About the Poconos...

Thoughtfulness. A gift, a note, a gesture; it is my purest pleasure to notice and act upon an opportunity to make someone happy. And so of course I treasure reciprocity in this endeavor, the unexpected considerations of others. I believe this is called a love language.

That said, I know I can be quite a frustration, as I find that I am frequently apologizing for the little inconveniences that I present to other people in this world simply by being here and being me. Being late or being way too early. Needing your help with my children. Again. Asking too many questions. Eating all the pecans out of the ice cream. I can be unintentionally inconsiderate and absent-minded, and I feel my best line of defense is to ingratiate myself to the people in my life with the sincerest statement I can make about my tendency to operate in a vacuum which is to say “I’m sorry”.

Arguably one of the most important phrases in our language. And just knowing this won’t do you any good. You have to learn how to say it. There is a right time, a right voice and a right way of placing it into that space between two people so that it matters.

And it does matter: knowing when and how, it could be one of your most defining attributes, your greatest flaw. This phrase, its palpable truth, admitting imperfection and a desire to be better, to empathize more deeply, it washes over humanity like water over river rocks. Turning them and shaping them into marbled, edgeless stones, beautifully rounded by the purpose and force of the current.

For transgressions great and small, I give this phrase to ensure that we are rounded and not cut by one another.

But there have been times when I kept the words to myself, not wanting to concede that I, who take such great pride in being thoughtful, could be so careless.

I made a dear friend my sophomore year in college. When we went out, she made sure we got home safely. When I needed her guidance, she listened intently. Her sense of humor sparkled and her grace in times of need was invaluable. When my father died, she was at the funeral. When I moved to Charleston, she visited. When I was married she was in the wedding, and when I had a baby, she flew down to see my belly and gave me the gift of her undivided affection.

She left Virginia and moved to New York in 2008. She seemed so far away, I imagined her walking the sidewalks of that strict city, bold and single. Drinking dirty martinis in pencil skirts and talking to handsome strangers about important things like Syria and Climate Change. She was only available during the oddest of hours and remained uninterested in social media. Keeping up with her was a challenge. We left a great deal of voicemail messages, which grew shorter and further apart as time went by. I made the foolish assumption that she did not want to hear about suburban life, marriage, children, and spreadsheets.

About 3 years ago she married a man whose name I had trouble remembering. They were wed in a small ceremony at the justice of the peace with the intention of having a larger celebration when the time was right. The following Fall a group of her friends organized an after-the-wedding weekend in the Poconos. I was supposed to go but the expense of the trip coupled with my fear of flying plus a nursing newborn kept me at home. Or at least that is how I explained it in my email.

Needful children and crashing planes, while real and true, were selfish excuses for missing out on something that was important to her. It is so easy to convince yourself that your time and the demands upon your life are so unrelenting that sacrificing something of value to someone else is reasonable. That you aren’t behaving dangerously. And surely I did not ruin her celebration, but I was most assuredly not there. Not in any way. Not in any form or function. I was decidedly absent.

No gift. No note. No gesture.

We did not speak for some time until she sent me a message late this summer letting me know they had rented a house on Canon Street and would be visiting the following weekend.

We met twice for drinks, longer and less awkwardly the second time. Her husband was wonderful (I've learned his name now). We explored the city at night and basked in each other’s company. I called to tell the sitter we would be late. After midnight, we stopped for dim sum and gin cocktails at a little place off an alley, and laughed and laughed and I knew she had forgiven me, though I never formally asked her to.

And I realized something: one of the greatest and most overlooked aspects of friendship is that to be a really good friend, you have to be aware of how important you are within the friendship. You have to appreciate how much you do matter. How much you can hurt someone with the things you do and do not do. You have to be responsible, accountable.

You have to ask yourself: Does it matter to them? Would it matter to me? And if it does and it would: Go. Do. Be. Embrace your significance. And if you can’t, for whatever frightful reason, search until you find the phrase. Polish it. Wrap it in gold and gossamer. Place it tenderly before them. Be unapologetically apologetic.

My friend is leaving New York soon, and they aren’t likely to move any closer. I don’t have plans to visit them yet but I will. I might need a prescription, but I will. I need to. We still don’t talk much, but I’m not sure that matters, we are where we were or at least in that place where you can be with special people.

And if I reach down into our riverbed, the water is in motion and the stones are smooth and unscathed.

Green Eggs and Blue Berries

I’ve sat down to so many ideas in the last couple of months. I’ve written about the curious habit of running, about the blueberry bush our daughters found hidden in our backyard. I’ve written about the good fortune of kind neighbors and a little cabin on a river in the middle of nowhere. But try as I might I can’t focus my thoughts enough to finish any of these because none of them are what I really want to write about. Because what I really want to write about, most of the time (pretty much all of the time), is Autism.

I perseverate about Autism.

Perseverate is a word I learned fairly recently. It is a word of criticism. A word with harsh connotations, suggesting that a person continues to repeat something far beyond a desired point. Insistent, redundant, without purpose or direction.

But we all perseverate. We all talk about the same things, again and again: dating, football, fitness, babies, gluten, that one friend that cannot get it together, a new tardy policy at the office, what to watch on Netflix, campaign politics, whatever. Green Eggs and Ham. We all have our collections of subject matter, like playing cards, which we are desperate to fold into any conversation, at any given time. 

And this is my hand. So I do, I perseverate. I perseverate for answers, for attention, for sympathy and ideas. But mostly, I think, I perseverate for comfort, for understanding. Because even though the verbiage of our predicament may have it seem dismal and despairing, it isn’t that way at all so much as it is heavy, complicated and ubiquitous. It is rich soil filled with rocks, deep, dark, still water and a sunset that could break your heart. It isn’t good or bad it’s just geography. Our life’s landscape. How will anyone ever see it for what it is if I don’t speak the words, in spite of their connotations?

Try them, try them and you may…try them and you may I say.

This is why we tell our stories, this is why we perseverate: initially seeking comfort and later, when the right words are finally found, to give light.

I yelled at her once because she wouldn’t answer me. Because it is, sometimes, so difficult to pull her out of herself, to compel her to hear me, to look up. I said her name over and over and over and she wouldn’t answer. So then I yelled ANSWER ME! ANSWER ME! and I was crying and yelling and she finally looked up. She walked over to me and put her hand on my face and said “I’m sorry. I just don’t know you are there sometimes. But you can do it. You can calm down. I know you can.” And her words fell over me like hope, like light dappling our world.

Someday soon I’ll tell you the story about the pie we made with the small round fruit the children found in our backyard. They told us again and again it was there and we did not believe them until we finally, begrudgingly, went to see it for ourselves.

I’ll tell you about pace and pentameter, the summer I ran the hills of Charlottesville, what I learned crossing those streets again and again, how comfortable I became with distance and prose. How much I miss these things in a life which doesn’t have as much time for them to become what they need to be: the forty minute mark, lines and language making sense, the heart swell, the feeling that you must, you can, you will keep going.

I’ll tell you about the time we left the cabin and drove and drove down that long gravel road toward the races, how it seemed to take forever, but we finally arrived, and walked the path to stand barefoot in the current, the cool water rushing over our legs. We must have caught twenty fish that day.

I’ll tell you about the man who lives next door and his teenager who loves to take pictures of elevators, about how I wanted and wished and waited to talk to him, about the time he stood in my driveway and told me not to be afraid.

I’ll tell you about all of it.

But know this: my perseverations, whatever they may be, will always be the undercurrent, the instruments, the music in the background, the sound that shapes my thoughts and urges me to choose words of a fragile variety. Words that bear unfair connotations, nuances beyond their control. And I’ll carry them carefully into the light of an honest paragraph about how much this child means to me, how much she has changed me, how much better I am for loving someone who is everything I was most afraid of. And it might seem like a story about blueberries but it's really, always, about the uncertainty of the walk, guided by their small stained hands, and what it meant to them to be right. For so many remarkable discoveries of this earth are disregarded, denied, approached with reluctance and doubt, and yet: perseverantly defended by the ones who saw them first.

So please: perseverate. Tell me again and again about your mother, the pieces you lose of her every day. Tell me about your marriage, the things you can’t undo. Tell me about the day you met your baby and they all asked: don’t you just love him so much already? And you didn’t, not yet. Tell me about the time you went to Leon’s and sat outside. There were glasses of wine and empty plates. It might have been your birthday. You looked across the table and asked him Do you think she is going to be okay? And he took your hands and said I don’t know…but she has us.

Tell me again, tell me about all of it. It is so good, so good, you see.

To You, with your Big Heart...

It is 2015 and we are seeing some pretty staggering statistics with regards to Autism Spectrum Disorders: 1 in 68. I don’t know the reason and I certainly don’t have the answers, but I do know that with numbers like these, the odds are also going up that your child might be in a class or a camp or an after school program (or the Chic-Fil-A play area) with the 1. The 1 of the 68. And for every one of them there are a few of us: their family.

Sometimes you’ll see us and never wonder or think a thing. But maybe we had a talk outside the classroom. Maybe we are both room moms or volunteering at gymnastics or bringing coolers to the soccer game. Maybe you’ve gotten to know us more than you thought you would, you’ve seen my face at school functions, the look in my eyes when things aren’t going the way I hoped and planned… and you want to know: Is there anything you can do to help?

Yes, you with your big heart, yes there are most definitely a few things you can do:

1.  Ask me those uncomfortable questions. Go ahead, ask them! When was she diagnosed? How did we know? Strengths? Weaknesses? Does she show affection? Can he solve complex math problems in his head? Memorize the phone book? Have we tried a gluten-free diet? We so often keep ourselves removed from the experiences of others by not asking the questions circling in our minds. Don’t do that. Get to know us. We won’t be offended. In fact, you will be immediately endeared to us because you cared enough to ask any question at all.

2. Ask us over for playdates! Invite us to your birthdays and end-of-the-year pool parties. Please. PLEASE! These kids need balloons and cupcakes and an occasional paper invitation sent home in their backpack and time: time with your kids. Because the more time these kids spend with neurotypical people, the more comfortable they become with them, and the more comfortable they become the more balanced they are able to be in mainstream settings. So many ASD kids can play just like anyone else (and want to play just like anyone else), but it takes time spent around your naturally charismatic, socially adept children to help us get to that.

3. Keep trying. You’re going to say hi and she is going to walk right past you. You’re going to ask him a question and he’s going to not answer. You’re going to call her to do something and she’ll stay right where she is, reading or drawing or playing by herself. Sometimes you have to say it twice, three times, maybe even more than that. But please, keep trying. Touch his arm. Get right up in her face. Force the eye contact. Keep trying, and eventually you will get a response.

4. Cut them some slack. They look like any other kid so sometimes it is hard to tell. But having ASD is like living on another planet where no one speaks your language and no one gets your jokes. You are constantly being bombarded with distractions and no one else seems to notice them. So if they start jumping up and down for no reason or curl up in a ball or become devastated by the simplest of directions, be as patient as you can be, give them a break, and see #3.

5. When you teach your kid about diversity, don’t stop after race, religion and gender. Teach them about disabilities. Teach them about mental illness. Teach them about wheelchairs and head injuries and amputations and rare diseases. Teach them respect and patience for all things outside the norm. Teach them that all people are worth the time it takes to get to know them. Teach them that a friendship with a special person makes you a more special person because your heart and your mind will grow a little bit bigger. Trust me. I know. I’m friends with one of them.

Sincerely,

Mom of one of the 1's.

xo

Bearing Life

My first child was breech so all of our children have come into this world via physician-advised scheduled cesarean deliveries. It has been mostly uneventful with the exception of the third who was ready a few days early. A tentative call to a sleepy doctor at 4 AM, the measured panic with which we packed and parked. He was our only surprise, and while I had suspected him to be a him for most of the pregnancy it was still thrilling to hear the words, to meet him with all his peculiar parts, his funny little scrunched up face. 

Our baby boy.

And there on the operating table as they were putting me back together again:

        “This is your last right”?

        “Huh?”

        “Your last baby. Are you done?”

        “Umm…Yes?

        “Okay good. Your uterus is looking pretty scarred.”

If you have any children at all chances are you’ve been asked this question (hopefully not 30 seconds after delivery). And the more children you have, the more you’ll be asked it until…I don’t know…you start looking really old and tired and like your uterus couldn’t handle it (unless you’re Frieda Birnbaum, of course).

It’s a funny question, especially for a mother I think, because you have a physical response to it. A palpitation, a pang. A soft ringing in your ears. And your answer feels more like an explanation than a simple yes or no. But maybe that’s just me.

This is not a question that I am trying to answer because I feel that anyone cares or is owed an answer or that there really even is an answer. It's the same with anyone thinking about children, about a first child, about another child, about fertility and age and clocks and maternal instincts. It is personal and private. A decision that is yours and yours alone. 

Still it is curious to me how similarly divided we are by the question, and by how often (and how freely) the question is asked.

I have no short answer but if I did I suppose it would be no. And my even shorter (but slightly longer) answer would be yes. We are and we aren't. We are in a weird limbo place where we don't really want to be done. I smile and say yes and it bubbles out of my mouth like the half-truth that it is. We hold on to our towel aware that it is probably time to throw it to whomever we are supposed to throw it to and accept that we don't need or really even want a future in which we will be wearing a Bjorn and carrying that (expletive) (expletive) infant car seat. But the question gets asked again, and the farther time removes us from the memory of his first fretful year, the more plausible another child becomes, and I wonder if we have it in us to bear another life. 

To bear life is perhaps the most self-injurious thing any of us could do. It changes your body. It wrecks your back and tires your arms. It scars your insides. It bites and shoves and pinches and pulls. It keeps you awake and abuses your mind. You cry about everything now. Because everything is emotional. Everything feels big and scary. But to say that you are done with it can feel equally frightening. An admission of what you cannot do, of limitations, acknowledgment of the great divide between how young we look and feel and how young we actually are.

Bearing life is an engineering term as well (I didn’t know that until just now when I googled it to make sure I was spelling it right). There is even an equation for it, so you can calculate how long something (in this case a bearing) can endure. Considering the question within this context, bearing life, it would seem, is not limited to the event of birth, but the sustaining experience, the lifetime given, the provision of time.

So: with the three that we have, with all the fears and complications, the big emotions and the small decisions; with the constancy of their presence; their breath on our necks and their hands in our hair. Through the years we live in the secret squares of their faces and the years they don't want us anywhere near them. So loud and then so quiet. Through praises and punishments and immeasurable joy, the honor of knowing them (as horrible as they sometimes can be) and the gentle, daily pains of letting them go: we bear life.

Today, the day after his second birthday, without a babe in my arms or on the way, without the hope or expectation of one to be on the way. Without any kind of maternal anticipation; I see the answer to our human equation: life endures as long as we are blessed with it, privileged to bear it, regardless of order or accident. We are never done.

Our Common Home

I am not going to tell you anything you don’t already know. But maybe I’ll remind you of something you forgot...

It is significant to me that all this happened during a time when I was already trying to write something about Charleston anyway. About how much being a part of her means to me. To live here, to raise our children here. It matters.

I moved home after college. Not because I wanted to, but because it never occurred to me to move anywhere else. It was not so bad. I met a boy and some friends and chewed on the sweet story of settling down in my hometown. But the boy was going nowhere and the friends went everywhere and eventually it was just me and my mom in my little lonely apartment, drinking wine and ebaying, enjoying our tipsy evenings and avoiding what was coming: a change.

I think for a long time I had been thinking I was a person that I wasn’t. Not really in a bad way, more like I resigned myself to an incorrect answer. Living an ill-fitting life because of the careless oversight of forgetting that I was still young enough to go anywhere I wanted to.

I reached out to my relocated friends and tried several places on for size: Jacksonville was cumbersome. Atlanta was bottlenecked. Nashville was lovely, but moved like a revolving door with no entry. Charlotte was simply too perfect: too tailored and tucked in. And then I came here…

It was not the most ideal time, and I think the fact that I chose this city in her worst month, maybe says a lot about the both of us. It was a late July weekend that fed into August, and I rented a hotel room with two friends and the notion that we might be coming here to stay. A couple of nights spent walking the thoroughfares and leaning into new scenery. It felt right. The balmy air of a city near the beach. An abundance of flip flops. Everyone’s hair and clothes slightly out of place, like a second thought to other things that matter more. The elements. Life. Happiness.

And three months later I was here, with my rent paid and my spoons in the sink. And it was alright.

Until this…

Friday June 19^th, 8AM:

It isn’t true, what they are saying on the news. I mean: it’s true, but not the way they are saying it. There has been tragedy, but we are not a tragic city. There has been loss, but we are not a lost city. There has been devastation, but we are not devastated. We have not been consumed by this monster. He was not ours. He drove down here in his dark car and tried to take something from those beautiful people, our beautiful city, but anger and fear and hate leave no room for anything good to be carried. And so he surrendered the following morning, sad and empty-handed.

My husband and I were pulled downtown, compelled to be part of it all. The air was pensive and paused, there were empathetic tourists and locals with purpose in their steps. We made a few stops and worked our way up to the church. It was midnight but the crowd remained, and you could feel the collective mourning, the wish that it had not happened, that it could somehow be undone. Everything was quiet and soft, save for the national news people in their big vans holding hard and heavy microphones. Can I speak to you? What do you have to say about this?

We cried as we walked back to our car.

Sunday, June 21, 7PM

The voices of our leaders have fortified us. We have heard pastors and mayors, governors and the reflective sigh of the crowd outside Emanuel AME, some loud and some soft, some zealous and some weary, but all imbued with the sentiment of hope. Hope for change, hope for our people and our nation, hope that maybe this was the last time.

Someone had an idea and she saw it through. And 72 hours later here we are, standing under the bridge, listening to the footsteps of thousands, cheering horns and happy sirens, our people singing a common refrain.

I don’t mean to be romantic, we are not without scandal and topics that divide us. We have high crime areas and streets you stay away from at night. We are not always holding hands in prayer circles and we are not always unified by incident. But our climate sets a pace for cooperation and tolerance, slows us down so that we can do something more powerful and meaningful than simply ‘react’.

Wednesday, June 24^th 12pm

It is a magnificent coincidence that all this happened as Pope Francis delivered his message on the environment, urging us to consider ‘our common home’, to ‘strengthen our conviction that we are one single human family’,  ‘that we have a shared responsibility for others and for the world, and that being good and decent are worth it’.

There are at least a hundred sparkling sentences in his encyclical, but they all speak to our real and urgent problem: consideration. For the environment, for humanity, for property and ideas, for health and hunger, for earth and water, for life and freedom.

We say that it takes a village to raise a child. I think about this sick young man, how his village failed him, how I am a part of that village in some small way and therefore failed those nine people, their good and prayer-filled hearts. This monster is ours, he is all of ours. And he sat at his computer feeding on hate for God knows how long because that hate is protected by our laws.

It is easy to think this is about gun control or a flag or a history of staggered disappointments, and it is. It is about these things. But perhaps moreover, it is about our broken village. The village we cultivate and then leave behind when it becomes less convenient, when we get so busy, so entrenched in the minutia of our personal and private routines that we forget the importance of community. When we get tired of standing up and speaking out.

We do not all have to believe the same things, but every belief that we have must consider our common home.

…

This week has reminded me why I moved here: because this place is a village, or as close to one as I could hope to find and still be within driving distance of my family. But it has also reminded me that while Charleston may have been more impressive than others by how we handled ourselves, we never should have been given this test in the first place.  No one should.

We talk about the mark we want to leave, about being on the right or the wrong side of history, which is just another way of saying that, in hindsight, there was a right choice and wrong choice. A way to be and a way not to be. Which means that gut feeling, that visceral rumor, that queasy uneasiness: it is telling us to consider our steps, ‘to think deeply and love generously’ and choose the right path.

It is about guns. It is about a flag. It is about pornography and recycling and the cost of medicine. It is about the amount of litter on a street in a village ten thousand miles away, the people and parks I will never see and a kid named Dylann Roof who lost his way and no one was there to help him find the way back.

‘Yet all is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.’

I pray that we can do this. I pray that we can rebuild our village. I pray that we can see the significance of the small choices in the light of greater good. I pray that we can take down the things that should never have been put up and replace them with the signs to lead all our lost children back home. I pray that we can find the courage to speak the words that will incite the change we so desperately need, and that we are encouraged by truths we already know.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

The first time she ever talked to me, really talked to me, was from under the covers, in the midst of our bedtime ritual. Hairwashing and teethbrushing and pajamas and stories. Bantering and bargaining with her sister. She started to sing a Christmas song but the words were her own. She was using the holiday melody to help move her thoughts, which so often get stuck inside the complicated gears of her mind, to tell me that she loved me and wanted me to stay with her. And for the first time in 4 years I felt noticed, needed.

Autism has many tells. Sensory sensitivities and rigid thought patterns. Self-stimulating behaviors, repetitiveness, social delays, gastrointestinal issues and sleep disorders. We see these in varying degrees on a daily basis but, thankfully, sleep is not a problem for our eldest daughter. She goes to bed relatively easily and would sleep soundly until late morning everyday if it weren’t for the clamor of siblings.

'Thankfully' because bedtime in our home is essentially a series of battles fought upstairs and down. My husband and I become negotiators, defenders of "Eight PM", explaining the meaning and importance of sleep to three small people who want nothing to do with it. It is like this for the better part of an hour; pure folly. But once everything that needs to be cleaned has been cleaned, once the last bottle has been served and the last story read, once everyone has found their usual place, surrounded by their soft items of comfort; a quiet settles over our home.

They often fall asleep in our bed. It has become our ace in the hole when standard practice fails: the offer to sleep in our room. They follow the same routines, but then crawl up and into our bed, bury themselves in the layers of pillows, sheets, and comforter. Cotton and down. Bliss.

They settle quickly this way. The happiness of this reward must be overwhelming and they are a precious mess of dangling arms and legs in no time. It is the perfect ending to a typically long and wonderful day, filled with the big emotions that characterize motherhood’s highs and lows and in-betweens.

Hours later, wrapped loosely around us, we carry them to their room and plant them in the coolness of their unopened beds. Their breathing is heavy and reliable. The same. You couldn’t tell neurotypical from anything. Autism is nowhere to be found.

I take great comfort in this. Sleep is the great equalizer. On good days it is the peace she deserves. On bad days, it is the reminder that we get to start over tomorrow, that change and adjustments are possible. When she sleeps, her body is still and calm and full of rich and vibrant dreams. Nothing is being measured or recorded. No prompting for attention or eye contact. No 3 part directions to follow. When she sleeps I imagine her taking apart the confusing structure of her time in our world and piecing it all back together in a shape that makes more sense. She’s just like anyone else when she is sleeping, no tics or tells. No IEPs or 504s, no social goals or gaps to close. Indiscernible.

And I am just her mother, without concern or special needs to attend to. Without the weight of disorder. I get to remember what it is to just love her, simply and beautifully, not because of or in spite of. Just: love her. For who she is and for who I am. A mother, a daughter, a wife, a sister, a woman, a girl…

Just people, navigating a vast and often perplexing world, trying to pinpoint what is positive and meaningful, trying to keep these things whole even as we acclimate to the tepid waters of disability. Trying to construct something useful with the pieces that don’t quite fit. Taking comfort in the hours of rest that are promised when the sun goes down, our daily bread, our dependence on tomorrow and another chance to take a few steps forward.

Mountains and Molehills

This has been a hard one to pin down. And I’m still not sure my head is wrapped around it the right way. It is about too many things…

It is about my unreliable capability; the things I can do in such exhaustive detail but then forget about the groceries in the car.

It is about my grandfather; the son he disinherited and the daughter he did not. A choice that broke apart our family, made strangers of cousins. The answers we’ll never have and questions that won’t go away. The distance between people that swells and shrinks in the most awesome and tragic of ways.

It is about our relative anguish.

It is about my children, a pile of arms and legs, asleep in our bed after a day at the beach. Pink and sandy, overtaken by that particular kind of body to bone tiredness.

It is about swimming lessons and this feeling that we exist at the deep end of everything; day in and day out, holding our breath and coming up for air again and again, the joy and the mystery of those eerie underwater sounds as we bounce back to the safety and certainty of the surface.

But mainly, mostly, it is about parenting, from the bottom up, and what I wish I would have known about having more than one child.

There was doubt going into it: that you might not be able to love the others as much as the first. But that instantly eased at your introduction, those tiny features and fingers, the cries and the stillness, the routine beginning again. There was more than enough, there was plenty.

Until it presents itself: the one who sleeps soundly and the one who frets and twists. The one who eats everything and one who only eats bananas. The one who is cautious and the one who might, at any unsupervised moment, leap off the roof.

This is the best way I know to articulate it: the love itself, the emotion, is the same, but the amount you have to dispense, your endless reservoir, is tapped in different ways by each of them, and while the feelings are identical, you might have to give more or do more for one than the others and it can’t be predicted or helped or avoided. A morning that began simply comes to startling halt: an ultrasound or a checklist or a teacher or a specialist or your gut: something or someone tells you to sit down. It could be any assembly of strange and foreign words but this is what it means: one of them is going to need you noticeably more.

And with every response to that need comes the fear that you could lose one in pursuit of the other. Because you can’t, no one could, be wholly there for more than one person at a time.

Their needs become so strikingly different, so far from satisfaction by one stone. Some; desperate and deep. Expensive. Hours of therapy and time to be alone. Urgent reminders. Your shoes are on the wrong feet. Look at me, we have to go and your shoes; they are on the wrong feet. Tears. Others are superficial, precious, ridiculous. Cereal on a plate with a fork please and to be carried. Plastic necklaces and warmed juice. A book about cars, read a million times.

But if you put them on a scale they would weigh the same, I know. I can see it in their eyes whenever someone else takes precedence.

How can you balance the unbalanceable?

It is a process of shifting and repurposing. Just as we took apart the crib to reassemble it in another room, just as we painted the walls a soft pastel and hung something dear and meaningful above the rocking chair; we made room, we created their spaces, and each in its own way must be kept.

The puzzle of their needs, stacked and ordered by what seems the most important- best guesses because I don’t know the future. These decisions I wrestle with, terrifically heavy, bolstered by my sincere hope for the ideal outcome, but really I have no clue what I am doing.

It is entirely haphazard.

They are hungry, and they each want something different: graham crackers with honey, a bowl of salted popcorn, and two fat slices of cheese on a paper towel. Their needs will always be diverse and endearingly inconvenient, but as long as they sit together at our table and climb on top of each other on the sofa, as long as they race in and out of each other’s rooms, laughing and screaming, as long as they play and fight and speak and share, my best guess is that they already know someone needs more, and they accept it. No one is lost.

What I wish I would have known about having more than one child is that they are needed by each other as much as they need me, and that they understand this in profound and selfless ways.

This great disparity we perceive and fear is just another lesson in taking turns. A molehill.

Marriage and Football

There is little that can truly, realistically prepare you for marriage.

You may have had an inspired sermon during your ceremony, one with a more progressive minister who clued you in to the roller coaster and made a snappy joke about picking socks up off the floor. Maybe you grew up together and knew each other’s families and what you were getting yourself into, or perhaps you’re the owner of an old soul, wise beyond your age and richly aware of who you were and what you would be for one another. But even then: it is a contract made at the beginning of a million unknown circumstances, and difficult to believe anyone could be prepared for the fraught positions that time will inevitably move us into.

Our service was more traditional, but we did attend a series of premarital counseling sessions during which my husband’s eyes were mostly glassed over with boredom and I answered questions and shared anecdotes with zealous sincerity that I am sure annoyed everyone in the room. I was certain that my honesty and enthusiasm would yield maximum absorption of everything I needed to know about getting along, serving one another, giving in and holding fast, division of labor, how to talk about finances and how to be quiet when you want to scream. Etcetera etcetera.

It did not. There was, at the time, no hook to hang it on.

And then we were married. It was terrifying. I remember standing in front of a mirror in full bridal mode, searching the room for a sign, clinging desperately to borrowed and blue. But despite my hesitations, the music played and I walked down the aisle toward this man I loved but barely knew, said yes, ate some cake, and it was done.

The first two years were easy. It was like it had been. And then we decided to have children, and the roller coaster we’d avoided up to that point began to crank and churn, lift us off the ground and up to uneasy heights. But it isn't just children that changes the altitude, it’s thirtysomething. Marriage in your late 30’s, life in your late 30’s, is noticeably different from what I've lived through thus far. We are all making decisions and directional shifts that seem slight but have great consequences.  Choices as insignificant as what jokes I laugh at or what I wear to drop my kids off in the morning; little tells, rumors of what kind of person I am, what kind of parent, what kind of wife, what kind of friend.

Our 8^th anniversary is today. We will go somewhere and have salty margaritas and probably not do much reflecting outside the exchange of stories of his work, which is hearty right now, bitty funnies about the children, things they did or said while one of us was out. We’ll renew our promise not to drive foreign cars or want for more than a really great vacation every year. To keep life simple and removed from that place where material things start to matter. To fight less and love more and search until we find the humor in things.

My husband lives for football. Causing him continued emotional stress is the fact that, for the last 30 years and probably the next 50 the teams he claims his own are perennial underdogs. Try as they may to bolster their rosters and improve the coaching staff, little changes from year to year with the exception of the outing of a particularly bad kicker. In 2008 his Alma mater traveled upstate for their annual, scheduled beating by a division 1 powerhouse. This is not an epic tale about the little guy winning, it is, however, a glimpse into who this man is, sitting there in the stands as only the home side of the scoreboard climbed, chewing his nails and believing in that ever elusive game changing moment.  He insisted that we stay until the very last second of the game. Which we did. In the rain.

Our marriage is far from perfect; it is rife with things we knew better than to say or do. We are an only child and a youngest child, selfish and stubborn, undeniably me-oriented. We cannot help ourselves. But the inevitable challenges have somehow, miraculously, forced us further and deeper into this union. And I suppose that is what we hope for: losing seasons that become our proudest accomplishments. The foxholes we escape, by tooth and nail, bloody and beat. To be able to say: we survived. To weather this ever-changing climate, to grow and grow together. Separate but entangled in a present tense.

    

8 years later, I've grown some hooks. I’m starting to understand a little bit better about patience and service. I choose to be grateful today for this person whose nature is to see it through. I choose today to believe that while our direction may be altered by little decisions, our path is kept good and real by the disposition with which we accept failure, celebrate success, and enjoy waking up each day to this home and these children, this life; its many meaningful moments, often borne of distress and grief, that we have carved into something beautiful beyond words.

There is little that can truly, realistically prepare you for marriage. But a rainy football game might give you a hint.

Back into the woods...

A friend stopped by this week to borrow our double stroller, darling new baby in tow. They are headed to North Carolina for a Bluegrass Festival, to enjoy a long, soul stirring weekend of music and family. We had the usual conversation about feeding and sleeping until I made the unfortunate mistake of asking when she was going back to work. 

If there is ever a time when mothers' faces look exactly the same, it is when they are too near to the end of that precious allotment of time with their newborn. It is an expression that is full of duty and longing, knowledge of what we want and what must be and the difference between them. It moves across our faces and clouds our eyes. And we keep it like a secret because we don’t want to betray ourselves, our gender, by talking about it too much. Because we appreciate our employment, our offices and responsibilities. Our minds being needed elsewhere.

This is not an essay about one or the other, and certainly not one versus the other. It is about the emotions of both and the burden of choice. I have read so many of the former kind- printed only to polarize. It is hard for me to believe any of them were written by mothers, who understand with the rawest of senses what it is to have your mind in one place and your heart in another. This is what it is like for our kind. We are given windowless corners to contemplate the choice between two things, neither of them what we really want.

I remember it so well: how you will dread that slow walk back through the door of your old life, the return to your desk and your files. Your heart will race and sweat will break. Of course it will! You aren't the same in form or function, a stranger within yourself. Your body, your clothes, your posture, your hunger. You won’t shake it: the feeling that you are missing something important.  

Try to be still if you can. Try to see beyond this countdown. Someone has probably told you that it is the quality of the time and not the quantity that matters, and they are right. Your sweet baby will not remember the minutes that ticked by so fast, but she will remember what you did with them when you were together. Glistening bubbles you blew into the wide open of summer, the way you look at her when you sing happy birthday, something as simple as shoes and socks in the morning, inconsequential routines like silver cups you fill with joy, shaping who she becomes.

I have been listening to music myself these days, hearing the voices and reading the words of remarkable women who came before me, mothers and martyrs, philosophers and philanthropists. They all seem to whisper the same refrain: There is only one choice, only one way to be and only one person to be it for: You.

I wish us all the strength to go fearlessly into the woods, the ability to learn what we can from the music and the mountains, and faith in this: there is no right or wrong place to be, no end to whatever amount of minutes we think we have left, no use in worrying, doubting. We are good mothers. We will raise, rear, teach, sacrifice, love deeper and stronger than we ever thought possible and, eventually, we will forgive ourselves for the time we never lost.

SW 7023: Requisite Gray

We had a guest speaker this morning, a man who spent two decades as an attorney until he could no longer ignore that he was being called to the Lord. He spoke of the challenges of seminary school. Many things you might expect, but he took a moment to reflect upon humanity. He said that our culture has a way of driving people inward, compelling us to be proud and competitive, and that this is the antithesis of what we should be doing: exposing ourselves, living vulnerably, letting our community embrace and fortify us. So I will do that; tell a story about a week whose hours passed anxiously and left me feeling as though I woke up somewhere I had not intended to be.

It began with a sentence I read a year ago:

63% of Teens with Aspergers and High-functioning Autism are bullied; they are 50% more likely to demonstrate suicidal ideation and 28 times more likely to attempt suicide.

I wish I could unlearn this. It doesn’t loom, not exactly. It is more like a dark cat that saunters through our weaker moments. A pause, a glance, a reminder. It takes my breath away. But a pause is just that and life resumes its normal speed, and the creature wanders away…

I don’t think about these numbers more than I should, more than any parent in our situation would. I don’t think about them at all when it is bright and sunny and we’ve had a great week at school. But the weather turned cold and dull last Sunday and I knew they would come creeping through. Feelings of distance and uncertainty followed me around the rooms of our house where we were stranded inside, looking out the windows, waiting. I tried to find my way out with friends, but the air was stifled, I couldn't connect. It is hard for me to keep up with conversations about home décor and crock pot recipes, when my mind is suspended elsewhere: Who do I need to speak to next, are we out of intake? Has our case manager been assigned? What is the next step, what’s working, what’s not working, the ABA bill was how much this month? I am a mouse on a wheel, spinning in circles, desperate for answers. I know I need this, camaraderie outside the world of special needs. And I remember being there, lost in a Color Book. Can’t I go back? Paint is important. I believe that. Don’t I?

It rained all the way home.

Tuesday was our parent support meeting. The woman that leads the group is the mother of a kind and beautiful 9 year old girl. This has been a big month for them: Georgia legislators pushed through the bill, named for her daughter, which will require insurance companies in the state to cover autism therapy interventions for preschool age children. They have improved the lives and the futures of no less than 32,000 families. That was last week. This week the same girl was bullied by some kids at her school. Because she has autism and an Instagram account. The sentence purrs and the week moves slowly.

Friday I went to the school to have lunch with my daughter and a nice-enough boy sat next to us and opened his lunchbox. He looked at me and reported: “She has to ask the teacher to help her play with people at recess and if they don’t want to play with her she cries. She cries in music, too. She puts her hands over her ears and cries and cries and cries.” And then he turned back to his lunch and went on about his ham and cheese. And the numbers rose out of nowhere, circled my legs, told me to get her out of there, take her home to where it is safe and dry and there’s no one to tally up what behaviors are inadequate, unacceptable.

I should have told him about last year, how much better we are now, how much progress has been made. I should have explained that the music hurts her, like needles in her ears. She told me once it feels like it is squeezing her brain. I should have done sensitivity training with the classroom. Read them a book that explains what a sensory processing disorder is and how a perfectly lovely day can be ruined by escalators or polyester or people singing in unison.  I should have bought her those headphones.

I am angry. With the boy and the cat and everything that is easier than this. I called my mother and got a pep talk. Everyone has unshared problems. It is all relative. Keep your chin up.

Saturday: Dog grooming day. The clippers hum brilliantly and the fur falls off in downy clouds. It’s the closest thing I have to a Zen garden. I was covered in hair when I finally stood up an hour later. Our toddler had been playing with the tufts, chasing them as they blew haplessly around on the porch, so I took him upstairs to shower with me. There we were, standing under the water, and he was laughing and laughing and laughing. And I could feel it: the week and the numbers and the words breaking apart into a collection of sounds and shapes that don’t mean anything without knowing what time will make of them. I see my son’s smiling face as he looks up toward the pressure and warmth of the shower. He is perfect, beautiful, happy.  I think: how well we are represented by the person we become when we quietly let go of superstition and the things that keep us separated and hold tightly to what is real and binding. We are more than pieces of life ambling through the weeks in a year; we are parts of a whole. And special needs are more than headphones and tears at recess, they are the landmarks of parenthood, of family, humanity. I pick my little boy up and hold him. The water is hot and wonderful. I could be melting.

I hear my daughters in the room next door, having a very neurotypical conversation about kittens and bracelets and bugs in the yard. The playground is miles away and autism is a small box filled with six letters and the memories we are learning from. I’m wrapping it up for you, our gift, our special needs. I don’t know what they will mean to you but I know they will be entirely relative.

It is important, all of it. Colors worth sharing.

The Loquat Climber

There's a tree in our old neighborhood that my husband pointed out on a walk once. Years ago, someone nailed a sign to it. “No Trespassing”, most likely, but you can barely read it. The tree has grown up and around the sign such that today, only a few black letters are visible beyond the gnarled and knobby bark. How the steely edges of that yellow sign must have dug and cut into its proud trunk along the way. I think about that tree sometimes when I think about our hardships and the things of this world that are wont to undo us; if I can just keep growing, if I can embrace this with all my might, if I can twist this into becoming part of us, and not the other way around…

It was exactly a year ago that I answered the phone and listened intently as a nice young woman with a soft voice explained the tests, the results, and what our next steps were to be. And there we were in that forest, the words AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER on a square metal sign being nailed to us, suddenly aware of a new reality. Dates were discussed, an IEP meeting was scheduled. “She’s going to do great things” she said, “She’s going to be just fine”.

And she is. I think. I don’t know. Autism is a wild and lonely predicament. It is energy and fear, tunneled focus and aimless wandering. It is my sweet and precious child running and running in circles, over and over again and again. But it is other things too. It is patterns and shapes and the ability to grasp new concepts with little to no explanation beyond the fact of a rule: Qu says “Kwa”. And just like that she could read and make tigers out of tangrams. So I know we are headed somewhere. There’s direction, there’s purpose, a future. But who she is can feel like a secret sometimes, kept even from me. There was a summer that I kept losing her. She was so quiet that year. She would be next to me and I would look up and she would be gone. I would tear through the house in a panic and find her, every time, perched like a tiny bird in our Loquat tree, eating the sweet summer fruit.

It is right out of life’s lesson book: how afraid you can be of words, how they can make your stomach turn, trap you in one fearful, visceral moment, the air around you tight and thick with worry. And all it takes is learning, accepting. A deep breath: It’s going to be okay.

So much has changed in just a year. Therapy, integration. Our expectations. Our degree of neurotypical-ness. We have moved away from the silence and the Loquat tree and into something else that, quite honestly, I am too deep into to speak about intelligently. We are growing though, finding our way around this. What we want for her seems so easy: to hear music without feeling scared, to speak to her peers without feeling overwhelmed and out of place, to move from one thing to the next without confusion. To see and be seen, without the chaos of sound and sense and the volume of human dynamic forcing her back into herself.  

We are a young tree now. The sign hangs bright and obvious. Our trunk has met its edges and it is digging in. It hurts sometimes. But the sign is small and we are growing. Winter has passed and shoots of green emerge from our fingertips and turn up and toward the light, like little gifts opening to the sun.

It’s going to be okay.

A Friendly Conversation

One of my mother’s best friends passed away recently. A friend who, before her move out west was a regular in our home, and as much a part of my life as any family friend could become, her history a part of our history. Her parents had been dear friends of my grandparents, the two families within walking distance on Vista Circle and, as the story goes, the young girls were forced to play together as children. But I’m sure that is where many stories like this begin as over the years not much in common became quite a bit in common.

My mother was fortunate to have several friendships like this one, or I suppose I should say—fortunate that this friendship was part of a larger friendship; several young girls who were introduced as children and cultivated relationships that would endure the rest of their lives.

Years ago, one of them found an old black and white photo of them all together, lined up for a photographer, perhaps at a spring birthday party, all in dresses, pretty white shoes and curls, holding hands and smiling. My mother has it framed and keeps it beside another picture of the same girls, some 50 years later, smiling the kind of smile you’d smile if you were with people you’d known and loved for that long. They have seen each other through marriage, children, loss of children, children never born. Some divorced. Several became widows. The emotions of a thousand independent milestones, shared among them all.

I wish for this kind of southern friendship, this ya-ya sisterhood, and I work to build it with the special people that I know. But as any woman in her 30's would surely agree, friendships are complicated. They all begin by happenstance: a few doors down on Vista Circle. Second encounters planned tenderly and purposefully, our willingness like a blessing whispered upon them, borne of great expectations for all the things we hope to be for one another.

Most don’t last like we hope they will. They remain important, historical: funny memories, valuable anecdotes. Maybe we don’t live near each other anymore, maybe she didn't speak the right words when she needed to, or maybe you didn't do the right thing when you should have. Maybe our points were too staggered on life’s timeline: You: married, kids, suburbia. Me: single in the city. These kinds of friendships leave quietly and unnoticed, like something you don’t even realize you've dropped.

But some of these friendships have an elastic quality, they are patient and resilient. They stretch across great distances and hold their breath underwater for a staggering amount of time, only to pop back up, buoyant and unchanged. These are great friendships. They are monumental, they have a complex past: stories of inconvenience and trust. They are hilarious and quirky, generous and forgiving. And they know everything about you.

Fortified and abandoned by the presence or absence of dialogue, even the greatest friendships are vulnerable in silence. So the next time we are seated together at the table while the children play peacefully in another room I will ask you about your day, about your family, your life in the city, about how you felt and what you did, where you came from and where you want to go…

And when we are 50 I hope someone takes a picture of us, telling our secrets, keeping the conversation.

Inspirational Property

It was late summer 2013. I was at a popular brunch spot for a lively celebration of a friend’s 40^th birthday. I had just had a baby 3 weeks prior and was feeling a little lost from myself between the sleepless nights, the constant feedings, and the ignited neediness of my other two children, both of them home all the time, waiting out that last hot month before school begins. And I don’t mean to add all that in as though it were a feeling only a new mother could have, as though we had the market cornered on displacement. But I do think we are, perhaps, more prone toward it; tip toeing around familiar places, spit up in our hair and on the shoulders of shirts we Just. Changed. Into.  All day long: keeping rooms straight and bottles clean, keeping the time, keeping the peace, breasts full and body aching, so deeply grounded in motherhood. I would welcome 3am and the quiet of the playroom where I could sit in the still of the night, hooked up to my pump, remembering who I was before all of this, before I shopped for nursing bras and knew what a Boppy was.

And then: this Sunday afternoon, a long and lonely shower!! A dress that still fit just fine and plans with friends. Beignets like clouds. Cinnamon sugar. Someone playing a piano. Laughter. Mimosas! Uninterrupted conversation. Heaven…And I found her in the powder room mirror, staring back at me with an electric grin. 

A while later, warm from the sun and champagne, I turned on my car and with it the radio which was playing “Blurred Lines” and I was young and happy and full of love and gratitude for the simplicity of fun. I turned the music up as loud as it would go and, windows down, driving faster than I should have, I sang and I danced and I lived in the moment, just like everyone is always telling us to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that day in light of the court’s decision to award the Gaye family millions in damages due to copyright infringement, a decision which I find sad and perplexing, making the creative process about money, two things that really should never be in the same room together if anything truly great ever hopes to leave.

While I am not an artist in the professional sense, I like to think that, when writing, I have a method that resembles theirs, if only on an elementary level. And here’s what I know: My words are mine in the sense that they come from my hand and are put on my paper, but their origins are rooted in the first novel I couldn't put down, prose that stirred my soul, rich poetry that changed how I understood the movement of language, an English teacher’s kind, encouraging smile, the summer spent at writing camp, our desks in circles, our hands shaking with the energy of mutual enthusiasm for finding the right words. A professor with higher expectations and an insistence on fact checking. A ball point pen that glides. The smell of the ink, the lines on the paper. It is all mine but it belongs to all these things, a lifetime of useful moments.

Years ago, a particular night with a particular boy: we sat on the floor in a half-lit basement with half-full glasses of wine and listened to Marvin Gaye and King Curtis and Otis Redding, their music providing the pulse for two young people talking about things that young people like to talk about: moving to a bigger city, doing something that means something, ideas seeming important and the future full of gravity and potential.  

Alive with Motown and heady saxophone, I went home and wrote a lovely poem for him which I hope he still has today…

…I guess I owe Nona Gaye 50 cents for that.