Home

(was Grounded)

He says, “Home,” and we don’t know what it means. He says it when we are at home. He says it when we are all together, my son, husband, me, sitting on the sofa, around the TV. He says it when his grandparents visit and it confounds them. “Home.” We say, “We are home, honey.” It’s not the answer he wants. “Home.” “Yes, we are staying home,” we say, thinking maybe he doesn’t want to go anywhere. It is a Saturday so no school, no therapy sessions, no sitter. He can’t say those words, so maybe this is efficient shorthand for his desire. We could go shopping, we could go to the park, or to an event for special needs kids, which are almost always on Saturdays mornings, but we don’t because the weeks are jam-packed and maybe we all just need a break from trying so hard. Maybe that’s all he means: “Home.”

Maybe he is talking to me when he says, “Home.” I rarely am. After I drop him off at school—his still-small hand in mine, his weighty backpack stuffed with his feeding pump and supplies, some extra pull-ups, some lunch he won’t eat, slung over my shoulder as it’s too heavy for him with his weak torso and stumbly gait to carry—I drive to work and spend nine hours there, sometimes more, doing what needs to be done. After, I go to the gym, or to play tennis. Often I stop at the grocery store, run an errand, meet a friend. Sometimes I have a drink or two on Fridays. My husband or the sitters have cared for him since the end of the school day, 2:30. I am rarely home before 7:30 and his bedtime is at eight.

At 8 pm, I once again I wrap my hand around his, support him as he unfolds his stiff legs from his usual cross-legged position on the couch, walk with him to the bedroom. A nighttime pull-up—thank god he hasn’t yet outgrown the XL children’s size yet—, some warm clothes as his figure is so slight he is always cold, melatonin to help him fall asleep or he’d be up for hours like he has been his whole life, his brain waves misbehaving since the beginning, and he curls up with his favorite blanket, now almost thirteen years loved, and descends hesitantly into sleep. I realize I’m little more than a token mother by normal standards. But I will spend the next ten hours with him and with luck he won’t wake to know I’m there.

I climb into bed next to him because I still don’t trust that his seizures are truly under control. Even his most recent tests show the atypical activity is still happening and happens most obviously when he sleeps. The shark is in the water. It’s been almost three years since his last one but I am well-conditioned to believe it’s only a matter of time. Seizures do that to you, create an environment of unsafeness, a standard of alertness, not unlike expecting a bomb to go off. My therapist called it PTSD, but that seemed somehow like I was appropriating someone else’s holy terror. Yes, he’s had a seizure on a plane, causing it to turn around mid-flight and return to the airport. He’s had one in a hotel in a strange city and an emergency team stormed our room and rushed him to a strange hospital we struggled to locate. He’s had ones that turn him blue, ones that wouldn’t end despite medication, some ending in a call to 911 and the lights from a first-responder fire truck and the following ambulance lit our street and woke our neighbors in the middle of the night. “Those poor people,” I imagine they said to one another. “There by the grace of God go I,” I imagine they meant.

We stopped trying to vacation. We didn’t even trust a day trip to an unexplored town, or a nearby water park. It became hard to leave the house if we didn’t really have to. At least at home, the curtains hid the worst, and our brave smiles did the rest. But at the same time, it became harder for me to stay in it. The walls closed in. The doorways shrank. The air grew heavy. Being unable to help my child, to ensure his safety, did something to my pride, did something to me. I began looking sideways at life, never wanting to catch its eye in case it noticed me and lashed out again, master to servant, wolf to lamb.

For the first 17 years of my life, I lived in the same house on land that my father’s family had owned for 3 generations. From as early as I can remember, I wanted to be anywhere but there. Not that my home was unsafe; just that it wasn’t ever me. I’ve been restless when it comes to houses ever since.

Like any other 20-something, there were numerous apartments, but I’m always a little shocked to say aloud to someone that I’ve owned four houses. We bought our first when I got tired of living in other people’s properties. Duplex owners had worn me out. We had no savings, but started circling houses for sale in the local paper, before, I hate to say, the Internet was anything more than AOL dial-up. I had heard about a neighborhood where all the gays had moved: cheap and ripe for reinvention. I got pregnant while we lived in our starter house, painted baby-poop brown, which featured a tiny shed in the back yard that once housed the previous owners rideable train engine. I was sure we needed a bigger house since this one had two bedrooms on two different levels. We were starting a family: we were going to need space. Lucky for us the neighborhood had boomed and we sold the house for double what we’d bought it for.

The problem with selling a house in an in-demand neighborhood was that it sold quick, and we struggled to find the next house, the house my son would be born in. We bought a four-square on a busy street that had pocket doors and a dramatic stair-case up to the second floor. The backyard was expansive. I should have loved the house, but it felt dark with its deep mahogany woodwork, high ceilings, four bedrooms, and the start of the seizures.

In less than two years, we were walking around the neighborhood and saw a for-sale sign. Mark ran up the stairs and peaked into the house, while I waited on the sidewalk with Noah’s stroller. “You’re going to love this house,” he said. And we bought it, selling our cavernous turn of the century house for a small loss. Our new house was my dream house. A 1020s California bungalow gussied up by a previous owner who had also been a carpenter. Classic stained glass windows, built-ins, light woodwork, plus a high-end kitchen with granite countertops and a Bosch dishwasher. I was in love. But our needs outweighed what the house had to offer. The stairs made the house unsafe for Noah; cancer made the house a hospital. So again, we moved.

Last year we moved into a new house. It’s big, too big for a family of three. But there is space, in the rooms and in the halls. Space between us and the neighboring houses. Space between us and each other. Space akin to breath akin to hope. For the time being, we’ve left the memory of his many seizures behind, and they have yet to darken this doorstep. Cancer too, for that matter, though there is now room for a lodger. I fear they both will catch up with us before long so I keep moving, superstitious of getting too comfortable, of safety denied. Maybe if we don’t stay too long, they’ll lose our scent. Maybe if I don’t stay still too long, I can dodge weight of my choices.

“Home,” he says, but I don’t know what that means.