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.