Category: essay

To Swim is to Fly

~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

Many years later, Cindi Peterson and her husband would buy up what remained of my father’s acreage when he died in considerable debt and my brother and I couldn’t afford to keep the farmland or the homestead that had been our family’s for three generations. The Peterson’s had tended the land for years and paid out a percentage to our family, and I now realize that must have been the little bit extra that kept us afloat, if afloat is what you call it. But when I was a little girl, Cindi Peterson tried with great tenderness and persistence to teach me to swim.

There are grainy 1970s photos of my brother and me at the Northwood swimming pool either before or after our swim lessons with Cindi. I was usually in the kiddie end, sitting on the shallow steps or holding onto the edge grinning up at my mother as she took pictures with our brownie camera. My brother was usually a bit deeper in, swimming away, but still looking at Mom, he and me still young enough to be playmates. Other pictures star Cindi. I say “star” because she had charisma, a certain 70s housewife cum pinup look that made you look.

I thought Cindi was a bombshell for all I knew about bombshells at that age. Perhaps I’d started watching Charlie’s Angels by that time so I thought Cindi had a kind of Minnesota farm version of the Farrah Fawcett brand. Except Cindi was large. Her arms and legs and torso were round but not at all flabby. Her bosom (because it seems completely accurate to describe her swell of breasts as a bosom) strained against the low curved neckline of her white swimsuit. And she was tan, the color of a gleaming chestnut-coated horse. The depth of her tan made the white of her swimsuit glow in the shimmering blue pool water, and her white blond hair, waved and feathered, sat atop her head like a dollop of whipped cream tops off a luscious dessert.

At least that’s how I remember Cindi. It sounds romantic, I know. But she was so very different from my mother. My mother who wore pantsuits and owned but didn’t wear a swimsuit. I had found it once in a hallway drawer where she kept table linens and embroidered handkerchiefs, the kinds of items you kept but never used. If I reach all the way back into my memory, or the memory that looking at old photographs imprint on us, I think she may have worn it once, at a lake, on a family vacation when us kids were very young? It was yellow and gold floral and made from a heavy, plastic-y fabric. I think it had a bit of a skirt. And even when I’d discovered it, in a drawer amid tablecloths and guest towels, it seemed to have no utility. I don’t remember her ever joining us to swim in the pool. My mother had had diabetes from a very young age, and was very careful about exposing her feet in sandals and never didn’t wear shoes, for fear of injury because she couldn’t feel her feet well. But I don’t think I remember her ever going fishing with us when we took those family vacations at Leech Lake either, siting in the boat as we threaded worms onto hooks and learned the difference between walleyes, northerns, and bullheads. While she never said she was afraid of the water, now I wonder why she herself didn’t teach us to swim.

That was left to Cindi, the neighbor lady who gave kids from the area lessons. I remember how she tried to coax me to trust the water. As with most things, my brother had no issues with swimming. He would soon pass the test that allowed him under the ropes and buoys and into the deep end. Soon some of the neighbor boys would come with us to the pool, and while my brother and his friends wrestled in the water like puppies, I laid my head back against Cindi’s bosom as her hands supported my hips to suspend my little body perpendicular to hers. But the minute she removed her hands, I went from being on top of the water one second to piking down in fear the next, wanting my feet touching the bottom of the pool. Or if the water was too deep, I flailed at her, grabbing at her taut, tan skin for purchase, holding her close. Floating was simply something I could not do. Cindi taught me a lot about the water the way any teacher starts with the ABCs — I learned how to blow bubbles, tread water, how to kick while holding onto the wall, and then how to use a kickboard and leave the wall behind. But she was never able to teach me how to use the water to suspend my body when she wasn’t there to assist.

I have never been afraid of the water, so those early lessons accomplished that at least. I’ve never not wanted to don my suit and jump in on a hot day. Or take a boat ride. I could jump off a dock at our cousin’s cabin, do a front flip at pool, and even perform a handstand of sorts, because those moves only required me to hold my breath a few seconds, mouth closed, nose pinched. But I could never just float. Or so what we called the American crawl well enough to pass the deep end test. And I certainly never got up the courage to dive in head first, or even jump off a diving board. Except that one time when I was a preteen and a camp counselor and the long line of kids standing on the ladder behind me forced me to jump and I still remember feeling like I would never rise to the surface.

Swimming is just the start of it, a thing I can almost do. I have never ice skated or ski-ed or even slid barefooted across a wet floor like my brother and his friends did when my mother washed the kitchen linoleum. Having to give up control or lacking faith in my body to react, to stabilize me when met with unpredictable physical influences of water or speed or slickness, has always been…an impossibility. There are other things I’ve always been afraid of. Heights is one. Bridges is another. Singing in front of a crowd, or anyone. Asking for want I need. Or what I want. Because I’m afraid the act of asking is the same as admitting weakness. And now that I’m older, middle-aged at best, I’ve grown afraid of my body in a different way. Once I was afraid my body would embarrass me, that it would get injured; now I’m afraid of how my body will communicate to me that I am dying, soon to be out of the time I need to stop being so afraid.

It was probably 1981 or 82 when I had my first major surgery to correct a length discrepancy in my left leg compared to my right. Physical therapy wasn’t as accepted as necessary for healing that it is now, but my mother must have talked with Cindi and come to an agreement. By then, Cindi had an above-ground pool on their farm, their driveway about a 1/2 mile down the gravel road from our driveway. So I spent a couple of visits to Cindi’s pool, not swimming but walking slowly through the water, using its resistance to strengthen my weakened leg. But our relationship had changed. I was awkward around Cindi now, much like I had become awkward in so many situations. Despite an open invitation to use the pool any time after those first instructional visits, I didn’t go back.

Thirty years later, when we were preparing to sell my father’s farm, I still thought fondly of Cindi when I thought of her at all. I knew the rumors. People said she’d gotten nasty. That she dictated the terms of their family life and her husband was no more than a pawn to her demands. People said she carried around a shotgun, and sometimes, ironically, shot it at trespassing hunters. I seem to remember Cindi coming to my mother’s funeral when I was 12. And then my father’s — no, that seems impossible, but surely she would have? — about a decade ago. She must be, what, 70 by now? But Cindi with her white-blond hair and white-white suit and beautifully browned body is how I think of her, and I think of her often now because we take my son to the pool whenever we can. He loves the water. So when I get a whiff of that signature scent of chlorine and suntan lotion that makes you feel 6 year old again, I think of Cindi. And I bet all those rumors about her are untrue. She may have done all of those things, but those rumors have the scent of “who does that woman think she is?” rather than a woman gone rouge.

For years, I just let my husband, Mark, take our to the pool. But when he was a year or two old, I enrolled Noah is a baby class at the frigid pool of the neighborhood high school. It’s what you did when you wanted to be a good mother who could check off another line on the long list of things good mothers do. Teach your child early not to be afraid of the water. Babies, we were told, instinctively knew to hold their breath underwater. And Noah certainly did. The pool was so exciting for him. He held his breath; he kicked his legs. He splashed his hands against the surface of the water with an energy that he didn’t use for much else. He didn’t reach up to play with the tiny stuffed fish we hung from the handle of his car seat. Instead of stacking wooden blocks on the tray of his high chair, he just pushed the blocks off onto the floor. We already knew he had “low tone” — that’s what the internet called it when I searched for why he wasn’t able to hold his head up and balance on his little elbows like every baby did for their first mall photo shoot. The photographer had to roll a small washcloth under his chest to lift him up enough to look like he was looking toward the camera. And we knew he wasn’t meeting milestones. But some kids didn’t, I was told. And often baby boys didn’t. So I tried to be the kind of mother every other mother I knew tried to be: a good mother who put her worry aside and took her baby to the pool.

Soon Noah’s love of water — pool, bath water, play table, sprinkler, fountain, hose — irritated me. Not because I begrudged him his joy, but because it was a sign. Autistic children, children with a diagnosis, loved water. They loved water, they loved lights, they love to put toys in rows, they love to make things roll and fall. I watched Noah like a hawk. How many more signs would there be that there was something wrong with him? Every cute thing he did that someone might comment on, “Doesn’t he just love the water?” for example, made me sad. As the months went by and the other babies we knew added skill after skill, all anyone could really say about Noah was, “Doesn’t he just love the water?” One afternoon after our swim class, I was carrying Noah across the cement locker room floor after rinsing ourselves off under the showers, and I slipped. I fell awkwardly because I rearranged my body to protect his. We were both fine, but I hated slipping. I hated feeling out of control. And I hated that Noah had been in danger. It would be the last time I took Noah to the pool by myself, and Mark, who loves the water anyway, became the default swim parent.

Until Mark got leukemia, that is. During Mark’s initial treatment, there wasn’t much call to take Noah to the pool. Mark got sick in July that year, underwent numerous rounds of chemotherapy, and had his transplant six months later. Friends or sitters would take Noah, who was ten, to the wading pool while I was at work, but there wasn’t time to do much beyond holding our lives together that winter. One of the more terrible side effects for Mark of having leukemia and getting a life-saving stem cell transplant is that he has to continue, even in remission, even if he becomes technically cured, to try to lighten the burden on his immune system. With that consideration, Mark stopped teaching. And with that consideration, Mark had to stop swimming.

But that didn’t mean that good mothers don’t do the right thing, even if they hate swimming, so I once again enrolled Noah in swim classes. These classes were adaptive swim classes, and I had had ten years to get used to life, however reluctantly, with a special needs child. The woman who taught this class was large. Unlike Cindi (though her name was also Cindy), her skin sagged low off the bone, and her suit, a muddled floral top with a muddled purple skirt, amplified her pale skin in the pale light of the middle school pool. Because Cindy had other students, and Noah was unable to be safe in the water without assistance, I got in the water with him. And that was fine. He wore a safety belt and was buoyed by the water, and I had my feet on the ground. I could lead him through the exercises, Cindy showed to us while she worked with the other kids. But the other kids, they were skilled enough to practice by moving up and down the length of the pool no matter how slowly. Cindy wanted us to do the same. And so did Noah. And I … was too prideful to limit us only to where my toes touched. In five feet of water, my five foot three inch self could just keep my chin above the surface. Beyond that, I would not only have to guide Noah through his exercises, but at the same time, I would have to keep myself afloat.

Much like when I was a child, I could manage to tread water for a short amount of time. And since, when staying in hotels or even going to the local pool with Mark and Noah, I had been very willing to get in the water, even doing a sort of dogpaddle/applebasket stroke that mimicked swimming, could take me from one side of a pool to the other, and most importantly, keep my head above the water. But problems arose as we moved into deeper water. The pool depth went to twelve feet, so getting to the five foot mark wasn’t even half way down to where Cindy laid out all of the practice gear like kickboards and tubes. Also, twelve feet was where Noah wanted to go too. Noah’s love of water had continued to grow as he did, and his very favorite thing to do is to jump off the side of a pool into deep water. He loves to feel the impact of the water, hold his breath until he comes to the surface. He practices holding his breath in the bathtub, able to push his face beneath the bubbles and hold it there for nearly 15 seconds. But what the hell was I going to do once I couldn’t touch the bottom of the pool? Keeping myself afloat was one thing, keeping Noah afloat so he didn’t have to hold his breath beyond 15 seconds.

We would stay near the side of the pool. I would be able to grab onto the edge with my left hand, while assisting Noah with my dominant right. If he started to swim too far away from me, I could grab onto his flotation belt and drag him back with me to the wall. It was inefficient, but we managed. It was exhausting, but at the end of every class I felt more deeply connected to Noah. I had helped him do something he loved, while we held on to each other doing it. Cindy was there to rescue us if I couldn’t manage, but I was managing. Eventually I began to take Noah to the recreational pools my myself. We rarely ranged beyond five feet, but that was deep enough for me help him get up out of the pool and jump back in. Over and over. Then we would ‘swim’ to the toddler depth and back, practicing what we learned from Cindy. A few times we pushed our limits, but the minute I felt unsafe, I would tense up, maybe swallow some water, and I simply became scared.

One of the ways I’ve learned to cope with my anxiety — an anxiety that I’ve described to my doctor, my therapist, my friends, as feeling like I’m in a closed room that is filling up with water, and there is only an inch or two between the surface of the water and the ceiling from which to draw a breath, and I’m so, so tired of trying –, whether that’s anxiety due to having a disabled child or simply being me with my brain in my body, is by being brave. Being scared comes naturally to me. I’ve been scared since I was a child. I was scared when I had surgery. I was scared of my body. I was scared when my mother got sick, I was scared of her body. I was scared when Noah started having seizures. I was scared of his body. (Let’s face it, I still am. At 14, his body is doing all sorts of crazy things I’m not convinced I signed up for; and at 48, my body is doing all sorts of crazy things that are at best a nuisance, and at worst, a reminder of my mortality. I have always been scared off all the things that could hurt us, internal or external. So now, within reason, I do things that scare me. I’m not talking about bungy jumping or even roller coaster riding. But I try to show up. I have tattooed “Be brave” on my forearm to keep me honest.

To confront my childhood fear of singing in public, I now give work speeches in front of groups. To work on my fear of failure and rejection, I submit my writing to magazines and agents. I have even cooperated with my fear of heights by taking a trapeze lesson. (I did it, and don’t ever need to do it again.) I recently declined a sunset flight in a two-seater airplane with my friend’s husband for a pilot, and the next day I regretted saying no. I can’t say for certain I would say yes should that opportunity be offered again, because I can’t imagine calling Mark and Noah and saying, just so you know, I’m taking a huge risk with my life and I apologize if I don’t come back. But I’m kind of proud of myself for even thinking I should have said yes.

And I can credit all sorts of things for why I am able now to take risks that, as a child, I shrank from. But I have Noah to thank for valuing bravery rather than prioritizing my fear. Every day that he had a seizure and we had to pick up the pieces of our lives and pretend we hadn’t just had a bomb set off in our home, I learned to be brave. Every doctor’s appointment when some test could tell us some very bad news about our son’s future, I had to be brave. Every time I had to hold him down for a procedure, I had to tuck my fear away. And when I think of this young man, now fourteen, with the cognitive and physical abilities of a toddler and confront the depth of my love for him but also my deep sadness over his unrealized potential — which is every.damn.day — I have to be brave. I owe my bravery to Noah, and I try to show up for him even when I want nothing more than to hide.

Which explains why, this past Fourth of July, I got it in my head that Noah and I should go tubing on his grandparent’s lake. Mark’s sister and her family kept their motorboat docked there and Noah’s cousin, just 6 months older than he, wanted to take a large inflatable “chair” out on the water. Despite Mark’s parents having lived on the lake for years now, we rarely went out on it, and we never swam in it. And that’s often a point of contention between Mark and I — Noah loves the water, so why can’t he swim in the lake? Of course, in my heart, I know why. Noah can hold his breath and such, but he also swallows a lot of water and doesn’t really recognize when something is dangerous, so he could step on a sharp rock, hit his head on the dock, eat lake weeds, what have you. But! In the name of bravery, and fairness, and not acquiescing — I said, Noah and I want to go tubing as well!

Tubing is a thing I have never done. Water skiing is a thing I have tried once as a kid, got dragged on my face after never truly standing up, and never tried again. Boats are fine for fishing out of, but I’ve never driven one so know little about the physics. I’m even a little awkward wiggling myself onto a circular floatie in order to just sit on one. But this big seated “tube” tied to the back of the boat? I’m sure we can do that. And, I think, everyone must have thought I knew what I was doing rather than just being brave, because no one gave us instructions and I assumed that being towed was just like floating on the water but at a faster clip.

After stuffing ourselves into safety jackets, Noah and I got settled onto the tube. I noted that there were no seatbelts likes on a carnival ride. Which, of course. Being belted into something that could capsize would be a very bad idea. I found the handholds, so that reassured me. But Noah doesn’t have the strength or occupational skills to hold onto a handle, so much like during his swimming lessons I held onto the edge of the pool with one hand, and Noah’s flotation belt with the other, I grabbed a handhold with my right hand to stabalize us, and Noah’s safety vest with the other. The first slow lengths as the boat pulled away from the dock seemed to indicate this ride would be a pleasure cruise. But as my brother-in-law picked up speed, the “chair” began to tip backward. I was unaware that this was par for the course. That we couldn’t just toodle along on the water at a slightly quick pace but instead we had to pick up speed in order to even out the raft and regain a horizontal position on the surface of the water. But unlike at the pool, Noah’s weight, now around 100 lbs was not buoyed by the water, but instead being pushed and pulled by centrifugal force. And that’s not even considering how I needed to manage my own weight which as about twice his.

What seems critical now — now that we’ve survived this trip around the lake that I will never volunteer us for again — is an understanding of the handsignals. While my brother in law drove the boat, my sister in law kept an eye on Noah and me. But she was also, in addition to our safety, interested in us having a good time. And for most people, having a good time when being towed by a boat is to go fast. The handsignal to go faster is a thumbs up. I assumed a thumbs up was an agreement that we were, at the speed we were at, in the current situation which really felt like a bad situation by the time we were too far to turn back, doing ok. So every time she gave us a thumbs up, I gave her one back. Which translated into, doing well, but let’s crank it up a notch. The faster we went the tighter I held on. (Again, science isn’t really my thing, so probably if I had relaxed, we’d never have been at a risk for being thrown off, but I couldn’t tell my brain in it’s panicked state that.) The faster we went, the more upright we could sit, but the more Noah slid into me until I thought we might get pushed off the side when the boat turned. And despite my stubbornness, and my inability to admit when I’m out of my depth, I eventually let go of the handhold long enough to drag a finger across my neck giving my most clear handsignal that I was done that I could.

Obviously we made it back to the dock. Noah and I played in the water a bit before we all went up to the house to bathe. My right forearm was so sore I could barely flex my wrist. My abs were so tired from trying to stablize us my ribs ached. As we walked to the house, Mark helping Noah navigate the steps, I admitted to all of my misconceptions and fears. He said, “Yep, that’s how I felt too.” Incredulous, I asked, “What? You’ve taken Noah tubing before?” “Last summer,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it again.” And of course I was put out. “Why didn’t you warn me?” I wanted to ask. But we were on dry land, safe, Noah had had an experience, and…I had been brave.

***

Tonight at my swim lesson, my trainer, Melissa, taught me how to do the breast stroke. For the past two weeks since I’d transferred to this new gym and requested a swim coach, we’ve worked on the basics of breathing while doing the freestyle (aka, that old American crawl.) The coordination of all of the elements it takes to swim freestyle laps correctly is still many of hours of practice away. I get it but I’m also easily distracted and when my mind wanders, so does my technique, and I either lose my bearings or end up with a mouthful of water. The reality of swimming is and always will be — unless you pay attention, you can choke or flounder or even drown.

My form while doing the breast stroke is ridiculously awkward, and I have to be careful not to laugh so as not to get water up my nose. The frog legs and the arm pull and then the “glide” … well, it’s easy to get off the beat like when Baby is first learning the merengue with Johnny in Dirty Dancing and she keeps stepping on his foot. But when I hit a groove for maybe five to ten yards, the exhalation of the breath underwater comes naturally to me and I’m hopeful that with practice I can not only complete an entire length of the pool while doing the breast stroke, but do it gracefully. Swimming feels like dance when you are doing it right. It’s effortful yet liberating.

But there is something else about swimming that distinguishes it from other physical activities. It’s the buoyancy of the water and the way you can speed up if only you relax. It’s the balance between tension and release. The years, they have begun to weigh on me. And I get tired sometimes of holding up my head and trying to draw breath. But I have learned, or at least I am learning, acceptance. I cannot change who Noah is, and to needlessly bang my head against the wall of our reality is futile. I cannot change anything about the past that led us here. And accepting him isn’t capitulation as I feared for so long. It just means you direct your energies in the right place instead of wasting your effort. Swimming is about maximizing your movements and not doing more than you have to. The more you push, the more rigid your body, the more rushed your motions. You simply have to work with the water, not against it.

When I explained to Melissa why, at 48, I wanted to take swimming lessons, despite being a “recreational” swimmer, I told her the story of tubing earlier in the year. That’s just one of the reasons, but I had certainly wondered as we banked through a turn and I thought Noah might go sliding into the water that I wasn’t sure how I might help him as we waited in the water for rescue. I also told her how my husband can no longer swim with my son, but my son still loves the water no matter how big he gets, and he needs me swim with him, not hang onto the edge. And I explained, maybe not in so many words, but in words that reference fitness and weight loss and non-impact exercise being good for aging joints, that I want to be in better control over my body. I wanted to learn to trust it. I wanted to stop being afraid.

To my surprise, the backstroke is the easiest of the swim strokes I’m learning, or re-learning. (The butterfly isn’t great on the shoulders at our age, Melissa tells me.) And it’s when I first launch back and float a few lengths of my body, before I begin to windmill my arms over my head and my feet flutterkick, that I began to think about Cindi and those days in the sun at the Northwood pool, my head leaning back against her shoulder, my back supported by her front, and her strong body smelling of cocoa butter gliding us as one along the water. In those seconds before she would let go of me and hope I could hold the position, I could believe I would one day learn to float. Over 40 years later, I no longer pike down into the water. I no longer fear I’ll fall. It helps, of course, that the lap pool only goes to 5 feet, so I’m never in danger of not being able to touch the ground. But I find I don’t want to feel the rough bottom of the pool beneath my feet. Actually, I find I don’t need to.

Examinations

~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

 

(Revised)

 

I

The floors of the examination rooms at the Mayo Clinic were always cold. I kept my socks on until the very last moment. I stayed in the changing cubicle, behind the pale, printed curtain, soft and faded like a child’s favorite blanket that kept the dressing area cordoned off from the rest of the room, until the very last moment too.  Though that meant waiting until everyone had arrived and then pulling back the curtain to reveal my appearance with a screech and clatter as the metal rings scraped along the metal rod. Before advancing into the room, I had to stop and strip off my socks, my bare feet on the cold floor forming a memory that would last a lifetime. My mother and father sat on minimal metal and plastic chairs flush against one wall.  Lined up along the window across from them was the phalanx of doctors who would be examining me.

During the years I did not have surgery, I saw Dr. Peterson twice a year in an examination room on the 16th floor of the Mayo Clinic. During the years I did have surgery, I was there more often. He was the only recurring character during these nightmarish visits (except for the pale nurse who sat at the reception desk and looked like a model with her straight blond hair parted down the center.) An orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Peterson was, I knew, well-regarded, but I didn’t know at the time by whom or for what. All I knew was that ever since I could remember, my parents and I, and sometimes my brother before he was old enough to stay home alone, traveled ninety-minutes to Rochester from our farm near Austin to see him, specifically. To take my mind off the appointment, my parents challenged me to find as many different state license plates as I could in the parking ramp outside the clinic. I suppose it was a small comfort to know someone from Wyoming or New Hampshire had come all the way to Minnesota for help from a doctor like mine.

Mayo was exotic—I remember seeing a family in Indian dress and men in turbans and young girls in Mennonite prairie dresses and aprons for the first time there—and thus terrifying. Why was there something so wrong with me to warrant being a patient at such a place, a place to which people flew over oceans? But Dr. Peterson, everyone seemed confident, was the man for the job, the only doctor in the country, I believed then, who knew how to lengthen legs.

But with Dr. Peterson came that cadre of blue-clad interns and suit-wearing academics who stood behind my famous surgeon with the brown wing-tip shoes and half-moon glasses as he examined me from his perch on a rolling stool, all of them bent forward like vultures peering down on prey.  Each visit I would be introduced to the extra people who followed him into the room, but since I never saw any of them again, and none of them ever spoke directly to me beyond the initial greeting, I never bothered to identify them as people in so much as interlopers to this private exhibit that featured me as the main attraction.

Each exam was the same. I would exit the cubicle, my clothes folded on the wood-grain bench behind me, socks stacked on top, and walk out toward the adults in the room while wearing nothing but a hospital gown with two ties, one behind my neck, the other at my mid-back, and my own underwear. Presenting myself in the middle of the room, I silently waited for instruction. It seemed wrong to proceed without being told what to do, though my next moves were as well known to me as practiced as a dancer’s choreography.

Standing in front of Dr. Peterson, he would take my shoulders and turn me away from him. Then he would open the tie at the middle of my back, take both sides of the gown and drop them off my shoulders, letting it hang down in front of me like a column of cloth so most of my body was bare. I would stand stock-still, unable to move, like Lot’s wife after she looked. Not just because I was nearly naked in front of a group of strangers, but also because allowing this examination, standing still and being studied like some insect pinned to a display board, filled me with a paralyzing anxiety that flooded through my body like ice water and made me near unresponsive. Never did it feel like this was a normal sequence in the life of a normal kid, no matter my age: undress, be instructed, be examined, submit.

All the fight had been drained out of me already in the crying and pleading arguments I had with my unwavering parents that began the day my mother reminded me of the appointment, escalated the night before, and continued through the glass doors of Mayo’s main entrance, its rotating doors sucking me in like a vacuum, summoning me against my will. I did not want to do this, come to this place, and I wanted to be heard.

But I also wanted my parents to say I didn’t have to go. But they never did. Instead, they made bargains. If I just calmed down, we would stop at Perkins for onion rings and a Pepsi, or maybe Long John Silvers. (Austin only had a McDonalds.) They bought me word find and invisible ink puzzle books from the gift shop. Regardless, by then, I had exhausted my resources and could do nothing more than behave.

 

When Dr. Peterson said, walk across the room, I did. Turn and walk back, he’d say, and I would. Stop there, and he would roll closer to me, place his hands on my hips, push and knead, then rotate me and repeat, while I stood with a kind of anxious static in my ears, drowning out thoughts. As I got older and heavier, the fear turned into humiliation, bitter like salt, filling me up with solidifying tears.

Turn and bend at the waist, he would say. And I turned, and bent, and felt every pair of eyes in the room studying my bare back, my cotton-covered hips, my bare legs. Sometimes he took the waistband of my underwear and rolled it under to expose more of my back, looking for the telltale curve of scoliosis. The rest of the exam was performed on the table. I was measured, stretched, compared. The x-rays taken earlier in the day were hung on lighted screens: there I was. My bones, the shadow of my bulk, the unevenness in my legs. There I was, more real than I was in my own live body, and I wanted to own none of me.

I was rarely spoken to. Throughout the examination there was murmuring, but I was the topic of conversation. Dr. Peterson led the discussion, and each member of the group took turns describing his (and rarely her) observations, would utter short fragments of knowledge with conviction, and sometimes offer me a faint close-mouthed smile. But all I heard, as I stood there, sat there, walked there, bent there, laid there, was one word said repeatedly, discrepancy.

Discrepancy. I heard that term used to describe my body year after year, visit after visit. My left leg, as a result of a bone infection before I was born, did not grow as quickly as my right. Everything about my left side from the hip down was smaller, shorter: discrepant. A factual word, not meant as an insult by any of those who uttered it in my vicinity, describing my leg, not me. But when I heard it time and time again, the word clearly indicated I was faulty, inadequate, abnormal.

 

Dr. Peterson performed two complicated surgeries on my legs. The first—so rare that another girl who had the same surgery done appeared on the TV show, That’s Incredible!—was done when I was in third grade and I spent five weeks in the hospital, missing friends as well as missing all the lessons on how to do long division. A foot-long metal apparatus was attached parallel to my leg via four screws that punctured my skin and were anchored to my femur bone, which had been cut in half at the middle. At the end of the apparatus was a dial.

Each day, Dr. Peterson arrived at my hospital room during rounds and turned the dial the barest of millimeters because more would cause too much strain on my muscles and skin. Millimeter by millimeter, for five weeks, my left leg was stretched until my legs were of equal length. Then a measure of hip bone was inserted into the made gap, a strip of metal attached to secure the pieces together, and finally, a body cast molded over me from my toes to around my ribcage to keep me immobile through my tenth summer.

For many days, blood and fluid seeped out of the holes in my skin made by the protruding screws, dampening the absorbent blue sheets the nurses lay underneath me on the bed. When they were soaked and finally removed, they smelled like raw hamburger. Sometimes there was too much fluid and it was suctioned out. Any place they inserted an IV quickly got painful, so it was moved around my hands so often they appeared to have chicken pox due to the scabs. I bathed out of a pan, and peed into a different one. I was checked for bedsores.

When I was released, I wore a body cast from ribcage to the toes on my left foot. I was good at using my crutches and raced my classmates along the school hallways. When the cast was removed, my leg had shriveled, but the lengths of my legs were close to even. I got to wear sandals and tennis shoes. I didn’t suddenly improve at kickball and still ended up near the end of the line in gym class, but I was rid of the awkward, clompy gait that elicited stares as I shopped at the mall. But it didn’t last long, because, again, as I grew, my left leg again lagged behind.  At seventeen, once my body had completed most of its growth, the second surgery was done. Dr. Peterson spoke of medical progress, said they’d long since moved past that slow dial-turning surgery I’d had the first time around. This one would have me out of the hospital in three days.

To prepare for that last surgery, a series of pictures were taken of me so the doctors could determine their surgical plan. After so many years of the same surgery preparation, this process was new to me. For these photos, I was to stand, wearing only the bra I had arrived in, and a pair of provided underwear—triangles of crinkly blue paper connected around the hips with bare elastic that I struggled to pull on because I could no longer wear the largest youth size and I was too embarrassed to ask for something larger—and submit to being photographed from every angle.

I stood passively against the white backdrop, horrified at having to expose so much of my discrepant teenage self, as the man stood behind his camera and snapped, snapped, snapped at the captured moth I surely was.  I quickly looked away when these pictures were hung up during my exam, studied by the tidy Dr. Peterson and the half-circle of people standing behind him. These pictures were not in the anonymous black and white of x-rays, where one’s size is just a hint, a shadow, but in two-dimensional color, flooded unflatteringly with fluorescence. Those pictures were more than an examination; they were a record of my flaws.

After the surgery, I was out of the hospital three days later, this time with no casts, just crutches, and puzzle pieces for legs. This time, they had sawed both of my femur bones in half, took one and one-half inches of bone from my right leg and spliced it into my left. A metal rod was inserted from incisions at the top of each of my hips all the way down through the marrow of my bones. I woke from the surgery with an IV conveying morphine into my arm.  The morphine burned when it traveled from needle to vein, and it quickly became difficult to decide whether my leg pain was strong enough to justify the arm pain from a self-administered dose. The next day I found myself in the PT room, encouraged to walk on two broken legs by a physical therapist I fought against, raving, because I couldn’t believe anyone had the right to make me walk on two broken legs.

I was deconstructed again and again in those exam rooms at Mayo Clinic, then physically reconstructed twice over my lifetime, knitted together well enough to resemble someone whole, yet not at all whole.

 

II

I take my son for exams by the specialists at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee, where he is undressed, inspected head to toe. The rooms are small, white and well-lit with floor-to-ceiling windows, the light muted by vertical blinds. During this particular visit, a geneticist takes each one of Noah’s fingers and examines the nails, the width of his knuckles, the flexation in his joints, to look for signs of a genetic disorder that might explain his eclectic constellation of symptoms. They judge the distance between his eyes, his hairline, the length of his feet, the feel of his scrotum, the roof of his mouth, the shape of his ears, looking for abnormalities. They find nothing out of the ordinary, no dysmorphic features to point them down a particular genetic path. But that simply makes the mystery of Noah’s seizure disorder and delayed development more perplexing rather than less.

The first six months of Noah’s life had been relatively normal. While he hadn’t been the most mobile baby before birth, and he seemed to have some hyper-reflexes as an infant, only the fact that his eyes never quite aligned as babies’ eyes do soon after birth, gave us any hint of a disorder, a fairly common and fixable one at that. Slowly I came to realize, by watching other babies and watching him, that he was significantly different.

I saw that Noah did not reach up and out to play with the small animals hanging from his car seat handle like other babies did. He couldn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time no matter which magic formula we tried; we even set up a video camera to record in the night, hoping for some hint of what was waking him. And he couldn’t hold himself up on his elbows at three months. The photographer at Sears had to stuff his arms underneath him like he was a rag doll for us to get a picture of him looking up into the camera.  You could tell that she knew there was something different about Noah too. I saw these things, all the signs that my good efforts—losing weight, the prenatal vitamins, the weekly doctor’s appointments, giving up sushi and lunch meat—had guaranteed nothing. I had been naïve to think I had earned special treatment from the universe. Unfortunately fate is not a meritocracy.

At the end of his first year, we waited in a different examination room for our first visit to a neurologist, after Noah had had his first three seizures and missed more milestones than he had met. I held my one-year-old son who had no idea, yet, that being examined was anything different from being adored. I was afraid, not only of the news we might hear about our child, but because I could feel a tingle of subordination playing around the edges of my already-frayed strength. I remembered too clearly being a mere scientific conundrum to the doctors who examined me, and I feared being reduced to the frightened child I had been, instead of holding myself together and being the mother I knew I needed to be.

That day I was grateful when the neurologist walked casually into the room, looked my son over head-to-toe, and pronounced, with contagious positivity: “That’s a good-looking kid you’ve got there.” He went on to say that he’d been doing this for twenty-five years and could tell the really severe cases just by looking at the child, so we really shouldn’t worry too much. For some time after that visit, I hoped that Noah would be one of the lucky ones. I needed to hope, so I did, until the seizures took that hope away.

At each visit to each new doctor, we must reconstruct Noah’s life so far. We reveal our family histories, or, because I am adopted, what there is of mine. I tell the story of my pregnancy, of his birth, of his first days. I tell people that my pregnancy and Noah’s birth were uneventful, but it feels like a lie. I shrug when I say it, like it was all no big deal; but to give birth is the biggest deal, regardless of the child.

I am thankful that Noah will not remember all those rapid-fire appointments, one after another—emergency room, doctor, CAT scan, neurologist, EEG, emergency room, allergist, neurologist, MRI, geneticist, orthopedist, and so on—but of course, that will not always be the case. These kinds of visits to specialists will not end, because the question of why Noah is the way Noah is seems unlikely to be answered since we have done every test science can offer us and received no revelatory results. I fear that the older he gets, the more risk there is that he will face the same deconstruction of self that I withstood as doctors visually dissected me during all those years of my own gauntlet-walking. Every day, in the eyes of so many, my son is different, less than, rather than valued as singular, incomparable.

 

Though I am his mother, I am no different than anyone else who looks at Noah and sees “other.” I have been forced—by love but more so by an instinct for sanity—to forgive his flaws in a way that I could never learn to forgive my own. I have made peace with the part of me that was so bitterly disappointed that she would spend her child’s childhood in doctors’ offices because she spent her own in them. I have humbled myself in the face of this great responsibility, come to realize that his life is not about me, only about him. I have learned to ignore the unconscionable inner voice that perseverates over whether this faulty mother simply gave birth to a faulty child.

The burden of parenting Noah is suffocating because there is no shrugging off the tough stuff. Taking Noah to his appointments breaks my heart each time. He cries, repeating, “done, done” with frantic sign language and abbreviated vocalizations, before we’ve even gone through the doors of the clinic. I cajole, and I demand, and sometimes I let the nurses take over despite his plaintive, “Mama? Mama?” because I am at a loss as to how to force my child to do these things he fears. I too want to say, “done,” and spirit him away to some remote cabin in the woods in some other time where there are no constraints, no obligations, no expectations, a fantasy world.

My parents must have felt the same anguish at each of my appointments. What I saw then as their lack of compassion was no doubt resoluteness, knowing that what they were making me do was in my best interest despite my dramatic protestations. The lesson is not lost on me, and if my parents were alive, I would thank them for being just as brave as they needed to be.

It’s been nearly fifteen years since I saw any doctor about my legs. I still have a metal rod in my left femur, and I still have some sensitivity and lack of strength on that side. But I’ve held together this long, and it will take a significant setback to force me back to an orthopedic specialist. The time will come, I imagine, as age creeps up and my bones break down, for me to be examined again. In the meantime, I count my blessings that I can run, I can walk, I can carry my son. In fact, except for some truths revealed by the scars on my legs and a slight limp when I am especially tired, I might even come off as what I so desired as a child: normal.

There is little about Noah that appears normal now. As he has grown, his oddities have become more obvious. As a toddler, he could be carried; there was no wonky gait to expose him as different. Now, when he walks across a room or an aisle in the grocery store, no matter how slowly, he will inevitably run into something that was not actually in his way. Such is ataxia. I hold onto the back of his collar, gently so he barely notices, to guide him when he veers too far off the path.

The doctors don’t bother showing us the results of his EEGS any more. They have told us time and again that the abnormal brain activity doesn’t tell them anything definitive. Unlike my body, my son’s doesn’t offer options for surgical intervention. We medicate, we prevaricate. The specialists offer us a collective shrug.

Noah has all ten fingers and toes, but he cannot use them dexterously.  Putting a train car on a toy track is an exercise in frustration. Scooping food onto a spoon is a hit or miss proposition; getting the food to his mouth the same. He loves to color, but his squiggles are just squiggles to anyone’s eye but his. He can kick a ball, but will most likely fall on the ground with the ball only inches away. He can have a conversation with me through his few words, sounds and gestures, but few others understand his mixed bag of approximations. Noah loves the things normal little boys love: trains, trucks, dogs, swimming, sandpits, books; but, at seven, the version of these things he plays with better suits a three-year-old. At twelve, he is much the same.

It has taken me years to see my son as more than the sum of his discrepancies. When I look at his baby pictures—all of us so innocent that I feel slightly sickened by our naiveté—in photo albums, or hold his arms down tight as his head is wrapped in gauze to hold tight a plethora of electrodes glued to his head so that specialists can examine what happens in his misbehaving brain, or watch him as he runs excitedly, but so awkwardly, across the grass expanse that circles the local playground, knowing he is being stared at by children and parents alike, I struggle to quiet the child in me who still fears being different, who took the blame for the things that made her different from everyone else.

Noah is not the child I imagined I would raise, and oh have I mourned that child—the one not made up of flesh and blood, but made up of expectations. So each day, I perform an examination on my own heart. When I push past the guilt and the blame and the fear, I sometimes locate the strength I built up to survive those surgeries, those stares, the study of my body, and I think I just might have enough to pass some on to my son too.

A Meditation, on Noah’s 12th Birthday

~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

I woke early and put a pot of oatmeal on the stove to cook. Noah is recovering from strep, and now so am I, so we need something to eat that will be gentle on our sore throats.

I didn’t hear Noah get out of bed while I prepared breakfast. Didn’t know he was awake. Usually he cries out, wanting early morning attention, wanting help to get his iPad turned on, cold because he’s kicked his blankets off again. Instead, when I returned to the bedroom, his covers were pushed back and his space–which is exactly how “where your child once was” always feels, spacious, bereft–was empty. I had a flash as all parents do. Where is he? Where has he gone? Is he lost? Will he ever come back? Some parents feel it in the mall. Some when they have lost sight of their child in the backyard. Because Noah is never without me, my husband, or his respite sitter, I have yet to work on the muscle that all parents must strengthen: let your child off the leash of your attention; let them go out into the world without your eyes on their backs. But still, a moment out of sight has my heart jumping.

Independence is why we moved to this new house. In our old house, Noah would have awoken upstairs while I was downstairs in the kitchen. To join me, he would have had to navigate steep wooden stairs, and over the years, our caution, or warnings–“Noah, wait for me. Noah, sit down at the top of the stairs and bump down on your butt.”–had taken root and he rarely descended on his own. But this house is one story, and he occasionally will, as we’d hoped, move about the space more freely. Still, when I can’t see him, I get a jolt. Is he somewhere he could hurt himself? Is there something he could hurt himself with? Noah’s world is rife with hard surfaces and sharp edges.

I found Noah in the livingroom, sitting among his birthday presents that he opened piece by piece over the weekend. Diagnosed with strep throat on the actual celebration day, he’d had no interest in presents. And if you are one of the few people to know Noah well, you know that he loves nothing more than opening a wrapped gift. He doesn’t much care what’s in the present; he just wants to experience, I think, the mystery. What is it? Can I open it? Noah’s extended family knows to wrap a lot of gifts at Christmas. Socks. Matchbox cars. Books. Snacks. And still he’ll move on to yours. He’ll open them all, everyone’s, if he’s given the chance. Handing the opened gift to the owner holds its own revered place in the ritual too. But ultimately it is the wrapped that becomes the unwrapped that thrills him.

But this morning, his attention was pulled by the mass of 10 x 10 colorful, interlocking floor tiles we ordered and wrapped, a practical gift to be used as a mat for his playroom downstairs, to soften and warm the cold tiles of the refinished basement, to guard against risk. I stood in the doorway and watched him for a moment. Took a picture of Noah with a tile in each hand. Took a moment to feel what it must feel like to have your child play on his own; it’s a rare experience for me. To have quiet. To watch him use his body and brain to progress a concept, even if that concept is stacking floor tiles, which is what his goal seemed to be.

Noah’s need for help, for a companion, for interaction, is often a burden, one I’m certain me and my insufficient character have inflicted upon him. I’m not tough enough to force him to figure problems out on his own. I wasn’t tough enough in the face of one special needs child to have a second child, provide him with a brother or sister who would have not only been his sibling, but also his model. Sometimes Noah behaves like a dog, because the dog is sometimes his most ready mentor. When I indulge in the idyllic, I wonder how much more capable Noah would be if I’d been more brave. When I indulge in self-abuse (maybe the same thing?), I wonder why I couldn’t have found a way to be less selfish.

I’ve developed the skill over the past twelve years not to deal in the “what ifs” around Noah’s birth that circle with abandon like seagulls after a street fair. What if I had chosen to have children earlier, before my 30s? What if I hadn’t rushed back into the pursuit of pregnancy after my miscarriage, waited the recommended length of time for my hormones to reset? What if I hadn’t drunk the wine on my 33rd birthday before I knew I was pregnant again, because for some reason I’d thought it unlikely I’d get pregnant again so quickly during that time of hormonal flux. What if I’d simply decided children were not for me, and the seductive tick of my biological clock and the desire and responsibility I’d felt to make my husband a father hadn’t swayed me. Still, the “what if” of having had more children still haunts me. In this way, I know I have done life wrong. And I know I have done wrong by Noah.

Noah has made two piles of floor tiles. I suggest he might want to make more piles, sort by color. There are some days when he is up for the challenge of matching like items. I know he can do it at school as that is a kudos he receives regularly. But not today. He has tried to link one set of tiles, like puzzle pieces, but it’s too hard for him to align the tabs. He’s complicating his play in a way that would be considered dead simple by any child over the age of one: he’s crossed the room to collect more tiles to bring them over to those he has already stacked. It seems ridiculous that I’m proud he’s decided to extend his play in this way, that this is evidence that he identifies that there are more tiles to be had, that the room is big and even if he can’t see the extra tiles in front of him, he knows they are there. But it also seems like a sound observation. I am my own Jane Goodall, and I am neutral in my assessment of this rare being interacting with objects.

Noah’s world is small, his environment contained. Years of therapy have done little to expand his instincts with regard to space and possibility. There are a million small instances that I observed when he was very young that added up, like Tetris on its slowest speed, to my understanding of his natural limits. We dangled toys from the arching handle of his car seat, but he never reached out to touch them. He heard airplanes, but even if I got him to tip his head up toward the sky, he had no way of understanding where and what he was looking for. If someone calls his name, even someone he loves, who excites him, he smiles to himself rather than reacts. Some people process this as a lack of social skill; but we know his challenges are more nuanced than that. When he looks up, or to the side, his eyes twitch, a condition called nystagmus, and security and stability, comes from staying focused on what is right in front of him. When he stretches out his arm, he doesn’t seem to know where it is in space. And so, it becomes all of our responsibility to be the mountain that comes to Mohammad, and as I said above, that can be a burden when the mountain has shit to do.

It’s likely true for all children born in the early ’00s, but documenting Noah’s childhood rather rapidly changed from us pasting pictures in a baby book, to recording hand-held videos of him eating his first foods, interacting with his dogs, taking his first steps, and storing those little cassettes in a desk drawer to someday transfer onto DVDs, to movies and pictures accumulating on iPhones, ScanDisks, and out there in the cloud. It feels somehow more dismissive in Noah’s case. His progress is so slow that we’ve run out of accomplishments to document. He is twelve years old and has spent a half hour this morning stacking foam mat tiles, and I am pleased and find it a moment worthy of documentation.

I am pleased enough that I have edged into the room, seated myself on the couch with a coffee, and started to record this play session. I think to myself, if I posted this video on Facebook, it would be the most boring any of my friends could sit though if they committed themselves to it. And what would I type in the status update? “Say something about this video” the app instructs. Do I write that this video portrays Noah as he really is? That I have captured what it is like to raise a child whose progress is 13 minutes of self-motivated play regardless of what that play is? That this is as much progress as we’ve achieved in 12 years? That these moments of quiet meditation are more about me and less about him, about how I’ve fought to find an emotional equanimity that allows me to see and feel and know, but not see and feel and know too much. My practice has led me to identifying and stepping back from the edge.

Last weekend, I played in a tennis tournament, and doing so always requires me to perform some cursory small talk with my opponent before each match. And because these are women about my same age, 35-45ish, the usual topics are work and children. What do you do? Oh, that sounds interesting. Do you have kids? Yes, one son. Only one? Yes. (Some people make a sigh of regret here, which I always think is a bit presumptuous.) How old is he? Twelve. Oh, that’s a great age, does he play tennis too? No, he’s not really very coordinated. So he’s more of a video game kid? Well, he does like his movies, and he has his favorite shows. Then, does he play an instrument? No, he likes music, but is more into listening.

I prevaricate not so much any more because I’m afraid to talk about my son, afraid of the emotions that would well up unbidden, though that certainly was the case for a long time. I hedge my answers now because I hate to disappoint people. I hate to be the person who brings that into the conversation. And by that, I mean…whatever having a special needs kid might mean to that person. Maybe fear. Maybe even horror. Maybe judgment. Likely discomfort. Likely some embarrassment. Likely some sympathy. Definitely some awkwardness. Rare has been the occurrence of someone having a like story, an “I’ve been there” look to share with me. And so I deflect. Ask them about their kids, and in an about-face of my usual narcissism, I listen and ask questions. That is good practice too.

In my second tennis match of the day, my opponent told me about her two daughters, eleven and thirteen. The eldest is laid back and cool. The youngest is a drama-queen who obsesses about over-performing. She says the younger auditioned for a part in the school play and never got a callback, so spent the weekend lamenting, anguished, with her mother doing dancing-bear antics to try get her to look at the situation from a different angle. Maybe she did so well that she didn’t need to perform a second audition! (Which turned out to be true.)

While tamping down the voice in my head that wants to goad me into feeling sorry for myself because Noah will never, as I did, audition for a play, I told her I completely understood what her daughter was going through. I too was a lamenter, prone to wallow in how I understood reality, rather than choose to believe there were many more plausible scenarios than the most self-punishing and unfair one I’d settled upon, and that didn’t really change until I got much older. She asked me how I’d gotten over it. And I answered truthfully: I had children. I said, nothing teaches you that you can’t control everything more than having children. And she seemed to agree. I didn’t add that nothing teaches you that you can’t control everything more than having a special needs child.

Every parent builds, even unconsciously from a very young age, a whole infrastructure of exceptions and desires around what kind of parent he or she will be, and what kind of child he or she will raise. Even if your goal is to be the antithesis of a helicopter parent, that too is a preconceived goal. My son received a Future President onesie when he was a baby, and I happily dressed him in it. My enjoyment in seeing him wear such bravado wasn’t because I dreamed he’d someday be President, but because it felt like a symbol of his limitless potential. But that whole dreamscape that gets built over years of watching idyllic family-based sit-coms, judging your friends as they have children and raise them differently that you believe you would, worrying before you even give birth over Montessori versus traditional early education programs, and the like, forgets one thing: the child. With Noah, the only thing I can control is how well I parent him. And, at the risk of sounding the world-wearily know-it-all, that’s true for any parent, or, I believe, should be.

I’ve now recorded 13 minutes of Noah stacking floor tiles. He’s gathered them all from the furthest reaches of our living room. I’ve recorded his progress largely because it is progress, from the formation of a desire to the attainment: stack all the floor tiles into two somewhat uniform stacks. (I won’t know until a minute later that the end goal was to pick the piles up and hurtle himself and them across the room.) My son is 12 this year, and with practice I’ve learned not to hate myself, fate, a world full of expectations, or even him, like some everlasting duck-duck-goose blame game, and to sit comfortably with a reality I would never have chosen for either of us. I have this story to tell, and so I do.

I won’t tell you I’ve achieved a state of peace. I still wish we as humans didn’t celebrate birthdays at all, because then I wouldn’t have to confront what having a 12 year old with the skills of a 1-5 year old means. And I won’t tell you that fear of the future doesn’t haunt me to a degree that still occasionally dips its toe into mental instability. But I will ask you, should I ever upload the video, to watch for the full 13 minutes. To have the patience to wait it out. (Even if it’s to catch a glimpse of a black and white beasty roar-yawn his way past the screen in search of a dog treat when he hears my husband rustling in the kitchen.) Sit, and watch, and see what I get to see.