I love my son most when we are alone and he is quiet. I hold him–a heft and thickness to his limbs now that surprises me though I’ve watched him grow, inspected him even, twelve years now–against my chest and the ache of loving him burns through my center like I’ve downed a tequila shot and eaten the lime whole. I want to fold him back into my belly, return him to his point of origin. I could be his chrysalis. I could rebirth him and give him a chance. I could rebirth him and give myself another chance. It’s not romantic, but this special kind of motherhood rarely is. It’s pulsing blood in my jaw and nerves revealed only in the twitch of my eyelid. It’s still shit and drool and too-sharp nails and sometimes bites and lots of shame, and twelve years of tiredness that makes my body ache and all I can do is lay myself on the floor and wait to feel myself again. I’ve read that the center of a star is held together only by the force of its own gravity.
Tag: disability
Hysteria
I lift heavy weights because I can no longer lift my son. I’ve grown stronger over the past year: my quads have a stone-like quality under the skin and fat. I think of myself as an ice cream cake. Hard center, soft exterior. I enjoy the bulge in my bicep. I like to flex and find the crease between bicep and deltoid. But I still cannot lift him. I work at the gym for a month or more and I injure myself. Elbow, wrist, knee, back, and have to pull back my training for awhile until that injured part of my body heals, and then it’s up the hill again. But I still can’t lift him. He is now 100 pounds which is a lot but still little, and yet like the proverbial sack of potatoes, N doesn’t know how to use his own body to help me. I think of figure skating pairs, the man lifts the woman, but it is the woman’s core, the woman’s complimentary tensity, that assists in the lift and lightens the man’s load. N just hangs, an armful of wet towels. There isn’t one moment of hysteria; it’s a slow drip of hand-numbing anxiety: this could be it. No matter how hard I train, how strong I become, I might never be able to lift him again.
And again I can see her on the distant shore, the maybe other me who might decide not to feed her son in order to keep him small, in order to deny him a growing body because his mind does not keep apace. She thinks of him as a baby, she thinks of him as a toddler, she thinks of him even last year when he was eleven, when she could still lift him. No, that’s not right: she wishes for him to be again eleven. Is this empathy for the woman who tosses her child off a bridge, or the man who engages a shotgun to keep the future from ever arriving for his child and then himself? Is my fear of the future and my inability to keep lifting my spirits, my hope, just hysteria? There was a time when it was still ok for him to go and play on the playground, because he was small. There was a time when it was still ok for him to climb into a shopping cart and ride instead of walk. He is small for his age, but it is only a matter of time until he is taller, thicker than she is, stronger, and she fears that’s when the hyena she hides will burst from behind her hyoid and devour all hope. She is certain that when he is 14 and 17 and 22, he will still want to play on the playground, ride in a shopping cart: it makes her sick how his world will get smaller as he grows, it makes her pulse with a keening need to keep him to stay small. For there to be symbiosis between his mind and his body. She is a mother who might do whatever it takes to stop time.
So instead I try to grow. The longer I can lift him, the longer he can stay little, and there is little chance I will become her.
The Shadow
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
~T.S.Eliot
One of the habits, or maybe disciplines, that you develop as a special needs parent is to look on the bright side, or at least, focus on the positives while rationalizing away what’s painful. Another of the habits is to be selective in how much of the shadow you are willing to show publicly. It’s a fine line between owning your emotions and being owned by them, but I suppose that’s what being an adult is largely about. I’m so proud of the kid that Noah has become, and I’m so relieved at his excitement at getting back to school. For how hard it is for Noah to learn, he loves learning.
For me, it was a hard, hard day. 6th grade should be an accomplishment– middle-school! tween! can you believe it? –but instead it’s a reminder that my 6th grader is a preschooler, and my preschooler is a 6th grader. And I think it’s important to…oh, I don’t know…sometimes show that it’s possible, but also a hell of a lot of work, to hold both the joy and the sorrow of my child’s life in my heart at one time.
All of us, at some point in our lives, confront loss of control over that which we desperately want, or at the very least, confront our inability to insure that the lives of those we love most will be as ideal as we wish for them. I hope Noah has a kick-ass 6th grade year, and I will, no doubt, figure out once again how to celebrate the ways that he gives so much more than he takes–which is really all we can ask of ourselves and our kids.
But today? Today is about making it through the hurt instead of denying that it’s there.
Rough Drafts Only 