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My son has started turning. Turning his body, I mean, pivoting 360 degrees on the threshold before going through doors, mostly, though sometimes it’s an N.B.A.-like fake left or right just before he starts to move forward. Once we noticed, we asked him about it and got, eventually, a pretty clear answer: “I was turned the wrong way.” Ah.

I am mostly not worked up about this. My son is 8, with autism, and I reminded myself the first time I recognized the pattern that this is just one of many tics he has lived with for a time since he was 3. Like a hermit crab, he’ll most likely outgrow this behavior, only to move to another one better suited to handle his needs. I’ll mention here that, behind this cool calm, if you could tune into the frequency of my inner brain, you would hear the air-conditioner-like hum of a constant, fervent prayer that the next tic is as unobtrusive to him as turning in doorways.

O.C.D.-looking behavior is pretty common among children with autism. I don’t know for sure the psychology of obsessive-compulsive disorder among the typically developing population, but with children with sensory or processing differences, I’m guessing that repetitive behaviors are coping mechanisms — you do something the same each time for comfort, for reassurance that this, at least, is something you are not going to get wrong, provoking more noise and chaos from an already noisy and chaotic world.

So what’s my boy coping with by turning? Not sure. This is the thing when you’re parenting children who are neurologically different from you: Your own experience doesn’t help you discern what is ailing your kid. So we become the best guessers we can be. He can answer “yes” or “no” to a question like, “Is the smell of this toothpaste bothering you?” — but finding the words himself to explain his troubles to you? Not easy or likely.

I watch him move through a crowd and I wonder what sensations and webs of connection he picks up that I don’t. What forces he perceives that he would rather duck under or pivot around. What requires shouldering through like a ball-carrier on a 1920s football team (well, that one has an easy answer: any freelance musician playing on the subway platform). When I’m feeling good, it’s kind of fun to speculate on what his operating system is picking up that I don’t see. When he is suffering, though, I make no such flights. I know then only the spiral winding between his pain and the elaborate rituals he has had to invent, all by himself, for getting through anxious space.

Every once in a while, I can help him. Mostly by getting off his back about what helps him, like wearing his hood all the time (although the balaclava he tried out one July day broke me for sure — he looked like a sweaty bank robber and I couldn’t hold my tongue about taking it off). Or carrying a backpack full of stuffed animals (the tool three years ago) wherever he went. I’ve taken to carrying noise-canceling earphones when we go out in the city, and sometimes we all wear them, a family of four, moving in the underwater quiet they produce. Staring at each other as we wait for the train, knowing that there would be little point in speaking, my boy and I smile at each other and make funny faces. It’s a relief, this little bubble of no talking. We hold hands for a minute, a rarity. And when he’s ready to let go, I do.