The Least We Can Do

August 4, 2020August 4, 2020 ~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

We sent our son to school today. Even as the coronavirus rages through the US, and not insignificantly through our city, and the debate about opening schools and returning students to classrooms also rages. It’s not yet the dog days of August, but our school is offering special education students two weeks of preparatory classes. It’s only for two hours a day, so there’s that. These classes are for assessing the “summer slide” experienced by the special ed children. More like a Covid slide since the schools were closed in the spring and as hard as we and the teachers tried, what passed for virtual lessons for Noah hardly passed as learning. What we learned was that he has difficulty engaging with a screen. The teachers and kids coming at him via Zoom are not much different from the characters on his favorite TV shows. They are there for him to watch, not to communicate with. That’s not to say he didn’t try, but you could tell that the concept was too abstract for him. And for a child with significant vision issues, focusing on a screen that is often too dark or uses screen-share graphics that are too small, the finer points of a lesson evade him. And when it’s a struggle for us as parents to even keep him upright during the lesson — he kept wanting to lay down, such was the struggle to concentrate — there was little more achieved than a hefty dose of frustration by all. No amount of cheerful cajoling could make the effort feel valuable and instead set us up for a miserable rest of the day.

Our son is 15 years old and cannot read or write. His vision and his mobility are impaired. He cannot identify all of the letters of the alphabet and something in his brain is so circuitous that even though he knows his colors, he often says the wrong one first and needs to be prompted to correct his answer. The second time he is nearly always right, so there’s that. We have flashcards and we have a lightbox and we have endless containers of crafting materials to use for counting. But every home teaching session is like opening a new jar of pickles. You know your hands are strong enough to twist off the cover, but you immediately feel flummoxed and beaten by the sheer impossibility of getting a grip. There are better analogies I could use. Every day with a special needs child is Sisyphean. There is no reaching the apex of the mountain and finding a resting place to enjoy the view. But you can’t live with yourself day in and day out if you don’t try.

We have debated long and hard about sending Noah back to school for these hours. They don’t matter. He won’t get a grade. He won’t magically learn all he has never been able to learn. He will get to interact with people other than his parents, and god knows he needs that. And he will be able to participate in activities with the pretense of learning, and he enjoys that too. If I sound pessimistic about his abilities, I prefer to think I’m realistic, and in the special needs world, realism can sometimes read like a loss of hope. But really it’s having found a middle path. While I am not a practicing Buddhist — my temperament makes it difficult to be a practicing anything since I abhor repetitive work, and it is not lost on me that it is this temperament that makes it difficult to live with a cognitively disabled child who needs repetition day in and day out — I have absorbed some of its instruction while searching for ways to make peace with Noah’s limitations. The middle path avoids extremes, is located somewhere between “eternalism and annihilation”, all or nothing. Much like a therapist may warn against “catastrophizing”, or the tendency to think that the worst case is the inevitable case. More simply put, I try not to bang my head against the brick wall of his disabilities while I also simply keep trying to try.

The media messaging around Covid is so extreme that it can be challenging to identify a rational response to creating a life during the pandemic. We have new parameters, and yet, don’t we always have parameters with which we must deal? Of course we have spent much of the past few months quarantined in our house with very few outings, most of them outside. We have made an exception for outdoor physical activity — going to a park, a beach, a tennis court — because outdoors activity is deemed nearly 2O times safer than indoor activity. (20x safer than what?) And we have made an exception for Noah’s therapy three times a week. Even that seems like we were somehow violating what felt like new societal rules. That we were being frivolous with risk, risk which we might mitigate by wearing masks, washing our hands, cleaning our fruits and vegetables, staying away from other people unless those people are also dedicated to taking all safety precautions. But because I don’t see the virus as a temporary thing, something that will suddenly be vanquished by September or January, all of the behavioral adjustments we have made are now a question of endurance. Not only how long can a person tolerate quarantine? But what is the quality of life that person has during a year’s long quarantine?

What does absence do to us? What is the long-term unintended consequences of a child who doesn’t have anywhere safe to be or any food to eat if the schools don’t open? What hard-earned skills will Noah lose if he doesn’t go back to school for 6 months when he is not the kind of child who can instigate play or use technology? If we go and visit Noah’s grandparents, will he and they benefit more from the love than they lose risking infection? Of course no death is acceptable and becoming inured to the deaths caused by the coronavirus is not a way to be a human in this world. But isn’t death inevitable? Can we escape that one true fact of being human? Every day that we are alive we mitigate risks and still actively participate in the world. When we drive our cars, we accept that on the rare occasion a semi could cross the line into our lane. When we swim in the lake, we accept that on the rare occasion an undertow could sweep us away. When we attend a public event, we accept that on the rare occasion the bandshell could collapse, or a gunman could be lurking, or a drug could be slipped into our drink. To believe we have control over our mortality is to ignore what it is to be human.

Since Noah was born, we have been negotiating with his mortality more than our own. First as a baby, like all first-time parents with a new baby you simply hope to keep them alive. But then at 11 months when he began to have seizures, every day was a day during which he could have a seizure and we could lose him. Some days his death seemed a near inevitability. It was safer to keep him at home under our watch because we knew the signs, could respond more quickly than could distracted teachers or unprepared assistants. As he grew older, even as the risk of something catastrophic happening seemed to increase — the bigger he got, the harder he might literally fall. And as his condition worsened we had to make decisions about medications. Medications that made him ill, or lethargic, or had long-term consequences. These aren’t considerations most parents have to engage with when wanting to insure their child’s safety. And the burden of those decisions doesn’t make us special, but it does make us tired, and well-practiced. Will Noah contract the coronavirus because we decided to send him to school? We can’t know. And if he does, will he spread it to us? Will any one of us have a disastrous reaction to the virus or will it pass through our house like a bad case of the flu? We can’t know. Will the virus cause Noah to have a fever high enough to reignite his seizures which have been under control for years? We can’t know that either. But in the absence of answers, the extremes (eternalism or annihilation) cannot be the only alternative.

None of our options are good ones. If we keep him at home are we contributing to a continued loss of skills? If we send him are we contributing to the spread of a virus that could kill one of us or someone we interact with? Will what Noah learned in school today make the risk worth it? Do we even know what that risk is? Should we let our fears determine that the risk factor is 99% if it is actually 9%? If going to school today is not notably more risky than Noah going to school on any given day, because the protocols are being carefully followed, why would we not give him that opportunity to grow? If Noah gets ill, if we get ill, and we regret our choice, is that so dissimilar to any regret that results from struggle? The message will be that we could have made a different choice, that we could have avoided exposure. (Even as I write this, my husband is downstairs cleaning the basement bedroom and bathroom in preparation for possible isolation when one of us gets ill.) But we can apply that thinking to any risk. We could have avoided getting into the car on that day, wading into the water on that day, going to that event on that day.

So we are left to trust the measures that the school and more importantly the teachers are taking. There are masks and face shields. The kids will be kept in groups of three with two teachers per group to keep them separated. They will be taught things most of us have been relearning since the spring — how long to wash your hands, what 6″ of separation actually looks like (apparently there is a song and dance), how to keep your hands off your face. His high school is in a fairly new building so I assume has decent ventilation and filtration. And I also assume that the custodians have had the whole summer to perfect their cleaning regimen. But I also know that Noah does not have control over his body. He touches any and all surfaces. He most often eats with his hands. Sometimes he drools. So when he comes home we will soap up his hands. We will likely become obsessed with taking his temperature and our own. We will keep him at home otherwise so that he doesn’t expose anyone but us, so he doesn’t bring the virus back to the school, to the teachers, the other kids. We will keep our risk-taking as much to ourselves as we can. It’s the least we can do. And we will hope that that is enough.

To Swim is to Fly

October 7, 2019October 7, 2019 ~ 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.

On the Surface

August 18, 2018January 3, 2019 ~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

Mark is hosting Dungeons and Dragons tonight. Since taking disability after cancer treatment, D&D is Mark’s most effective treatment against the depression that can sneak up on him if he doesn’t arm himself with a purpose. Noah likes to sit with the gamers (Noah signs “friends” by alternating his index fingers, laying one over the other) at the card tables set up on the back porch. When the players laugh, Noah laughs, though he doesn’t understand what they are saying, why what they are saying is funny. Occasionally he takes a turn rolling the dice, but usually he watches his iPad, one ear on the conversation, waiting for words he recognizes, waiting for laughter.

Tonight Noah has been given a stack of blank copier paper and a blue highlighter. He bends close over his work like a jeweler inspecting a tray of diamonds. His nose almost touches the paper, he is both so intent but also so almost-blind. We still don’t understand his vision issues. He is significantly near-sighted, but being close to a screen or book also helps focus his eyes, still the nystagmus that makes his eyes flicker and dodge. A variety of examinations by a variety of experts have yielded no concrete answers, no applicable strategies. Some tell us to try glasses; some say glasses won’t really help and will only confuse his adapting perceptions. Noah can’t tell us much. He just adapts.

I have walked past the door to the porch several times to check if he’s being disruptive to the game, but he is sitting quietly next to Mark, diligently drawing. I post a picture on Facebook of him in such studious pose, label it: Dungeon Master’s Apprentice. The picture gets many likes. But that captured moment is like so many: on the face of it, Noah is accomplishing something that looks so like what other children are doing. I post a picture of him riding a horse like he is taking a lesson, but it is hippotherapy. I post a picture of us at the pool, but after years of lessons he still cannot swim and we stay in the shallower end. I post a video of Noah ‘running’ the 50 yard dash at a track and field event for his school district’s special needs children. He crosses the finish line though he comes in last, and I am proud because he mostly stayed in his lane, didn’t fall, and ran the whole length without an adult to guide him. But that is not competition; that is participation. And for us, it is enough, but it isn’t what it appears to be.

When I share pictures like these, usually adorned with a clever quip or positive message, I am sharing my son, and my love for my son, and our adventures as a family, with my friends and our family and many acquaintances. This is as it should be. But each time I share these pictures I am also lying. The lie is the one I tell myself in trying to convince myself that my heart doesn’t ache with sadness over the limitations of Noah’s accomplishments documented as celebrations.

I know I am not alone in telling this lie. Social media is full of them. Lies of omission told by the abused, the abusers, the lost, the lonely, the insecure, the in-debt, and the unexceptional. What we present is not what we are. What we present is only what we wish for.

At 9pm I decide it’s time to retrieve Noah from the porch despite his diligent tasking. His face and hands are littered in blue highlighter graffiti. He grabs for his stack of papers, maybe 7 or 8 sheets, says, “Wook!”, proud of his art. I oooh and ahh, and I try so very hard to ignore–no, transcend–the fact that every sheet is covered with roughly-drawn circles, the only shape in 13 years he has learned to draw. Pages and pages of almost-circles.

There should be a word for this feeling of almost. Bittersweet feels too tender, a word for reverie. I want a word that is pride and sorrow intertwined. I want a word, a fresh addition to the limits of language, so I can claim this state. At the same time, I berate myself, think a better person–a better mother–would have by now shed her sorrow, managed her disappointment, and internalized the optimistic messaging she posts along with her Facebook photos. I adore my child, and I am so proud of his half-words, and small gains, and his pages of almost-circles, but I too remain almost-complete, my mother-heart more break than burst.