God Forbid a Mother Shows Her Teeth

I’m trying to write this with a gentleness I do not feel. A public gentleness, because God forbid a mother shows her teeth. But inside, the marrow of me is screaming. There are things that need to be dragged into the light, especially when the body that hits the floor belongs to your child.

The scene: a sensory gym, one of those post-pandemic temples of parental guilt, primary colors lined the walls, selling us supervised imagination. Kinetix Kids at The Podium—a place engineered to look safe, so many CCTVs, I was told. A panopticon for the anxious parent.

Saying one’s child is autistic isn’t a free pass, it’s a gentle reminder, to say, I’m very well aware of my son’s condition and that I will try my best to not intrude too much to an otherwise neurotypical day of yours, but like most things in life, there are things I may not end up controlling, so let us give each other space to protect ourselves and each other for the surprises this condition may bring about.

My son, Nemo, is a gentle giant in the making, shaped by his own silence. I am his translator, decoding the language he creates, where a single word holds a universe of meaning. This makes me a “full-time mom,” a title perpetually up for debate by people not living it. It means I’ve said no to oceans of money to witness the small, sacred miracles of his becoming. Mothering is a kind of universal bloodletting; you are always giving something up. The question is whether we’ve also given up knowing what our children are capable of—both the beautiful and the monstrous.
So when a boy, bigger than Nemo, pushed him so hard he went down flat, his head and back landing against the firm matted edge of the trampoline. I screamed.

It took a lifetime for the staff to arrive. The place was swarming with nannies in matching pink, a hired army for a playdate, outnumbering the staff. They should have just shut down the place for things like this, there’s no discerning between who are part of the group and who are the walk-ins. The boy’s yaya, petite, overwhelmed by a boy much stronger than her watched him pull Nemo’s collar moments before. I sensed he was on the spectrum, and knowing how kids on the spectrum can be like magnets, repelling and attracting chaos, I kept a close watch.

“Ano nangyari?” I asked her.

“Natamaan lang po.” A lie so thin it was transparent. A nudge doesn’t create a fall like that. I called Nemo over, and then while I was holding him, the boy swooped in and slapped him—a hard, open-palmed slap across the back of his head. My friend saw it all. Traumatic, she’d later say. I had to raise my voice to a register that shook the building before the staff in blue finally appeared.

Where were the parents? The yaya didn’t know. She was a placeholder. It was obvious she couldn’t handle it, so she should be getting help, not letting my son be target practice. The other boy might come back for more, so I stayed with Nemo.

Then the mother appeared, radiating a practiced sorrow, ready to apologize for her son, as most of us mothers of autstic children approach an aggrieved parent. It contrasted so sharply with my rage she might as well have been a Virgin Mary with a vibe that says 'I see you. I understand you'. But this wasn't going to work this time.

“My son is autistic, too,” I said, the intention of my words tasted like acid in my mouth. It was a violation of a code I thought existed between parents of disabled children. You support other mothers, not confront them.

“I’m a full-time mother. I don’t have a yaya. I watch his every move. Where were you?” I asked.

The air shifted. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she began. “I don’t mean to look down on you…”

Wait. What? She wasn’t apologizing for her son’s violence. She was pitying my lack of hired help, reducing my fury to the "Tired Mother Trope." Clearly, I knew this was a dead conversation. Everyone around me just kept saying sorry. Not one of them checked my son’s head.

And of course, a maritess yaya with a little boy in tow, materialized, circling to gather details for her own retelling. She was the one who, after I told her to GTFO, had the audacity to scream back at me, furious at being denied the starring role in my trauma.

It’s a familiar story: we hire people to be our children's minders, which in turn become their role models, and then wonder why the world feels so unkind when they serve as our children's mirror to the world instead of us.

I asked Kinetix why they let the little kids in the trampoline area when the sign clearly says that anyone below this height will not be allowed. This was about GTFO yaya. They replied, “Because may kasama naman po yaya.” Okay, mash up 3 year old little girls with 13 year old boys and hope to God nothing happens. Let the yayas also deal with the other children who have no supervisors, right?

A playdate party was happening around the same time. A group of girls who were part of this group decided that Nemo was the villain and started pulling his arms behind him and pulling the watch from his wrist. I watched the girl’s yaya staring blankly as my son was hurt. No, “gentle hands”, no care at all. Just watching her charge twist my son’s arms, saying nothing because as long as her kid isn’t the one getting hurt, it’s not her problem.

These were four girls, not so little, who was trying to gang up on Nemo. I watched closely, but when Nemo kept saying no, and pulled his hand away. I had to intervene. If Nemo retaliates, he automatically becomes the bad guy. Only because he was bigger, even if he was provoked. So the responsibility falls on me to know his limits and pull him from a situation before it ignites since the yayas couldn’t care less.

This is the deal. The world will not adjust to our children. It’s just too big. We have to make a world that works for them, and if we can’t, then we sacrifice more. If you know your child can hurt others, you watch them like a hawk, or you hire someone strong enough to intervene.

The institutional response from Kinetix Kids was a masterclass in ineptitude. They insisted I take a bottle of water, as if to quell my rage, followed me around with it. Putting it so close to my face. It was infuriating. They NEVER once checked if Nemo had a head injury. The therapy center across it, Hatch, Nemo’s very first therapy center, had always had ice packs and in Shine Center in Kapitolyo where they deal with neurodiverse children from small to adult, and where Nemo has progressed very well, a small clinic, and a first aid kit is always on the ready. We've been around the therapy circuit, Nemo is popular in most of these places and we've measured and assessed how effective they are based on how they deal with my son.

The manager, a man with zero ability to read a room, tried to shake my hand mid-crisis. A lesson: you never offer a hand to an enemy mid-strike. Instead of offering medical aid, their parting shot was, “You can just email us a formal complaint.”

They didn’t even ask me for my name. Let alone Nemo’s real name which they misspelled. They don’t know who I am, couldn’t even call me by my first name. They were all just silent, panicking, nodding, waiting for me to just disappear since they absofuckinglutely do not know what to do.

So Email? I’ll do you one better. They thought I was going to file a formal complaint against the mother, or the yayas, but I don’t think they ever considered that the problem was Kinetix.

I was forced to repeat the story three times, a recitation of trauma for an audience that wasn’t listening. “We will get the statement of the other party,” they said. Everyone was just saying sorry, or they are sorry to hear that, and I just felt gaslit. Acknowledgment is nothing without action, especially if it’s said by the aggrieved party. As if an apology absolves them of all fault.

“Oh, I didn’t know this was a he-said, she-said thing. Don’t you have CCTVs?” Their priority, of course, was the paying party, apparently you need to be a ‘member’ in Kinetix or you’ll be paying more, and it’s always the members that they take care of. Recurring subscribers. I was just a curious passerby who signed up for free play.

It felt like I needed to prove that I was telling the truth. When the real reaction should be medical attention, mediate between myself and the other parent, and process this with the two autistic children, just like most professional therapy centers do.

But they didn’t. They just kept following me around with overpriced Hope in a Bottle.

While all this was happening, I tried to distance myself from Nemo to keep him from hearing the stressful conversation (where I had to explain three times) . My friend saw Nemo walking in circles, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” to himself. Absorbing the blame. That broke me.

How do I process an assault with a child who thinks in puzzles? He deflects, chooses to forget. He learned the word "dangerous" during the pandemic, and now uses it for a stubbed toe. I tried to use it, “We can’t go back to Kinetix, it’s a dangerous place.” The only way I can describe it because we haven’t got a lot of words together. He changes topic, which I would assume he doesn't want to think about it. But I have to. I saw what the other mother refused to see: her child will do this again. We can’t keep using our children’s disabilities as an excuse anymore.

This was autistic-on-autistic, a perfect storm of clashing parenting philosophies in a venue that failed us both. Ironic, they created an unsafe place for children who they were supposed to be supporting, and placed two mothers of autistic sons in conflict. Sure, these things happen in the playground, rough and tough play, but I think I expected it to be different since they are a therapy center and it would be safe for children with special needs a little more than the other places who don't offer such services.

This was preventable. All it required was supervision, enforced rules, a trained staff to assess possible threats in clusters of children and prevent any mishaps. It was my fault to think that because there were licensed therapist in the premises that their standards would trickle down to the more public play area.

I didn't leave empty handed, though. My consolation prize was a refund I demanded out of sheer defeat, and a pair of itchy, mandatory wrong sized socks. The only kind you're allowed to wear, they said. Sticky and stinky in my bag as I walked away.

This is the cult of the modern, therapeutic play-space. They monetize our post-lockdown fear that our children are broken. So many places popping up without the proper guidelines or actual legal precautions. They’re not going anywhere, there will be more of them because we simply do not have a choice. Our cities have no more green spaces, so we build bigger playgrounds inside bigger concrete boxes, paying for the fiction that play spaces offer while we stare at our phones, absolved, while being surrounded by underpaid therapists waiting for their big break or better pay abroad.

Yet, a place offering therapy sessions doesn't mean its staff can handle a crisis. Prevention isn’t a bunch of words on a poster written in Canva-font declaring they’re not liable. Is that even legal? Spaces for children NEED to be liable to operate. It keeps them on their toes, to make sure nothing bad happens. That's what insurance is for. So you can deal with people and children as promised and not coming from a place where they are worried about their business.

What I got for my money and trust was a stage set for trauma. I’ve forgotten that the playground is the most brutal place that a child can be in. Nemo is physically okay, for now at least. Mentally, I will never fully know the landscape of the damage for Nemo.

I write this as he sleeps. I am still wired, my teeth hurting from the clenching as I processed this for several hours. So I can show up as a normal mother to my son today.

Someone once asked how you turn dirty water clean; you just keep pouring in the good until the bad disappears. So if I can’t talk to him about what happened, my only job now is to fill his world with enough new, good moments to wash this one away.