It really did take this long to get back on my feet, although in reality I have been clomping around in my therapeutic sneakers since October. All of those other things, though, they are still under repair – including the bathrooms. The 6 week project is now more like a 6 month project, and we have just recently gotten back the results of the vocational assessment while we wait for other private testing to come back. The rehabilitation, the construction, the October snowstorm, the testing, the college search, the holidays, and the preoccupation with the future have all taken their toll. January is the time to hibernate and ruminate and make sense of it all.
Waiting for Happy Feet
It’s never a good sign when you find yourself trying to decide which part of your body hurts the most. Without providing litany of complaints, suffice to say that a broken foot results in pain everywhere else, too. I now understand all too well my mother’s gratitude at having her feet massaged when she arrived at hospice care – no morphine drip provides the same kind of joyous relief and that which emanates from properly rubbed feet. Turns out that when your feet are happy the rest is sure to follow, and thus the opposite is also true. Chronic pain emanating from the bottom up can make you an emotional wreck.
So when you rearrange the furniture in your daughter’s room, you cry. When the Mother’s Day vase topples and breaks, you cry. When you take that school picture sticker from second grade off the ugly bathroom mirror before they throw it in the dumpster, you cry. When you find you are missing a family dinner far away, you cry. When you move the preschool books to the attic, you cry. And when you drive away from the special education collaborative where you have dropped your boy off for a vocational assessment you cry so hard you can’t breathe.
I don’t have much wisdom to glean from any of this other than I’d better work on healing my feet before they break my heart.
Sealed With a Kiss
Several years ago we remodeled our kids’ bathroom because it was bound to leak into the new kitchen directly below it. In fact, the water damage to the ceiling was one of many reasons we needed to redo the kitchen in the first place. Aside from poor construction, one of the reasons it leaked was our boy’s propensity to overfill the bath tub – a blue fiberglass monstrosity that never kept the water hot enough and wasn’t very deep. These attributes were great for bathing babies but less than ideal for a boy who loves nothing more than to be fully immersed. But back then we weren’t ready to part with the blue beast – for money and safety reasons – and remodeled the rest of the bathroom using copious amounts of caulk to keep it water tight.
Now it’s time to replace the tub, and our boy has opinions about that. Will it be deeper? Yes. Will it be blue? Thankfully, no. Will it fit all of the boats from the Big Harbor? Probably. Will I be delighted? We hope so.
So last weekend, we prepared him for the adjustments made necessary by construction – everyone sharing the one shower while the blue tub gets replaced. We noted that it would take weeks to get it all done, but at the end of the first day he came home from school and asked if his new tub is ready yet. We said no but took him upstairs that he would see where they had begun to remove it. He gently placed his hand on the side where the tub joined the wall, and said, “I am going to give it a kiss goodbye.” 
And with a gentle smooch, he left and closed the door behind him.
Okay, that’s not what I meant
When I said that things were going to change I didn’t mean the next day. I have had countless humbling experiences in my life but breaking my foot is in the top, oh, 100 and moving up the charts fast. A loose sandal strap, an overabundance of enthusiasm at seeing an old friend, and a menacing threshold, and in an instant I am imprisoned in my house full of stairs (how have I not noticed this?) and faced with the prospect of being burden to friends and family for untold weeks. There’s nothing like going up and down stairs on your butt to give you a little perspective, unless it’s sitting on a plastic stool in the shower with your trash bad-clad leg sticking outside of the curtain and then realizing the soap is above and behind you. Naturally, the stereo is up too loud to hope that a call for assistance would be answered but I’m too proud to let anyone see me in such a ridiculous posture anyway. Humbling, indeed.
But I am doggedly determined to see the silver lining (but let the record show there is no such thing as a silver lining of any kind at 6am if there are crutches involved) and thus far there are a few notable glimmers. First, our autistic son is the most empathetic and least likely to engage in emotional blackmail while doing things for me – and every time he passes by, he solicitously taps my big toe and smiles at me. The others, while helpful to a point, roll their eyes and and ask for take-out pizza at every opportunity. I have already collapsed in tears once, declaring that I have raised a passel of self-centered prima donnas, but then again that is the definition of adolescence, pretty much. And just when I think they are doomed to a life lived with the House of Pizza on speed dial, they ask me to guide them through the process of cooking eggs for an after school snack, after which the kitchen still looks clean. So, even though I hate the sound of it, I have a feeling we are all in for a lot of teachable moments.
And, one more beam cuts through the fog – now I have no excuse for not writing.
Raison d’être
September brings out the manager of children in me. I realize, as I do every year while filling out forms and calendars, arranging transportation, and purging all of the stuff from last year, that they are my job, my passion, my center of focus. This year, just as I hit my stride, they show distressing signs of growing up.
As we approach the dinner hour on this first day of school I survey the scene of everyone doing their own thing – one draws and watches streaming TV (Dexter, probably) in front of her computer, one belts out Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting on guitar hero and the third lobs a question from the next room “Mom, is mist like baby fog?” These days, in which I am privy to what all of them are doing in a single moment, are going to get scarce.
Rice simmers, grill heats, and summer slips quietly out the screen door to the strains of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition.
Last Day of Summer
I wonder how many posts with this title are running today? Everywhere the light is changing, calendars are flipping, windows are opening to let in the first cool dry breezes of fall, and parents are rejoicing and mourning the impending first day of school.
Tomorrow we go the high schools – new teachers, new principals, new schedules to conquer. An urge to volunteer for everything and nothing. An itch to get to all of those practical things we meant to do on a rainy day this summer and the bittersweetness of having to do them in an empty house.
Cats vs. Dogs
A version of this post appeared in LettersHead in October 2010
Our boys play a game called cats versus dogs, and as you can see, one side of the room is mostly cats and the other is mostly dogs. The game involves a fight modeled on the battle scene in The first Chronicle of Narnia movie, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Devised by my older son with ASD, it involves charging horses and airborne animals colliding all over the place, accompanied by epic music and battle cries. If you look very closely, the animals and toys that are neither cats nor dogs are divided up (roughly) by good guys and bad guys – Captain Hook with the dogs, Peter Pan with the cats, etc. After the battles, we notice that cats and their friends always win, and the ensuing conversation goes something like this:
“When you play cats versus dogs, who wins?”
“The cats.”
“Always?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“They’re the heroes; dogs are villains.”
“How come?”
“Because dogs chase cats. Dogs are villains because they are too jumpy.”
“So the cats are good because they get chased by the dogs?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a good kid, you always root for the underdog.”
“No – the undercat.”
It’s the Little Things
This post originally appeared on the LettersHead site in the summer of 2010.
Living with a person who has autism brings surprises every day, some pleasant and some decidedly less so, but they always catch at your heart, one way or the other. Take this box of peaches. I left it in the back of the car for the night, knowing that if I brought it into the house that my son would eat them all before dinner and then I would have no fruit to put in his lunch the next morning. He is, after all, a teenage boy. This morning when I went to fetch the box, I found it like this, with four peaches eaten and the remaining pits carefully placed in each compartment (the two empty ones are the ones I put in his lunch). When I asked if he “sneaked the peaches,” he said, “Yes! And I left you the seeds!”
Sometimes saying I Love You is the best revenge
Everyone has a Dad story, even if it is about not having a Dad. My Dad stories, like most people’s, I think – run from the bitter to the sublime. As I hear stories on the radio and read them everywhere about Dads and whether or not they could tell their children that they loved them, I recall my own parents, and what they said to each other and to us and what they left unspoken.
Years ago I was talking long distance with my mother about navigating my own adolescent relationships as she sat at her desk near the kitchen in our home in St. Louis. She had taken over the breakfast nook as her office, and it was situated across from the kitchen and around the corner from the dining room. Eavesdropping was simple and fairly common because her melodious voice and contagious laughter carried easily into the adjoining rooms. She also had a tendency to take on the accents or speech patterns of the people she spoke with, which made listening to her talk on the phone highly entertaining. During this particular conversation she was telling me – quite matter of factly, without rancor – that my father did not like to talk on the phone (I knew this) and that he just wasn’t one of those people who expressed feeling openly – he simply didn’t say I love you – to her or to anyone. I wasn’t entirely sure of this but was agreeing with her that while not big on introspective, emotive chats it was clear, in his way, that he cared for us. Within minutes I heard my mother pause as the floor creaked as my father passed on in the way to the kitchen.
“Who’s that?” he asked, wanting to know who she had on the line. When she said it was me, he said, “Oh, let me talk.” He got on the phone, chatted with me at notable length and then before handing it back, chirped “Love you!” Mom didn’t know whether to be insulted or delighted at being so openly contradicted.
That was classic Dad – never wanting to be analyzed or pigeonholed, he was a master of defying expectations, creating delight or disappointment at every turn. Only now does it occur to me to picture him, very likely hovering just out of sight in the dining room, knowing that she was talking about him and plotting to exact his revenge. I understand that his expressing his love for me was as much about him letting her know he was privy to her armchair analysis than it was about me. So much of what we say and leave out depends on who is listening, who is overhearing, and who we can depend upon to love us back, whether they say it or not.
And When the Moon is on the Rise…
Tonight is supposed to be the largest moonrise in twenty years. I positioned my tripod outside in hoped of getting a truly spectacular photo, but, as usual, the cosmic event brought me something entirely different. My boy followed me out onto the porch and said, “It’s time to call the owls.” There he stood, hand on his heart, and called to them with perfect pitch, sounding every bit like the owls we heard last spring as the boys camped out in a tent in the front yard. The photos did not come out the way that I had hoped but the evening could not have been better.
I Wouldn't Have Missed It 