Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Fall/Winter 2009 - Online Volume 2
Alumni
Alumni Essay
Lessons My Son Taught Me
By By Justice Helen E. Hoens (L’79)
A New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Reflects on Raising a Child with Autism
May 1979. Thirty years ago. Standing there waiting to receive my J.D., surrounded by family and friends. And there, right there within my grasp, a life that would be filled with nothing but good things. Oh, to be sure, a life with responsibilities to family, and the obligation to do good works reflecting one’s notions of stewardship and charity to the less fortunate. But they would be voluntary, just part of a rich, full and rewarding life.
What a life to come. I knew even then that there would be the clerkship with the legendary Judge John Gibbons, on the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, and the wedding that November to fellow Georgetown Law alum Bob Schwaneberg (L’78). I envisioned a position at some Big Law Firm. I even dared to dream about pursuing not just a career, but a calling, a long-heard calling, to the bench.
Three years earlier, as a brand-new law student, I felt a twinge of pride when my professors spoke about the New Jersey Supreme Court, holding it up as a model of progressive decision-making and persuasive analysis, a place where justice was the polestar and one of the few courts in the nation to which others looked for guidance. Imagine that, my home state, little New Jersey, a place that was the butt of jokes. Here at Georgetown Law, and around the nation, a beacon of hope. Oh, to be part of that honorable tradition, to serve in that court system.
May 2009. Thirty years later, asked to look back, to pen a reflection on my life, I see a life that others might envy. Outwardly, everything I dreamed of, including the Big Law Firm jobs, the service as a judge in the trial and appellate courts, all culminating in an appointment to serve as a Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court in October 2006.
But the path was not what I anticipated, the road was not the sun-drenched, charmed life I thought I saw stretching before me in 1979. Instead, the way was hard, the route filled with struggle and sorrow beyond my worst imaginings. And yet, it has been by walking that path that I was shaped and transformed from what I was then into who I became along the way. It has only been through living that unexpected life that my dreams became possible.
I am not a big fan of reading newspaper accounts about one’s achievements. Inevitably, if those reports are harsh or unfavorable, they lead to sadness and resentment, not change for the better. Worse, if they are positive, there is the risk that one will believe them, leading to “swelled head syndrome.”
Nevertheless, as part of preparing for my Supreme Court confirmation hearings, I thought it would be prudent to know what was being written about me. I guess I expected to read positive things about my career and my pro bono work; I knew that I had a reputation for being diligent, scholarly, fair and open-minded. But I didn’t expect to read that others saw in me qualities they found essential to service on our Supreme Court, things like patience, compassion, courage and strength.
At first, I was startled, then humbled to read such things. I began to wonder where — if they were true — those qualities might have come from. Then I realized I learned them from my son.
Hubert Humphrey said that we should judge a society by the way it treats those in the shadows of life. And if ever there was someone in the shadows, it’s my son. To live with him is to inhabit the shadows, to live at the margins of society. To walk along life’s road and know how it feels to be invisible to ordinary folks. Well, invisible on a good day, but the object of open scorn and derision on so many other days.
My son, born, it seemed, so perfect, was diagnosed with autism in 1987. The dark ages as far as that now too common label is concerned. And, lest you think you know how this one turns out, he is not one of the success stories so popular in the media today. Instead, he’s the kid you don’t hear about, the one who never learns speech or even the rudiments of communication; the one whose mom gets told to “put him away before he beats her to death” and refuses; the one for whom there is no hope of an independent life. He’s the one excluded from family events, the one strangers feel free to point at and laugh, mimicking the funny way he walks or the strange sounds he makes.
If you think you’ve never encountered a profoundly autistic person, picture the annoying kid at the fast food restaurant, endlessly wiping the table where you want to sit or sweeping the floor even though your feet are there, or the mismatched herd of folks in the supermarket clogging up the aisle while one tries to find an item on the shelf. Quintessentially people in the margins, lives in the shadows. People we only notice because they’re in our way.
But for those of us who find ourselves among them, they are people, real people, with lives and hopes and dreams and feelings. People for whom every small task is a struggle, every tiny step an achievement, people who dream of being able to have a job, perform a task unsupervised, have some semblance of a “normal” life. Living among people like my son, you learn things like patience as they struggle to do things we master with ease, compassion for those who will always need to rely on others, the strength and courage required to speak up for those who have no voice.
Many years ago, when everything about my son seemed hopeless, when that faith that said I’d have a perfect life lay in tatters, I had a dream. I dreamed that in spite of it, one day I would be appointed to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Turns out the dream was half right. Because it’s not in spite of my son, but because of him, because of being forced to “pitch my tent and dwell among” people like him, that I learned those qualities others say I have — patience, compassion, strength, courage.
Not the life I expected. But if it means that, by telling others about the struggles endured by people like my son, I get the chance to speak up for the folks in the shadows, perhaps an even better life than I could have imagined.
