The Story of Mae
Daughter, Sister, Grandaughter, Niece, Cousin, Herself.
In July 2009 our daughter Katherine and her husband Colin —accompanied by their sons, Ben and Pete (ages five and three at the time) my wife, Susan and I — traveled to Beijing to meet the little girl they had adopted from an orphanage, where she had been for two years.
When the woman checking us in at Newark Airport learned why we were making the trip, she said, “God bless you,” and upgraded us all to business class.
In Beijing the morning after we arrived, two representatives of the orphanage brought Mae (the name Katherine and Colin had chosen for her) to our temporary apartment. She wore brand new shoes that squeaked with every step and delighted her.
Joining us to help with translation were Katherine’s brother, Evan, a New Yorker staff writer in China, and his soon-to-be fiancée, Sarabeth Berman, who was working for Teach for China.
The handoff went smoothly, and as I recall we all went to lunch nearby, a family enlarged by one.
That meal and those that followed over the next few days were festive with a bit of unsurprising disarray.
The next stop was Guangzhou, where formalities were scheduled at the U.S. consulate. Most families stay for those days at the White Swan Hotel, where I watched Katherine working two phones to locate a missing piece of official documentation that had to be retrieved from a mailbox in Greenwich, Connecticut (where we lived adjacent to each other), and faxed to the hotel.
The boys spent time in a White Swan swimming pool, watched by us, and Mae mainly slept as her parents successfully navigated the bureaucracy.
When we returned to Newark Airport, Katherine held Mae in her arms, determined that her first American steps be taken at home and not at an airport immigration desk.
As we came to know Mae over the next year, we recognized that she was not a typical toddler. Katherine had said that she and Colin would accept a “special needs” child. A medical report from the orphanage classified her as “epileptic.” A year later, as we all sat on a screen porch one night at our summer house in Michigan, Katherine said — calmly but clearly — that a number of tests had now concluded that Mae was autistic.
We all knew that the responsibility and challenges ahead would be formidable. When Katherine and Colin moved to Northern California in 2014, Katherine found a wooden sign in an antique store that I thought caught the essence of their little girl. “Warrior Mouse,” it said. She placed it over the door to Mae’s room.
Mae is now seventeen. Over the years Katherine has written extensively about the very largely misunderstood realities of complex disabilities. Her first piece was headlined “One in Sixty,” which was then thought to the prevalence of autism among children. Due in part to improved diagnostic techniques, the Centers for Disease Control currently sets this number at one in thirty-six.
Katherine’s writing for the Washington Post, Time, Mother Jones, and elsewhere is invaluable for its insights and (in my view) eloquence, humor, and distinctive voice. Here are links to her articles, well worth your time and sharing:
https://time.com/4740129/autism-special-education/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/when-inclusion-fails-kids-education-disabilities-idea/
Thanks for sharing