture that looks something like this: there's a photograph of an conventionally unattractive woman (i.e overweight, bad skin, all of that fun unattainable beauty standard stuff) along with the caption along the lines of "Have you seen Adam/Joe/Etc? He said he would meet me here." Facebook users then share these photos with their friends of the mentioned name to embarrass them. For Example:

This is a real one. By the way, the woman in this photograph deals with an agonizing disorder that doesn't allow her body to store fat and stole the vision in one eye. So yeah. Hilarious.

Everyone gets a good laugh and it's harmless, right?

Well, actually, no.

This trend is cruel and incredibly offensive and damaging. Take it from someone who knows.
I don't just identify with the type of girl in these memes.

I was that girl.

I was that girl who had boys come up to her in middle school on dares and falsely ask me to be their friend's girlfriend as a humiliation tactic. I was that girl who was repeatedly told, both directly and through actions of others, that the very thought of being romantic with her was horrifying and unimaginable. As if my own preteen girl's inner voice wasn't mean enough to me, I had outside sources confirming its hateful words. It happened more than once, and each time it ate at me, leaving deep scars that ached quietly at all times, and that still reopen to hurt me often. These are painful wounds that I don't think will ever close, and that I'll have to fight my whole life to conquer.

I would put on a brave face when it happened, and I remember writing a Facebook status about it, stating how I was too good for them anyway, but I didn't believe it. When I looked in the mirror, I saw what they had taught me to see: An ugly, unloveable girl of no worth. They are an enormous part of the reason that I have never been able to tell anyone that I'm interested in them, because all I hear in the grating, crushing laughter of those boys from so long ago.

And while I thankfully wasn't made into one of the memes,  I have experienced exactly the same mysogonistic, damaging sentiment.  I don't tell this story to elicit sympathy or to gain attention. In fact, I still carry shame from it and I'm intensely uncomfortable talking about it. But I feel that it's important to share to help people look deeper at what they post. To those of you who keep sharing these memes, I respond with the words of the brilliant Dieter F. Uchtdorf: Stop it.

Stop yourself the next time you see one of these pictures, even if it has the perfect name on it of your friend/son/cousin/whatever. Stop and think about the person whose image is being stolen and held against them. Think about the girl on your friends list who might scroll past it and see herself in the meme, and realize that so many people think girls like her are unlovable. That she's unloveable. Think about any time anyone had made you feel less-than, and decide if you want to be the kind of person who makes others experience that.

Every time one of these memes is shared, that culture of shame and hatred is perpetuated further and further. Is this a world you want your daughters growing up in? Or your sons, for that matter? Nothing healthy can grow in such a toxic mindset.

Please help stop it.

An Open Letter To My Dog's Previous Family

To My Dog's Previous Family:


I don't know anything about you.

I don't know where you live, what your name is, what kind of car you drive. I don't even know what language you speak. You don't know anything about me, either. Chances are you'll never see this, chances are you'll never know I ever wrote it, but I feel to need to write it anyway. Because the thing that links us together is one of my very favorite things in the entire world.

We named her Sydney. I don't know what your name for her is, and I wonder about that a lot. I wonder what toys she loved at your house, and whether you knew about her weird affinity for playing with towels or how much she enjoys eating squash and cucumbers. I wonder what she was like as a puppy, and I want to see what she looked like then. I can only imagine that she was heinously cute.

s

Sydney's haircut when we found her. This is how you probably remember her.

The one thing I don't ever have to guess about her life before us is the fact that you loved her. I found her in 2014, joyfully rolling around in the leaves on a patch of greenery and trees heart-stoppingly near a freeway entrance. She was trusting of people, as though it would never enter into her mind that someone would hurt her, as I believe your kindness taught her to be. Her thick husky fur had been lovingly cut, probably to keep her cool under the July sun, and she was wearing a sturdy black collar, signs of a family who cared for her and wanted people to know she had a home. But that collar had no tags to lead us to where that home might be. My family and I tried everything to find you, from Facebook posts to physical signs to putting her description in the "Lost Dog" section of the local newspapers. Eventually, we gave her to the SPCA, in hopes you would look for her there, with instructions to call us if she had reached the deadline of her stay and would have to be put to sleep.

She lived there for two weeks before we got the call.  There wasn't a question about picking her up, but there was an uncertainty about keeping her. At the time, I liked her a lot. I thought she was pretty, smart, patient, and sweet, but just previously to finding her,  I had been promised to opportunity to pick out my own dog for the first time in my life, and keeping her would mean giving up that chance. And on top of that admittedly selfish hurdle, she was somebody else's dog. She was your dog. You had raised her, fed her, trained her, loved her for the first two years of her life. She was not mine.

But when we walked into the SPCA to sign the adoption papers that would authorize us to take her home something happened that changed that. I hadn't seen her for two weeks, and I'd assumed she'd forgotten about me. Still, I asked to see her, and they opened the door to the where the dogs lived. She was in the one of the first kennels in my line of vision, and her head was resting on her paws, a bored, lonely expression on her face. But then she looked up, and she saw me standing there, and she knew me instantly. She got up to her feet, dancing in the way she does when she's excited, beside herself with joy, looking at me with that intense, pure love that only a dog can give. And from that moment on, she had me. I'm obsessed with my Sydney girl. We had to leave her there because she was scheduled to be fixed (although they discovered, upon shaving her belly and finding a surgical scar, that you had already gotten that done, yet another piece of evidence about your responsible and loving dog ownership.) That extra week without her was tortuous. But we eventually were able to bring her home, and she's been one of us ever since.

I don't tell you this to cause you pain, if you ever see this. I want it to be clear that my intention is not to rub it in that she lives with my family now. I do want you to know, more than anything, that she is loved. She's safe, fed, and she has two small-dog siblings that adore her to the point of driving her crazy. She wears a pink collar now, but we keep that black one with us, tucked away safely. I love to dress her up on holidays, and she bears it patiently, like the good girl she is.

Halloween 2015.

One of my personal favorites. We printed it out, and now use it as a Christmas decoration.

She makes me happy when I'm sad, and she's helped me through some difficult, stressful times in my life. I love her so much it's stupid. When I go away on trips, I ask whoever is housesitting to send me pictures of her. And as I'm preparing to move out of my family home, the thought of being so far away from my dog makes my heart break, even though I know she has more than enough love to go around with my family members who will stay with her.

She loves car rides.

In the end,  there are countless questions I could ask you if I could, endless things I would love to be able to tell you, if I ever met you. But the biggest thing I would want to say, besides letting you know that she's safe and happy, is to tell you thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to have this sweet puppy in my life. Thank you for taking care of her when she was yours.

I promise to take care of her while she's mine.

Poem: On the Prospect of Being a Woman in Donald Trump's America

Note: In the wake of Donald Trump's most recent slew of disgusting comments towards women, and in the defenses I have seen made over them, I wrote this poem. The items in italics are actual quotes from the mouth of the actual republican candidate in this election. Keep that in mind.

On The Prospect of Being A Woman in Donald Trump's America

I am a woman, and I am not beautiful.

“I really understand beauty.”

Some of you who hear me say this may disagree,

Possibly because you are literally my mother,

Or you maybe happen to find my personal brand of appearance

Attractive, or perhaps you wish that I could love myself

And find beauty elsewhere in my being other than

The surface of my skin.

“You know, it doesn’t really matter what the media writes about you as long as you have a young and beautiful piece of ass on your arm”

None of you are wrong, as beauty lies in the

Eye of the beholder, but in the gaze of the public,

Under the checklist on the rubric of

American beauty standards,

I am not beautiful.

“My women are the most beautiful.”

I wish it didn’t matter.

Sometimes I am brave enough to think we may be

Nearing the time where not only is beauty allowed to be

Diverse and not formed in a certain plastic mold,

but in the image of Humanity herself.

And then I turn on the television.

I open a newspaper.

I peer into social media.

And there he is.

“I do own Miss Universe, I do own Miss U.S.A.”

His wide wrinkled lips spread open,

His harsh grating, uncouth voice spilling out,

His words a million straight-razors loosing the cages

Of the animals who have waited for him,

As his vitriol oils the rusted vocal cords of like-minded

Scum who suddenly feel emboldened enough

To crawl out of their shadowy, damp caves

And spit on, beat, verbally abuse, urinate on, rape

Those they have hated quietly for so long.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

I am white.

I am Christian, able-bodied,

Straight,cisgender, from a suburban family. And still, even I, nearly the picture of privilege,

l have reason to be frozen with fear at the prospect of

Eight years, eight horrific, frightening years,

At the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency.

“I’ve had a beautiful campaign.”

Because I am a woman, and all of us

Who happen to be female have every reason to want to

Purchase pepper spray, and hold our keys between

White-knuckled fingers crossing dark parking lots alone,

Especially with that man so dangerously close to

Sitting, smug and orange, in the oval office.

“This is nothing more than a distraction.”

Those of us who are perceived as beautiful risk being reduced,

At the blatant example of the potential President of the United States,

To their body parts, laid out like a buffet for the hungry eyes

And the reaching, greedy fingers of lecherous men.

Because, after all, isn’t it only natural?

“26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together?”

And those of us who are not seen as sexually desirable

Will be crushed under heels of dress shoes and work boots alike,

In the company of drugstore brand cigarette butts,

Because our faces and bodies do not please them,

Hushed up because no one likes to look at us,

So nothing we say, feel, need matters.

“This was locker room banter.”

And our country’s daughters who deserve respect and equality,

Will look into the reflective glass of Donald Trump’s empty eyes,

And begin to watch their reflections warp until they are nothing more

Than whatever inconsequential pieces of them are left after his pet buzzards,

lovingly named Misogyny and Chauvinism pick over them,

Reducing them, these precious young women of incalculable value,

To quiet piles of

Bone and

ash and

Dust.

“We’re only getting started, and it’s going to be beautiful.”

"We're only getting started."

Stop Calling Him The Stanford Swimmer.

It is September 2nd, 2016. It's a Friday. My library books are due today. The weather outside my house is warm and sunny.

And today, Brock Turner, a convicted rapist of an unconscious woman has waltzed out of prison a free man after spending only three months behind bars. Three months ago, the world was in an uproar after Judge Aaron Persky, "concerned about the effect that prison would have on Turner", sentenced the rapist to only six months in prison.

And now, due to good behavior, that sentence has been sliced in half. Time, it seems, is something the media has continued to associate with Turner, as if it could shed favorable light on him. Multiple newspapers printed his exceptional swim times in articles about the brutal rape he committed. His father lamented in a letter to the judge about the time his son wouldn't be able to enjoy the simple things in life, like steak, his boy's favorite food, because of, and I quote him here,"twenty minutes of action."

Yes, you read that right. Mr. Turner referred to a rape, perpetrated by his own son, as "twenty minutes of action."  If you need to go vomit, this post will be here when you return. It's okay.

This entire case was bizarrely and disgustingly focused on Brock's well-being, and his precious swim career was hanging in jeopardy. In that same letter, his father spoke about how Turner would never be the same after this trial, as if his son's victim bounced right back after waking up to her body brutalized and violated, pine needles shoved into her hair and her body, listening in a lengthy trial about how her rape was her fault because she had been drinking. Having to sit in the same room as her rapist and listen to details about his swim career, about how it wasn't a problem what he did, about how raping a person was as small of a mistake as tugging on a girl's pigtails.  This strong woman gave an incredible speech at the close of the trial, addressing how, in spite of physical evidence and eye-witnesses, it was his word against hers, and how, due to the disgusting rape culture we live in, his was widely accepted over hers. Here's a link to a transcription of that speech. Warning: it's slightly graphic, as she does not shy away from letting her audience know what horrors she suffered, post-rape included as she endured invasive testing to gather proof against her rapist. (https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.jyAeO0qjR#.coW3BagqR.)

As if the two Swedish visitors who found Turner on top of his unresponsive victim, who chased him off, and were brought to tears telling police what they had witnessed, will be fine and forget this horrific memory in a little while. Because, after all, it was just twenty minutes of action, right?

And today, after he has been convicted, after all of the uproar about his sentencing, as it is trending on Facebook today that he has been released early, the headline on that site refers to Brock Turner not as "Convicted Rapist", but as "Stanford Swimmer."

I have heard him addressed in this ridiculous, asinine way on multiple platforms. Not only does it focus on an aspect of Turner that is completely irrelevant to this issue, but it is a thinly veiled attempt to draw focus on his athletic career, as if that alone with exonerate him from his actions. As I've just been extremely troubled to find out as I was looking for Brock Turner's mug shot, when you google his name, the dropdown selection of suggestions to pair up with it is deeply unsettling, to say the least. Remember that these come from what is googled about Turner most often.

Not once, not once on the ten most googled phrases about Brock Turner is the word Rapist attached to his name. But the number one suggestion? Swimming.

This is a huge issue, huge in the protection of our women, on college campuses or walking alone on the street or generally existing. Nowhere is safe for us, and the blame of what may happen to us is always ours to bear. So often are rape cases thrown out because of insufficient evidence, and here we have a case laden with irrefutable proof, and still it is "debatable" because there was alcohol in her system, because apparently, being unconscious equals giving consent somehow in the twisted brains behind Turner's ludicrous sentencing. And because, somehow, being an athlete means you are incapable of any wrongdoing. We need to stop blaming the victims of rape, and stop putting the magnifying glass on them, and put it on their attackers.

It is my fondest wish that Brock Turner will somehow pay for what he did, that his victim will somehow receive her justice. But a person cannot be unraped, and a trial cannot be redone under the United States Bill of Rights.

What I suggest we, as a society who is tired of living in this rape culture, do about this particular case, about the case of the "Stanford Swimmer", is to eradicate that phrase from our vocabulary concerning him. We focus on what's important. We focus on what is vital history remembers about this man.

His name is Brock Turner.

And he is a rapist. 

The Loss of Little Girlhood

While waiting for my optometry appointment yesterday, I was reading a magazine, and came across an article speculating on Prince William and Duchess Kate's unborn baby's gender. Apparently, while no official gender has been announced, people think they'll be having a girl. I thought the article was cute, if a little bit superfluous, until I came to a paragraph talking about what it would mean for William and Kate to have a girl, and I was angry.

A line in the article detailed how as soon as the baby is born- let me repeat that- as a one-day-old, newborn baby-she would be a "fashion icon." 

Putting aside how utterly ridiculous it is to call a tiny human who can't even roll over yet a fashion icon, and believe me, I could write pages on that, there is something even more disturbing about that sentence, about that idea. 

The underlying current of the climate this baby, if it is a girl, would be born into is already based on how she would be dressed and how she would look, before she has a chance to take her first steps or say her first word. Tell me that isn't sick.

This illustrates a very ugly trend I've noticed, both in my life and in the media, of both the heavy emphasis society puts on the beauty if little girls and the over-sexualization of them. Just last month, while eating dinner with my mother at a restaurant, we witnessed a woman stick her toddler-aged daughter on the table and announce loudly, "Look, she's going to grow up to be a stripper!" And, as though her little girl was a doll, proceeded to make her squat up and down while sticking the child's butt out as the rest of the family laughed. 

Needless to say, my mom and I were horrified. 

And not long before that incident, I saw a picture of Beyonce's and Jay Z's daughter, who is only three years old, with incredibly literate caption of  "When ur mom is Beyonce, but u look lik Jay Z's lil brother." Not even four years old, and she's already being judged on how beautiful she is. Below is a picture of the little girl on a website made for petitions to better the world and stop injustice.

Because, of course,  this is such a pressing and important injustice in this world.

Yeah, I know that there are wars and murders and rape and racism in the world, but hey, let's worry about Blue Ivy's hair.

A definite symptom of the emphasis of girls's appearances at a young age (and it's still an issue for the rest of their lives, and is a lifelong battle for us to find acceptance, from ourselves as well as others,  but I digress.), is the absolute atrocity known as TLC's "Toddler's and Tiaras", or maybe, just the children's glitz pageant industry in general.

Here's a picture of  Eden Woods. She is 9 years old in this photo.

Even worse than the caked on make-up, fake teeth, and hair extensions plastered on this child and the other little girls of the glitz pageant world, are the costumes, which are often horrendously inappropriate for the children's ages. The only time I have seen a public uproar about it is when pageant mom Wendy Dickey put her 3-year-old daughter, Paisley, in a costume based off of a prostitute from the movie "Pretty Woman."

Yeah, you heard that right.

Paisley, who is too young to understand what she's wearing. 

From the movie "Pretty Woman".

I think the reason this got so much attention is because of the connection to the very famous movie. There are plenty of other highly inappropriate costumes given to little girls.  Here are a few of them that a cursory google search brought up.

I am sick to my stomach when I see these pictures, and those making fun of anybody's appearance, especially that of a young child. It breaks my heart to think of the pressure little girls living in this twisted world face, and it's hard not to feel a little bit helpless to fix it.

We can't change what some idiots who are pathetic enough to be living vicariously through their children or attacking toddlers beauty on the internet, but what we can do is follow Ghandi's advice and "Be the change we wish to see in the world." We can build up out daughters or other young girls in out lives and teach them to be confident and strong. We can let them be little girls and get muddy and play and wear little-girl clothes instead of prematurely hurtling them into the tumultuous frenzy of being a woman in today's beauty-centric society.

And when she grows up, she will be a stronger human being because of it.

So to answer the question that started this: What should Will and Kate expect if there baby is a girl?

They can expect a lovable, strong, amazing person, just as incredible as their son.