Cue the Marvel music.
There’s just something about mom-reflexes and mom-hearing.
It was in the middle of the first thump when Shalee Shumiloff, like a customed superhero and keeper of calm, began lifting off from the couch.
The laughter and piping voices that had been coming from the hallway went silent – just like that.
Then, they turned loud and sharp, just like that. Then, the thump.
“Uh-oh,” she said.
She was halfway down the hall by the second thump.
“Here we go,” she said.
The third thump, and she’s in the doorway – right in the middle of a full-on, gosh-darned, genuine sibling-scrum, involving her three boys.
Over something.
She never did figure out what, exactly.
Three sets of knees, three sets of elbows and three straw-haired heads, right in the midst of it.
Sean, 11, was showing his mettle. Nicholas, 4, was quite annoyed.
And Ben, 12, was breaking bad.
Shumiloff waded right in, saying the calming things said by moms in such circumstances.
(OK, she was loudest of all, actually).
“Hey, hey, hey!”
“Guys!”
“Boys!”
“Gentlemen!”
“Fellas!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
It was over just as quick. Eyes weren’t poked. Noses weren’t bloodied.
The brothers were getting along again, which they do most of the time, anyway.
Ben Nash, her eldest, especially.
There he was, smiling that smile of his, and laughing that laugh of his.
Back on the couch, Shumiloff was smiling, too.
Because it was all so … normal.
“We’re finally to point in the house where we are having those social interactions like everybody else,” she said.
I mean, there are going to be arguments. That’s what brothers do.”
A diagnosis (country roads, take me home)
The doctors told her that such exchanges, such fundamental communication, would likely be just outside the grasp of Ben, who turned 13 on Saturday.
He did so, by the way, with a surprise birthday party that was a full-on, gosh-darned, genuine act of kid-cool – more on that.
First, some history.
Because of his autism, those doctors said, Ben would be lucky if he ever uttered a syllable, much less a sentence.
Well, OK. Except now, he has definite opinions.
And, he’s a primo-dispenser of hugs.
His brand is that contagious laugh of his.
It goes great with his Disney-kid smile, even if it covered by a face mask most of time – the wearing of which, as Ben has a propensity to explain, just makes medical sense in the middle of pandemic.
Ben’s mom is a highly trained medical professional. She’s a physician assistant, one notch down from the M.D. stitching on the white coat.
She didn’t need that background to know something wasn’t quite meshing with her first-born.
“When you’re a mom, you know,” she said.
Ben never cooed as a baby and he never laughed as a toddler.
He wouldn’t make eye contact, and he couldn’t tolerate baby toys with their flashing lights, clangs and peek-a-boo slapstick.
What he could do, was what he did: He drew in on himself, and would go to his fingers, both out of solace and frustration. After his teeth came in, the digits were often raw and bleeding.
There were appointments, counseling sessions, and more appointments and counseling sessions.
When the diagnosis of autism finally came when he was 3, Shumiloff wasn’t surprised – since she had already made her own, two years before.
As a physician assistant, she already had a working knowledge of the sensory disorder that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can affect as many as 1 in 54 children across the country.
She knew about the cognitive challenges and the repetitive tics and the disruption of sleep patterns.
Same for seizures, the gastrointestinal distress and that razor’s edge tiptoe between calm and anger.
Shumiloff knew it academically, but this was her child.
Early on, every day was like living on the shore in hurricane season.
So, the physician assistant wrote a prescription.
Shumiloff, a Preston County native, was living and working in the Pittsburgh area when Ben was born. She started making phone calls and scanning her resume for typos.
“Ben is why we moved back to West Virginia,” she said.
“We really needed to have him around family.”
Here comes the parade
Ben was surrounded (in a socially distanced way) by family Saturday afternoon.
There were some friends, too, and people he didn’t know. They were neighbors of his grandmother’s in the housing development off Brookhaven Road, where it all commenced.
Ben has gotten to be very intuitive and observant, in his emergence from all the shadows of autism, but the kid never saw this one coming.
Not only was it a surprise party for his 13th birthday – it was a surprise party for his 13th birthday involving a full-on, gosh-darned, genuine parade, with lights, sirens and tossing candy.
Pretty good for guy who once couldn’t tolerate loud noises and crowds.
Kelly Watkins was there, too.
She got to know Ben last year as aide assisting him with his day-to-day at Mountaineer Middle School before COVID-19 clamped it all down.
Now, she’s one of the family. She babysits and does what she can, including parade-planning.
“Parades are his favorite thing,” she said.
That, plus classic Disney movies and “Blue’s Clues,” the kids’ show about the intrepid pup of the same name and hue who puts her paw print of a set of clues for viewers to decipher every episode.
As a student, Watkins said, Ben – perhaps allowing for his autism – prefers the scritch-scritch-scritch of a pencil on paper while doing his assignments, rather than the texture and antiseptic-clicks of a computer keyboard.
“That kid,” she said. “He’s a joy. And every day he overcomes a challenge.”
Lessons from solitary confinement
Moving to Morgantown, his mom said, was the tipping point – in a good form of the tipping point – for her son.
With the city being a medical hub for the state and region, there are all the resources, she said.
Not that there aren’t days that could be better.
Having to go remote learning hasn’t been easy, Shumiloff said. There are days when Ben still gets angry – she doesn’t count the above-mentioned skirmish with his siblings – and there are days when he still draws in.
But his fingers are free of bite-marks these days.
And, these days, since he can’t dispense hugs, Shumiloff says, he dispenses advice on how to cope with the coronavirus.
“Yeah, he’ll say, ‘The world is sick right now – wear your mask.’ Sounds good to me.
The times that are most poignant, she says, are when she catches him drawing back to moments he experienced when he was 4, the age Nicholas is now.
Such as the welcoming song from long-gone kid camp, when the other kids were singing, and Ben was off to one side – locked in the solitary confinement of his own psyche.
It only looked like he wasn’t comprehending, Shumiloff said. Like Blue and her clues, the information was still being downloaded and catalogued – for a transmission at a later date.
“Ben was in there,” she said. “He was in there the whole time. He just couldn’t get it out.”
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