SWEET ANIMAL

And Then I Was Attacked

2011-12-13T19:24:00.001-08:00

The other night I was up at Hunter working on my paper; I'd been there about five hours and my eyeballs were starting to sting and crust over. It was only about 8:30 but as usual I'd been going full bore since 6 a.m. We'd been to a Cub Scouts hike and breakfast with Santa, swim lesson... then five hours of screen time on the paper... I was toast. It was time to pack it up.

It was pleasantly cold out. Lexington Ave. was very alive with tourists and people who have a life after dinner. I think there was some bizarre "dress up as Santa" thing happening in the city because we'd seen 20-somethings throughout the day in red fuzzy suits; literally hundreds of them, maybe more, swarmed the South Street Seaport which Bud and I could see from the bottom of the FDR as we came out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel coming into Manhattan from scout camp on Staten Island. And they were still out carousing, ringing jingle bells menacingly. I called my dad to express my relief at finally having found a topic for my paper, and to report on the kids' day. He offered to drive in to the city to pick me up, but I said No Thanks.

It was odd to step onto the first of several escalators down to the F train alone; Moopy and I do this four days a week together around 4 p.m. And I hadn't done schoolwork at Hunter at night in ages, favoring my local McD's instead. But it had been convenient, we'd had the kids there to their swim lesson, so i'd stayed. The first level by the token booth looked even dingier and more red-tiled-hellish than usual. The second escalator was broken, and I lumbered down to the mezzanine with my big bag and my laptop in it's hot pink case. As I stepped onto the last escalator down to the platform, (are there three escalators or four? i think there are four but suddenly don't feel sure) a flood of people, half of them demonic post-adolescent santas with black sunglasses and toy guns, surged up from a train that had just emptied and pulled out.

Shit. Saturday night on the F; there was no knowing how long I'd wait for the next one.

I would not, actually, wait at all. I walked off the escalator and saw I was not alone on the platform. Three young women, maybe they were 18 or 20 years old, were huddled in the corner of a bench, with a map in front of them, trying to dissuade a man who appeared homeless, (he was filthy, wearing broken shoes, he stank of urine and alcohol even from a distance, and pushed a small shopping cart full of plastic bags and news papers,) from trying to take their map and who knows what else; he swiped and lunged and yammered at them as they reared back, their faces frozen in perverse smiles. I don't know why I immediately thought they were foreign but I was right; they turned out to be from Chile. They all had on beautiful boots and new looking tight jeans, pea coats, and stylish bags, as if they'd dressed to match on purpose, and they all had long, brown, shiny hair and the kind of clear skin and clear eyes you can't have if you're raised in the pollution of NYC.

The man's arm shot out as he tried to grab the map from them and he said:

"Gimme the map, I'll tell you how to go! You're going to Queens! I will tell you how to go to Queens! Of course you're going to Queens, what are you doing getting on the F train if you ain't going to Queens! Now give me the map!"

The girls swayed and dodged together, clutching the map, as the man tried over and over to grab it from them. In the fifteen seconds I watched them he must have snatched at it about ten quick times. The girls' eyes bulged and they got up from the bench as one, to move away, and the man jumped in front of them, holding his arms out wide so they couldn't pass; the platform at that station is very narrow and there wasn't enough room even to run past him if they'd tried.

He almost plucked the map completely away and the middle girl grabbed it back and it tore. The man closed in on the girls, bringing his arms together as if he would gather them up; behind them a plywood wall concealing construction intruded out into the platform, making it even narrower; they could have run past it single file but he was so close, he could easily have reached out and grabbed one of them, and he was more than ready to do it.

"Girls!" I shouted in exactly my mother's voice, half reprimanding, half delighted to see them. "Girls, come on! Let's go, girls!" I yelled at them, with no real clear idea of what i was doing, other than trying to break up the scene and get the girls moving. They looked up and refroze as I waved at them as if I was on a cruise ship, and the man turned around and stared at me; I kept going toward them with no plan. "Come on girls," i kept saying, as if i was rounding up dogs, hoping i think to startle the man into inaction, but as I got close, he turned his body away from me, wound up, and spun around with his arm straight out and knocked me in the face, almost; i ducked.

"What the fuck, bitch!" he roared at me.

"Girls, RUN!" i screamed, and they did, and I did, and he ran after us , swinging violently with one hand and pushing his shopping cart ahead of him with the other, he was not more than ten or fifteen feet behind us, screaming obscenities and threats. The girls got ahead of me easily and leaped onto the stairs as the man heaved his shopping cart at us with all his strength and it crashed past me and caught the last girl up in the back of the leg, and she lost her balance for a second, threw herself forward to gain traction and hurtled up the stairs with her friends, the four of us screaming "HELP! HELP! HELP!"

As the shopping cart crashed and spilled over on its side with a shattering echo, the man caught up with me, and grabbed me by the back of the coat and then by the arm, about six feet before the foot of the stairs. I wrenched free of him and swung back with my laptop so i could hit him with it, not convinced at all that this would work, and considering in the lightening in my mind at the same second just dropping the laptop and throwing myself at him and pushing him over the edge of the platform onto the tracks, but i didn't have to; astoundingly, he let go.

If he had truly intended to attack me he would have done it; as it was he stopped short.

I ran like hell up the stairs.

Idiotic people stared down at the girls and at me as I caught up with them, the four of us still screaming HELP until we realized that the man had stopped chasing us. In Spanish and English we instinctively started shouting at women crossing the mezzanine to go down to the platform, "Don't go down there! There's a dangerous man!" People just stopped and looked at us as if we were incomprehensible. Our breath was rasping. One girl started to cry. The three of them began thanking me, and yet, I felt sickly responsible for the whole thing; if I hadn't intervened maybe nothing would have happened.

By the time we got to the first mezzanine just below street level we found out that another woman had seen the whole thing, beat us up the stairs and reported it. A lone, languid cop showed up and asked us with disinterest, "Is somebody being disorderly?"

"Disorderly?" i said in horror to the cop. "He could have fucking killed us!"

The cop stared at me for a moment, then turned, giving me his back, to take information from the girls. I ascended to the street, my hands shaking, my throat sore from screaming, furious.

This fucking city.

I took the R home.

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SHORT STORY

2011-11-30T20:15:00.000-08:00

Bus

The headache that Robert gives Nancy by just his being there in the driver’s seat, oblivious, is almost deadly. Robert and the diesel fumes bring on searing migraines that make her nauseous, that blind her with pain, and that simply make her want to cry; that’s what it boils down to. She wants to cry. It’s Robert and the fumes.

Because ultimately the diesel revving, the Rn-rn-Rn-rn-Rn-rn-Rn-rn that echoes in her head for hours after a tour, that reverbs in her sleep, becomes soothing, by the third or fourth hour; it actually helps. She stretches out on the gurney most tours, at some point, for maybe ten minutes, sometimes half an hour, and opens her ears, allowing the revving to massage her brain. Because it’s not the sound that makes her sick, no, it’s the smell, like smoke and metal, the filth of gas stations, the sweat and menthol of Colby in the engine shop, God! He’s another asshole, with his attitude and his dark laugh, his knotted, greased-up knuckles and dangling silver combination wrenches. Nancy burns when she sees him, through and through, the core of her body immolates on sight of him and she would go, she would run for one chance, one hour with him, if only he’d cease and desist the bullshit go-rounds with the wife he says he doesn’t have, if he’d stem the flow of children through the shop whom he claims don’t belong to him. What the… fine. This also adds to her migraines.

The worst of it though is the smell, the smell… the fumes circling her skull and invading her nose so redolently that she can’t stand to hang out near the bus, she can not just stand there outside it; she has to stay in, with the AC on, or, stand inside a Dunkin’s or a McD’s or an ER, looking out the window at the bus, as if it was a gigantic dog tied to a meter, waiting, the rig, the am-bo-lance as Keelah calls it, because she can so truly feel the engine poisons entering her lungs that what it is, this obliterating ambulance life, makes everything else seem pointless.

If that takes root then she is fucked. Ambulance as God is a Hannibal Lecter you don’t want inside your head. Nancy loves to lay on the cool gurney between two and four a.m. and imagine herself as Clarice Starling, as better than Jodi Foster in ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ the diesel rumble shaping her into a brilliant candidate for the FBI, catching a killer on her sinewy instincts, alone. Keelah kicks her awake on the gurney and hands her a pint of fried rice soaked in duck sauce, “Lightin’ it up, lady.”

What beauty will they see? What heartbreak? What systemic abuse of persons, what chronic despair? Why not smoke? Why not fuck the mechanics?

Why NOT?

But it’s Robert tonight, not Keelah, and everything is worse. His blubbery jowls covered in sparse reddish beard look hopelessly pubic to her, like the mystical body part of an overweight hermaphrodite, bulbous and private, and she wishes up high in the keening of her brain that she never thought of the phrase because now it will stick; she’ll see it every time she looks at his face, which she tries not to do.

Bulbous privates.

What’d I DO to DESERVE THIS?

How she hates him; it’s too much. His greasy glasses. His plastered down hair. His gut. That he’s thirty-five and looks fifty and likes it. His high-water uniform pants that bunch up his ass and his too-tight belt, that he actually wears all his bars on his shirt and all his pins and that the shirt is shiny from ironing, that he wears a white dickey underneath with his initials embroidered on the collar. What an ASS. His tool belt. His Nextel. His Swiss army knife. His badge.

Get a LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFFE! She screams in her mind at him. You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re embarrassing ME!

His speech impediment, the salivacious L’s, the swallowed words; that she must ask him to repeat himself because she is half deaf in her left ear and he sits on her left because he drives, he always drives, contributes to Robert’s gratifying conviction that Nancy is a moron.

Robert has worked for St. Agnes Medical for thirteen years; it’s a nearly unheard of record, the distinction of which he is welcome to; you don’t sit on your ass at St. Ag’s for years and years, even as a medic, unless you can’t get into nursing or medical or PA school or just can’t be bothered to do anything else with your life, and there are guys like that. They’re all obese with self-loathing and married to nurses who despise them. All women leave Ag’s and only return as nurses. Five years at St. Ag’s on a rig should be the most or there’s something radically wrong with you. Nancy is rounding the corner into year two and killing herself ready for her medic in a month. Many say it’s too soon; fuck ‘em.

But good medics agree; you should work as an EMT for three years before medic school. You should be able to run certain codes in your sleep. And it’s true that Nancy is short on experience. She hasn’t had a birth in the field or a gunshot wound. And because it’s the city, where hospitals are both as frequent and as excellent as dog shit, she has not had to use her BCLS, her Basic Cardiac Life Support skills, at all. She hasn’t had to ride in on compressions, clear an airway or make a splint. It’s just scoop and run, scoop and run; take a history and vitals and roll them on in.

Nancy is the magic number, she has learned; she is 33. That’s very old for a woman in EMS, Keelah has explained, “That’s why nobody likes you,” while Nancy’s face burned. And Nancy is not wild about adding another two years of living with her father to the drive-by devastations of her life. She wants to be a medic. She needs the money. She studies hard. But she’s afraid, and on rotations for skills practice, she’s way behind. She hasn’t had to run deuce IVs. She hasn’t had a burn or a cardiac crash. She hasn’t had to use the paddles. And it feels like nobody wants to help her.

“Why aren’t you a nurse by now?”

Mind your own business, ass.

It’s very late in the game. She’s down to the wire. She has a month to get her skills signed off on and has only now realized that it’s best to ride with the same medics over and over, and to stick to the old guys, who don’t want to do it any more and are delighted to allow you to fuck it up. They laugh at her, out loud, but they willingly sign her reports. It’s not that she’s bad looking; it’s that she’s desperate, and everybody knows it, except, apparently, Colby, who they all call The Cheese, or he likes her that way, panicked and sweaty when he flashes her his black-brown eyes and offers up a slick carburetor or a limp, flapping fan belt she can stick her needle in, if that helps, smirking like a dare, when he’s not on his cell or ignoring her.

So here’s the choice.

She’s on till 8 a.m., and can sneak in with Circus Mike and Little Eddie from eight to twelve, which can be good, as in busy, on a Saturday morning, and possibly get three or four of the 8 needle sticks she’s missing, and, seeing as it’s not a real rotation, because you’re not allowed to ride along back to back after working, Circus Mike will line up the carbon copies of her last report and fill in the missing sticks; no one will go back and count how many IVs wheeled into the St. Ag’s ER or who did them; QC can only go so far without imploding. And then she can hang out at Woodhull all day Sunday by the FDNY rigs, breathing in the diesel, studying for the medic, waiting for a fire, and if she gets a burn the jolly vollies will sign her report and back-time her a shift which she can make up to them next month, after the medic. Which means that, if she hangs on till twelve today, she’ll have to ask Robert to bring the bus back to the garage without her, and which also means she’ll miss Colby, and then she’ll have to run to be in class by one, stay awake in there till four, stay on for skills practice till maybe six, run home to her dad, eat, take the dog out, and then try, try, to study protocols till ten or eleven, and be in class for skills super early on Sunday in order to be out in time to make the most of waiting for a fire.

Or.

She can ask Robert to let her try all the sticks tonight and even, if they get one, a tube; that’s a tube in a throat to reinflate a lung. This is allowed, to get your skills at work, as long as you’re riding with a senior medic, which Robert never, ever tires of announcing that he is. Either way, Nancy needs something from Robert, and he sits in the driver’s seat even though he’s not supposed to, all strained shirt buttons and self satisfaction in spite of the fact that Nancy is supposed to drive, the EMT drives the medic, that’s how it’s done, but Robert rolls his buttocks with delight when she asks to drive and he consistently responds, “Don’t be personal about it; I’m not crazy about women drivers, that’s all.”

If Robert gives her the sticks, she’ll be changing in the garage bathroom at 8:05 because Robert never ends a tour late, and Colby will come into the bathroom and kiss her and leave grease on her breast which she will not wash off in the shower. If Robert gives her the sticks, she’ll get the hell out of work in time for three precious hours of sleep before class.

If Robert gives her the sticks, she’ll get the sticks; she won’t miss, because he won’t get in the way. He won’t help her with sticks, or tubes, unless she asks. Robert loves to breathe on Nancy, he loves to lay his meaty palm on her back during anything mundane; she could be putting a band-aid on a nine-year-old and he’d look over her shoulder and direct, his French-fry breath hot on her. The skills, however, when she’s learning, when she must fly solo and do it right and once, are when Robert stands back, breathes easy, and lets Nancy live. Because Robert loves EMS so much that he can’t bear even to allow his own stout, righteous self to get in the way of anyone else ascending to medic and bringing the gospel of emergency medical transport to those in need. For Robert, collecting needle sticks on your report is a sacred right. They are not his to obfuscate with misogyny and mind-fuck.

Nancy clears her throat.

Robert says, “You wanna try sticks tonight?”

Nancy lets out a long unintentional whistle of relief. “That would be great, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” says Robert, “if you – I think it’s good. Because I looked in your book and you’re behind. If you don’t mind my saying. Because otherwise you’ll be here till noon tomorrow and frankly, I don’t sanction that. Especially because I’ve heard of Circus Mike signing off on good efforts, which as far as I’m concerned amounts to manslaughter. So no I don’t mind. Let’s try you out. Let’s get you up to speed. Would you like me to do flashcards with you in between?”

Nancy is aghast, as stupid as she knows it is. Robert has looked into her backpack before and found sanitary napkins and asked her throughout a tour if she would like to stop in the ladies room for a hygiene check.

“Thank you,” she says in a low growl. “But no, no flashcards. Just the sticks.”

“All righty,” says Robert, turning the key in the ignition. “Buckle up.”

And off they go.

Pissed Off

2011-11-20T22:53:00.000-08:00

Defensive? Confrontational? Wonder where he gets it...

As Thanksgiving approaches, I feel I have a lot to be irritated about. The writer who accused me of being ungracious and elitist because I’m not including her agenda in my book, that was one. The mysterious bus strike is another, which’ll be announced, or not, probably around 6:55 a.m., which is about when my son actually gets ON the bus, which may or may not be here for him to board, thanks a bunch, because kids with Asperger’s Syndrome love it when their routine dissolves and their mother stares at them in blank dismay.

But staring in blank dismay seems to be the order of the evening; staring at my laptop screen, actually, and not at any real person, which just underscores the volatility (as in fleeting, flying away, particulate, rather than unstable or dangerous) of the interchanges rendering me so… pissed off. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just pissed off. For no good reason.

What is a good reason to be pissed off? Somebody crashed into our parked car once, our old car, cracked the radiator, and didn’t leave their number; that pissed me off. We used to have a neighbor who lived under us and would pray and sing and speak in tongues as loud as she could at 2 a.m. then slam the door in my face and call me a bloody-handed Jew (whatever that is) when I asked her to stop; that pissed me off a lot. This is the concrete stuff of life in New York; there’s plenty of meat and potatoes piss-off to go around. Shit happens all the time.

But on the internet, nothing actually happens, so when I get pissed off here, I feel like an idiot. My tirade about Tina Fey was like this; she’ll never read it, she’ll never care, and some people who DID read it thought I was certifiable.

Yet here I am.

I can’t identify the sources of any of this, which pisses me off, because I don’t want to piss anyone off. So I’ll just say that I encountered someone who came to the conclusion that they would medicate their child with behavior problems, because their doctor said that if they did not, special ed would be their only option, the last resort!

Oh! did that piss me OFF!

From the top... I’ve been an outsider all my life. I got that message, you’re different, you don’t belong, early on. It was said to me by, and about, my lefty Jewish family in a gentile, conservative neighborhood, and it developed as an identity by association, to my Autistic sister, who was the only local disabled person I knew, other than the one boy with Downs Syndrome, who was the town pet.

I’m sure I suffered from undiagnosed anxiety as a child because I was afraid of everyone, and I probably had some Aspie-like traits; I always felt much safer with adults, who would affirm me for my intelligence and vocabulary, than with kids who thought I was a pudgy weirdo and told me so to my face all day long at school, and who wouldn’t let me play with them in the cul de sac on the weekend, not least because I was afraid to ride my bike fast and didn’t think running, screaming, punching, and falling was a good game.

By the time I was in college, all I’d figured out was that to some degree I could fit in by copying what I thought other people were doing, which seemed to me to mostly be partying. And I may even have had undiscovered learning disabilities, because as far back as elementary school, words have swam on pages, I could not comprehend even the simplest math, and science and history eluded me. In fact an adulthood friend who knows all this about me once pointed out that maybe the reason I haven’t graduated college yet is that I’m afraid to leave the luxury and welcome of writing and literature classes, where I revel, excel, and am free.

But up till college, my entire experience of school, a good quality, mainstream school in a well-appointed suburb, was one of constant terror. I was aware of kids who performed poorly or had “emotional problems,” (didn’t I?) and were moved to private schools; in fact I begged my mother to do the same for me. I didn’t know what really went on in the private schools, but I had a fantasy that it involved not being made fun of by peers or criticized all day by teachers for not applying myself. Adults’ disappointment made an unbearable impression on me, and I struggled with depression and shit self-esteem well into my adulthood.

So it was in my 30s, that I began to pull myself together; it really started with my dog walking business. I’d hopped from one waitressing or retail job to another over the years, but finally, working at something that belonged only to me, that was the outcome of just my own efforts, skills, and decisions, I started to experience confidence for the first time. My discomfort in the world, my overall self-loathing, just began to abate, bit by bit. I was outside all day. I was in shape. I was with dogs. I didn’t even mind working seven days a week. I got an idea of what it meant to be happy.

Fast forward ten years, to when I would find out that my son has autism; at first I experienced a bizarre hurtling backward through time, as if my whole emergence from an unhappy childhood had been a dream, as if I’d learned nothing, accomplished nothing, was back at square one. Over the ensuing months I would get my head around the fact that my son is not me, nor is he my sister, nor am I my mother, and we have our own path to forge, and honestly, so far, it’s going good.

But one of the reasons it’s going good is because I’m an outsider, I’m used to this shit, and, I’m not actually that impressed anymore with what the regular people are doing. I’ve gotten liberated over the years from the approval of others (for the most part,) and I’m prepared to walk away. So from that perspective, I’m able to see my children's places here not as what will be allowed to them, but as what I help them take for themselves.

New York City, specifically Queens, is not, in fact, a well-appointed suburb with a (as in one) solid school system. In terms of public education, this boro is an out-of-control hodge-podge of kids from all over the world and from every economic strata, going to decent schools in somebody else’s neighborhood, not getting into the good schools in their own neighborhoods, making the best of it in crappy schools, elbowing their way into G&T, sitting tight for charter school seats, and about 20 thousand sets of parents annually having nervous breakdowns.

But where Bud and his needs are concerned, I am reasonably well equipped to say to all that, Fuck it.

What happened to Bud when he tried regular kindergarden was every bit as concrete as the ululating Jesus freak who lived under us in the last building. There was no denying that this boy wouldn’t survive in a mainstream school, despite his nice, solidly high-ish IQ; he has no cognitive problems, in fact he has some strengths. His verbal skills and his gift for nuance, symbolism, and complex narrative are nauseatingly familiar, but that and a metrocard’ll get you on the subway. The behavioral crisis this kid had served a true purpose; it was proof. He’s different. It’s not amorphous, it’s not debatable. He needs a special school, where people are quiet, and there are no bells, and adults don’t shout, and there are no crowds, and where all day long, he reckons, gently, with himself.

And he has that school, and I’m so grateful. I’m mad about Bud, I’m crazy about him, and he deserves to be safe and happy. There is this place, this school, that is like a magical wonderland where smartness and brightness do not rule; his teachers take him as he is, as a whole kid, and they give him what he needs, not just to survive, not in order to get some municipal or federal stamp of approval, but to learn, and to grow as a person.

It’s a special ed school. It’s what’s called a New York State Approved school, which means that, based on evaluations, (which are necessary evils at any specialized school, even if you have all the money it takes to send your child wherever you’d like,) if the DOE’s Committee For Special Education can offer no fit setting for a child with high cognitive function and intensive behavioral support needs, your child can attend, and the DOE will pay.

My son has therapy of one kind or another five days a week. He has gym every day. Do NYC general ed schools have gym every day? My son swims in the school pool once a week and has karate once a week. He brings art home all the time. He’s asked to take responsibility for his poor behaviors and is expected to improve, with counseling, and for his good behavior, he’s rewarded. He has all the help he needs to get all his work done. In a gen.ed. school, he’d be in first grade; in his special ed school, he’s doing first and second grade work, with 7 other kids in his classroom, and as many aides as are needed.

Is every special ed school so ideal? Probably not. Do doctors or other professionals ever represent special ed to parents this way? Definitely not. Which is the one sort of out I can grant to the abject revulsion that flashes on parents’ faces when the option of special ed rears its funky head. Okay; they didn’t know, they didn’t grow up with it, nobody told them. But is that the way it’s done these days, especially here in the city? We just wait around to be told? We don’t research all night into our child’s options, into what choices we may have? We just let the doctor decide? Really?

When I read that someone chooses behavior and mood modifying medications for a child because the doctor said there’s no other way, I get really pissed off. The child in this instance hadn’t tried special ed, they weren’t given a chance. I’ll bet that the parents never even looked into a special needs school, but I don’t know that; I have, however, heard other parents reject the very idea of special ed, saying, “I can’t even go there.” I guess they're afraid they'll never come back.

Or maybe it's something more. I participated in a research study recently, helping therapists help special needs families more effectively. I said that therapists should support parents' autonomy, no matter what, that parents shouldn't be afraid; if they don't like the way their child is being treated at school, if it's not the right place, they should yank the kid right out, and that therapists should support that. People at the study audibly gasped.

"What," I said.

"That's really hard to do," somebody said. "That's a big decision."

Of course it's a big decision! I had to drop out of school when I did it for my kid. But isn't medication a big decision, too?

Or is there some siren call to it, is there some secret wish involved, that the right pill will...

make all the problems go away...

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

I don’t think I have all the answers about myself. I don’t think I have fully parsed what it means to me, why it hurts me, that some parents so desperately want their kids to fit in. Maybe it touches some forever-raw nerve, some off-limits zone where love is conditional, and therefore lost. Maybe I re-experience my parents’ disappointment in me, when I could not bend my narrative imagination into a knack for numbers, when I couldn’t get off my training wheels, or stop being afraid of a ball. Maybe in some ways, Bud’s special needs vindicate or affirm me, and if that’s so, I’m very sorry toward him; I don’t want to get strong on my own son.

At the same time, I really get it that there’s enough about Bud that’s manageable and delightful so that my life with him is relatively easy, now. His chatterboxy style and sense of the absurd is just plain fun to be around, and when I’m fried, he can operate reasonably well on his own; he plays PBS Kids on the computer, and is no longer afraid to write and draw, in fact he loves to (thanks to intensive OT.) Most days he’ll play with his little sister for significant chunks of time before he wants to whack her with a Barbie doll; in fact he’s become able to come to me and say, “She’s annoying me; can you help us please?” which is music. Call all of that pretty normal, but he wasn’t always this way; he is this way now, because of special ed.

When he had his crisis, he was violent. He eloped from the school and ran into traffic, desperate to come home. He lost the power of speech and could only communicate in a rasping, wordless growl. He bit people and had insomnia. He had jolting spasms of Tourette Syndrome. His eyes bulged and he scratched at his skin and sweated and spoke tangentially at times, about things that are not real, and we were not sure he knew it. He beat up the dog, kicked my husband in the balls, was hitting his sister. He was, frankly, out of control.

And of course, of course, I considered putting him on medication at the time; every where we went people told us to do it. I considered it, but deep down, I just felt sure that it wasn’t the answer. I had no evidence that I’d be right, it was my maternal gut instinct. But the educators and therapists, the principle, at the special ed school, agreed with me.

Let’s give him a chance, they said. And, It could be a tough transition, but we’ll handle it.

And they did.

A year later, that school is Bud's second home. His social, coping, and academic skills have come such a long way, because of special ed, and the pace, dimensions, and therapies that go along with it; and it’s free. We didn’t sue anybody, we didn’t go into mediation, we didn’t lay out tens of thousands of dollars, and we also didn’t try to force him to be not himself, to do or live with more than he could bear.

I talk to parents around me all the time, and I read; that’s what parents of young kids in NYC do. We obsess about schools, we compare and compete, we look for ways in, for edges, for leads. I hear about ‘good schools’ in the mainstream that have 25 children in a room with one teacher, where it takes 20 minutes to describe the weather and put the appropriate icon on the board for that day; I hear that the teacher says “Quiet down!” more than she says anything else. I hear that kids who score well on standardized test sit in the back of the room and are ignored or given worksheet after worksheet to keep them busy, that some classes have lunch at 9:30 a.m., that there is no recess because the school can’t afford insurance for their yards, that the children watch “Spongebob” to be kept from running around in the overcrowded lunchroom, that they have no gym, no art, that they spend 10 – 20 minutes of every 45 standing on line.

And I want to ask parents of kids with special needs, have you even considered what this normalcy dream is really about? Is this what is ‘best’ for your struggling child?

I want to ask them, what if special ed school was great, and your kid missed it?

Wouldn’t you be pissed off?

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

BEAUTIFUL KID: Chapter 4

2011-11-09T08:40:00.000-08:00

Evaluation

Early on, when Bud and Moopy were very little, we had tried them at a regular pre-school, by which I mean a school that was chaotic, disorganized, loud, but the only game in town, or so I thought.

It was in a church, a few blocks from our apartment building, and was almost affordable, but Bud and Moopy hated it; 40 children in a pen, divided by collapsible walls for two-, three-, and four-year-old areas, with a gang of disinterested teachers to go around. Bud wanted to stay with the two-year-olds although he was three, because their teacher was the soft-spoken, forgiving one, and he wanted to be near Moopy, but the directors wouldn’t allow it. They advised me to drop him, kiss him, and run, and I tried, but for almost two months, he cried every day until he threw up.

He wouldn’t sit down for art, his teacher told me, he ran around during circle time, refused the potty, was hitting other children and getting hit. Moopy did somewhat better, because she was two and had the kindly teacher, but not much.

I knew I was in trouble when the directors took me out to breakfast and told me, “We think Bud is stuck. We think he needs an evaluation.”

Stuck? I thought. What the fuck? What kind of word is that?

You people are assholes.

I said, “Thank you. I will certainly look into it.”

I grew up with a schizophrenic Autistic sister. NOBODY in MY HOUSEHOLD is getting evaluated for shit.

FUCK OFF.

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What is personal history? What is the point? What is part of the trajectory? What is random? What does it mean to be conscious? What is supposed to resonate with a person? With me?

Where was I?

I wrote a bunch of short stories in 2002, before Bud was anything but a ticking egg, and I was between marriages, between lives. One was about myself and my x-husband, Jimmy, while we were married. My character had a mentally ill sibling, and a clubfoot. His had other ailments. The couple chose not to have children. I wrote, for my character to say:

“There’s a darkness of what you don’t know about yourself, that we’d rather stay away from.”

And after that, in my paramedic training, I had lectures in Anatomy and Physiology with a philosophically-minded bio professor who got the class into discussions about whether inaccurate DNA makes people inaccurately human, and I dared him to say that about my sister, (whom I rarely went to visit but played like a high card.) He liked me for it, the professor, and said I was in the wrong business.

I was aggressively anti-children those years. I used to sit in front of a café on Smith Street in Brooklyn with my friend Kelly, smoking, glaring at three-year-olds that passed by with their organic-only-eating, neatly coupled-up parents, and muttering about how much I hated them. My marriage to Jimmy was based on that.

I would think of my mother then, as I do constantly now, and of my sister, and of myself in my early life with them, my father hovering protectively near, and then I would think of sacrifice, how unwanted it was, how un-noble.

I yearn for my mother now, who was both street smart and innocent, who wrote in her autobiography, when she returned to college in her 50’s, that she had once dreamed of “ease for my husband, and bows on my girls.” She didn’t aspire; she wasn’t ambitious; she was more straightforward than that. First generation American, she was just trying for a simple, middle class life her own parents could be proud of; a China cabinet, Pocono vacations, and a couple of nice, normal kids.

I think of her in the 1960’s, with what she actually got; a tiny, fawn-skinned, wild-eyed, screaming pixie, a child unable to speak, unwilling to eat, fragile, terrified, a creature received by others as if never before seen on earth, shunned by all but my 25-year-old mother, herself barely more than a child, with sickly, un-Western parents of her own to care for, and a half-feral husband straining at the yoke of it all.

I think of my sister, who for all her lessness, her disparities, incapacities, knew.

And I think of myself, at five, six, seven years old, coming to consciousness, surrounded by unhappiness, emotionally arrested. It was at that time that I began to announce to any adult who would listen that I was a feminist, and a writer, and would live my life peacefully alone. Yes. I said that when I was seven.

And I stuck to my guns for years. I smoked, wrote, drank, job- and man-hopped my way through an early adulthood driven by avoidance. After the death of a drug-addicted boyfriend, I greedily married Jimmy, and instantly, he and I both felt like trapped wild animals. We paced around his big brownstone house snarling at each other like Nick Nolte and James Coburn in the movie Affliction, two revenge-hungry alcoholics. I didn’t drink like Jimmy, but I could seethe him eye to eye.

Then, my friend Hannah had a baby, and I freaked out.

At thirty-two, I became apoplectic with jealousy and panic, but it was too late for my marriage with Jimmy. I felt as if the ground I stood on was shaking with my need to be pregnant, and he would not help me. Something cellular had kicked me into overdrive. I didn’t even know myself anymore. I wanted a baby much more than I wanted to go on living without one. Jimmy and I divorced.

My mother died just after Thanksgiving that year, of a massive, but not entirely unexpected, heart attack.

I moved in with my father. I was a terrible roommate; irritable, depressed. I worked for a gritty ambulance company making crap pay and borrowed money from him I’d never pay back. I was like, junk-sick for a good man, strung out to get knocked up. I began hatching plans to become a single mother through plotted encounters. I had one guy-friend who would do it. I mean I was really…

Often, now, I recall feeling at the time like Bud was already inside me, chomping at the bit. But I never, ever allowed myself to entertain the possibility that DNA, that something evident and historical in my family, might resurface through my own body.

I had loved my mother, and continued to love my father, and be grateful to him, but all the years of my growing up in that family felt severed, by the many upsets of my stumbling, smacked-up adult life. I would like to say that I love my sister, but it’s more complicated than that. Regardless, in my mind, I and these three people were not, really, blood-related.

Isn’t that amazing? And insane?

So when I did meet Bruce, and I did get pregnant, and I was 34 years old, of advanced maternal age, sibling to an Autistic person with psychoses and a one-in-ten-thousand DNA snafu called Turner’s Syndrome, and my midwife, 25 years in the birthing trenches and ardently anti-interventionist, urged me to go for amniocentesis, I refused.

I refused.

“Look,” she said to me, not a little threatening. “Do you need this information, or do you not need it?”

I stared at her. I waited for her to stop talking about it. She did. I made no appointment for any genetic testing. Because what would I do with information?

The baby was mine.

And anyway he was not going to have any fucking thing wrong with him, whatever that means.

There are some moments in time from which there is simply no turning back. That moment is where I was, when I first heard the word, over breakfast with the preschool directors, the word evaluation.

SHORT STORY

2011-11-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

A Vessel

North strained his neck craning it upward, tilting his neat head back toward the high ceiling of the library.

“It’s like Tarot cards,” he said, with a slow smile at the pleasing revelations of his own electricky brain. He loved himself in certain moments.

North could feel what he was; the merging of worlds in a vessel. He could feel that 19^th century paintings were placed purposefully to exalt books and make libraries look like cathedrals, higher-arching than churches, and were reflecting holographically through him, bouncing like light beams off the faces of people, off the walls, little comets of understanding, all around him in the library.

He could feel a cathedral in his heart. He could remember his friend Peter’s mother remarking that Peter could only fit one thing in his heart at a time, and North knew that wasn’t true. He could feel the whirling of connected objects in Peter’s heart and in his own heart and could feel the memory of the wish that Peter would explain himself to adults.

North could feel the painter’s arrogance, making everyone look like a David statue or a Roman statue, making tableaux messages, although he understood the reason for it; that people did not usually know what messengers were talking about; it was true in North’s own life. At these times, a symbol, a David, a tarot card, was useful; times like this, with his mother, in the library.

“It is like Tarot cards,” said his mother. There was a lot his mother didn’t know, but she understood about symbols. She always tried.

And she was learning to say less, which helped. And North was learning to affirm her. This interaction, North’s mother saying less, North looking at her and grinning in affirmation, represented a language, and more; a speed of comprehension his mother did not previously know she possessed, a trust North had lost and reclaimed. The language was both the result and the act of repair, of the damage the two of them had sustained during North’s crisis a year ago; it was evidence, this language, that the crisis was over, that they were getting better, moving on. During the crisis, neither one of them could speak. North had roared and hissed and rocked. His mother had been silent.

Then for some months, right afterward, North’s mother talked without ceasing, to doctors, teachers, therapists, and to baby sitters who would spin on their heels at the first opportunity. It took only the hurling of a chair, one fingernail gouge to the face, and they’d leave. It seemed silly of them, to North’s mother; he’d been only seven. But you can’t coerce people.

Once a school was found, however, North began to meander back, asking for noodles and chocolate milk. He stepped up onto the bus without trepidation, as if he’d always taken a little bus, and waved good-bye. He began reporting about his days at the school, about a project involving glue and plastic prisms, about meeting Peter, who miraculously moved into the building just weeks later. North continued reporting, about kickball, about consequences, about speech therapy, about a hermit crab named Pinchy, who was the class pet.

And now his mother could say, “Ready for dinner?” And North might say back, “What will it involve?” And his mother might say, “Spaghetti, and an apple, and sitting at the table.” And North might say, “I am absolutely prepared for that, as long as there are cookie bears for desert; that’s conditional.” His mother would say, “There are,” and hold back more.

In the library, North reached into his backpack for his Ziploc bag of cookie bears. Without looking down, he snuck the bag up to his chin, carefully opened it, and began tucking inch-tall bear-shaped graham crackers into his mouth.

His mother stared, distractedly, at his defined, feline face; bow lips beneath a perky nose, symmetrical cheekbones and broadly placed, green eyes, a smattering of freckles, ash blonde hair cut close. He was a big boy, for eight, barrel-chested like both his grandfathers but with his dad’s lanky legs. In swim trunks you could see his pectoral muscles already announcing themselves. He had an assertive little stomach, and insistent, gripping feet.

Nothing about his appearance, at first, gave him away. You would have to watch him, or listen. If you saw him in the Morgan Library with his mother, perched birdlike on the red velvet bench, looking up at the ceiling mosaics, you might flash on the fact that he was squatting, feet on the velvet, inappropriately; you might wonder why the security guard had not asked him to put his feet on the floor. But you would leave it at that, until you heard the security guard say;

“Ma’am, I said, no eating in the library.”

“Right,” said North’s mother, her wide, distant eyes thrown out of focus. What? Hadn’t everything been fine? She looked at the security guard then back again at North, who froze, the tiny brown cookie in his hand between the dangling bag and his slightly open mouth, caught. “Quick,” she said to him, starting to laugh, side-eying the security guard, adding, “Sorry…” as she stood, taking the Ziploc bag from North, zipping it, tucking it into the Transformer’s backpack, taking North by the wrist, North standing up. She said to North, “You had enough?”

“I had enough,” said North, unfolding his long legs and doing a few deep knee bends, arms outstretched as if leading a geriatric exercise class. He smiled, and looked up again. His mother walked out. He followed, looking at the ceiling, doing knee bends as he walked, singing, “Bumb buh da bump buh da bump bump bump…” softly, to the tune of the “Rocky” movie overtures.

North’s mother walked ahead because she knew that North would rather walk behind her, and keep track of her that way, until his mind was organized. Everything in the library surged and receded until each thing clicked into place; the sailing balsa sculpture of birds idealized as words which almost made North angry; why did that have to be pointed out? Birds and words? The flight of language? Did the artist think North was stupid? He nearly lost patience with his mother on that one. The people eating at their little tables. Why could they eat at little tables and he couldn’t eat his cookie bears? Also very stupid. The security guards staring at him. Why were they all black? Was that anything like the ice cream cart ladies all being Nicaraguan? Questions began to line themselves up. He would begin with the bus. His mother went down the steps onto the sidewalk of Madison Avenue and turned, waiting for him.

“I would quit with the knee bends, North,” she said. “It’ll be hard to do the stairs.”

She was right. He stopped and took a moment. “I’m taking a moment,” he called down to her, squinting, “to adjust my rods and cones.”

“Me, too,” she said, putting on her sunglasses. “Do you want your sunglasses?”

“Hat,” he said, and he jumped down each step with both feet. His new sneakers were amazing. He felt taller and safer and springier in them, though they were hot. His mother handed him his hat. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked, grinning.

“Goof,” she said; the language; the connections. Saying less. She wrapped her arm around his head, which was the height of her ribs, and pressed his face into her soft side. She held out water in a sports bottle and he drank it. She held out a wipe and he leaned in and blew his nose.

He put on the hat; a baseball hat that just said “New York” on the front. “Are we taking the bus?” They were. “Can we sit in the front? In the seats marked ‘disabled’?” They could, unless real disabled people came on and needed the seats. “You mean people traveling in wheelchairs?” Yes. “Is that why the front of the bus is wider than the back? For the wheelchairs?” Yes. “Is that a hydraulic lift the driver uses to raise the wheelchairs up onto the bus?” It is. “Do some people lie to the government to get free wheelchairs because they are lazy and don’t want to walk?”

“Is that what Uncle Mike says?” North’s mother asked.

“It’s one thing he says,” said North. “Could you imagine if that’s all he said, all day?”

“Actually,” said North’s mother, “I can.”

The bus came and hissed to a stop. They got on. They sat in a deuce of seats up front. North began to take off his sneakers. “I plan to air out my feet,” he explained.

“No,” said his mother.

“Rrrrrrrrgggghhhh!” North growled at her, and reached for her neck.

“No,” said his mother, “sit down.” She pushed him firmly on the chest, downward, into the seat, and gave him back the bag of cookie bears.

He turned his back to her and leaned on her and began eating the cookie bears, looking out the window. She reached over his shoulder and took a few bears. She rested her chin on the top of his head and closed her eyes, listening to the grinding diesel engine of the bus, taking deep inhalations of the scent of North’s hair.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Uncle Mike was in the apartment when North and his mother got home to Queens. The door was held open by the battered toolbox, also open, burnished and rusted tools tottering out of the raised trays, screws and nails, untouched new wrenches and tiny screwdrivers and threatening hammers fanned out across the dull hardwood floor. Every light in the place was on. The TV was on, blaring news. The coffee maker was on, a sandwich and beer were open on the counter. One cigarette sat burning quietly on the bathroom windowsill while Uncle Mike drilled into the gutted ceramic over the sink, installing new sockets, new lights, though North’s mother had not asked him to do it. His dog, a knotted old Lab named Razor, snored on the couch. North’s dog, Piggy, a short, fat, Beagle mix, lay on Uncle Mike’s coat, on the floor.

North’s mother’s heart sank. It was already after five. North had homework which would now not get done. He’d need to examine every tool in Uncle Mike’s box and work the collapsible trays up and down, up and down. She’d spoon-feed North his dinner as he drew picture-lists of the tools and spoke at length of imaginary machines he could make while Uncle Mike tromped back and forth from the tools to the bathroom with drill bits and metal spatulas, suggesting supplemental materials North loved the sound of; sheet rock, Tyvek, plywood, lathing, Masonite, two-by-fours, glazing, sealant. And the cigarette smoke. And feeding the dogs off their plates. A late bath. He would have to sleep in her bed, farthest from the bathroom; in his room, the noise of Uncle Mike’s drill was too loud. All these adjustments flashed in front of her as she pushed on the door.

“Oh,” North whispered, mouth and eyes wide open as he stepped inside slowly, as if his home had been transformed. “The tools,” he said, looking up at his mother. “Can I go get Peter?”

“Go,” said his mother, and North took off at a smack-footed run down the hall toward the elevator then smacked the button with the flat of his hand and waited for it hopping, up and down up and down, and it came and he scuttled in, continued hopping, and went up to six to get Peter. In a moment the boys were back, attended by Gladys, Peter’s mother, who North’s mother was always relieved to see.

“Tools, huh?” said Gladys as she trailed the boys in, looking around with only the mildest dismay, used to it.

“Gladys!” Uncle Mike shouted over the drilling, in greeting, without turning around. He could not stand to look Gladys in the eye and Gladys knew it.

North’s mother could not decide how to feel about it; no emotion registered itself with any force, regarding her brother’s helplessness around her friend. She couldn’t blame him, in ways. Gladys’s straight, jet hair that hung in an undisturbed curtain down her delicate back, her shocked, globe eyes and tiny mouth, her upturned hill of nose, even her mottled, acne-scarred skin, all taken together gave her the strangest, most adolescent, ethereal presence; no one could ignore Gladys; not police, firemen, neighbors, or strangers on the street as she and North’s mother walked out to get coffee or took the boys to the mall. It was vaguely repugnant to North’s mother that her brother would think of Gladys sexually; Gladys was so small, she seemed barely bigger than her own eight-year-old son; it was like pederasty, like Mike was doing something wrong just by thinking it. On the other hand, Gladys would have been perfect for him; gentle, undemanding, never flustered.

“Oh-hey,” Gladys hollered back thinly, her head rotating around, her eyes unabashedly scanning the apartment, cataloguing the place. “Look at your dog,” she said to North, touching his head with tiny, two-fingered affection.

North glanced at lumpy Piggy, who adored him until Uncle Mike materialized and then she would switch devotions entirely. “Yeah,” said North, unconcerned, tucking into the tools, pulling Peter by the pale, skinny wrist to bring him down to the floor so they could dismantle the tool box in unison.

“You think he really cares for that dog?” Gladys asked North’s mother.

“I do,” North’s mother responded. “He’s very private about it. Did you eat?”

“I know, it’s late, right?” said Gladys. “We should have eaten already.”

“I have lasagna,” said North’s mother. “Stay.”

“Okay,” said Gladys. “Let me leave him for a few minutes. I’ll make a little salad and get his cereal, and come back.”

“Good,” said North’s mother. She leaned down to Peter, and turned his head with her hands, toward his own mother.

“Stay with North,” Gladys said to Peter forcefully, looking hard into his face. “I’m getting your cereal and coming back.”

Peter made eye contact with his mother, and wordlessly, always wordlessly, returned his attention to the tools.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

By 11 North was finally asleep. Peter and Gladys left after nine. It had been particularly painful to separate Peter and North; they had clung to each other at the elevator. Tears welled up in North’s eyes as his mother pried his hands off Peter’s shoulders and Peter made guttural wanting sounds as the door slid between them. In her bed in the dark, his arm around his yielding, porcine little dog, North’s mother told him a long, wandering story about two boys named North and Peter who lived on an island in the middle of an enormous lake and who ate only fish and roots and leaves and spent their time combing the island for injured animals, then nursing them back to health in their hut. Eventually she felt his weight sink into her bed. She lifted Piggy out, and shut the door.

Then she walked the Piggy and Razor slowly, and for a long time. She bought beer at Mr. Corey’s store on the way back, and also wine from Mr. Corey’s secret stash. “Mothers only want the wine,” Mr. Corey had said, disappearing down the dark stairwell into the store cellar, returning with a cold bottle of white zinfandel for which he charged an exorbitant $12. “The men want the beer.”

“It’s for my brother,” she blurted to Mr. Corey.

“I know your brother,” Mr. Corey said. “He comes to my other store in Maspeth. He’s always buying the same beer. And Newport.”

“You have another store?” she asked. “Why didn’t I know that?” People’s lives outside of her own surprised her more than ever, since North’s crisis.

“Why you gonna know that? You don’t go to Maspeth.”

“I used to,” she said. “Give me a pack of Newports, too.” She uncrumpled money from her pocket and smoothed it on the counter.

“Now your brother visits you. Nice man. He helps you.” Mr. Corey rang up the beer and the wine and the cigarettes and handed North’s mother her change.

“He does,” she said, taking her bag, and making clicking sounds at the dogs who rested on the cool, dirty tile floor, then hauled themselves up. “Good night, Mr. Corey.”

“Say good night to your brother.”

“I will.”

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

In the apartment Mike sat on the couch in the dark, watching the news, smoking, his right leg jittering up and down at incredible speed. He rubbed his head repeatedly with one hand, and with the smoking hand, tapped an empty beer bottle on his stuttering knee. The tools were in a sort of pile, at least collected, on the floor. The smell of grout damply underscored the cigarette smoke and the food odors and the musty dogs. North’s mother unhooked the leashes and the dogs folded themselves down side by side on the rug. Then she dropped her coat on the floor and went into the kitchen and opened two beers and twisted the cap off the wine and poured a glass of that, too.

She brought the drinks into the living room and sat by her brother on the couch, handing him the beers. He set his empty bottle on the floor, one new beer on the crowded end table between the ashtray and the remote controls, and drank down half the other, then touched the cold bottle to his forehead.

“You short?” North’s mother asked him.

“Nah,” he said.

“You out of meds or you’re just off?” she asked him gently.

“I’m off,” he said quietly. “I don’t like it. It’s embarrassing. You don’t understand.”

Saying less. She held her brother’s hand and watched TV with him. He finished the beer in his grip and she could see his face slacken. His leg stopped. He took one small sip off the remaining beer, then set it aside; he’d had enough.

“Take off your shoes,” she said after a while, and he did. He stretched out on the couch. She shook the afghan as she stood up, to remind him that it was there, to cover himself as he dozed off. She drank up her wine and put the glass in the sink, turned out the kitchen light, and went to the bathroom, and changed to pajamas, and went to sleep in her son’s bed.

She could feel what she was; a merging of worlds in a vessel.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

SHORT STORY

2011-10-25T05:48:00.000-07:00

The Wolf

I wish I could have protected my children, and my husband. He is such a beauty, and pretends not to understand when I say it. Inside, he knows what I know; that it’s his elegant, sinewy, able frame, the long knowing of his arms, the mauve-gray cloud of his curling hair, his hawk-like face; the body-truth of him makes me able to go on. He’s petulant sometimes, wants food prepared for him, wants things found in our new house that aren’t lost. But when I need him, he pulls me close.

Progenitor of my children, mine to look at, to have, the ascendant arching of his hard penis, the salty taste of the tip; that’s how it started, I thought, of the unexpected pregnancy that became our son, Hildebrand, after Jaret’s father; the Hildys, little and big. Jaret’s hands look like beautiful tarantulas; the fingers bloom open with arachnid grace, can be probing, gently obscene, or efficient, gathering, firm.

Earlier in the evening he had washed Hildy, who was four, then; shit in the toilet still novel, celebratory, the culmination of a long process. From the tub Jaret scooped him up then sat him down gingerly, wrapped in a purple towel, on the bright green plastic pot and kept him there enchanted with a story of Godzilla The Man in the Plastic Suit meeting Mothra Who Is Also Not Real, long enough, wiped his anus, then deposited him back into the soapy water. He dumped the shit and washed the plastic pot. He washed Hildy’s seal-sleek body sing-songing, “It’s a quick trip for the soap to Mooney Town, Mister!” We call an ass a moony. We call Hildy ‘Mister.’ “Don’t forget Penis Town,” sang Hildy, jutting out his hips to make it available for cleaning. Jaret laughed. “Watch how I do this,” he said. He poured blue liquid soap into his hand, then into Hildy’s hand. “Now you do it.”

It was becoming time for all these things; for Hildy to wash himself, dress himself, to comb his sandy colored hair that went every which way, to wipe his own hazel eyed face with a washcloth. We had to be reminded, because we wanted to do it. I wondered if Jaret felt sad about that like I did. There were so many things I missed asking him about when the days shot away from us like spooked rabbits. I wondered if he ever thought in the past that he would wash someone else’s penis and laugh.

In that spot in the hall between the bathroom and the kitchen, I could see them, in there, but they could not see me. I left the faucet on so they would hear that, think I was endlessly washing the dishes, and not know that I was watching.

My friend Tabitha told me, before I ever met Jaret, that one night she had put her baby daughter to bed, and gently closed the door, then went into the small living room and saw her husband sitting with his legs under him, in a soft chair, reading a book, his beard, his glasses, his stomach, his hand on his foot, unaware of her, and she started to shake, and she retreated into the hall, and thought, These are the people I love most in the world, under one roof; this is the ‘why.’

It disturbed me for years that she had said this, but eventually I would find myself standing in the same hall.

I went back to the dishes and the cooking chicken and the lunches for the next day and the Sunday night emptying out of Tupperware and the wiping of vegetable drawers. I made Jaret turkey and horseradish sauce and greens on pumpernickel, a bag of carrots, a bag of grapes, an extra sandwich of peanut butter and jelly in case he got stuck late, and put all that and two granola bars, and a yogurt, in a bag; that’s lunch for 6ft 3 and wiry with the metabolism of a 20-year-old. I loved to watch Jaret eat. Hildy got American cheese and butter on no-crust whole wheat (no one could bring peanut butter to day care because of the allergic girl,) and a bag of tiny chocolate cracker bears, a sliced apple, and a packet of microwaveable popcorn to share. Pillow liked to take noodles in a special princess container and pink yogurt. Jaret was a draftsman, and Hildy and Pillow went to a lady’s house, a few days a week.

Pillow; Pillowscent. Nursed to sleep. I regretted naming her Millicent. I hated ‘Millie’ and my father had said people would call her that and I ignored him but he’d been right. I would cringe. “You can call her Pillow like we do, she likes it,” I would say, and sometimes they would. ‘Millie’ was like a name for a strict church lady, someone Pillow would never be. I forecast that I would be astonished if she didn’t become pregnant in high school, her skin as pink and fuzzy as a peach, round muscles everywhere, blue globe eyes, doll cheeks, corn silk hair, an expression of fearless, scheming glee. She lay on her back in the bathtub earlier that night, floating on the water, staring at the ceiling, smiling, fingering her vulva in amazement, then flipping herself over like a huge chicken on a rotisserie and submerging herself, forcing out violent explosions of bubbles. She burst from under the water like a salvage diver, holding up a cup with holes in the bottom which she raised over her head, and as the water poured down on her through the holes she announced, “Raining.” She was two and a half.

Hildy and Pillow gave into sleep willingly that night as usual. But our dog, Element, was restless and irritable. Element, ‘Elly,’ was getting old, the picture of ‘long in the tooth,’ and more lupine and feral than ever. She was a slate gray, bony Shepherd mix I’d taken home from a shelter, somewhat on a whim, the year I met Jaret, which made her ten, by that time. She had rocky joints now, and was easily annoyed, though not by the children, who stayed a little away from her; she was not cuddly, was not compelling to children. She considered herself my guardian and was hyper vigilant even in sleep. In recent weeks she had begun following me around more closely, panting; I thought, until that night, that she was in pain with her arthritis and wanted me to do something for her, but that wasn’t it.

As I did the dishes and then sprayed out the sink, moved the toaster and the coffee maker and the knife block and wiped down the counter, took a few damp swipes at the stove top but could not bear to take it apart and clean it, Elly stood with hunched shoulders just inside the kitchen doorway; when I’d spied on Jaret and Hildy I’d had to go around her. She just panted, steady, waiting for me to stop. I bent under the sink for the dustpan and brush and swept the kitchen floor superficially, flung the dirt out the kitchen window into the shallow side yard area where birds and squirrels came now every day for our crumbs, and put the brush and pan away. As I straightened up I felt a quick, piercing pain below my belly, and then felt the bands of my back muscles contract, and then give in a way that was strange and familiar but too far off to think about. Outside I heard a cat shriek and then leaves shake and snapping twigs as it ran off. I wondered whose cat.

I turned off the lights except for the one over the stove. I could see just my face reflected in the high, open window, and my body seemed to be part of the night. It was almost nine. Hildy should already have been in bed but Jaret and I were always slower than we realized in the evenings. Everything we did was staggered. The children ate their little supper at their little table while Jaret supervised, and watched an episode of an animal show. Then Pillow took a bath, and Hildy read with Jaret, while I made food for myself and Jaret then put it aside and we took turns snacking. We were not organized about anything but we had a way, a rhythm. Pillow got into pajamas, we read a book, and then she nursed for a long time. She would go on nursing until three years old, because Hildy had, which was the rationale for everything; Hildy did so Pillow will. I had nursed Hildy all the while I was pregnant with Pillow. Now Hildy got pajamas on with a little help, and had three books read to him and a honey sandwich and water. He had a final pee in the toilet and Mr. Weasly and Bluey Blanket and a long cuddle in the dark, and with murmuring speculation about the next day, and about a dream he planned to have, sank fully and warmly into sleep.

As I stepped out of their room and closed the door, Elly pushed herself up from the floor, moved toward me, and head-butted my legs. She let out a very low, rippling current of sound, and then her head hung tiredly. She continued to pant. I looked at her food and saw that she barely touched it. Oh, my God, I thought. My dog is dying. She was old, I realized, and my last dog had gone like that; aged stably for a long time, then took a disturbed, anxious down turn, became lame, and died in sleep. I leaned down to pet Elly and she snarled in a measured way; she didn’t want that. She pushed me again. “Okay, old lady,” I said to her, and I went toward the back of the house to let her out.

Our house was small, and not in good shape, but well laid out and on a nice piece of property; a wide front lawn surrounded by trees with hammocks between some of them, a narrow side yard next to the kitchen, after which was a good size woods, enough to walk in, to spot deer and rabbits and skunks and possums at twilight. I could sometimes see their eyes reflecting green in the night. We had a little porch in the back; Jaret was looking for a good swing that wouldn’t pull down the bonnet of it. I loved our screen door, and the wide, shallow three steps that led down to the yard, which sloped a little way out into more woods.

The kitchen was right off the front door when you walked in, which always made me feel like someone had spun the house around, but I got used to it. Opposite was the living room, where we had a small table we ate at sometimes, the television, two couches, toys scattered around, and bookshelves. Elly slept on a blanket in the corner. On the same side of the hall was the children’s room, then Jaret’s workroom. On the other side, after the kitchen, was the bathroom and then our bedroom, and the screen door at the end of the hall.

I had workspace in the basement; a computer table, a crafting table, comfortable chairs, the hum of the washer and dryer. We didn’t have a hamper for dirty clothes, we just threw them down the stairs for me to collect and wash, which the children loved. On rainy days we made sock balls and threw them down there, then went down and had a contest to see who could throw them all the way back up to the top. It was cool down there, I could spend hours there alone in the utter quiet, my feet on the cold cement as I folded laundry, read a book, wrote my occasional articles for animal lover magazines or for a midwifery organization’s newsletter. Elly had a bed down there she never came to anymore because the stairs hurt her. Sometimes I carried her down. Lately, in her agitated state, she stood at the top of the stairs whining until I came for her, but still she wouldn’t lie in the bed; she would pace.

Now I went toward the back door. Jaret was at his computer researching porch swings. The light was low. The screen reflected in his glasses. From behind him I gathered up his long hair and gently, firmly pulled it into a ponytail, then made a knot, tugging it to massage his head, and he moaned and took off his glasses, allowed his head to fall forward. Pulling his thick hair with one hand, I pinched the back of his neck deeply with the other. “I think Elly is failing,” I said.

“I noticed that,” he said softly. “Something is going on with her. She’s worried all the time.” He straightened himself and turned to put his arms around me.

Our nights together were short. Jaret loved to work and so did I. The nursing and cuddling took a lot of time. But we gave a lot to avoid crying, arguing of any kind, misusing our power with the children. We wanted peace for them. By the time one of us came out from Hildy’s bed, nearly asleep ourselves, the other would be deeply engrossed in the work, or a book. But often enough, emerging from the children’s dark, sweet smelling bedroom, I would find Jaret naked on the bed, waiting, stroking himself under the gentle lamp, smiling at me, hopeful, restless, infinitely welcoming and grateful. How I loved him, with every cell in my body.

I sat on his lap and half faced him, ran my thumbs over the crow’s feet at his blue eyes, which had become, like Elly’s, a bit clouded. He pressed me to his chest and my breasts felt sore and pressured. It’s so strange to me now that I still did not realize what was happening. Over his shoulder I could see Elly lurking in the door, her fur stiff and her eyes glassy, the ridge of agitation high on her back. “Let me get her out,” I said, and I got up and went toward her, to go out the screen door.

Now, I think of snowflakes falling when I remember this, although it was autumn. Snowflakes in the house, and air shattering like icicles crashing in spring. I think of it as if I watched it and was not in it. I stood from Jaret’s lap with my hand on my aching breast, and as time slowed I could feel my bones directing the force of my life and wants, the simple going to the door to let out the dog, my legs walked toward Elly, knee raised and then lowered, foot on the floor, knee raised, and that’s when Elly spun at a sound, no sound I could name, nothing I could actually say I heard, but we felt it, Elly and I, and she snapped around to run from the room at the same moment that I lurched toward it, something outside, and her bone-arrow, thick furred body wove like shock through my legs and then shot out of the room to the door, and I fell fast as if the floor boards yanked me down, crashed on my hip and yelled, my sound the distinct herald of broken bone and stabbing pain, overlain by Elly’s murderous barking.

Something was out there.

Jaret leapt out of his chair hissing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” at me, because he ran around me to the screen door, and then I heard him say in the hall, “Oh my God,” and I got up on my left knee, tears streaming down my face, and crawled, dragging my right leg, to him. He was frozen, his hands in the air. Elly stood inches from the screen door, her legs rigid and slightly splayed, every slate gray hair on her body raised and sharp as tiny swords, her sides distended as she sucked air and barked compulsively, a raging, rasping bark filled with threat, at what she saw; a wolf, foaming at the mouth, ripping the screen out of the door with his teeth, his jaws bloody.

We didn’t have a gun. Jaret ran past me to the kitchen and I turned to watch him. He came back out with the largest knife I had in the block; can my husband stab a rabid wolf? Elly’s enraged barking continued and deepened, but slowed; she couldn’t go on like that much longer. For drawn out seconds my pain wound around my brain inside my skull as a high pitched, lingering tone of alarm and I watched the wolf, his eyes wild and mismatched, he was ill, possessed with shredding my screen, a death-seeking stupidity had run away with him; I thought, it’s not his fault.

Jaret ran toward us with the knife raised over his head and saw that it wouldn’t work; he panicked then. The blood drained from his face, he was white and sweating. He turned to the closet, set the knife inside it on the floor, and grabbed his winter parka, unfurled it and shook it out like a matador, and that’s when we heard the door of the children’s room open. Hildy and Pillow stood there, peering out, the fronts of both their pajamas wet with urine, the smell floating toward me, their faces still, and Elly turned, smelled them, her tight black nose twitching, and she turned back to the wolf, his whole face now inside our house. He was beside himself with aimless fury, he could have stepped right through the screen by then and killed any of us but didn’t, he still tore at the screen, and Elly lunged.

She eased back into her joints and shot forward, her vicious angle of mouth full of old, yellow teeth open as she dove on him, snarling. The children started screaming and the dog and the wolf, stuck in the shredded square of the door began killing each other. “Stop!” I heard myself screaming at the animals, “Stop! Elly! STOP!” but they would not stop.

Jaret shook his coat open one more time and ran at the door, threw himself on it, and came crashing down on top of the animals, the coat covering them as they continued to tear at each other’s throats, growling and yelping in agony as the three of them fell onto the porch, the door on top of the animals, Jaret on the door, holding it down as it galloped under him, himself now shouting out sounds, crying out for me, yelling my name a dozen times before I understood what he was saying, because I was suspended, lifeless, watching, until I really heard him and then looked at his terrified eyes; “Anne! Anne! Anne! Help me!”

“Jaret,” I heard myself whisper, and I began to crawl toward him, the children still screaming behind me. The coat was alive with the killing beneath it, the door shook, Jaret held them down with all his weight and might and then Elly’s snout tore through the coat and her dead black eyes and bloody face appeared, and she bit through Jaret’s left hand, which sprung blood. He released his hold on the door and the coat with his right hand and brought his fist down on her snout and cracked her skull. He raised his fist and brought it down again, over and over, seeking the skull of the wolf, and found it, and he cracked that, too, and the animals were dead.

****************************************************************************

It was not a wolf. It was a feral dog that had lived near a run-down garden apartment complex some miles away. He had been seen in town several times, we learned, and the local police had complacently not looked for him, in spite of the recent reports of rabid skunks and opossums in the area.

I was so furious I could barely speak, when I saw the police chief’s wife in the market, the first time I went out alone, weeks later, my leg in a brace after surgery to place pins in my femur, my pregnant belly becoming evident. I lumbered toward her and she had the humility, at least, to stand and take it.

“How could you,” I whispered to her, spittle flying off my tongue, tears welling in my eyes. I meant it for her husband and she knew that.

“I’m sorry, Anne,” she said, and suddenly she was crying.

My eyes, I knew, were black with sleeplessness, my skin slack and gray with exhaustion and sorrow. My breath was stale in my mouth. I just stood by her. I had nothing else to say. I lived in my head. I couldn’t talk to people. I just thought about what was happening, all the time.

We were selling the house.

Jaret’s hand was sewn back together with black, twiney stitches that were crusted over with blood. I wrapped it and rewrapped it several times a day to keep him from picking at it. He had finally given into medication after two weeks without sleeping and chronic scratching of his own whole body. He slept now all the time. We did not know when he would go back to work.

His friend Hector had come with his son right away that night, our neighbor had called them, and removed the carcasses from the porch, cleaned the blood, took away the destroyed door. Then they came right back and stayed all night, with a small rifle, even though it was too late. In the morning, they began to fix the doorway and didn’t leave till it was done. They replaced the screen door with a storm door and refused any money from Jaret, who told me about it while I was in the hospital, where I stayed for a week after surgery. Our parents came and stayed with the children while I was there.

My only job, when I came home, was to make quiet. I moved so slowly, so carefully, that I could have watched new leaves uncurl from spring buds on trees while I did each tiny, crucial thing; to put butter on bread, to pour milk into a glass, to answer a call for me, was a whole act and took time. Everything now was one thing, isolate, fragile, necessary. I did nothing other than feed the children, feed Jaret, wash the children, hold them, sleep with them, and quiet them. The four of us slept in one bed. They did not go to the daycare lady for months.

By spring, my belly was large, but not as big as it had been with Hildy or with Pillow. I didn’t eat, this pregnancy, because my leg couldn’t bear the weight gain, and I wanted to keep the baby from getting too big; I couldn’t tolerate the idea of a c-section. I also wasn’t hungry. Jaret’s hand healed, and after months of physical therapy, he started back at work, first quarter days, then half days. His company loved him and his colleagues and bosses were kind and patient about everything. He began to taper off his medication, very slowly. He held me more. Pillow turned three, and did not want a party, but said that she missed daycare, and went back.

Hildy wouldn’t. He stayed at my hip all the time, and began to make keening noises at night.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

2011-10-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

I’m delighted to announce that I am developing a collection of writings for special needs families on the topic of forgiveness, and I am opening it up to your creative contributions.

If you are family to a special needs child, this invitation is for you. If you know a special needs family, please pass this on to them!

The idea of this collection is a kind of parenting book, except with no system. It's for people who experience special needs parenting as intuitive, passionate, and autonomous, people who give it all and falter anyway and understand that as parents, we have no choice but to get up tomorrow and get back to it. To do that, we often have to forgive ourselves, for our frustrations and failings.

In the space between books like "My Baby Rides The Short Bus," "Gravity Pulls You In," and "Seeing Ezra," which are groundbreaking truth-tellers, we still need something that speaks to the process of parenting and pain, evolution and liberation, in our lives. That's what I hope to accomplish here.

I also hope for this book to help enrich the dialogue regarding 'resentments across the spectrum,' and to create an atmosphere where individuality gains traction over labels.

If you look at the introduction to the book, which I've posted here, you'll get an idea what I mean. The book will include essays like this one, which explores the topic and experience of forgiveness personally.

My post 'The Hundred-Dollar Haircut,' represents the kind of anecdotal, advice-based pieces I am seeking. These should tell a story of how parents responded to a problem their child faced, how that response did or didn't work, and carry to the parents the message that, 'Even if this doesn't work for you, and it may not, you're still a good parent, and you're doing enough.'

Submissions can range from 1,200 to 5,000 words, or 5 to 10 pages, and should be sent as a Word document attachment or in the body of the email, to my direct email address, by or about Jan.1.

Jsteiner70@gmail.com

'Letter From Tigress, the Pit Bull' & 'Narration of Plastic Lizards'

2011-10-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

A Letter from Tigress, 

the PitBull                                                         

Dear Large Dark Male;

How is your hairless head? 

I lay in the bed 

and think of licking it like 

at the cage place. Nobody

makes me take many

baths now. I don’t roll 

in my shit now.

The large male here is kind 

but not boss, a soap 

smell but lets no 

licking though I get all the plates;

ketchuppy meatloaf, spicy rice, chicken

fingers and bottoms of salad and 

there’s a lot!

I am so fat! I am glorious!  I wish

you could see me shine some day.

I don’t think how

my own bones tempted me to gnaw myself before

you got me off the road

with the cage truck.

Don’t worry!

It’s still secret

that I sat on your lap as we drove.

The large female here is good and full

of smells, I love

the butter, the sour morning, that coffee stuff, the 

blood, the armpits.

After the male and children go out the door

we chew each others’ ears and arms on the floor,

snooze, then she zooms 

around putting things 

back and then we walk and it’s good. 

The small female is like a turkey but I’m not stupid.

Anyway it’s the small male I adore.

He beats me all the time. 

His love for me shakes 

his whole body, if he 

were a dog he would hump me 

like mad! He dives on me screaming

 “banzai!” from the sit-relax thing and yanks

on every limb and ratty nipple I have at 

least he doesn’t poke

my eyeballs.

His whole face fits in my mouth.

That’s how I kiss him,

pinned on my back

by his loneliness.

The large female says into the talk-thing

he is brilliant, only

five, fragile; she’s dull

in the nose, always shocked.

I could smell my destiny

on him the first day!

He pays me 

in bed, our bodies 

stretched out long playing nose-in-ear 

his breath chocolatey, whispering

all the mysteries 

of his days away 

from home missing me.

I miss you sometimes, 

large, dark male, smelly head, enormous lap,

menthol in the run, oil, gasoline in the garage

even the the cage place, spare rib scraps and chop 

bones from your home but I

am needed here.

And I am glad, 

so glad, 

I did not die.

Thank you.

Goodbye!

Narration of Plastic Lizards

Tonsil is small but equipped with a killing

claw, throwback Deinonychus,

killer Utahraptor

ferocious talons and

better than T-Rex

which was just a scavenger.

Tonsil is small, only an animal alive

today among many such as Wisso and Plato who

fight together although they are brothers,

Tonsil and Wisso, Plato

is the sister.

Who will win remains to be seen.

They are not the same species but

have the same mother,

a climber of remarkable heights.

Plato is small and may not survive mating.

Tonsil and Wisso and Plato each weigh

seven ounces and walk over water

using foot flags.

Only Tonsil has the killing claw, like his father.

Wisso and Plato are herbivores but will eat bees,

praying mantises, larvae, krill in a pond.

I can resist doing something fun because I would rather stay home

and not put on my shoes.

The Leash

2011-10-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

Bud, 15 months old, walking good old Eena, who is much missed.

I got kicked out of a mom’s group, when Bud was about 18 months old and all over the place, and I was massively pregnant with Moopy. Why? Because I put him on a leash.

There exploded on the mom’s group chat a torrent of vociferous pontificating and sancti-mom-ious scolding (of me!) to which I responded with as much damn-the-torpedoes aplomb as I cold muster; they’d already ejected me, what did I have to lose?

Having moved on and found new friends, I suppose I thought it was settled. In my mind, only the most strenuously anti-mainstream folks had an issue with the leash, and the rest of us would do what we had to do to share the city with aggressive drivers, psychotic cyclists, and preoccupied pedestrians.

I see people with kids on leashes often; I thought the topic was finished. But then a friend posted this article on Facebook:

My Parents Kept Me on a Leash and I Turned Out Just Fine

It was the only thing I’d read in a long time, regardless of topic, wherein the writer truly had no agenda; she really wanted to know if people felt the leash was a good idea, and her approach was restoratively different from what I’d experienced years earlier.

Friends who’d had kids well before I did had warned me I wouldn’t like the group I joined; too dogmatic, too crunchy, they said. But I countered, "I'm dogmatic! Maybe not crunchy, but ... it's about the babies, right?"

It turned out that in fact, the group was 100% agenda-driven, even down to what words members could use on a variety of topics, what books members could discuss, which products they could suggest… it was shocking, but more disturbing still was that the group claimed one of it’s main purposes was progress on behalf of mothers, and to improve the environment of mothers’ lives.

I had not seen any of that schism until I wrote on the chat, late one night, when we were all gratefully talking to each other from the breast-milk-saturated hot-houses of our apartments, that I’d taken to using what I call a safety harness, which others call a leash, when out walking with Bud, and my Macy’s-Thanksgiving-Day-Parade-size belly.

People freaked.

I soon learned it was not permitted to admit to using any product that “comes between the mother and her baby,” any product that the group didn’t endorse.

“You can’t talk about that product here,” one of the managers of the group wrote me privately. “It damages the group’s integrity.”

I was mortified, not only by the feeling of having my wrists slapped by another adult, presumably my equal, but also because I felt I’d been fooled; no one had asked me to take an oath or promise to adhere to anything when I joined. I’d thought the principle mission of the group was to encourage one another, and to speak up on behalf of our own and our peers’ parenting choices, in public and to family and friends; how did it make any sense for those in charge to insist on dishonesty and suppression among ourselves?

I wrote an open letter to the group in which I expressed my deep gratitude for the volunteership and sisterhood. But I also cautioned everyone that casting contradiction or independent thought as a ‘no-no’ was a slippery slope into cultishness and groupthink.

“I don’t doubt for a minute,” I wrote, “these new mothers' ability to decide for themselves weather they want to use a leash, a pump, or a unicycle. I think it's important that this organization check itself, that it doesn't get involved with the same kind of information-straining of which its [managers], and members including myself, accuse doctors, mainstream parenting educators, and marketers. The driving reason that we're all here is that we want community and information, and we're exposed enough, and sophisticated enough, to decide for ourselves what makes sense.”

The next message I received was notice that my continued access to the chat was denied.

*************************************************************************

Though that episode feels like eons ago (it wasn’t even five years,) I find myself hearing similar, if more vague, rumblings throughout the Autism community today. It takes a different tone, and there’s a lot of preemptive reassurance that comment writers don’t mean to step on toes or offend, but I best heard it termed at a panel discussion as ‘resentment across the spectrum.’

I was astounded.

At the time, my child was just emerging from the crisis that preceded his diagnoses of Asperger’s, Anxiety, OCD, SPD, and Tourette Syndrome. Life in our apartment was still volatile, sometimes, although since my son had been placed in a therapeutic school, things had really begun to improve. However, I could not imagine what about that aspect of our lives seemed enviable. I suppose I had forgotten, for the moment, my own parents’ struggles, and mine as a sibling, with my Autistic sister who came of age in the Bettelheim years. I had been so intensely, internally focused on my little family’s spate of troubles that I didn’t even consider how demanding are the lives of families whose children need much more attention and resource than my own.

Fortunately, I began to wake up.

**************************************************************************

Parenting a child with Autism is radically different from and surprisingly the same as parenting in general; Rob Gorski illuminates this stunningly in his blog post:

Ten Reasons Why You're Lucky, But Don't Know It

For myself, the differences are concrete but less drastic, which makes the word ‘spectrum’ seem apt. While my son can’t go to regular birthday parties, for example, he has friendships, and has become able to participate in birthdays within his classroom, and to mouth the words to the Happy Birthday song and not experience an anxiety attack; that’s one small step into the expansive gray area between Autism and typicality, but it’s a big step for my particular kid, and for me.

For us, it’s also enough. For others, it isn’t.

Anxiety is just one piece of the fluid and dynamic constellation of Autism; many Asperger’s kids have it. It’s also one good lens for looking at disparities and similarities across the Autism spectrum, and beyond.

For some children, Anxiety can be debilitating, but it’s hard to pinpoint what that means. Plenty of parents would call yelling “Booo! Booo!” during the singing of the Happy Birthday song and running out of the party (yup, that was Bud,) debilitating anxiety, and it is if birthday parties are really important; but to us, they’re not, and recognizing that for my family is a kind of freedom. We just don’t go anymore.

But what if I wasn’t okay with that? What if my son wasn’t? To what lengths would I go to make his participation possible? Would I make special arrangements with the birthday family in advance? Would I create a consequence / reward context for his behavior? Would I medicate him? Would I medicate myself? And would any of that work? Is that a risk I’d be willing to take? What’s worth it? What’s it worth?

And what if it’s not about birthdays? What if it’s about self-injury, regression, illness, impoverishment, violence? What if it’s about never knowing if your child is aware that you love him?

When I used to talk with people a lot about baby care, it became evident to me very quickly that there were so many variables that one rule couldn’t possibly fit us all. So similarly, when we talk about Autism, we are talking about the constitution of individuals, beginning with their very DNA, a complexity of literally millions of elements, placed in an unending variety of contexts; families, living situations, neighborhoods, schools… I’m not even convinced that the word ‘spectrum’ really does the job.

Nothing that the parent of a pre-verbal, stimming, passive child with Autism experiences is exactly like what the parent of a hyperverbal, aggressive, insomniac Autistic child experiences, yet here we are. I’ve had or read discussions among parents whose singular goal is cure, and they describe chronic behaviors and unanswered struggles that really make us know, if we listen, why they just want this to stop, why they want Autism to go away, why they desperately need relief, and I want it for them.

It throws me, though, because I don’t need those things, my child doesn’t, and many other families whose children have any number of requirements also do not, in spite of the fact that they, and I, exist under the same umbrella as those who do.

But my child does need therapy, and lots of it. He needs a special school. And some families need much more: money, transportation, care, medication… are they, and I, not entitled to those things? Are these children not entitled to be well met, well attended, but also to just be?

In some ways, it’s a philosophical question; does Autism comprise the self of your child, or obfuscate it? Science might answer that some day, but for now, I’m convinced of certain things.

I grew up with a sibling whose profound Autism was diagnosed at the age of four, and who spent her life being schooled, treated, and medicated with some of the finest resources available, long before anyone questioned if her condition could be eradicated. Today, she’s 54 years old, and still Autistic; she has also exceeded her lifespan prediction by about 20 years, and to the best of our knowledge, she’s happy. She lives in a group home, with peers, round the clock care, and extensive medication and accommodations that make her as comfortable, capable, and connected as she can be.

My family has been lucky, now for two generations; but in the end, it’s a person at stake, a person. It’s not a dream, it’s not a mission, it’s not a set of protocols; it’s somebody’s baby.

My mother’s, and mine.

***************************************************************************

If the advent and synthesis of support groups in our society, especially online, have taught us anything, it’s what we borrow from the original support group, the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Take what you like, and leave the rest.” Many groups claim to uphold this respect of members’ individuality, yet when it comes down to looking in the mirror of ourselves in one another, the idea shatters under the weight of our judgments. When a group is overly insistent about their beliefs, welcoming and safety are destroyed. At the same time, muscling ahead, even for the sake of only our own smug fantasy of passing, amounts to being a silent bully. Products and systems and chemicals are sold to parents by means of threat all the time; do we need more fear of failure and alienation in the very places we come for solace?

No, I don't know what exactly I want us all to say; maybe we just need to be careful.

When I think back to the leash debate, what I recall most vividly was the irony, the assertion by the group manager that the leash came between the mother and the child, yet what is it, exactly, that the leash does? I couldn’t believe that she really meant I should take no choice other than to hold my toddler by the hand all the time, that I should allow him not even three feet of autonomy, that I should take the risk of his danger over his life to satisfy a prescribed set of values I didn’t even believe in; and yet she did, and she asserted it on behalf of the greater good. But I, too, am part of the greater, and my child should have a share in the good, as should yours.

Ultimately, I didn’t mind getting kicked out of the group. One day, one way or another, my kids would stop nursing, and of course they did; at over three years old, which I’m a little proud of, not because it raises me in any organizational esteem, but because I look at my kids now and I believe I see glowing evidence of the nutrition and the bond, and even if that’s just my perception, it feels good, and that helps me.

But if I get kicked out of Autism, if my son does, because he’s not Autistic enough, or because I’m not willing to go to extremes to make him un-Autistic, a convolution so dangerous and self-defeating I’m almost scared to write it, then we’re both frankly doomed.

And alone.

These are the phantoms that walk around in my head at night: what if he improves too much, and loses his diagnosis? what if Autism is broken down into subsets and only some count? if my son lost his rights, couldn't yours?

One more thing of which I am certain is that we must advocate together.

Nobody on any Autism chat has rejected me outright, though despite being late to this party I’ve already encountered my share of scoldings for what I feed the kid or how I discipline him or don’t. But by and large, chatters seem to me to go to the other… end of the spectrum. I’ve known them to remove their own postings because their words motivated a bracing discussion, but then they got scared they’d hurt someone’s feelings, and that’s almost as unhelpful; to withhold our discoveries out of an excess of gentility.

But it’s out there, the hostility, the divisiveness, the labile triage of who has to go and who gets to stay. And I guess what I want is for the doors to stop slamming.

I have dreams for my son, and they change all the time. Some days, I like to imagine him washing and rehabilitating animals who’ve been injured in oil spills; he’s been a vegetarian since he was three and can’t tolerate the idea of anyone stepping on a bug. Other days, I picture him walking the halls of the school he now goes to, as a teacher or an OT. Still others, I envision him in work much less socially demanding; perhaps he’ll garden for the parks department and keep to himself; that would be fine. Perhaps things won’t work out so neatly; perhaps he won’t work. We can’t know that another crisis will never darken our door. I just hope that I’m able enough to help him if it does. But even if I am, I won’t be doing it alone. None of us do this alone.

Maybe someone’s child will be a leader. Maybe a therapy or a technique will help him, and he in turn, will help others. Maybe I don’t like being lumped in with the grueling needs of a much more complicated family; maybe they don’t like me taking credit for their unity and strength; maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe our griefs are nothing alike, not in depth, not in quantity, not in scope. Maybe it doesn’t matter, and maybe it does.

Autism was hard on the family I grew up in, and I ran from it, yet I’ve arrived at the very same place. My son is here. My sister is here. I am the mother, so my husband and my daughter have little choice but to remain with us. I don’t want my kids to be angry, like I was. I don’t want to be glad I’m not you. I just want to talk about it all, about all of it, and I want you to talk about it, because you’re a person, and I’m a person, and the Autistic kids are persons, and the non-Autistic kids are persons, and we’re tethered to one another, this is the leash of human connection; without it, any one of us could get lost.

The Hundred-Dollar Haircut

2011-10-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

Rudy’s nostrils flared and his rotund, powerful form advanced as he arched his shoulders back. A sheen of sweat seeped out onto his balding, domed head, and his eyes glittered. I would swear his ears twitched. Curling chest hairs that sprang out of the top of his starched, white barber’s jacket seemed electrified.

“I can do it,” he said.

I believed him.

Today was the day.

Bud had not had a haircut in a year.

***************************************************************************

Last time, it was also August, and Bruce had brought Bud home with half his head clipped neat, half left summer-shaggy, by a barber one block away who Bud had been to three or four times before without incident. This time, however, Bud squirmed, screamed and wept in the chair, and fought off the scissors and the clipper so violently that the barber nicked his ear, then refused to go on. It was just as well. Bruce reported that by then, Bud was hysterical to the point of near vomiting, which had become our barometer, that unraveling year, for just how badly things were going.

Still, I couldn’t quite believe what walked in the door. Bud’s sandy colored, straight, slightly doggish hair, which had gown down over the top of his shirt collar and begun to get in his eyes, remained that way, on one side; on the other, he had a clean buzz, almost perfect to his natural part, marred only by one bloody lobe, with bits of hair stuck to it.

I recall making some useful remark like, “No freaking way.”

Bruce had developed a gesture of submissive renouncement, I’d noticed; palms up in self defense coupled with an I’m done shake of the head. He went into the kitchen for a cold drink. Moopy was napping.

I sat in the big chair and Bud climbed up on top of my lap. It wasn’t that I wanted to care about nice haircuts, but he couldn’t start kindergarten like this; moreover, something was happening.

“Would you like to go for ice cream?” I asked Bud.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice scratchy from screaming, as a last weeping shudder phantomed through his slumped body.

“Why don’t you sit in the stroller and take a break,” I said, and he nodded gratefully, and climbed in, and I got my purse, and we walked out.

Heading down 79^th Street toward 37^th Avenue on that sunny summer afternoon, I felt a tingling in my hands; it was either pins and needles or a heart attack. Something was emerging. It was a different kind of thinking. I was aware of myself hanging my rage at Bruce on a hook; he was making me do this because he couldn’t, but that didn’t matter right now. And my fear for Bud, of what it meant that a 5-year-old child who once enjoyed haircuts suddenly acted like… well, an Autistic kid, screaming in terror at the utterly innocuous; I also had to set that aside, for the moment. It was a new part of me, this rage and fear combination, mechanical and organic at once, like some kind of collapsing alien arm.

But I had a big, gangly boy sitting in a stroller getting stared at because he looked like a brain surgery patient or the victim of a cruel joke, and I had to do something about it, right then.

Obviously, Bud couldn’t go back to the same barber. So instead we went to ‘Heads Ain’t Ready,’ a hip-hop-styling-shop on 37^th Avenue decorated with rugged graffiti and plastered with pictures of elaborate designs carved into young men’s buzzed scalps, a place peopled only by young men, giving and getting haircuts, posturing and smoking on the sidewalk, spilling out the door of the place mid-cell-phone-argument, white undershirts and silver neck chains everywhere, the blare of four different television channels flooding the block; soccer, rap music, Spanish language news, and movie gunfire.

I got Bud an ice cream from the truck, and parked him with it, in the stroller, in front of Headz. Though he’d begun a scary new habit in recent months of spontaneous running away, I was reasonably sure that just then, wiped out from crying and busy with a cone, he’d stay put long enough for me to corner a young barber inside with the threat of tears and the promise of a twenty dollar tip. I approached the first guy with an empty chair; he was wire-thin, with stylish drooping jeans that made the front of his body concave, and he wore a hand-painted t-shirt of graffiti designs around the word ‘Damn!’ His thick, stiff, long-grown hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail, half of it braided out, half a cloud at his neck; the weird coincidence of that motivated me.

“Listen,” I said to him, my face a little too close for his comfort and he reared back, “I need help. My kid just freaked out at another barber. My husband said he was screaming. I don’t know what’s going on. Now his head is completely fucked up. He can’t go to school like this. I’ll hold him in the chair and you buzz it off, okay? Not bald, okay? Like a crew cut. But no scissors. The other guy cut his ear. I’ll tip you twenty bucks.”

The guy nodded, and stood on tiptoe to peer over the window posters, out at Bud, who sat ridiculously placid in the stroller, licking ice cream off his hands, oblivious to his half-shorn head. Then the guy looked at me and said with a shrug, “Okay, bring him in.”

Outside, I stood Bud up, and doused his hands with bottled water and wiped them on my shirt. “We’re going to get your haircut finished now,” I said, and he froze, staring at me. “We have to,” I said. “But it will be fast. I’ll help you.” His shoulders drooped and I picked him up, and carried him inside.

I put him in the chair. The barber put the plastic cape on Bud, who was then fine for one minute. The barber was quiet with confusion, sneaking looks at me; what was the big deal? He firmly rubbed the cut half of Bud’s head, then tried to run his fingers through the long side, and they snagged, tugging Bud’s head sharply to the left. Bud whirled around and gave him a dirty look, growling, “Hey!” and the guy jumped back, then recomposed himself.

“Relax, little man,” he said.

He picked up the clippers and turned them on and Bud gripped the sides of the chair, howling “Nooooooooooooo!” As the clippers neared his head, he began to writhe and twist, and that’s when I got between him and the barber, and put my arms around him. The tighter I held him the more he squirmed, and the closer the clipper got to his ear as the barber sheared away sheets of his tangled, overgrown hair, the louder Bud got, crying “Noooo! No! NO!” By the end of five minutes, I was squeezing Bud with all my might and Bud had all but given up, bent in despair and full throated crying, tears streaming out of his eyes, whimpering, “No… no…” but the haircut was done.

If I had doubted Bruce’s report, I now had my evidence, but was shocked anyway. During previous haircuts, Bud had been twitchy, but giggly-twitchy, tickle-irked, yet he’d enjoyed it. He had liked getting haircuts. Now, he acted like an altogether different child, a child with amorphous, unmanageable problems, a child I didn’t know.

We pulled off the cape and Bud bolted from the chair. I lunged after him and caught him by the arm, just to keep him from escaping enraged to the street. I held on to him as I paid with my free hand, with exact change for the hair cut and a crisp twenty as promised for the tip.

The barber nodded in thanks and did not look me in the eye, and he turned around and proceeded to clean up. Bud and I left.

On the sidewalk, I pulled Bud’s shirt off him and brushed away the cascade of hair that had stuck to his tear-streaked face and neck and sweating body and sat him back down in the stroller. His head lolled back in exhaustion. We went to Starbucks and I got ice coffee, and he got juice, and a bagel he was too tired to eat. He fell asleep as I slowly pushed him down the avenue, slowly to lull him, and because he was so big. At a Korean belt-and-backpack store with a display of toys on boxes out front, I bought Bud a school bus, and a helicopter, and a sports car, and put them in his sleeping lap so they’d be there when he woke up, and we made our way home.

******************************************************************************

In the next few weeks, Bud experienced an emotional and behavioral crisis to which Bruce and I responded with a sequence of actions entirely familiar to the parents of almost every special needs child; removal from situation, evaluation, documentation, pursuit of services, placement, therapy, and then you wait; will it work?

It worked. The constellation of diagnoses Bud received, centering on Asperger’s Syndrome and Anxiety, indicated a school and range of therapies we were then able to access in totality; but we were very lucky. Some children with similar disparities, high cognitive scores with intensive behavioral management needs, are often more difficult to identify and thus end up less well-placed. But our stunning good fortune with the team of professionals we encountered resulted in Bud’s acclimating beautifully by late winter to special education with related services. Treatment repaired him from trauma, and we witnessed a transformation; Bud’s obsessions returned to the scale of intense interests, his violence receded completely, his pragmatic and relatable language improved a great deal, compassion, consideration, and flexibility emerged in his personality, he became able to sleep through the night again, stopped running away, made friends, and was happy.

But he wouldn’t get a haircut.

**************************************************************************

At first we didn’t even notice it; we had bigger fish to fry, as they say. We had all those evaluations, and research to do, had to find him a school, get him squared away in there, used to taking the bus; we kept a close eye on our daughter during all this and her reactiveness to her brother’s struggles. Once the kids did get settled, Bruce and I experienced crashes of our own, from which we emerged with a feeling of diminished resilience. But by late spring, when the dust began to clear, we looked at Bud and saw a taller, stronger, scruffy surfer dude only missing a necklace of puka shells; his hair was nearly to his shoulders again, and everyone thought it was adorable.

It was, except first thing in the morning when it had to be combed, and then it was a nightmare. He has my hair, only lighter in color; it’s straight, but a little coarse, just enough to knot up over night and ideal for cultivating dreadlocks, if one so chose. It is not hair that cooperates with a comb, not without being soaked through with detangling spray or globbed with conditioner. Bud was getting out of bed each day with gnarled hives of hair on the back of his head, and, given his Sensory Processing Disorder and Anxiety, the sight of the tangle spray and soft brush threw him into running, leaping paroxysms of screaming and hysterical crying; it was like being catapulted backward in time to the worst moments of his crisis, for fifteen minutes, every morning.

He needed to get a haircut; I needed him to get one. But consistent with his history, no amount of bribery was worth it to him. And while we had seen with his OT and swimming lessons how profoundly well non-verbal approaches to learning and regulation worked with him, on the haircut, it seemed we’d have to appeal to his intellect, because we wanted the haircut now, and we hoped he would listen to reason.

Over coming weeks, I’d walk him past Headz and other barbershops, and have him take a look inside to see how no-big-deal it all was. Sometimes barbers “got it,” what I was doing, and handed Bud an unsolicited lollipop, which he accepted with his characteristic suspicion. I’d say, “What do you think? Is today the day? You wanna hop in the chair and get it over with?”

“Nope!” he’s respond, turn on his heel, and march out.

At home, the combing process improved marginally when I started speaking to him very quietly during it, about how we wouldn’t have to go through this for at least six months if he got a haircut, or, if he got them often enough, ever again.

“No more combing ever again? Not ever?” he’d ask, his eyes darting toward me and away.

“Never,” I’d say, controlling my urge to roll on the floor and beg and cry because in spite of his somewhat calmer participation, now I’d become the Pavlovian victim, sweating through the bulk of the combing sessions during which Bud wailed and wept like a two-year-old or bolted from the room to hide in the closet or under my bed, my heart racing with resentment, and panic; how bad would it get? “Stop screaming,” I would say as he screamed, “Stop screaming! STOP SCREAMING!” I was certain that if I had to go through it with him even once more I’d have a massive coronary event.

On the less horrible comb-days, I’d venture, “So what do you think? Go for a haircut later today? We’ll get a big ice cream afterward?” My bribery mechanism was so primed it was automatic, despite amassed proof it never worked.

“Nope,” he’d say, hopping off the bed, “Not today.”

Months passed.

***********************************************************************

“Here’s the thing,” I said to Bud in July as I doused his head in the bathroom sink, then slathered his hair with Blonding Tones Conditioner which had been recommended to me by the mom of a girl with a Rapunzel-grade mane. “This hair thing is hurting us. It’s horrible for you. I’m screaming at you. You’re screaming at me. Why are we hurting each other? Don’t you want it to stop?”

“I do want it to stop,” said Bud, wincing and writhing, his shoulders jammed up into his ears, his arms extended crucifixion style, his fingers twitching, tears welling up in his eyes. “I just don’t want to get a haircut.”

“Why?” I whined.

“Because it’s going to hurt!” he shouted back at me.

“It’s not going to hurt! It’s hair!” I yelled at my son, my son with Autism and Anxiety, because deep down, I too, often just don’t want things to be the shitty way that they are.

“RRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!” he screamed at me, and ran into his room and slammed the door, and threw himself on the bed and cried.

*************************************************************************

Meanwhile, speaking of Rapunzel, my daughter Moopy had turned 4 over the winter, become highly alert to princess-culture, and fallen in love with the movie ‘TANGLED.’ She had also not had a haircut since the previous summer, her intention being “to grow Tangled hair,” which she certainly did. She, too, underwent intense combings every morning, but like me, she has an obscenely high tolerance for pain, and didn’t really care; it just annoyed her; sometimes a lot, but not enough to scream about it.

Through spring and on into summer, we combed and marveled at her lengthening ‘Tangled’ hair, the inverse mirroring of our ongoing hair-gatory with her brother, which she watched each day with growing curiosity. Moopy began a kind of call-and-response reaction to Bud’s combing meltdowns; the worse his fit, the more blithe and obsequious she’d be when the spray and brush were turned toward her. She was showing him up but good, and he knew it. There developed a resurgence in his striking out at her, grabbing her by the shirt, yanking her arm, during or after her exemplary grooming session, gritting his teeth and growling at her as he walked by; she’d smile and clutch her hands in self-satisfied glee.

I wanted to point out to both kids what a nice job Moop was doing, how her cooperation helped everyone, but it would only have made things worse. I was certain that Bud’s aggression about the issue had as much to do with his own shame as it did with his actual fear and discomfort. Appealing to his mind was not working, which really should have been no surprise to me. The horrible morning combings continued.

Then one morning, Moop unfurled a stunningly complex and subtle coup of sibling rivalry showmanship for which I can never fully repay her. She walked out of her bedroom for her hairbrushing and said, “I’m sick of this stupid Rapunzel hair! It’s a pain! I want to get a haircut! I want to get a haircut right now!”

Bruce, Bud, and I were stupefied.

That afternoon on the way home from school, I took her into the beauty shop I go to by the subway, and she marched straight to the back, climbed up into the chair, and told the stylist, who had given her a darling little chin-length cut the year before, “I will like a short haircut like I used to have, please. To make my face look like a beautiful flower.”

I nearly drowned her in kisses and lollipops, but I still had no clue as to what would follow. In that moment, all I knew was that $15 and a tip cut away a whole layer of dynamic jealousy in our household and stripped ten grueling minutes off our morning routine of getting the kids up, dressed, fed, shod, jacketed, backpacked and out the door by ten after seven, bless her Moopy little heart.

She strutted home from the beauty shop looking for any neighbors or pals we might run into for a chance to show off her frankly perfect Little Rascals style bob; it made her round head look rounder, her rubbery pink cheeks glow, and her blue eyes pop like stars. She posed and pivoted past the mirrors in our lobby and marched herself into our apartment, planting herself in front of Papa, her grandfather, and said, “Papa! Look at my excellent haircut! See how short it is? And it didn’t hurt or anything!”

“You look beautiful,” said Papa admiringly, but in low tones, trying not to crow about his grand-doll in front of Bud.

Bud walked over to Moopy and studied her head, brow furrowed.

“Look at my hair,” my daughter said to my son. “Look,” she said more quietly. “It didn’t hurt at all.”

We all seemed to breathe in carefully at once. Then Bud went into his room and lay on his bed. I followed him.

“What if we,” I said to him, “brought the little DVD player that we take in the car, and we go to the movie store and you can pick two new movies; one to watch during the haircut, and one for after dinner, and we can buy a nice desert for later on the way home. Let’s do it. Come on. What do you say?”

“I say okay,” he said, sitting up on the bed, already weary, but stalwart, and ready. “But we have to take the stroller.”

“You’re six years-,” I started to say, then didn’t. “Okay,” I said, “let’s take the stroller.”

And we did.

******************************************************************************

He picked out an animated Star Wars collection that cost over $30 and some kind of Marvel superhero cartoon thing that bordered on inappropriate but which I knew would hold his attention for the 15 minutes the haircut would take, and which I would hide, afterward. This was the last time, I told myself, that I would push this 4 ft. tall, 60 pound kid in a stroller, at least in public. I could barely get down the street, but I paced myself.

Outside Headz Ain’t Ready, I parked him and left him studying the DVD covers. The barber from last year wasn’t there, apparently replaced by the far more formidable Rudy, in the first chair by the door, who looked guardedly at me when I walked in.

“Hi,” I said. “My son has issues. He gets nervous. He hasn’t had a haircut in a year.”

Rudy stood up. “I got kids,” he said. “I understand.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He can get really spun up. He might freak out half way through, or cry, but I mean like, really cry. If he freaks out, can you work with me? Even if we have to take a break? He’s a good boy…” I prattled on. “Can you…”

“I can do it,” he said.

I believed him.

Today was the day.

I brought Bud to the door. He edged in, casing the place. Rudy stood next to the chair, not really looking at Bud, brushing this and that, picking up a cape… he was good.

“Did you really bring the DVD player?” Bud asked, putting himself into the chair nonchalantly.

“Here it is,” I said, also trying to lay low. There were no other customers, and the idle barbers watched a mob movie of some kind on a million-inch screen TV near the ceiling. The sound track of a pistol whipping roared over our heads, and Bud’s eyes were drawn to it.

Rudy half-shouted at the guy at the cash register, “Turn that shit off, I got a kid here.” The guy brought the volume way down.

I plugged in the DVD player and set it on Bud’s lap. I put in the Marvel movie, which wasn’t that much different from what had been turned off, though none of the superheroes were getting beat bloody with a gun, at least. Bud seemed to intentionally focus on the little screen, and to ignore what was happening on his head.

Rudy started the clippers. At the buzzing sound, Bud’s head jerked up, but Rudy was a nanosecond ahead of him and jumped back. “It’s just clippers, it’s okay,” he said. “Oh, look at your movie, what’s going on there?” Bud shot Rudy a look of mild disdain; he is no fool, but returned his attention to the heroes.

Like the year before, curtains of hair fell and slid down the cape to the floor. There was something unbearably institutional about it all, something military, punishing. I had, in truth, loved Bud’s long hair; I always had. He didn’t even have a first haircut until he was three years old and by then had blonde cornsilk to his shoulders; I loved the long hair as a counterpoint to that assertive, hard-nosed little personality of his, which was not little anymore. I loved the stylelessness of the long hair, the wild randomness of it; it did somehow speak back to me of the romance of my little boy, my one and only, my pal, Bud.

Only as the clippers rounded the delicate web of skin between Bud’s ear and the sides of his head did he react to them again; he jerked once, growled “Hey!” Rudy backed off for a second, but then resumed, even more gingerly. I kept my hands close to the DVD player just in case, but it never really got jostled. During the last detailing clipper strokes at the temples and nape, Bud scrunched up his neck a bit, as boys do; Rudy pushed his shoulder gently down, Bud brought it up, Rudy pushed it down and held it, and took a last swipe, and was done.

I took the DVD player. Rudy snapped off the cape. Bud got out of the chair and stepped up to the mirror, and smiled broadly. Rudy brushed him off fast as Bud turned left and right, admiring his head, rubbing it.

“Feels good,” he said, a little awed.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Really good. Okay, I’m ready to get a treat now!”

He remained there, looking at himself and alternately at Rudy, who smiled without commitment, and swept up all the hair, so much of it, while I walked to the back and paid the cashier. I returned and handed Bud the twenty-dollar bill which was Rudy’s due. I said, “Give it to Rudy, and say thanks.”

Bud turned to Rudy and handed him the bill, and said, “Thanks, Rudy!” smiling his most dementedly gleeful, open-mouthed, I’m-being-Kermit-the-Frog smile, bopping his head goofily up and down.

We walked out. Bud plunked himself into the stroller.

“You gotta be kidding,” I said.

“I’m tired!” he whined, smiling.

“Okay,” I said, smiling too, of course, and began to push.

And we have not combed his hair since.

****************************************************************************

I take credit for none of it. Neither the cajoling visits to barbershops nor the matter-of-fact chit-chat about how and why it would be easy and fine, not the whining or the wheedling, not the shrieking or the pleading, not the DVDs or the ice cream, is what did it. And as much as I loved Moop’s brilliantly underhanded yet compassionate coercion of her brother through that fragile transition in his life, whether she knew what she was doing or not… ultimately, the victory belongs to Bud alone.

His head was ready. That’s all.

***********************************************************************

Haircut for Moopy $15

Tip for Moopy’s Stylist $5

Star Wars DVDs $30

Marvel DVD $14

Bud’s Haircut $12

Tip for Rudy $20

Ice Cream and Whip Cream $10

Total Expenses for the afternoon $106

The Hundred-Dollar (and then some) Haircut …

Yes.

Worth every penny.

The Family Book of Forgiveness - Introduction

2011-09-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

I am not gifted with a great wealth of self-esteem, to begin with. So when my child went into crisis, I was not only breathless with terror and pain on his behalf, I was also shot through with humiliation; my worst fears had come true; I had failed as a parent.

At five years old, my son experienced a surge of unprecedented aggressive and unregulated behaviors. He had always been prickly, ‘slow to warm up,’ impulsive, but his gift for language and advanced concepts like metaphor and complex narrative, his fascination with science, deterred us entirely from ever considering that he might have developmental problems. A delayed child was a late speaker, no? Introverted? Physically weak or sickly? That was not my crashing, bashing, tanned, muscular, climbing, swimming, never-shutting-up… pacing… reactive… echolalic… obsessive… anxious… twitching… mistrustful…

…wait a minute…

Visits to a psychologist my husband and I trusted and conversations with our pediatrician yielded nothing. But by the third week of kindergarten, our son was running out of the school building into traffic screaming “Mommy!” or clawing his way through the principal’s face. It was time to get serious. A gamut of evaluations revealed Autism; more specifically, Asperger’s Syndrome. And OCD, and Anxiety, and Sensory Processing Disorder, and probably Tourette Syndrome. We were shocked. And we did not know what to do next.

So we blamed ourselves.

Right?

Isn’t that what we all do?

My own particular despair was case-building itself around the fact that I have a profoundly Autistic sister, my only sibling, twelve years older than me, who also has Turner’s Syndrome (and who later in her life has developed Schizophrenia); I had no business passing on this DNA.

I had a nagging suspicion all my adult life that I carried unusual genes. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety since I was a child, and have always felt like an outsider, maybe even to myself. When, in my early 30’s, my biological clock took over my every conscious and dreaming moment, I began to realize that I wanted a child more than I wanted to go on living without one, but I balked, for so many reasons; that poor self esteem, Autism and Turner’s in the family; I shouldn’t.

But I did. It was the most exciting time in my life, up to that point, being pregnant with my son; my husband and I were constantly giddy. I rejected genetic testing of any kind because I just didn’t want to know; what would I do? Terminate my son? Give him up?

It would have been pointless anyway, because as yet, there is no genetic test for Autism, or for any of the things my son has. And even if I could have known, the information would have served no purpose other than to torment me.

My son was gorgeous. He was perfect in every way except for tongue-tie; a symptom? I’ll never know. Once that got fixed we nursed our way uninterrupted, right through my pregnancy with my daughter, to fatness and cuteness and glowing good health. Everything was fine. I’d finally done something right. In some ways, I was even kind of good at it.

Till kindergarten.

After we learned that our son is Autistic, I had weeks where, yes… I wished I had not had him. Not because I didn’t love him; in fact I loved him more. But because I was sure that I had done him an unforgivable injustice; I’d passed him Autism. I’d drawn him what experience made me believe was the absolute worst card in the deck. And I couldn’t fix it. And I couldn’t help him. And I believed that we were doomed to repeat the stress and loss and shame of my own growing up, with my sister, and my parents, and their Sysephisian struggles. I had failed as a parent just by being one.

But, there’s no drop-out option, is there, like failing in college, then walking away and getting some small job to pay the rent. Of course, there are parents who tragically or mercifully leave, but luckily, sincerely so, I was not among them. My father recounted stories to me of fathers he knew when my sister was a child, fathers who couldn’t or wouldn’t love problem children enough to stay, and he spat on the ground as he spoke of them. In the swarming fears of my mind, I wanted to run away, too; from the uncertainty, the work ahead. My son had no school, now. He had no treatment. I’d quit my own school. My daughter began acting out and her teachers were calling. Everything felt out of control and I just wanted it all to stop.

It was information that would save me, and friends. One, who in this book I will call Holly (all the names and possibly sexes and ages of people represented here have been changed,) had been in the process of a similar experience with her daughter Kate, and she gave me the first contact I had for OT – occupational therapy – for my son, which was revelatory. I began my research there, and with Resources for Children With Special Needs, New York City’s only independent non-profit organization supporting families like mine. At Holly’s urging, I wrapped my head around that phrase, ‘special needs,’ and began digging like a badger, voraciously amassing literature, phone numbers, explanations, applications, and networking like crazy, calling this administrator to get that supervisor’s number to make an appointment with this therapist and follow up with a meeting with those teachers and touching base with this doctor to get this piece of paper that will verify my son being entitled to everything.

If you are this parent, you know exactly what I am talking about. The doing of it all was harrowing, but empowering. I had affect again. I was taking control. I couldn’t change my son, nor did I really want to, but suddenly, I could provide for him; the crashing sense of failure was mitigated. I worked aggressively with the Department of Education’s Committee for Special Education and the Central Base Support Team and found a perfect school for him. I watched as outside therapies we paid astonishing amounts of money for worked and made him more comfortable, capable, and connected. I found a babysitter, the Indomitable Angela, who walked into our apartment committed to loving and accepting my son, sight unseen, and who never wavered, and who continues to dote on both of my children, slathering them with a generosity of patience and spirit and humor that I’ve never actually witnessed in another human being.

Holly, and Linda and Amy, the other two special needs moms with whom I have formed lasting friendships and an invaluable support group, all said something to me that I did not believe, early on; It will get better.

It did.

Yet something lurked, some phantom thing walked around in my head at night, keeping me awake despite my prismatic exhaustion; it wasn’t the failure, which abated with action, and my son’s improvement and small successes.

It was that I was sorry, and I couldn’t let it go.

For this wound, there seemed to be no salve outside myself. In books, I found a very broad and creative variety of practical techniques for coping with children who struggle with sensory challenges and Autism-related difficulties; in fact I was amazed at the accuracy with which I saw my own child described, time and again. The research and resources that went into these works was frankly incredible, but they didn’t reach back to me about myself, about how to cope with the me problem in this constellation.

I did find a sense of belonging within the pages of two wonderful anthologies by parents of special needs children; My Baby Rides the Short Bus edited by Jen Silverman, Yantra Bertelli, and Sarah Margaret, and Gravity Pulls You In, edited by Kyra Anderson and Vicki Forman. In these essays and anecdotes, I felt like I was shaking hands with parents forever riding the same train I was, trundling along at a rocking speed, shoveling the coal, feeding the fire, with barely a moment to notice the scenery as it snaps by, in search of that answer that burns somewhere in themselves, but remains yet unseen on the horizon; peace.

And that’s what this book is about; forgiveness; of our children, and of ourselves.

I get angry with my son almost every day. I don’t like the way he talks to me sometimes, whining or complaining bitterly when he’s unsatisfied with all that he has in life, his food, his toys, his choices, me. I don’t like it when he fights with his sister, because he’s bigger than she is, and does know better. And I don’t like it when he starts screeching like a howler monkey at homework time even though he knows damn well that the homework is getting done come hell or midnight. I love and give too much to be treated like that; but there it is. I want him to display control that he does not yet have, and may never; I would like him, in that way, to be different; and so I speak sharply back to him, I shout and break things, and then I want to slam my head on the wall because he learns these behaviors from me.

Neither he nor I am scheduled to become flawless, or even much better, any time soon. We are it. Now. And when things go well, I reward him effusively. I believe in the immediate affirmation of candy. I am fortunate in that my son’s most effective motivator is pretend play with me. These are things I have at my disposal; a dollar’s worth of chocolate, my time.

Forgiveness is less accessible. I don’t know where to get it. The place inside me, maybe the flesh vortex where my son first came into being, feels like a possible source. Maybe there’s a door in my heart that swings wide and liberates my son and me. I don’t know. But I feel something. When I truly see my son for who he is, and myself, and I forgive us, we feel free.

I want that peace for all the special needs children, and for all their parents.

I offer it here. And I hope it helps.

Vacation in Cape Cod

2011-09-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

The Playground

Whale Watching

Race Point

The Lake

The Hotel

Labor Day

2011-09-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

You don't tug on Superman’s cape

You don’t spit into the wind

You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger

And you don’t mess around with Jim!

- Jim Croce

I just want to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke all of them. At once. I try breaking things and hold back at the last second, scaring myself. Walking the dog, a young couple on a Japanese motorcycle rev their engine at me menacingly in a cross walk and I stop dead in front of them, shouting, “Get off the fucking bike, assholes! You fucks! Come on!” and they stare at me and give me the finger, saying “Fuck you, lady!” and I give them the finger back and move on.

Summer in New York.

I remember the scene in “Pollock” when Marcia Gay Harden’s Lee Krasner screams at Ed Harris’s binge-drinking Jackson, “PAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNT!” I remember my friend Philosopher Mom reminding me of this scene, when I was in one of my ruts, shouting at me through the cell phone, “Wriiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttte!”

It’s that. It’s certainly that.

I’m not writing enough. I’m not exercising. My fall clothes won’t fit and my hair is a disaster. I’m exhausted. We have mice and I don’t care; I just feel bad that Bruce deserves better. Nothing that I’m doing feels like it’s working. I miss my mother.

But there’s more.

It’s been a year.

Labor Day was a year.

Since I tried to reinvent my life, since my cousin died on his motorcycle, since the bed bugs, the shredded rugs, since Bud’s crisis, since I tried to reel it all back in, the beginning of our unraveling…

and I, today, am running in place.

*****************************************************************************

Like everything, it crept up on me. Bud’s summer school ended mid August, but my daughter Moopy and I had no break; we had school straight through. Bud was unmoored, spending long days with the sitter, away from his routine, his peers, and what amounts really to all-day therapy at school; he began to fray at the edges. I tried implementing home-style OT, but it was sporadic at best. I filled his days with the pool club and day trips, and the sitter took him to the playground and ran him ragged with water guns. But by the end of his third week, all his indicative behaviors had resurfaced, and while I noticed it all, I didn’t get it.

The twitching, the eye bugging, the crashing and bashing through the apartment, the noise making, negativity, impulsivity, compulsive prattle, pacing, and his second most effective ball-breaking expression of agitation; hurting his sister. What did it mean?

But first, to be clear, and fair; he does not abuse her, and for her part, she antagonizes equally, ambushing him around corners and smacking him on the head with a Barbie doll. Having witnessed the relentless pinching and pushing in office, more than one psychologist back in the winter pointed out to me that it’s nothing ‘typically developing’ children don’t do all the time to each other.

I, however, never really experienced this behavior before; my only sibling is 12 years older than me and has profound autism and schizophrenia. She fed me canned peaches in my high chair and pushed me in the stroller, but she never, ever gave me an Indian Burn (yes, it’s still called that,) and she never, ever hit me. I needed to be told that slapping and arm-twisting are all in a sibling’s day’s work.

But it gets to me.

Typical for neurotypicals or not, behavior like that in a kid with Bud’s resplendent, necessary, saturating diagnostic terms means something.

And let’s be honest. He’s not this way off the wall.

Who stands in the middle of the avenue at midnight threatening motorcyclists?

Okay.

So the twitching and the slapping and the on and on and on? It meant Bud needed his goddamn therapy! And I need my therapy because all my behaviors are back. I’m eating junk and dreaming of smoking, I’m bitchy and reactive and impatient, I’m peeling my feet. I need my clickety-clacky on the keyboard, my word counts, some screen time, some long walks, and some no one screaming MOMMY!

Bud and I, we want to be good, but it’s not easy.

*********************************************************************************

The summer started fine. My classes were fine, Moopy’s school was fine. There did seem to be a lot of drama with Bud’s summer bus, a lot of 30 mile drives for me and The Moop down the BQE to pick him up, rather than waiting out the incomprehensible 2 hours it seemed to take the bus to get him home (which never happened during the regular school year, so WTF?); that alone may have put me in gear. I didn’t think I minded the drive; at least that way we could run to the pool instead of getting our brains blasted in the Sensory Processing Hell that is our filthy and overcrowded playground; and, we were going to the pool. Even I don’t have the gauche to complain about that. Plus the minivan Bruce got us is no less than a first class space ship. Apparently it liquefies the roadway and is rigged underneath with hovercraft pontoons. Also an in-tact credit card greased the weeks.

There were a lot of golden moments. Many evenings while I made the kids’ dinner, I’d become aware of their two voices, playing pretend with a blend of Barbies and action figures and dinosaurs, in the doll house and the Rapunzel castle, working out scenes of plastic three-horned children arguing and Power Ranger parents enforcing a truce. They took long baths sometimes, cooking soap food in their tub restaurant and inviting me to come try it “on the house.” Often we walked the dog down to the LaGuardia Landing Lights fields and on the way back one time, met a bunch of kids with a gaggle of little mop-top dogs; a boy stood shyly to the side, and Bud said to him, “I’m six years old. Do you go to summer school?” and the two of them all but walked off together into the sunset. One day at the pool Bud taught a gentle tempered nine-year-old boy to swim to the bottom of the deep end, by holding hands.

But once Bud was on break, school-free, the tempo changed. There seemed to be even more running around, a lot of riding the subway in and out of Manhattan every day and climbing in and out of the van, a lot of organizing of gear and building up of garbage and extra laundry and lost toys and a lot of me running out to write my papers the minute Bruce walked in. I seemed to always have more to do than I could manage and my hours and minutes just evaporated. I knew going into the summer I wouldn’t get much writing, or much exercise, but I actually got none; it became a blur.

Except for Bud’s surges. Those are sharp. Because I forget, when he’s fine.

We went to DC one long weekend while summer school was still in session; Bud had been really steady for some weeks. But every single DC tourist attraction was mobbed, which represents Bud’s absolute single worst psycho-social nightmare; crowds. Each day started all right, with breakfast at a nearby Starbucks that had an awesome interactive sound sculpture outside on the wide sidewalk; Bruce and I took turns eating and then standing outside with the kids, tucking pieces of buttered bagel into their faces as they swung by on the sculpture. But by ten or eleven a.m., at each destination, Bud was just running. Blind, deaf, tunnel vision running through the throngs, through the Smithsonian, through the zoo, through Natural History, through town, across the Mall, into the hotel lobby and up and down the geometric patterned carpet hallways. Running.

Except in the hotel pool. Well, you can’t run in a pool. But I think over the course of three days the kids spent something like 15 hours in there, that blessed sensory integration tank, and thank God, because toward the end of the third day Bruce and I were on the brink of twin psychic explosions, just from the running and the bickering between the kids and the smacking. And the fourth day of the trip, on what brilliant whim I can’t recall, I changed the breakfast place.

Because he’s over the OCD stuff, isn’t he? Not quite so autistic? He’s fine, right?

Was I HIGH? By the time we walked out of the wrong Starbucks, Bud was bug-eyed, tangential, and literally shaking with anxiety.

The drive home to New York was long.

But half way into the school week that followed, half a week of OT, speech pragmatics, and psychotherapy, half a week with Miss Sharon and Miss Louise, his world whirring evenly on axis once again, Bud was right as rain.

Two weeks later, school was over.

******************************************************************************

Don’t fuck with it! Right? Don’t stop school! Don’t bring therapy to a screeching halt with no back-up plan! I mean, I know this stuff! Don’t mess with the kid’s concept. It is not worth it. That shit will not fly here. End of story. Bruce did the shopping recently and bought the wrong noodles and I gave them to my neighbor. Why? Because Bud can’t eat the wrong noodles! Duh! Do YOU want to make a big bunch of noodles and then throw them in the garbage? I don’t!

(Who am I ranting at? Oh. Myself.)

Why did I not find something to tide the kid over the school break? Because I’m still a newbie at all this? A grinne? Because I wanted to believe?

********************************************************************************

On the first of September I posted an old piece on my blog; a kind of ‘9/11 related’ memoir, of which I was very proud, but which was not new; I had nothing new. I had twenty pages of the next chapter of BEAUTIFUL KID, but it was nowhere near done. The window to finish it before classes ramped up for the fall had shut. Bud still had weeks to go before school started, and I was trying desperately to streamline sitter expenses, which meant no daylight writing hours for me. Every night I planned to get up early the next morning to exercise, then didn’t do it. Poems of mine that were accepted to a magazine would not come out till December, I learned - many months later than I’d hoped. And two other things I’d submitted with great optimism were rejected.

On September 2nd, I saw a rave review by an autism writer I respect, about an autism parenting memoir that got a ton of press and that I thought was awful; nevertheless, there it was, the memoir, published, grinning at me, as were two blogs I’d recently discovered, both outstandingly well written and picked up by publishers for books that will come out this year. I buried my face in my hands and cried for an hour, feeling very, very sorry for myself, and very, very jealous.

Meanwhile, Bud was spinning in his bed. He’d come out and we’d put him back in. He woke up the next morning talking a blue streak and did not stop, except to pull his sister down on her ass on the hardwood floor by the back of her shirt, “Because she was annoying me!” He spent the day jumping off the furniture. He completely stopped responding to his name. He talked about imaginary animals incessantly.

And that night, he and Moopy were in the tub, beating the daylights out of each other and patently refusing to knock it the fuck off (I do not curse at them, I swear.) Every time I walked out of the bathroom Moopy would scream. I charged back in to find Bud standing up in the sudsy water pointing at her, saying “She started it by throwing soap in my eyes so I smacked her in the face and I’m not sorry.” Moopy admitted that she’d thrown liquid soap in his eyes.

“I’ll be right back,” I muttered. “Stop killing each other.” I marched out to turn off the computer, giving up for the night, and inadvertently erased six really

good

pages.

I shut the computer. I went back into the bathroom. Bud and Moopy were holding each other’s heads under the water by force. I yanked them both up by their armpits. Bud I hauled out, Moop I left in there.

“You get yourself rinsed off,” I ordered her, “and you,” I said to Bud, “are done.”

“You get yourself rinsed off,” he mimicked, “and you are done.”

My blood ran cold. His echolalia was back. I turned toward the toilet because I thought I was going to be sick.

Bullying his sister is the second most inflaming thing Bud does when he’s not feeling right. Echolalia is, by far, number one. It scares the living shit out of me, like mental illness.

For some reason, all I could see inside my skull as Bud sing-songed the report of his panic, was that hatchet-faced-bitch art teacher at the mainstream kindergarten where he’d had his crisis, a snotty woman ten years younger than me with no kids of her own, who said, during the final meeting about Bud, “I’ve worked with children who’ve had ADD, retardation, even schizophrenia! So I understand how hard this is for you!” And then she promptly filed a report alleging that Bud, who was FIVE, had assaulted her.

It was, without a doubt, one of the worst moments of my life.

I now held on to Bud’s wrist and looked as hard as I could into his face. Was it all gone? A year of therapies? A year of progress? A year of reinvention, by all of us? Was that sinister little troll of a teacher right? Had Bud fallen through a wormhole, backward, to some smaller, fractured, unspooling self who bit and spit and hurled his body as if the shapes of his feverish limbs could spell out Fuck everything!?

********************************************************************************

My sister’s first and only speech for years was echolalia; the exact replication of heard verbal expression. That was not the case with Bud; he blended it with normal speaking, until his crisis, when it became a chronic response to anxiety; we did not know that, at first; we thought he was being a prick. Only later, during deep delving evaluations and long, exploratory discussions with the professionals who treated him, did we come to understand. Stress short circuited Bud’s brain just as if he were a little robot that fell in a puddle, sparks flying off his head and smoke coming out his ears as he called out a kind of Mayday! Mayday!

Except that you would have to have said ‘mayday’ first, for the echolalia to be obvious, but you didn’t, because you didn’t know. So you said things like, “Stop throwing metal cars!” and he said back Stop throwing metal cars! which was as close to Mayday! as his anxiety-fried brain could get, and he laughed, and his eyes bulged with fear, as all the other doors in his brain slammed shut.

And I'd forgotten all that.

So I dragged him by the armpit, wrapped in a towel, to my bedroom, and shoved him in there, and closed the door. And I doused Moopy with warm water and stuffed her into pajamas stuck her in a chair and shoved a movie into the DVD player and slammed a bowl of cheerios down on the table in front of her. She gave me a dirty look, but turned her attention to “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” for the seventeenth time.

I went back to my bedroom door. Something about the way my hand looked as I raised it, tanned, with a clean manicure for a change (that I’d found time for, but not exercise,) sent a chill of de ja vu through my chest. I opened my door. The room was still dark. Bud sat on the bed, in his towel, looking out at the rainy evening.

“Mommy,” he said. “Do you want to know about a bird that I made up?”

I went to him at the bed, and rewrapped the towel around him, and took all sixty pounds of his golden skin and green eyes and long legs into my lap, and I rocked him.

“Well, do you?” he asked me again.

I said, “I do.”

He had not fallen through a wormhole. He was right there in my lap. He was just having a hard time.

And I certainly know how that is.

******************************************************************************

A year ago, I had an inspiration to go to nursing school. I convinced myself that if 20-year-olds could do chemistry, so could I, and I indulged in fantasies of myself and Bruce going out to dinner once a week, dropping $100 on baby-sitting without stressing, because of my awesome disposable income.

Aside from the fact that the reality of chemistry shredded me in the first two weeks, my cousin’s sudden death that Labor Day weekend knocked me out. He’d been a big, athletic, hustling, bombastic lawyer with a brilliant smile, a gorgeous young family, and a mansion full of hard won success. He died on one of his toys; his motorcycle. I was not close to him, but it froze me in my tracks.

I could not believe that anything could take him down. Of course, we all get taken down, but my cousin had been a force, the kind of guy who bends every will around him to his own, with a big, cheesy grin. He was a man of appetites and energy, and he liked guns, and engines, and speed.

A few weeks after he died, Bud fell, to whatever it was that had taken hold of him; his DNA, time, circumstance; the conspiring of his own evolution brought him to a screeching halt. I yanked us both out of school. Time stopped.

From that moment on, I had no expectations. I did not know what would happen to any of us. I had my work cut out for me, finding help for Bud, finding a school, and I did it; robotically, adrenaline-driven, but I did it. And I am still doing it. And Bud is good. He has his ups and downs, sometimes thirty in a day, but this limbo before school starts up again will soon conclude. I know this now. He will return to his routine. He’ll regulate. He’ll stabilize. He will be himself. It will be okay.

It’s just not entirely evident to me yet where I fit in, or who I will be, when, if, I emerge. I’m not going to be a nurse. I don’t want to do it any more. I have not accomplished yet what I had hoped, but I have more chances coming.

"MY 9/11" Hunter College Memoir Prize

2011-09-01T05:05:00.000-07:00

My 9/11

I was leaving for work, and my neighbor, wearing her bathrobe, her stiff hair in shoots off her head, chased me down the stairs, calling me back inside the building.

“Go upstairs and turn on your TV,” she commanded. “Someone just bombed the World Trade Center.”

It was like she’d opened her mouth and a car horn sounded. I felt blank, then cold, and I went back up, tuned in, and sat open-mouthed on the floor, watching the towers coming down, the roiling fire.

Then, as if I was afraid of something in my own apartment, I started to look around, slowly; saw my dog dozing, normal, saw the silent phone. Outside, Bedford-Stuyvesant, on a sunny day; people began to gather on the sidewalks. I saw doors opening and old people looking out, up and down the street and at the sky, and people standing on stoops, dressed for work but stopped from getting there because of streets blocked off and subways screeching to a halt between stations.

My neighbors in the small brownstone were not friendly. I was surprised the one woman spoke to me at all. I went down to the stoop to eavesdrop on the street noise, so steady, so thick, the menacing, rising murmur of speculation.

But nobody panicked. Whatever it was had stopped downtown, it seemed; the smoke was coming toward us, but no more planes.

I took my bike out and rode up to Brooklyn Heights, where I worked as a dog-walker, for a better view, but there was no view. I didn’t know if I could, or should, walk the dogs, and decided I would wait. At that point I thought, probably a lot of people thought, that things would settle down.

Fulton Street was non-negotiable. Waves of people were coming over the Brooklyn Bridge or hurrying out of the subway, walking ten and twenty abreast down the middle of the streets. Cops materialized everywhere, distractedly controlling traffic, looking over their shoulders toward the Bridge and beyond, unsure for maybe the first time in their careers.

I walked the bike across Court Street and up Joralemon, and got back on to ride at Hicks Street, which was deserted. From there on, ashes filled the air as if a volcano had erupted in the river. Montague Street was thronged with people covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, going toward the Promenade and away, no one looking sure that they were moving in the right direction.

I rode home, one hand on the handlebars, the other fanning smoke from my face. My hair and skin were gritty and slightly pale. I took a shower, and at about 11:30, sat down again in front of the TV, the landline phone in my lap; cell phones were blocked. I ran through a list in my head but could think of no one in obvious, direct danger. Only C lived downtown, but in the East Village, out of range.

Far enough out of range?

I tried to call him at home; a recording about the high volume of calls. I called him at work; busy signal. I felt silly, anyway. It was already over, wasn’t it? He was fine at work, I told myself; he might not even know.

By noon I realized that couldn’t be true. The streets had emptied out because now people were inside watching TV; every channel carried “the attack” only, and endlessly. The news loops were hypnotic. The strangely fine-lined image of the black plane cutting the South Tower’s throat swam in front of me. I turned on the computer, and had the same email message from almost all my dog owners; phone lines jammed, don’t come today, be safe!

There were also two slightly panicked messages from C;

9/11/01 10:30 a.m.

hey sweets;

hope you’re ok. tried calling you on your cell, no luck. if you’re home email me at my work address…

hugzkisses,

-c

9/11/01 11:04 a.m.

write me as soon as you can…i hope you’re ok…

xoxoxoxoxo

-c

My heart swelled; I felt yanked back from the sick, plummeting feeling of watching the towers fall over and over, to the new normalcy I had been enjoying for a few weeks. It was too soon to call him a boyfriend, but the messages assured me that I hadn’t just overshot. C was a little older than me, more ‘man’ than ‘guy,’ handsome if pockmarked, bright, accomplished, and I just felt lucky about it.

It was not me, killed horribly in two thousand degrees of fuel fire. My life was in tact, and so was C’s. We two were not going to die. I was optimistic. I didn’t feel like that was wrong.

But C did.

************************************************************************

Battery Park City is haunted.

The North Cove Yacht Harbor, nestled in behind the World Financial center, facing New Jersey’s Colgate Clock across the river, and on our side the glass atrium of the Winter Garden, is a mausoleum to me. I had a boyfriend in the 90’s who was a first mate on a dinner cruiser out of North Cove, and he slaughtered himself with heroin in a cabin supply closet on the boat on July 17^th, 1996, the same day that TWA’s Flight 800 from New York City to Rome went down in the water, not far from the Long Island town where I grew up.

I had broken up with him, for good, three days before. He called me non-stop on my cell. I believed that he only wanted money. He would leave me weeping messages, rage-filled messages, threats. In his final message, he said he couldn’t take much more.

In the morning the cell phone was buzzing again and I waited till the call went to voice mail; the secretary from North Cove. They found him in the supply closet, blood and tiny empty plastic bags everywhere. I was his emergency contact.

I can’t explain loving that kind of person. Anyone who has loved an addicted person will understand and anyone who has not will judge me hard no matter what I say.

But this much is true; I know about loss, and about shock despite the obvious. I know very well the shipwreck that is the seemingly sudden death of a young, broken person. Even the corpse is incomprehensible.

I’m not a moron.

************************************************************************************

I responded:

9/11/01 1:14 p.m.

Hi guy!

Thank heavens you sent me this email! I was so worried about you. Called you at home & wk but couldn’t get through. I’m disconnecting my dial up from the landline so try me as soon as you can.

So glad you’re ok…. Huge hugs!

I sweated that email hard before I sent it, and instantly, something was wrong. Looking at the messages even now, mine doesn’t seem different from his; the tones match, I think. It was just a trans-boro vibe, a sudden, amorphous nausea that anyone who has dated in this city knows too well; the relationship started to unravel.

He responded:

9/11/01 1:32 p.m.

I’m ok… tried your number, but you must be online or calling others…

It may be a good idea to get out of the city for a while. I’m thinking of going to my sis’s house in peekskill if I can get out… we’ll get through this…

-c

In one exchange, he’d gone from closing his messages “xoxoxo” and “hugzkisses” to a detached dash. That was a thing. Also odd, I thought, the public service announcement about going to his sister’s house, without an offer to come along? Without a ‘what about you?’

I wasn’t confident at all that we’d get through “this.”

I didn’t even know what it was.

************************************************************************

C was not actually new to me, and I was not taking the relationship lightly because I thought we were embarking on our destiny. I’d met him three plus years earlier, while still with my boyfriend. I was working in a coffee bar in the East Village, around the corner from C’s policy-wonk office; he came in the first time right after the place opened, then every day; coffee and a muffin, two muffins if he was biking after work. He dressed like an FBI agent out of the 50’s complete with a pork pie hat; it was a little affected but I loved the way he owned his nerdiness, and put style to it. I was a dork in rock-n-roll clothing myself, and we had an extravagant flirtation, (“forgot my wallet!” “forgot your change!” “forgot a peck on the cheek!”) and a hilarity at the sight of each other that lit the place up. We liked each other a lot. We liked ourselves liking each other, too.

One morning there I half-hoped C wouldn’t come by; I looked and felt awful. My boyfriend had come home in the middle of the night after three days, and I pretended not to hear him rifle my purse for cash. But then he went to my bureau and started hunting around for the last of my jewelry, and I said, “Leave it.”

My boyfriend came to me in the bed. He smelled like mossed-over teeth, garbage, beer, and piss. He had been in the subway tunnels shooting up. I could feel the grit on his hand as he stroked my forehead.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” he said thickly. “You are a much bigger asshole than I am.”

He took the jewelry and left.

I sat up smoking, disgusted with myself, until it was time to go to work. I had a mercifully un-busy morning there. At a break in the slow stream of customers, I crouched to clean under the counter. I heard C’s boyish voice calling out giddily, “Where is my coffee wench? Coffee wench! Serve me, woman!”

“Keep yer britches hitched, ye randy goat!” I called back, half heartedly, not wanting to stand up and have him see my swollen, exhausted face. As I decided that I would say I’d had food poisoning in the night, I did stand, and there was C, at the counter, and my boyfriend standing right next to him, in black jeans and a torn t-shirt, his hair standing on end, his face streaked bizarrely with black grease, wearing a strange jacket, his hand ominously poised in the pocket.

“I’m going to the bank,” he said evenly. “Clean out the register for the boss, now.”

C was frozen, staring at my boyfriend. The air around us was like glass. I did as I was told. My boyfriend took all the money and put it in his pockets and walked out backward, slowly. “Don’t do anything, babe,” he said. The door closed, he turned and looked up and down the street, and walked east.

“Babe?” said C. “You, do you know him?”

“That’s my boyfriend,” I said blankly.

C left and didn’t come back.

************************************************************************

No, I can’t explain about loving that kind of person; a heroin person. They are a species of addict as are cokeheads, speed freaks, crackheads, potheads, all to themselves. They have their particulars, like the dip and roll of the nod that everybody knows, the sexlessness, the stealing, the slack mouth and hollow cheeks. But I didn’t love a kind of person.

He was so tall, and so lean, with such broad shoulders and long, elegant biceps and forearms, and enormous hands that could lift you up by your hips. His which-way hair was the color of summer mornings and sparkled when it was clean. He had bulging hazel eyes that could stop you cold, a formidable nose that hooked faintly and regally, these teeth he bared when smiling like he would gleefully kill anybody, and he was in so much pain, had been beaten by so many alcoholic fathers, was such a good poet, able to work with his hands on anything, loved engines and barbeques, black humor, was a long, beautiful swimmer, was born to smoke.

You don’t love that; bullshit.

************************************************************************

In the fall, I tried to forget about C. I went back to school part time and was trying to write poetry. All my money from my hodgepodge jobs went to rent and heroin. Some days I hoped my boyfriend would die, some I hoped he wouldn’t. There were needles tucked into every crevice of my apartment. It was like being slowly poisoned.

After a while, I got a night job at a Village copy shop. It was a big place with a wide, dirty, self service area in the front, a long iron counter, and two big freezing cold rooms full of industrial copy machines, shelves upon shelves of paper and containers of ink, and hundreds of empty cardboard boxes heaped up in pyramids. I liked the self service area because of the writers and strange people that came in, all slightly hysterical, to copy their poems or phone bills or freaked out letters to and from lawyers, porn on the color machines, or complicated productions of 11x17 collages for their ‘zines. I liked working behind the counter; it felt like a home.

I became friends with Tommy, who ran production, grinding out thousands of dollars worth of litigation jobs for law firms. He would look over my shoulder sometimes as I ran little color jobs, helping me adjust the hues or line things up the right way. If he ran out for a sandwich he brought me back hot chocolate or a candy bar. He never smiled. He never said hello or goodbye. He had black hair and blue eyes, was about thirty-five, built for bar room brawls of which he’d had many, and the way he strutted, was often mistaken for a cop. I adored him.

I’d run into C on Astor Place or in the general area; it was always awkward and quick. I would ask him about work and he would make a phew! noise or shake his head; so busy! A few times I planted myself with a cup of coffee and a book on the benches outside his office building and didn’t look up from the pages. Maybe he saw me and went the other way.

My boyfriend’s habit was out of control. I got a day job answering phones at an office, was at the copy shop nights, but we never had enough money. The rare times we saw each other, I screamed my brains out at him. Tommy and I started hanging out after work, drinking, and he would indulge my bitching about it.

Around Halloween, my boyfriend tried to “really” quit dope. After 10 days of paranoid chills, vomiting, and tears, he took a boiling hot shower and scrubbed himself raw with a loofa. He got a 9$ haircut at the nearest barber. He called on his charm and WASP childhood sailing experiences to get a job he’d heard about from a cook he shot dope with, at North Cove, on a party boat.

The job transformed him, somewhat. The work was hard and built him back up; he ate constantly. He learned about marine engines and got to drive around the Cove in a little cart, using a walkie-talkie, hauling ropes and equipment and just living this beautiful macho dream; he was kinder to me, though he spent most of his pay snorting coke with the chef and girls they met at events on the boat.

I was happy for him, and started to feel that I could leave him without guilt. I passed the winter talking about it with Tommy at the Cedar Tavern nearly every night after work. He’d say to me, You’ll leave when you’re ready; I’ll help you.

After tax season, the phone job ended. I worked extra hours at the copy shop to save up money Tommy held onto for me. I published a few of my poems, and that made me feel strong. My boyfriend stayed relatively steady, going to work, only doing coke at night, and through May, I worked up my nerve. In June, a friend of my mother’s offered me her idle studio on Wooster Street, to live in rent free until she began renovations.

One night when my boyfriend was out, I packed my clothes and a few books. Tommy picked me up. In the studio there was a mattress on the floor, one chair, and an old copy machine, which Tommy and I took as a sign.

My boyfriend didn’t come home till the next evening, and he called me at the copy shop, enraged. He hung up mid sentence and then came there, calm at first, but when I refused to come outside and talk to him, he lunged at me across the counter and grabbed my arm, and Tommy dove on him and Rick from the back and Donna the cashier all rushed him and pulled him off. Rick was good; he talked him down and walked out with him, kept him on the sidewalk smoking.

“Clean this up, now, or we’ll both lose our jobs,” Tommy said to me, opening his wallet and giving me the $45 he had in there, his hands shaking. “Go out there and clean it up. I am in here with the big staple gun, I’m right behind you.”

I walked out to my boyfriend and gave him Tommy’s money and all that I had in my purse.

“This isn’t anything, Jessica,” he said, looking at the money in his hand. “I have money. I love you.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and looked at the sidewalk. My boyfriend kept the money and left.

Three days later I got the call from North Cove.

************************************************************************

Tommy and I got married in the fall, and had a cocktail reception at The Cedar Tavern. By the following August, we were separated.

I stayed with a friend because I had no job and didn’t want to believe that Tommy and I couldn’t work things out. Her boyfriend, a paranoid sexual masochist, was in Martha’s Vineyard with his wealthy parents and my friend was not invited along. We went to St. Mark’s books one day to get inspired; she was an actress. I rounded an aisle and there was C, wearing an elaborate cycling outfit, even the little hat and a fanny pack. I almost laughed. I ran to the back where my friend was looking at plays and hid behind her until she could tell me that C went out the door.

The next day was Saturday. I stood outside his office building for an hour. The security guard asked me what I was doing. I asked if C was in; he tended to be a workaholic, so it was a legitimate question. The guard said that usually, C was in on Saturdays, but not today. I left a note.

“It’s me, Jessica. Hope all is well. Call, or email if you want. My #s are…”

The next day, I got this:

8/23/97 9:07 a.m.

Why now?

It would be nice to see you.

When can you have a drink?

-c

I didn’t respond. I moved back in with Tommy.

************************************************************************

‘98, ‘99, ‘2000… Tommy drank, and we fought about it. I left and came back three more times. My parents sold their little house and moved to an apartment in Queens so my father could get a sales job in the city, though he should have been retiring. He was exhausted, but took care of my mother, who’d had a series of strokes and became unable to walk. Our cousin Lillian, an old lady who we loved, got cancer, and began to die. Lillian’s daughter Paula was having trouble with her teenage son. My best friend’s horrible boyfriend beat her and locked her out of the apartment and Tommy refused to let her stay with us.

Everything was terrible.

I went to the Village a lot just to get out of the house. One spring afternoon on 14^th Street, I slammed into C in the aisle of an office supply store while buying a new notebook for my poetry. He lied and said that I looked good; I did not. Sitting at home, sometimes drinking just to do anything with Tommy, eating bags of cookies and smoking while I tried to write, I’d put on a lot of weight. I had a terrible middle class haircut. Often Tommy would drink until 5 in the morning and black out in bed, and I would just get up, put clothes on, and go to the bakery, then stay awake bleary eyed, lurching around lost in my husband’s house. In ways it was worse than life with my boyfriend.

C was not at his best, either. He is a little guy, prone to overwork and a raw skinniness. He has pretty blue eyes, but no chin. A hockey break across the bridge of his nose that had healed as flat as a penny casts a one-sided shadow on his face when he’s exhausted, which he was that afternoon. He had been promoted and was buying things for his new office; he said I should stop by and see it some time.

I didn’t. I knew that I looked too terrible. I couldn’t even imagine what had prompted him to invite me.

I avoided the Village for several months.

************************************************************************

A dog-walker I knew from around was taking his band on tour; would I walk his dogs? I lost 8 lbs in a week and had not felt so free in 5 years. I started my own dog-walking business in Brooklyn Heights, not far from where Tommy and I lived, and made much more money than I expected. When a chic new restaurant opened on our block, I took Tommy there for lunch.

We sat opposite each other, eating delicious hamburgers. Half way through, I said to him, “Is there any chance at all that we could have a baby?”

“No,” he said, biting the hamburger. “You just want one because all your friends have them and that’s a stupid reason. So no.”

“Then I think it’s time that we end this.”

“Agreed,” he said, and tossed his hamburger onto the plate, then walked out.

************************************************************************

By the end of the summer I had enough money to get my own place. I moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Tommy and I divorced, and I got a dog. I wrote articles about Bed-Stuy that were published and won an award.

In 2001, I began to see myself as a person who could not do everything, could not have a relationship and also work; I was happier working, so that was okay. I went to the beach with my parents that summer and my father and I would pull my mother out of her wheelchair, lower her onto a blanket, and drag her along the sand to the water’s edge; she was a very good sport.

Toward the end of summer, I went to a poetry reading. The work was so powerful, the writer’s performance of it so affecting, that I cried, and someone tapped me on the shoulder, and it was C, sitting behind me in the audience, offering me a tissue.

Our time had come, it seemed.

For three weeks, we went to dinner, and to hear live music, and see movies, often sleeping at his place. I liked him. I wanted to like him even more than I actually liked him.

I thought, maybe I had to go through this fire in my life to clean out my unhappiness, and make room for someone good. My life was good, his life was good. It seemed like we had been waiting for this time together, like it was important just because of that. I didn’t want to be disappointed again. He’d had several soured relationships, too. We wanted it to work.

***********************************************************************************

He emailed me the Friday after the 11^th:

9/14/01 9:14 p.m.

I’m coming back very early to beat traffic. Will you be around?

-c

I responded:

9/14/01 9:21 p.m.

Of course! Why don’t you come straight here first? I’ll make breakfast. I want to see you.

-j

He wrote back:

9/14/01 9:29 p.m.

I think I’ll be pretty tired. I’ll need to unpack. I have some important phone calls to make. Would you come over if I call you when I’m home?

-c

I responded:

9/14/01 9:59 p.m.

of course. Just call me. Travel safe. Can’t wait to see you.

-j

He didn’t respond.

************************************************************************

What was the howling outside my window? When I first moved into Bed-Stuy I’d heard it almost every night, after 11, stopping at midnight. Then it was gone for weeks, and now at 11:15 p.m., on Friday, September 14^th, 2001, it was back.

It was the howling of large dogs, from the cavernous chests of Rottweilers or pit bulls, the sound of pain, of throats being cut.

Was somebody murdering dogs on my block?

I spoke to the police about it once; they gave me a dirty look. Did they think I was making it up?

Why would I do that?

One of my clients lost her husband in the attack. She was a nervous, girlish, tiny woman, weighing maybe 100 pounds. Her daughter was two years old at the time. The woman had called me earlier in the day. Her dog, an elderly Rotty with advanced arthritis, had died in his sleep.

“We’re done,” she said to me, with a rasping hostility that I assumed was really intended for somebody else.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She hung up.

And the howling.

And the messages.

************************************************************************

On Saturday the 15^th, I walked my dog very early, and had coffee in the basketball court a few blocks away with the old man who loved my dog. I had the feeling that I would miss him.

At nine I went back to the apartment. I took a long shower, shaved my legs, painted my nails, waited for the phone to ring. C called at 11. He was terse. Could I please come over.

I’m not a moron.

************************************************************************

He buzzed me up and I went in to his apartment with cappuccinos and a bag of biscotti from a place I knew he liked. He kissed me on the cheek and took the breakfast and put it on the table. He looked like he’d been traveling for days. Traffic coming into the city was bad, but not horrible, he said, and he’d returned his rental car. His time at his sister’s was not restful; she and her husband watched the news obsessively and wanted him to talk about the attack the whole time. Also he’d had a hard time getting someone on the phone.

Here it comes, I thought. “Who?”

He coughed. “This woman, who I really care about. She works downtown. I was very worried about her.”

“Is she all right?” I asked, I think steadily.

“Well, yes, she is, now,” he said. “She wasn’t actually at her office Tuesday, she had a meeting in Midtown, but she was very shaken up. She lost several of her colleagues.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

He didn’t answer me. We were sitting at his little kitchen table. I took the covers off the cappuccinos and set one in front of him. “Here,” I said. “You probably haven’t had any breakfast. Can I put the biscotti on a plate?”

He looked at me like I was poisoning him. “How can you eat?” he said.

“How can I eat?”

“Let me ask you something,” he said to me, pushing the cappuccino away as if it was disgusting. “That guy. That boyfriend that you had years ago, who held up the coffee shop. Can you explain that to me?”

There was a bad beat.

“How would I explain it to you?” I asked softly. My face burned.

“I mean,” he said imperiously, “if you can be with someone like that. Why would you want to be with someone like me? I mean, what kind of person are you?”

I started to cry.

“Are you dating that woman who works downtown?” I hissed in disbelief. “Is that why you’re asking me these questions?” I put my face in my hands and fully sobbed, overwhelmed with disappointment.

“I just want to understand,” he said, softening a little. “I mean, if we’re going to have a relationship, what do you want out of it?”

“Love!” I screamed at him.

I knocked over the cappuccinos as I got up to run out the door, down the stairwell, and into the street.

When I got home, I had an email from him.

9/15/01 1:37 p.m.

I’m sorry that I upset you. The city has had a tragedy. We are all part of the tragedy. I just don’t understand how you can be thinking about cookies and love.

-c

I responded:

9/15/01 2:24 p.m.

I’m not.

***********************************************************************************

Toward the end of the month, Lillian died from her cancer. In my eulogy for her, I wrote:

“Going to visit Lillian on a holiday, or some random, lucky afternoon, was always a time to put on a nice outfit, and new shoes. When I was a little girl, we would drive to Manhattan from out east, on the LIE, up over the rise at Exit 23, and the whole breadth of the New York skyline would open before us, presenting the Emerald City; this was Lillian’s domain.

Now, there’s a hollowness here, and New York stands as quietly stunned without its towers as I do without my cousin.

We are all changed by loss.”

A month later, my mother died of a heart attack.

My dog and I walked up and down the streets of Bed-Stuy that comprised our micro-hood and said goodbye to people. The old man who lived by the basketball court cried and tried to give me money. I gave my dog clients to other walkers and moved in with my father and we sorted things out, a little at a time.

I still think of my boyfriend who died, every day, even though I have an entirely other life now. And Tommy and I are over it, and talk on the phone from time to time. I miss my mother, and Lillian, a lot, though I see Paula often; we’re what’s left of the family and we make the most of that.

As for C; it was only something between two young people who tried to get together; 9/11 didn’t really make it anything more. Maybe he’d never been that close to death before and thought he was next. Maybe he felt guilty for living, and I didn’t understand. I’ve felt guilty for a lot, but never for living.

On The Death of Amy Winehouse

2011-08-28T09:31:00.001-07:00

she had a choice, she did it to herself...

How dare they? The audacity that's inherent, the smug certainty that any one of us stacks up to more against whatever unseen hells beset her, is pompous bordering on demented. Who hasn't loved, lost, forgiven, or stayed enraged at a person consumed with destruction? Haven't we all gone on caring about those who've hurt us, who've hurt themselves, who gave up, who couldn't get well? What, about that person who we never gave up on, was any different from any one of us?

Nothing, i would bet, because i'm becoming convinced that every thing is random.

I loved an addict for four years, in my early 20's, and it was horrible. I was afraid of him and utterly smitten at the same time, and he used it against me. It took me years after he was gone to admit to myself that he slept with a lot of other women, and probably endangered my life in a number of ways. I was able to forgive him after his death fairly quickly, but death opens that door.

It took me much longer to forgive myself. I didn't love him because I was a loser or had no self esteem or couldn't do better (though maybe those things were true, regardless.) I loved him for the blinding flame inside himself. He suffered a wretched childhood and came from genes predisposed to addiction, if family history means anything. I've known a slew of other people with the same credentials who didn't shoot themselves full of poison in their mid 30s, people who sought help, pulled themselves up from despair, and soldiered on; there is no single truth, no summary why, that explains that he could not. There just isn't.

I used to allow my love for that person to define me as a failure. Now, in my astonishing life as a wife and mother, I still feel a sense of failure every day, a gnawing worry that i don't have what it takes to care for this family, to make it as a grown woman. But it's not because I loved someone who was in too much pain to go on. The willingness to love someone despite, and because, of their broken soul, even for the few years that I clung to him, is one of the things I have going for me.

What was Amy Winehouse afraid of? I don't think I can stand to know. It could have been as banal as crummy reviews, or as keen and ferocious as illness or abuse, or something else entirely that we've never considered. But I do know that it's impossible, at least for me, to imagine being her, and stopping; cleaning up and stepping out into broad daylight; I couldn't have done it. Everybody waiting on you to fuck up, tapping their toes, mistrustful, sanctimonious...

Maybe she was afraid of getting well; it might have been worse.

POEM

2011-08-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

The Fight For Freedom and Love On A City Sidewalk

Hopping down the block like the sidewalk’s on fire,

a puppety girl trips as her left foot flaps,

and goes spastic airborne, fearless

of falling

though her mother dives under her to fix

it with her body and paranoid love.

The catching motion the mother produces from love;

Has a baby tumbled from a window of fire?

Her hijab and jilbab ripple but with pins are fixed

against any instance of flapping

exposure, of wings without synch, of falling,

the mother, the daughter, the suck and surge of fear.

That’s the life of mothers of broken children; fear.

Mothers of rioting cities, husbands spat loveless

from bleached bone buildings like tongued rice fall

and are flicked into the outrage of citizen fire.

But insurrection is not for the US. Here, we flap;

flags and garments in wind gusts, fucked up synapses that don’t fix.

Flags, broken brains cast aside unfixed

just bide, fabric, liney meat, ticking, waiting for fear

to reveal itself, giggling behind a flap,

a flag, skin, bandages, banners for love.

Mothers, dictators, kids on fire;

every body falls.

One fall

I learned my kid can’t be fixed.

My brain was on fire.

I was throwing up with fear.

I was immolating with love

for my kid, who does that thing, that tell-tale flap

same as that marionette girl on the avenue, the flap

of her skinny fingers, splinter factions, falling,

leaping streetward? Don’t crash your face, Love!

Mothers by muscular uterus fix,

hurling handfuls of gravel shouting Fuck these thousand fears!

New York is on fire and nobody knows; Egypt, in front of everyone, is on fire.

I love my boy, how his toes flap.

The scarved mother loves the girl’s grimace, and we fall

to fixing them; mother is love, work, and fear.

BEAUTIFUL KID Chapter 3

2011-08-21T17:59:00.000-07:00

Trading Traits for Wholeness

My son Bud has Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a type of Autism. He also has Anxiety, in the form of free-floating nervous agitation that can attatch itself to any random event on a given day. He has OCD, too; Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, ‘of the mind,’ as I think of it; a rigidity of thinking, as in, don’t mess with his concept, don’t ever try to play him for a fool. And he has Tourette Syndrome, which makes him twitchy, when he’s nervous, which is often; lots of eye bugging and elbow jolting. My husband and I did not know that any of the oddball, difficult behaviors Bud always had comprised a conditional name, until Bud went into kindergarten and had a nervous breakdown; we had a family breakdown, too. We removed him from the mainstream school and began a fractious, panicked odyssey with the medical, behavioral, and educational professionals who would give us that name, Autism, which would in turn get Bud into a wonderful, life-altering school.

My son is Bud, and I like him a lot.

Finding The (Special) School in Brooklyn was not like deliverance; it was the real deal. I don’t ‘believe’ in stuff, like philosophies or gods, in fact sometimes I can barely make sense of objects and people in front of my face; but starting Bud at Special, where his intellect is respected, his struggles are met with compassion, and he has lots of time in the gym, transported us all from chaos to peace.

By February, he was settling in there with antennae-raising ease; when would the other shoe fall? It didn’t (for the most part.) Bud was happy, for the first time in months, and as Bud goes, so go the rest of us. Now I had a little time to catch up on Autism and disability readings (oh, super.) As I searched for my own son among the blogs, articles, and social media posts, I often found him, and that rattled my cage but good. Quirky and singular to be sure, Bud also conforms to whole rosters of traits for which Autism spectrum kids are famous; that’s good news, and bad news.

Good news; Oh, my kid has Autism! Well now things are starting to make sense, and we can work with him. Progress! Cool.

Bad news; Oh, my kid really does have Autism. He’s not a supreme being from outer space. Shit.

The emotional roller coaster of the Autism parent’s learning curve could drive a mother back to smoking (what?) However, I also discovered the phrase ‘neurodiversity,’ which was different kind of revelation all together, but I’ll get to that.

Jimmy, my X-husband, a deeply valued if rarely seen friend, had been keeping up with me via email during all this, which was a lifeline at the time. My birthday was the nostalgic reason for his most recent message; the Internet is the best relationship we’ve had. Unlike our marriage, we now share and laugh, from the safe distance of wholly other boros and lives. It’s perfect for him, a social-phobe who keeps his feelings and artistic gifts hidden from the world. We share a Zodiac sign, so it was his birthday, too; a chance to taunt each other about the rapid approach of old age, and death, which Jimmy liked to say couldn’t come soon enough.

We embrace dark humor, Jimmy and I, like many Pisces, yet are both given to sentimentalism; it’s that kind of Piscean thing that made us wrong for each other in the real world; no balance. Dramatic, self-pitying, we’re also paranoid; but I don’t believe in stuff, right? I mean, just because two people with the same birthday are morbid and excessive doesn’t make the Pisces profile true, does it?

The thing about the Zodiac though, as something akin to a guiding principle, is that its trait-based premise is a little compelling, because of the annoying frequency with which it’s spot-on.

A Zodiac website’s description of Pisces as otherworldly… lonely in a crowd… struggles with reality… creative… deep… a tendency to be the cause of your own unhappiness… fits me, and Jimmy, so snug it hurts.

And take, for example, Gemini Bud and his Gemini grandpa, Papa (or take them for an afternoon… or a weekend… I’ll pay… I’m kidding!... sort of…) who are by turns gallant, rude, kind, combative, gentle, abrasive, sullen, charming, broken, and strong. They are, like Gemini itself, The Twins.

The website describes Gemini as people who may think too much or over-analyze… enjoy companionship and dislike being alone… need constant excitement and stimulation… tendency to become bored...

Replace ‘companionship’ with ‘audience,’ and you’ve got Bud, and Papa, to a ‘T.’

I haven’t spent lots of time looking at other signs’ traits, because as a typically navel-gazing Pisces, I’m too interested in me and mine. But if feels meaningful to me that I have lots in common with other Pisces women I’ve known, that man-Pisces share stuff with Jimmy, that the Gemini are all a bunch of hard cases, and it made me start to wonder, as I came out of my post-diagnosis fugue, about the constellation of people I love, the central star of which at that moment was Bud...

What do traits mean?

Jimmy doesn’t deal with people, which I thought at first was a tough-guy act, and later realized is central. He barely ever makes eye contact, and in fact I knew he really wanted to be close to me when he started forcing himself to look into my face over the many, many drinks we had in many bars, which he needed, to be able to talk to me at all. Jimmy’s also a musician, completely self-taught because he detests teachers and suffered in school. He plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and has catalogued in his mind the lyrics to thousands of rock, country, and bluegrass songs. He’s memorized pages, whole scenes, of Shakespeare, just because he likes it. He loves animals, and forests, and had the nickname ‘Finder of All Things Lost,’ for his uncanny ability to locate any misplaced object, any where, any time, instantly; suffice it to say, Jimmy is a weird guy.

Or he just has Asperger’s Syndrome, like Bud.

You see where I’m going with this? I’m in no way qualified to diagnose somebody, but hang with me. Because what I’m proposing is that the traits don’t make the man, or the little boy, for that matter; I think it’s the other way around.

Jimmy kind of cares about Bud, in that creepy telepathic way that hermits love, by tasting the air, smelling with their hearts. A false extrovert compensating for social terror myself, I understand this deeply; I feel it when my far-flungs are falling, and call or email at the right moment, like Jimmy does. It was a psychic salve to get messages from him because for months, I hadn’t spoken to anyone except doctors, evaluators, and administrators, many of whom I never actually saw; it was like talking into a buzzing, sinister hive of disembodied voices about what, exactly, was wrong with my little boy, and what I was going to do about it. My husband, Bruce, was so busy diving into the fray with Bud, and Moopy, our 4 year old girl, the moment he’d get home from work so I could hurl myself back into the storm of researching schools and coordinating appointments, that I never even got a chance, those months, to keep him in the loop of what I was going to do about it. I was just trying to do it, as fast as humanly possible, or faster. Telling Jimmy about it all was like an affirmation; I wrote it, and Jimmy read it, and that felt real.

First and foremost, I told Jimmy, I was going to get Bud into a school with real teachers and children if it killed me, because the only other choice was home-school, which was no choice at all, though Bud’s traits, taken out of context, might have made him seem the perfect candidate for it. After all, his anxiety went into overdrive around new people and surroundings; his fear manifested as hyperactivity, which, when criticized or suppressed, could morph into animal-spirit-driven violence like a Power Ranger gone to the dark side. We had seen what happened to Bud in a classroom; what I had to hang on to was the conviction that last time, it was the wrong classroom. I believed, and I was correct, that in the right one, all of Bud’s traits, some powers, some fears, could come together, and carry him forward.

Context is everything. Here’s me; I know tons of people in the neighborhood. I can’t gab on my cell while walking the dog or unpack groceries from the car without encountering pals who brighten on sight of me because I am a fun yenta! I am! I love to yak and chat and bitch and gossip and I am funny! And I’m a good listener. I remember everything and I ask all the right questions. Everybody’s kids are happy to see me. And astonishingly, I’m never in a rush… outside.

But indoors? I can’t even be with people I like and have no gripe with for more than a few minutes (without booze,) because my anxiety takes the form of something like claustrophobia; call it cabin fever. I start to have trouble breathing, I get irritable, nervous, even depressed, and I start pacing around looking for chores that need to be done because if I stop moving I will choke like a shark. So the prospect of being stuck inside, with just one person, my passionately beloved, totally unregulated, demanding, irritating, brilliant, button-pushing, and at the time of the school search, still traumatized son, charged with the tasks of teaching him to write, spell, add, subtract, cut with scissors, color in the lines, and not strangle people, by myself, in our apartment, FOREVER, was terrifying.

A school with not more than six children in the classroom, with at least two adults, and no bells, and no getting on line, and no command-delivered directives, no large-scale lunch rooms, no no-recess (good lord,) no no-gym, and no punishment, would have to be found; it would have to. Because as much as new-everything scares the crap out of Bud, he also gets cabin fever like I do, and he was losing his marbles, stuck home every day, and he had to get out of the house and so did I because I am also a person. I am one person. And I can’t show him that he is a person who can cope with the world by hiding him from it.

Special School, I told Jimmy, was practically made to order. “He takes a little bus all the way to Brooklyn every day,” I wrote, “and he has his little classroom of five kids and two teachers, and it’s all very orderly and routine, which he loves, and nobody calls to tell me my kid is weird and bad, because he goes to weird-bad-kid school now, and that’s just the way it is.”

I know it’s glib to say that’s just the way it is. It isn’t that there’s nothing wrong with Bud; of course he is at odds with the majority of the world we know, here, in an urban enclave literally overrun with children; he doesn’t fit in. The traits that make him startling, like being hyper-verbal, intense, demanding, and extremely imaginative, also make him lonely. Most people are doing and thinking things a certain way and he isn’t. We can call that something wrong or we can call it a ham sandwich. But in the right circumstances, Bud can have peace and learning and fun like everybody else. He takes his traits wherever he goes, but in the right context, those traits comprise a thriving child, not an alienated one.

For my part, I know Bud’s not bad (though I do think he’s weird... kidding! Again!.. sort of…) I said it that way to Jimmy for a reason; I have a deep need to appropriate words that threaten me and then wave them around menacingly at other people, even people I love. During Bud’s crisis at, and then removal from, the mainstream kindergarten, nobody actually said the word ‘bad,’ about him to me (they wouldn’t have dared,) it just saturated every conversation; it was the only trait other than compliant that school believed in. By now, I’ve come to learn that Bud is almost never bad, even when his behavior is atrocious; at those times, what I am seeing is balking, not volition. So I speak of Bud and badness to people I trust as shorthand, a code, to get my bearings, and I speak of his badness to people I don’t trust so that I’m the one that gets to own the word.

But I seem to be putting the word aside these days. Bud lives in a blessedly mixed world now, reasonably protected but not isolate, and should stay there for as long as possible. He is learning at Special, to read and spell, math comes easy, puzzles, coloring; the kindergarten gamut. The real work for Bud isn’t the material, anyway; it’s the ability to sit at a desk for four minutes, ten minutes, twenty some day… and get something done. But until then, when he does struggle, Miss Sharon tells me things like, “He needed a break, so I gave it to him, and then he needed another break, and he ended up needing to finish the work during recess, so he saw that he lost some recess time, and next time, I’ll try to help him remember how that wasn’t what he wanted.”

Wouldn’t it be something if all kids could learn the progress of consequences with integrity, could be taught to identify their own private feeling of loss, rather than just be punished? Imagine a childhood without humiliation, how unwounded a person could be.

I told Jimmy about all this, about the gym at Bud’s school, the swimming and the karate, the therapy dogs that visit, and the photography walks, the trips to the library with pizza on the way back. I told him about the OT, Occupational Therapy, as in, how to hear and feel your own body and manage it a little better, with help, with that damn sensory swing. I told him about Speech Pragmatics, as in learning how to talk to people rather than prattling in a panic and finding yourself alone on the playground, or hitting, or being hit, again.

“He has counseling once or twice a week with a psychologist,” I wrote, “where he does get to be his full-bore Asperger’s self, making up prehistoric animals and pacing the office while giving a lecture on the Mesozoic Periods. The psychologist told me she has to get coffee before her sessions with him so she can keep up, that she’s always afraid there will be a quiz.”

“Man,” I went on, “Autism is the best thing that ever happened to that kid.”

Jimmy wrote back, without irony or additional comment, “I wish I could have gone to that school.”

I responded, “Me, too.”

I wish that Jimmy and I both could have. My own childhood style of anxiety and loneliness was obsequiousness to adults, avoidance of other kids, compulsive overeating, and failing a lot. For his part, Jimmy chose truancy. All we can do now is chalk it up to less being known about the way kids struggle, back in the 70’s, and less still in the 60’s, when Jimmy was a kid.

And speaking of kids who struggle, somebody else who turned out pretty ‘special’ in adulthood but who ‘passed,’ as they say, as a kid, is my husband.

Talk about traits; Bruce was a great student, had few friendships, studied hard. Who had time to play? The two kids he did like spent their time with him painting painstakingly accurate Star Wars murals on their bedroom walls and making 16 mm films about cowboy gangs or alien abductions. As a teen Bruce did not party, and it served him well. He went to UC Berkeley for architecture for a while, then graduated from San Francisco State in filmmaking; not too shabby.

He also went on NO dates during those years, and made NOT ONE new friend in college, not least because he chose to live off campus, with his elderly aunt in her cluttered San Francisco home. Despite a reasonably successful career in cable television that unfolded with mounting promotions and awards, he became increasingly socially awkward as time passed. He married the first woman who would date him and then they divorced; he followed a subsequent failed romance across the country to NYC; and then he found himself alone, well employed, at the prime of his life, emotionally paralyzed.

Asperger’s? Maybe. He was much more than shy, to be sure. He cultivated highly specialized gifts that allowed for an isolate lifestyle and sought the comfort of the familiar at the cost of human interactions; poor eye contact, even what I call poor ear contact; Bruce, Jimmy, and Bud all never hear me (but maybe I’m just annoying.)

As a group, what I really notice about these guys is not only that I love them, but that they share traits, to greater or lesser degrees (and they’re three different Zodiac signs!) So…

What do traits mean?

I’m not a wacko. I’m not proposing that the Zodiac is as relevant an evaluative tool as the research and tests central to the study and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders. It’s just that I think we’re not done; and by ‘we’ I mean the everybody who thinks about Autism. Traits are just traits. They mean themselves, no matter how typical, or not, the possessing individual.

But Autism is, every time, a consummate, unique gestalt.

As is a human being.

And that brings me back to neurodiversity.

Todd Drezner, Brooklyn dad of a child with Autism and filmmaker behind the documentary “Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic,” gives us to understand neurodiversity as a way of thinking about people that includes different kinds of minds, akin to the phrase ‘differently abled.’

For example, a person with Autism might enjoy the lampposts, or the benches, in a park, almost exclusively, whereas a person with more generally familiar thinking might love the great big sprawling park as all of a piece. Similarly, a person who is blind might use his hands to learn about a face, rather than his eyes; and while it seems harder, to a seeing person, to learn a face by hand, to a non-seeing person, it’s just his way.

Drezner agrees with me when I add that there’s no real reason to destabilize the non-seeing person by fixing (changing, medicating, altering) his eyeballs. His hands work well. In fact, why not give the non-seer five extra minutes to feel your face? Maybe you’ll like it! Maybe you and your special person can put on blindfolds some evening and feel each other’s faces for a while and see what happens… (Whoops, did I say that?)

Many writers, on the topic of neurodiversity, quote Harvey Blume and Judy Singer with regard to Autism, on evolution’s necessity of difference. Definitions of this relatively new term are legion, but they all seem to me to boil down to what neurodiversity isn’t; discrimination.

And that’s good, but not enough.

I believe, and I’m hope I’m right, that neurodiversity is the relatively simple idea of accepting the wholeness of persons, specifically ones with Autism. It’s not, as some bloggers and advocates fear, about ignoring it, or abandoning therapies that help people with Autism feel more comfortable, capable, and connected. It’s not about forgoing enrichment. In fact, it’s the validation of help. It’s the strangely obvious notion of just including, in our comprehension of people not ourselves, all the kinds of thinking represented on the Autism spectrum as belonging to individuals, and investing them with equal value to kinds of thinking belonging to other individuals.

Like, We’re here, we’re Autistic, fish.

Or, catapult. Meat loaf. Ramphoryncus (it’s a prehistoric ancestor to… never mind.) Choose your non sequitur.

And I like that.

Okay, maybe I do believe in something. For me, neurodiversity is the revelation of something I thought was just appropriate behavior. I’m baffled by the newness of that, but if respect needs heralding, what the hell.

“Bud lives in such a gray, dovetailed zone,” I wrote to Jimmy, “where the traits that earn him a diagnosis overlap so much with aspects of his personality that are just very out there, but also very deep. He actually reminds me of you.”

Ever reliable to lighten the mood, Jimmy responded, “The righteous rule the day!”

And when I tell my husband about Bud spending a solid hour in the corner of his room with his hundred plastic bugs laying out and reenacting, complete with English accent, a ten-minute BBC film narrated by Sir David Attenborough on the life cycle of the cicada, over and over, Bruce smirks, apologizes, and smirks again, because he gets it, maybe more than I ever will. Bruce spends his days mercifully alone behind a galactic digital editing console, tweaking minutia and organizing visual information within a lexicon so erudite that he literally can’t talk about it to me because I don’t speak ‘Edit.’ His work as a video editor and animator is an Aspie dream come true.

For Jimmy, it was dealing with customers in the copy shop where he worked; it’s client meetings for Bruce; and it’s lots of situations for Bud; eye contact gives them headaches and makes them depressed; it’s hard for them to filter noise, and listen. The ‘people problem,’ the ‘noise problem,’ the ‘always a beat behind’ dilemma, are experiences Jimmy, Bud, and Bruce have often; fortunately for Bud, a 21^st century child, all the problems taken together have a name, and a very special school, with a teeny tiny classroom in it for just a few lucky ducks.

Bud, Bruce, and Jimmy are not fluid or pliant. They are also not selfish, or unloving, nor cruel. They relish information. They love a few people, passionately. They don’t like interference. They never bully. They stand out, and aside, and that stance says, I want you to be in my world, my way, or, no hard feelings, later for you.

These are their traits. There’s no reason to change them.

For the first time in my life I find myself consciously filled with gratitude for the law. F.A.P.E., Free Appropriate Public Education, for Students With Disabilities, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, means there’s a good chance Bud will be able to stay in supported, protected school till at least the age of 18, and possibly 21. With a childhood and adolescence of fortification and a hard won tool belt of coping skills, adulthood will be up to him. I’m optimistic, mostly, that he’ll find a safe, tolerable, legal way to make a living, and people to love him other than us.

For children whose Autism restricts them to a narrower set of skills and options, I want more from neurodiversity; more good laws, more money, more humanity, more love.

My son has some quirks, difficulties that show up, several at a time, in other sons, and daughters; it’s good to name this collection of descriptives for the sake of making the sons and daughters known to the world. To be known is to see yourself reflected back in the eyes of others, to be sure that you exist, and that is what a child with Autism needs more than anything else. That is what every person needs more than anything else.

My son has Autism. He is a force. He is a person. My son is Bud.

BEAUTIFUL KID Chapter 2

2011-08-19T11:39:00.001-07:00

Swimming

Swimming means more than it should to my husband and me. But what doesn’t? Once you find out you have a kid with diagnosable conditions, that is, traits that can be collected into lists that have actual names, especially if the traits can be assigned and reassigned simultaneously to more than one list, so that really, you could meet, say, half a dozen people and tell each one your kid has a different thing, you start to pick at every little gesture, twitch and verbiage that emerges.

What you want to know is, what does that mean? And, why’s he doing that? Then you say, oh fuck.

When Bud’s eyes bug out of his head and his tongue wags and he retracts and extends his neck like a turtle on amphetamines and keeps accidentally hurling his pencil across the room while we’re trying to do homework, that means Tourette Syndrome. Seeming too rude and poorly parented to make eye contact or deign to say good morning to the doorman, for the zillionth time? Asperger’s Syndrome, is why he’s doing that, or rather, not doing it. Running up and down the halls of our apartment building, at breakneck speed, when people ask him how school’s going, is anxiety. And singing impromptu rap songs about his pre-K crush while holding a half-chewed dog toy for a microphone, almost two years after pre-K, and being unable to stop singing it, muttering it, or shouting it, through dinner, through bath time, and on into book time, that’s OCD; Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I’ve stopped saying oh fuck for the most part, largely because of swimming. Bud treads water, like a metaphor for survival on the surface of the known world; seeing him do it gives me vertigo. Nobody taught him how; he was empowered by jealousy. His sister, Moopy, 20 months his junior, started swimming entirely of her own volition at eight months, in the bathtub. By 17 months she was leaping off the edge of the 4 ft depth at our pool club, crashing into the water like a frozen chicken, and pollywogging her way to the other side. And there was Bud, standing on the pool steps, or wall-crawling, or hopping up and down shoulders-deep in the shallow end, watching everyone watch her, be they aghast or amazed at the swimming baby; boy, was he pissed.

My father said, “Let him get mad.”

Like we could stop him.

By the end of that summer, Bud was pushing off the side and dog-paddling rabidly to my father, ‘Papa,’ who would not stand closer than the middle of the pool. Bud was wild with sensory overload and thrill, thrashing, splashing, hurling his body through the water like a joyful animal, growling, spinning, rolling in the water, dragging Papa down to the bottom, diving off Papa’s knees, churning himself into a water dervish. He’d gone from hesitant to voracious. After two hours in the pool, three, we’d have to drag him, crying, out, and he would fall asleep in the locker room as we dressed him. He and Moopy would sack out for two hours in their car seats afterward, their fat little faces sweating.

Sometimes, Bud got water-crazy to the point of vomiting so that we had to watch him closely for signs of gagging on swallowed water, grab him, and toss him out of the pool so he could barf up whole lunches of mac and cheese. The kind lifeguards dumped barf-smell-eradication-powder on the mess and cleaned it up two or three times a week, much to our deeply humbling gratitude; still, swimming was revelatory.

Swimming is power. Cannon balling into the deep end, breasting the entire length of a college pool. Now almost six (with adequately developed gag control,) Bud takes private lessons with Imagine Swimming, Inc., at Hunter College, to learn actual strokes and real diving, because he’d much rather argue with my husband and me than let us teach him anything. His coach Eric has him slicing down to the 5 ft. bottom to get the rings, and hanging on to the diving platform then pushing off backwards into his “upside down roll,” because Bud is not afraid.

Anymore. Of that. Many things, many things, make Bud afraid; more like nervous. People he doesn’t know or didn’t expect to see, a sudden change of activities, too much butter on his crackers, a haircut, homework, buzzers, bells, car alarms, loud toilets, jack hammers, too much sunshine, too much music, the supermarket, the wrong socks, two-wheeled bikes, balls flying at him, crowded playgrounds, criticism, tart food, and did I mention homework? These things and more make him too nervous to function, too nervous to stop, too nervous to speak, too nervous to cease yammering really loudly, sometimes almost too nervous to breathe; but they aren’t in the water. In the water, Bud is free.

But I always thought swimming was freedom, long before Bud was even in my mind’s eye. I love to caress and handle in my brain the notion that, as I was born with all my eggs like most women, Bud was always in my body, waiting. Maybe he was swimming along with me, all those years I spent in suburban pools and pebbly Long Island beaches. Maybe he remembers the storm in Key West, the hurricane that swirled the sky one evening, red and violet and black, colors I didn’t believe the sky could be until I saw it, as I stood on the little dock just off the roadside beach, the wind whipping me, shaking my clothes and plucking the fine hairs on my skin into goose bumps. I stood under the storm mesmerized, and suddenly I dove into the water, and I believed, and I was right, that I could swim among the crashing, taunting breakers. Maybe Bud has breakers in his DNA.

When I was 14 months old, I fell into our pool. We had a huge in-ground swimming pool in our back yard that family lore holds was only possible because my father, a carpet installer who had a tiny store from which my parents eked out a living, was able to barter with an Italian landscaper guy he knew who lived way out east in Rocky Point. It was a huge pool, the most impressive in our town by far, with a mysterious light in the deep end for night swimming that made the whole thing glow blue. One spring, my parents had just taken the cover off to observe for seasonal damage, and left it off. My mother was weeding the brick path that led down the slope of our yard to the pool, and my sister, who has severe Autism, Turner’s Syndrome, and schizophrenia, was the healthiest of her life at 14 years old, and was in charge of me. In diapers and blue corduroy overalls and a turtleneck shirt, I marched with interest around the perimeter of the pool, and tumbled in.

That the water was low was more of a problem, not less. I could actually swim by that age, like my daughter. My father had me in the pool all the previous summer, blowing bubbles in the crystalline water and splashing in his arms, floating and shimmying from one end to the other. But now, in a soaking wet diaper and heavy clothes, well below the graspable edge, I bobbed, and my sister, without cue from anyone, must have quickly lay down alongside the edge, reached in, grabbed me by the back of my overalls, and hauled me out. My mother, unaware, was still weeding.

My sister brought me over to her, and according to my mother, said, “The baby fell in the pool. I will change her.”

She saved your life. Whether or not my sister really saved my life, if in a moment I’d have cried out and my mother would have heard and come to my rescue, doesn’t matter; the story has to start somewhere and my mother picked where.

Because that’s what you do. You pick things, and choose things, to help you love. And live. I know my mother did this; I learned it somewhere.

In her 20’s, my sister could ride the train. My parents put her on the Long Island Rail Road in Port Jefferson, an end-of-the-line stop 60 miles from Manhattan, that’s a two hour ride, and she would sit there, staring out the window or at an empty space, waiting, peacefully, earnestly waiting for Penn Station, where she would get out, and march robotically to a meeting point to hook up with a recreation group, which would then go see an ice skating show or the circus. She could do this without incident, despite an IQ in the low 70’s, little ability to read and none to communicate with strangers, delayed, mechanical speech, anxiety, OCD, and what the hell, one kidney. She could also get back on the train and come home, although my parents only permitted her to do so in the afternoon; for night events my father would drive to the city, and wait in the car for her outside Madison Square Garden, reading a spy novel.

My sister changed my diapers when I was a baby, bathed me and dressed me and pushed me in the stroller. Later, she walked to my school to pick me up and walk me home. She could chlorinate the pool, vacuum and dust, make spaghetti, pancakes, and boiled eggs, and find and buy up to four items in a grocery store. Did my mother put her to work? You bet she did. It’s called participating in a family. It’s also called independence. My sister could walk to the library and take out magazines to leaf through, watch her own television, use a tape deck and a record player, type badly, shower, comb her own jet black, Chinese-straight hair, choose her clothes and dress by herself. She could put on eye shadow. She could paint her own nails, and she had delicate, tan little hands back then, which my mother loved. She could not negotiate a nail file, so my mother, gently, did that part for her. She couldn’t swim, or ride a bike or ski, but my mother didn’t care about those things; she cared about beauty, and my sister, bird-like, with gigantic, somber brown eyes, that black silk hair, and freckles, was certainly beautiful.

Swimming is my equivalent of my mother’s belief in beauty, but I’m luckier than she was. Bud happens to be awfully handsome as well, if I do say so myself. He’s bigger than many boys his age by ten pounds of big bones and muscle he gets from practicing the ambulations of every kind of creature; it may look bizarre, but you can get really strong by imitating Australophithecus all day, leaping, squatting, climbing, and beating your chest. He has my husband’s long legs and high butt, and my father’s barrel chest. He has sandy hair that he’s determinedly growing long, hazel eyes, and a broad, symmetrical face made just a little pretty by a delicate nose, long eyelashes, and kissy lips, like a junior Brendan Frazier.

Not that I’m biased, but Bud gives back a lot. He can’t tolerate touching from outsiders, but he will hug the living shit out of my husband, Papa, and me, climbing up our bodies like a chimpanzee, constricting us with his octopus limbs, squeezing our faces and banging his cheeks against ours, saying, through teeth on edge with the intensity of his feelings, “You are so cute! And you’re very chubby! And I have to attack you because I love you so much!” Fifty-five hurtling pounds of free-falling unregulated emotion may not be adorable to others, but in my house it’s a jackpot.

Because the other face of Bud’s brute glee is terrifying. His real fears, not the petty ones about socks, crackers and jackhammers, but the deep ones, of people not us, reveal themselves as animal violence. My dear friend Dr. Penny Carmichael, who is a psychiatrist at one of the most hard core urban ERs in New York, warned me at the onset of Bud’s behavioral crisis when he tried to start kindergarten, that young children (he was five and a few months at the time,) are “extremely primal,” and that word, primal, is Bud. He has never recoiled from a confrontation, and in the worst of his implosion at that school, he brought the full force of his totemic, corporeal fury down on his offenders. Human speech went right out the window and he transformed, truly blurring the distinction of species, into a raging Saber Toothed Tiger, hissing, roaring, lunging, and biting his antagonizers (who fortunately were always adults.) At perceived threat, he abandoned civilization and became utterly wild.

“He’s not having a thought disorder,” Penny said, when I explained what I saw of my son, what I would not have believed otherwise. “He’s just afraid.”

And she was right. I was also afraid. But I held on, and Bud, did, too. In spite of the adrenaline that spilled over from the daily onslaught of panic attacks that we finally heeded, yanking him out of mainstream school, the flood in his blood of chemicals that caused him to run the length of a Baskin Robbins one evening from cash register to front door 29 times, I counted, yes I did, underneath it all, Bud knew what was going on in himself; he was scared shitless. It was fight or flight. He was little, but he was tough, and he fought.

What part of scratching the principle’s face almost deep enough to draw blood, of running out of the school building into traffic screaming “Mommy!” is hard to understand? It’s communication, which, handsomeness, swimming, death-by-hugging and raw animal self-preservation aside, is the single greatest attribute Bud has going for him. The chimpanzee thing, we love it, and the willingness to defend himself, too, now that we understand; but these are the irony and the counterpoint to Bud’s core, which is language. His verbal IQ score was 137 (and there I go, picking and choosing; I despise testing but I could brag on that 137 till the cows come home,) and that makes him special, not just to me, but in the world. It sets him apart from a lot of children on the Autism spectrum, and a lot of all children. But the mortar that makes his crazy word data-base more than just a party trick is his love of meaning.

At his most peaceful and introspective, he has cried at the unfairness of the lives of mayflies, which only last a day. We were riding in the car one afternoon, he, Moopy, and I, with our dog, Tigress, down to the La Guardia Airport Landing Lights, a little stretch of land between Jackson Heights and Astoria, Queens, designated for small light towers that help guide airplanes toward the runway. That’s three precious city blocks of flat, green room with a few trees and some well placed, climbable boulders, for kids and dogs to run free, for teenagers to hang out, for anybody around to have a picnic, play ball, or read a book, so long as you don’t mind the air- raid soundtrack and the dog poop. Bud, who in an ideal world would live in a cabin in the woods or in a small, secluded beach town, loves it there, but he emanated sadness on the way, and I could see his eyes welling up when I looked in the rearview mirror.

“What’s wrong, Chief?” I asked him.

“I’m very sad about mayflies,” he said.

“What about them?”

“It’s sad that they only live for one day, and then they die,” he told me, with a surge of anguish, and a few tears shook free into the air as he rocked twice, hard, slamming himself in his car seat. “I learned it in our bug unit in Miss Emily’s class today.”

“Well,” I asked him, appealing, I hoped, to the long narrative of the life cycle, which he loves, “what about destiny?”

His face relaxed a little bit and the sorrow in his voice abated somewhat. “What’s destiny again?”

“As I understand it,” I said, “it’s doing your whole job on earth. Everyone has a job. Is it possible that the mayflies are able to do their whole job in one day?”

“It is possible,” he said, the phrase ascending from his feeling. “But I can’t do my job on earth in one day. My job is much bigger than theirs.”

“What is your job on earth, Bud?” I asked him.

“It’s to be myself,” he said.

I never told him that. It was his own idea. As I floated for a moment in a kind of hypnotic relief at what he’d said, I passed several parking spaces, circling the field.

“Mommy!” Moopy spoke up. “Why you are not parking dis CAR? I WANT TO PLAY KICK BALL!”

“Sorry!” I blurted, and took the next space I saw. I hauled open the side door of our minivan and the dog, part Mastiff, part Staffie Bull, shot out into the open field, her jowly, loose face flapping back to expose her wicked looking teeth as she hit top speed. She played tag with Moopy for a few minutes as Bud scanned his bug book for the picture of mayflies. We gazed at it together.

“Sometimes part of my job is bad behavior,” he said.

“That’s part of everyone’s job,” I said. “I have bad behavior sometimes, like when I fight with other car drivers on the road, or when I yell at you and Moopy. I know you love me anyway, though, and I love you all the time, no matter what you do.”

“Mommy. Stop talking about love all the time. You act like talking about love is the most important thing on earth. But love, just love, is the most important thing.”

I stared at him.

“Don’t tease me. Just don’t talk about destiny any more. Talk normal.”

“Sorry,” I squeaked. “You wanna get out of the car?”

“Yes,” he said. “And I wanna get ice cream when the lady comes with the cart. Why is that lady with the cart so short? Why are all the ice cream cart ladies so short? Is it because they’re all from Guatamala?” And with that, he threw his bug book on the floor, unbelted himself from his car seat, climbed out, and began marching around the field, prattling at me, and then not at me, about prehistoric animals he created in his imagination whose fossils were found in South America and which do not resemble any animals alive today.

The next afternoon, at his swim lesson, Bud stood on his coach’s shoulders and dove off, down to the bottom of the pool, grabbed the rings, shot upward, broke the surface, rings in hand, and smiling, shook back a switch of wet, sandy brown hair from his face, his shoulders glistening as he tread water, and he looked sixteen years old.

BEAUTIFUL KID Chapter 1

2011-08-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

Five Trains To A Puppet Show

My mother once told me she took five trains to get my sister to a puppet show. How was that even possible? Apparently they got lost at one point and had to double back, and that’s the part I understand, even more than the interboro destination; the getting lost. But I only understand it now that I, too, like my mother, have an Autistic child.

“When you have a kid like her, you’ll do anything to get them stimulated, to put them in front of something they recognize, and give a shit about. You would do anything to be somewhere that they aren’t clawing you to escape their heads.”

My mother said that.

I do anything, well, not anything, but a lot, to give my son stimulation and to protect him from stimulation. And I do a lot myself, of therapy, a lot of going into this lady’s office to bang my psychic head against the wall trying to make a lasting dent of truth in my brain; my son is not like my sister; he is not my sis-ter. This technique of remembering my own life as I’m in it is time consuming, laborious, and painful, but it’s working.

How about that head banging. Autistics are known for it; a childhood specialty of my sister’s, my son has never, ever done it. Works for me, though.

I can’t talk in a straight line. I say one thing and it’s an octopus. My son compartmentalizes and I’m trying to learn from that. We figured this out with the bus. We didn’t think he would take the bus to the school, which is 29 miles away. I drove him the first few days, which put me in the car, given New York outer-boro traffic, for over 4 hours a day, and I was losing my mind.

I finally said to him, “Bud, if I have to drive you every day, we might break the car, and we’ll use up all our gas money and we won’t be able to go to Cape Cod.”

At that threat, the notion of losing his visit to his most ideal place in the whole world, he blinked in horror, and said, “Okay, I’ll do my part and ride the bus.”

And the next day he got on the bus and went to school as if he had been doing it all his life. A week later, for a variety of un-related reasons that only made sense in my own head, I thought for a ‘treat’ I would pick him up at school, which meant bringing my daughter along. At pick-up time, he came walking down the hall, peacefully holding his teacher’s hand and chatting with her, wearing his backpack as if he had been doing that, too, for years and years, and even though he knew we were coming, on sight of us, became furious, shouting, “You’re not supposed to be at school!”

I got it. OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, yet another of the many possible diagnoses that had been bandied around and which I had rejected because my kid absolutely does not wash his hands or flip light switches repetitively, nor is he afraid of germs or certain colors of food nor does he line up all his socks or any such bullshit; he’s got at least that going for him, for Christ’s sake. But that’s not what OCD looks like on him. On him, it is that everything has a place and never should these assignments collide. Mommy is home, a world of all the good and weird places we enter and depart together; and school is school, and I, and his sister, have no business on his turf, in the world of Velcro icon schedules and tiny Miss Sharon and kindly Miss Louise and the safety of his classroom, for he shuttles independently between worlds on the meteoric, metaphoric bus and can we not fuck with it, please. God bless the bus.

So I’m trying to borrow that. Each thing must have a box. My sister has a box to live in and must stay there. She actually lives in a large house made up of stuck on boxes, rooms that were added to this old Long Island colonial as each new resident arrived, a house bought from a family with several children, one of whom, the indomitable Cortlandt, would become the director of the place as it evolved into a ‘group home,’ (what was it when a family with many children lived in it? But never mind.) My sister has lived there for 25 years, which confounds me, because I’m 19, aren’t I? With time to get traction and complete a degree, launch a life, and take responsibility?

I am not. I am 41 and time has become the most relative thing in the world. Knowing is like that, too.

When my mother told me about the puppet show, I was horrified, but it was much too late for horror. She was talking to me about something that had happened 30-some-odd years before. My sister is 12 years older than I am, so by the time I was old enough to hear about my mother’s life with her, it was all long in the past, and I was still barely able to comprehend what my mother told me, and not too mature to judge her.

“Why?” I whined, in response to the story about the five trains. And that was when she said the thing about stimulation and clawing; which, clawing, my son also does not do. But I may have responded to my mother’s story with something very compassionate like, You spoiled her. You killed yourself for nothing.

I now know that nobody kills themselves for nothing, and I found that out before I even had a kid, let alone an Autistic one; it’s not a phrase to toss around. As far as ‘my Autistic kid’, that’s not a phrase to toss around, either, and my kid is not really that, in my driving mind; it’s not a thing I know. It’s a thing on paper that gets him into a school with just four other kids in the class, not the mainstream 20. It gets him Occupational Therapy in sensory gym where twice a week he can turn off the blast of Sensory Processing Disorder noise in his face by swinging on that fucking goddamn Temple Grandin swing thing. It gets him play therapy with a shrink, and Speech and Language for pragmatics, which is the learning of how to talk like other kids instead of giving multisyllabic-laden treatises on prehistoric life forms both real and manufactured. ‘Autistic’ is a word on paper that doesn’t cost us $50,000 a year for the school because it’s proof, medical proof. It’s a way in, and a way out. It’s how he gets liberated from a world for other children that’s too much and too loud and too loose, where everyone knows what to do but him, where nobody is different, but him. I don’t really know that he has Autism, but I know that saying it makes him free.

My mother said, when I told her she’d spoiled my sister (which Bruno Bettleheim also told her, in about 1965), “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know.”

My mother was a person of fierce conviction, but what is knowing? Who cares? Knowing and time, this is what I mean. That many years later, after the puppet show when my sister was maybe four or five or six, and at the time of the telling was in her late 30’s, safely ensconced, spoiling a forgone issue, how could it matter? I could have been right, why not? Busses explode. Dogs get electrocuted on the sidewalk. People get cancer or pardoned or fall in love. Autistics talk and make a million dollars. Parents wake up every morning and go to work after three hours of sleep and don’t crash the car and die on the way home. Children love them though they yell and punish all the time. The Middle East is on fire. Japan is under water. Why couldn’t it be so that my mother spoiled my sister? Why would I not still be mad about that?

Or is that just the Sensory Processing Disorder talking, to me? Is that my noise?

I can know that my son has Autism, or not know it. I can say it and secret away in a box for myself the conviction that he does not; that’s fine. And my mother, for her part, probably forgave herself for a lot of my sister’s life, and critiques like mine were old news; still plausible but not compelling any more. She could entertain it or not -- better not. Because if I was right, then the puppet show and the five trains fall away like autumn leaves, which need no one to help them or tell them how to fall. Better if I’m wrong and she was just too tired to bicker with me, who didn’t deserve it and also did, because I live five trains to a puppet show now, and the irony is almost more than I can bear.

Good-bye, Good Dog - January 10, 2009

2011-08-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

Nothing jump–starts introspection like death. And because a blog is really exo-spection, I have missed all of you as much as the comforting swamp inside my own skull. So it’s good to be back, waders on and lamp aloft, the gurgle and crackle of life’s guts and debris underfoot, slogging forth.

My dog, Eena, is gone. I can’t believe it.

B had seen it coming for months but I dismissed his cautious warnings. In the last year she’d gone from lazy to listless. Her muzzle lengthened through a spreading mask of gray, and her once electric, black coffee eyes became rheumy. She seemed to experience sudden shots of pain through her hips and legs that she expressed in yelps and mortified winces. I saw all that as B did but attributed it to arthritis. What I ultimately could not deny were the accidents; this supremely housebroken animal had one, and then another, and so on, with increasing frequency and urgency. Afterward she would cower in the corner shaking, doubtless now, from pain. By the time blood became evident, her cancer was in full-throttle aggression. A sonogram at the animal hospital on York Avenue revealed that she was, according to the doctor, “in danger of sudden failure, because of the rampant tumors.”

I dragged my 57 pound Pit Bull off the examining table and onto my lap and she lay across me sweet as a baby. I thought I would choke from guilt. I would not say that the guilt gnaws at me like its own tiny cancer, because I don’t have that kind of gall, but it’s pretty bad in moments, and then I stab myself in the brain with a psychic hat pin because it’s just NOT about me. I treated Eena like a princess. But she suffered, bravely, quietly, without complaint, and I am sorry about that.

For myself, I just miss her. She was such a beauty. She had a great dog-smell; warm and musty and toasty, like pretzels. Silken ears. A pink chin. She had good breath, until the end. She was powerful and discerning and loyal as all hell. She saved me from a car-jacking once, and from loneliness often. We were really together, partners, best friends. It was a good love, fully returned, and worth everything.

Eena happened to also be a very fine ambassador for her breed, and she touched, and changed, hearts and minds. Many hands reached out and changed her, as well. So I want to thank everyone I can think of who was part of her life. Here we go:

My mother, who named her. “How about ‘Eena’? She looks tough, like a Russian.”

My father, who welcomed her, and me, into his home, and ultimately gave it to us. “The thing I liked about Eena,” he said, “is she showed that all that crap about breeds is bullshit.”

My sister, Lori, who always asked, “How’s Eeeeeena the dog?” and who spent a lot of that Christmas patting her.

My husband, who gave up his bitchy cat (although the cat managed to wind up living down the hall from us anyway) to make room in his life for a Pit Bull he frankly feared, then fell in love with. Eena often made overtures of marriage to B, which he gracefully declined without ever embarrassing her. B took all those beautiful pictures. He made the videos for me.

Aunty Judy and Uncle Neil, and Aunty Betty and Uncle Sol, and Cousin Flora and Cousin Harold, who never said ‘no’ to a visit from Eena in their lovely homes. And Aunt Miriam and Uncle Eli and all our other family and friends who let Eena into their hearts.

Grandma from California, a true Horsewoman who walked a New York City Pit Bull like she owned the place! And Grandpa who expected nothing less.

My x-husband, Killer, and Uncle Vic, who were delighted to receive Eena as a guest more than a few times, fed her liverwurst straight out of the open fridge and gave her full run of the yard with its near-gettable squirrels, squeaky clothesline, and cool garden dirt. She slept on their couch. Uncle Vic fed Eena the Pit Bull extra-large biscuits from between his teeth.

Killer’s sister Lisa who let her kids chase Eena around the house in circles, and around and around and around….laughing…

Carolyn and Jeff Ingledue, who get it about dogs and who brought the kids over to play on the last day, and who cried the night before.

Kelly Kay Griffith, who is afraid of dogs and never admitted it until well after she fell for Eena. Kelly treated Eena like a lady, as only a lady from the South would do.

Megan O’Connor, who also kept a secret, that she thought I was crazy to bring this dog home, and said graciously, “You both proved me wrong.”

Patrick Dillon, who believes that animals hold their own funerals, and who could not keep his hands off her, and who played “Bite-cha!” with Eena; Eena won. Patrick, I believe that the dogs sang for your cat. I never forgot it.

Kevin Fitzgerald, to whom it never occurred to be afraid of Eena, and who threw a tennis ball at McCarren Park higher and farther than Eena and I would ever have dreamed.

Cindy Intile and Emmalie and Peter, and Allison Searson and Abby and Olivia, who never blanched at a house full of dog hair.

Chris Ryan, who was always delighted to see Eena and didn’t make a big deal about it.

The entire neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 2001, when I was the white girl, and Eena was that white girl’s dog, and no matter what they really thought, everybody was very, very nice. Hispanic old man who lived across the street from the basketball court, and who came out and joined us for coffee and fetch almost every morning and brought Eena rawhides, I’m sorry that we didn’t say goodbye.

Jessie O’Connor, who walked Eena all those nights I was coercing B into marrying me, and who had Eena off the leash in Travers Park, god help us, and fed her ice cream cones.

Ashleigh Hurwitz, who said, “I think a Pit Bull is a good dog for you… I mean, obviously.”

Joan Margiotta, who took allergy pills so she could visit and dragged her kids over, too. I still think Kate had a summer friendship with a Rotty when she was 1 year old, I did not dream this.

Nancy Caronia, who always shared the futon with Eena.

Candice and Rich and Max Polner, who not only took Eena for a long weekend but also chauffeured her home. Poor Rich believed Eena’s insinuations that she needed 6 walks a day, only to find out that the Pit he thought would look so cool with him was afraid of wind, rain, and garbage cans.

Everybody on Youtube with Pit tributes, who gets it. And all the single girls with Pits, who will never put a guy before their dogs. And everyone we ever met on the street, who testified about the goodness and nobility of the Pit Bulls they have known, and who stroked Eena and pet her and scratched her and saw her as she was and adored her on the spot.

And Dr. Cesar Tello, the veterinarian who told me the brutal truth about Eena, who believes in mercy and relief, and who crossed himself and wept with me at the very end.

Fuck You, Tina Fey, or, The Mother's Prayer, Interpreted

2011-07-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

When Tina Fey’s book Bossypants (Little, Brown & Company, 2011) came out, I ignored it, because I’m sick of her. She is already ubiquitous and redundant, and her glammed-up cover photos for fashion magazines are uninspired; she can’t even be bothered to have her own style or wear a great suit, she just lets ‘em tart her up so she can sell, sell, sell.

She had an article in The New Yorker for Valentine’s Day called “Confessions of a Juggler,” (thank you, Inner Monoblog for the text!) that pretended to concern itself with the pressured life of the working mother (as opposed, apparently, to mothers who are in their homes watching television and dicking around all fucking day) but in reality was just Fey’s frantic, limited, and late-to-the-party realizations about the incongruence of Hollywood and contemporary motherhood. Her opening quip that “It’s less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam… than it is to speak honestly about this topic [of working moms]” was overwrought, not true, and in poor taste.

Her assertion in the New Yorker that she has “the same struggles as any working parent” is offensive not because, as she says, she “just happens to be working at [her] dream job,” but because she has a million, billion dollars, so she in fact does not have any of the same struggles as most working parents, whose chief struggle is almost always money and the unlimited tangential stresses there from. Fey’s children can have everything they want to eat, soccer and swimming and ballet and French, two pairs or ten pairs of shoes that fit, the school of Fey’s choosing, the Fire Island house and vacation and camp, therapy, play dates, nannies, and Fey and her husband get to go out in the evening as often as they would like. Does that lifestyle sound familiar? I thought not!

It’s gross for wealthy people to compare themselves to working class people. It’s revolting. And let’s not even parse that bit about how “large families have become a status symbol” of what people can afford. You can afford it, Fey, everybody knows that.

But it’s also a loutishly insensitive thing to say exactly because she is working at her dream job, which is qualitatively, psychologically, emotionally, profoundly different from working at a job that sucks. And it’s really different from being a working parent who has no job and is desperately searching for one. So, you know, I’m working up to Shut up, Tina Fey, at this point.

The rest of the article was non-compelling because Fey had nothing new to add to a conversation that is, I assure you, not dangerous; women of all ages, all over my neighborhood, all over Facebook, email, and the phone, talk about working outside the home and inside it, and why that’s like, stressful, in any combination, all the time. What is sad is how Fey’s lack of awareness of that just makes her look like she has no friends.

But let’s get to the point, to the Fuck You, Tina Fey.

As I say, I was determinedly ignoring her book when I stumbled on this great blog Kyriolexi while seeking out definitions of the relatively new term ‘neurodiversity’ for something else I’m writing. I quote:

So this? Is never okay.

“May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.” - Fey, in her stupid essay

It doesn’t surprise me that someone would say such a thing. Ignorance and victim-blaming abound whenever child abuse, especially sexual abuse, is discussed. I am, however, slightly appalled at the uncritical praise this essay is receiving all over the internet, with little or no acknowledgement of the deeply offensive nature of this line, which in one sentence summarizes, reinforces, and solidifies the stigma and pain felt by those who have been harmed by childhood sexual abuse, and the fear that can linger in the mind of even the most self-confident survivor: maybe this happened to me because there’s something wrong with me. -Kyriolexy

Huh? I said. What the hell is this about? I read through the rest of the post and found out. And then I read the piece, “The Mother’s Prayer..,” and I was disgusted, though I don’t know why I was even surprised.

Sexual abuse of children is, to say the least, never, ever funny; not ever. But I’m not writing about sexual abuse, it’s not my field, and what’s wrong with Fey’s “Prayer,” (ugh, ugh, ugh,) is not just the one line; the whole piece is offensive, and especially the word ‘damage,’ not only with regard to sexual abuse, but as it relates to all children who struggle, and who are marginalized, and in how Fey uses the word to perpetuate pariah-ism, making gobs of cash while she’s at it.

Tina Fey is shaking her moneymaker, and I don’t resent her that part of it; I want a book contract, too; wha, wha, wha! What I resent (and here I go, I’m gonna be a sanctimommy, I’m gonna judge,) is that Fey is making her money taking advantage of the very women she blatantly pretends, in the New Yorker piece, to have as her peers, and selling those women’s children down the river in the process. I’m a mother. I’m her age (or I’m older by like four or five years.) I have stood next to her and had a glass of crap wine on the dock at Fire Island because my cousin has a house there that I get to visit. But nobody looking at me and at Fey could guess that; you don’t know that I’m not rich, you just know that she’s famous, I’m not. She’s a cultural leader, it is painful to say. I’m as angry about this as I was when Oprah threw a fucking parade for James Frey’s awful, stupid, lying, badly written fake book. Women are looking to Oprah to see what to read, and they are looking to Fey to see what to think, and Fey is saying, Think privilege! Think discrimination! Think me, Me, ME!!!

I was shocked when a friend I often call The Philosopher Mom, who is among the most political, well-read, informed people I know (there are four of them) posted the piece on her Facebook page. But I was glad it was she, because she’s about the only person I know whose postings I can fire back at without reservation.

I responded:

Jessica Steiner Sorry, i still can't abide the "for it's the damage that draws the creepy soccer coach's eye..." which translates as, ‘better your broken kid than mine,’ mentality. Not to mention the mutually exclusive 'beautiful but not damaged,' based on the assumption that beauty is evidence and security and damage is for-never. Fuck Tina Fey. Sorry.

Then I added:

Jessica Steiner oh and BTW both my male and female children are beautiful AND damaged and EVEN rich people's kids are in danger of predators. [Hon,] i know you will not take this personally. thanks for the vent.

And then I learned that the husband of a woman I’d grown up with had killed himself.

How could this possibly be relevant? Stay with me.

I will call the woman Beth. I grew up in a youth movement by whose standards today I’d be considered Tea Party material. This organization thirty years ago, as I knew it, was a vibrant, insular group of about one hundred and twenty kids, teens, and young adults forming an ethically driven community around such radical ideals as sharing, helping, heritage, hiking, debate, discussion, folk dancing, pot smoking and arts and crafts. Participants who could claim Israeli parentage were considered both exotics and the real deal. Beth was one of those. When I knew her she was near legal drinking age, tan, chestnut haired, stocky, beautiful, whip smart, a gifted musician, cuddly, popular, and super responsible, plus she spoke Hebrew with a charming lisp; I loved her and was filled with seething jealousy of her at the same time. She was my summer camp counselor and one of the proudest days of my twelve year old life was when she let me wear her red carpenter pants and her white sweat shirt with the red heart on the front after Shabbat on an unseasonably chilly Friday night.

The information about Beth’s husband came to me through a friend who’d also grown up under Beth’s tutelage. I responded to her email that I felt a sense of sliding off reality. That nothing is what it seems. I had heard over the years that Beth had a wonderful, successful husband, and healthy, advancing children, a beautiful home, and was a person of stature in her professional field; I had believed that Beth’s life was perfect.

Why would I believe that of anybody? Because that’s what we’re all trained to believe; that life can be perfect.

Let me just get this out right now: fuck that.

I had just been discussing the privation and despair inherent in such vicious one-ups-manship as Fey is purporting, with yet another mom, a member of my support group, who has a son like mine. Though our two boys have different diagnoses, they are both high-strung, reactive, prone to harrowing, embarrassing outbursts. My son has Asperger’s Syndrome, Sensory Processing Disorder, and Anxiety, among other things.

This mom and I, we love our support group friends, and our non-support-group friends who are supportive, but mothering young boys with stress-induced behavior challenges is qualitatively different from parenting boys with other disabilities, and it is an experience that must be had to be understood. And we often, in spite even of each other, feel alone.

I realized, reminiscing about Beth, that I’ve always felt this way; alone. I’m a chronic outsider. The sensation has attached itself to my experience of mothering a boy who keeps me out of the mom-club, even out of the special-needs-moms-club, to some degree. Like, alone, aloner…

And when Philosopher Mom reposted that yammering, ham-handed, oafish, self-aggrandizing piece of bullshit by Fey that she’s trying to pass off as wit; I felt alonest.

Possibly worst of all, I also felt cosmically, swooningly bored, because I just can’t believe that Fey has nothing any newer or smarter or funnier (the “Prayer” is not, actually, that funny,) to say than what boils down to I’m pretending I think I’m lame so I can say how rich and awesome I am and you suckers all think I’m your friend!

What hurts is the way people throw around that word damage, and don’t care about my boy. What’s embarrassing is that at my advanced age, I still carry a paranoid fantasy that other people are perfect and happy and that I’m getting left out. Nevertheless, Fey’s sleazy, elitist, sub-par humor still smacks of desperate pandering to the in-crowd.

Philosopher Mom says I’m missing the point. On Fey’s use of the word ‘damage,’ PM said, “[Fey] may not have chosen super-consciously, but damage is a word that applies when something traumatic has happened to someone, not when someone has problems that arose from the genes.”

Despite PM’s assertion that predators look for psychic “chinks in the armor,” which I’m sure is right, and she’s in tune with Kyriolexi’s essay, to that extent, ‘damage’ is an orange-alert word on the disability radar; it bespeaks an attitude toward individuals as damaged goods, as second rate rejects, and I believe that Fey has a much more sinister, eugenic message in mind than PM has considered.

I believe this stupid excuse for satire is Fey saying, Ewe, there’s that damaged kid! I’m sure glad my kid isn’t that kind of loser! Come on over here, honey, so you don’t catch anything nasty, or ugly, or weakening! And everybody else just laughs and laughs…

Granted, others who responded to Philosopher Mom’s posting gave me my due; if they disagreed in that lighten up! kind of way, they were mild about it. One person disagreed with me but tempered it by ‘sending love,’ so as not to hurt any feelings. Which is fine. Nobody called me a C U Next Tuesday, so that’s good.

By the way, the best treatment right now of the topic of careless word hurling is Robert Rummel-Hudson’s Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords: Just a word. Which is on www.schuylersmonsterblog.com so check that out.

Tina Fey's Fire Island house is around the corner from my cousin’s, which I visit with my family from time to wonderful time. I could very easily walk up to Fey and say, Your writing is bad. Your feelings are stupid. Your work is pretentious and offensive. Good-bye. And anyone could assume I'd do that out of jealousy; a dent in my reputation well worth it.

What I wonder, though, is what lurks inside a woman of Fey’s career and financial stature, that brings her so far down, that makes her so insecure she’s compelled to chatter on and on about presumed shopping trips to Hollister and slamming cab doors with indignation at her daughter’s future imagined sleights? As for that speculative business of “Architecht? Midwife? Golf course designer?” If Fey’s daughter grows up to be a dowdy woman in Wrangler jeans working at Home Depot, Fey will have to be put into a medically induced coma. All I can imagine on reading the “Prayer” is Fey, standing in her office, sticking her fingers in her ears and screaming LA LA LA LA LA LAAAAAA (rather like my Autistic son, actually,) so the mean voices of reality won’t get in and tell her the bad news; that none of us actually has a direct line to God and nobody knows what is in store for their child, no matter how many grapes we cut up, no matter where we shop, no matter how hard wish that nothing will fuck up our lives.

I’d like to walk over to Fey on the dock and be like, Really? This is all you've become? Just the same kind of stuck up idiot who crapped on you in junior high?

And then I’m like, Maybe when I see Fey I will just run up to her and breathe in her face and yell FAILED WRITER GERMS! FAILED MOTHER GERMS! MIDDLE CLASS VIRUS! In fact maybe I’ll tell my Autistic kid to go give her perfect, in-tact kid’s elbow a good, gross lick.

Alas, compare and despair, as Stuart Smiley used to say. It does not make me feel better to know that Beth has officially experienced cosmic proportion loss, nor would it gratify me if heartbreak happened to Fey. It doesn’t level the karma or balance the scales because I am not tallying up like that. The truth is that I am happy. I’m crazy about my son exactly as he is even when his struggles defeat my best efforts, I gaze upon and relish my daughter who will not grow out of this family unscathed, I’m in love with my husband, we have enough money, blab la blab la blab la. I just want something out of all this.

I feel like it’s best to assume that everybody has terrible shit in their lives, even people who really, really seem not to, who seem untouched by hardship. Not because it will make me kinder; I don’t want to be kinder, I don’t care about that. I guess I just want to be less horrified, less shocked. I would like things to make sense once in a while. I would like Tina Fey to use her savvy and her humor and her influence for good, and enlightenment, not for sucking the dick of the status quo, and certainly not for making other mothers feel like shit. I would like to wish Tina Fey well. I’d like to respect her. She has to respect me first, though, because I’m supposed to buy the book to pay for the house on Fire Island.

But for $26.99? Fuck you, Tina Fey.

What's Good

2007-10-15T18:55:00.000-07:00

M smells like pee in the morning, his own sweet pee, vaguely of breast milk, musky, distinctive as rain. His diaper's got to weigh 5 pounds. But his hair still smells like soap from last night's bath, his breath as clean and clear as tears. He is compelled to cry on waking up, no matter what, it seems; a noise that arches like a cat's back, snapping the morning into broken pieces and I crack awake to it.

"Noo-ooo!" is the first thing out of him, then a sob, then pitifully, in the dark, "mommy..."

"Sh! SH! SH!" I hiss. "I'm coming to you! Don't wake up the baby!" and I fight my way out of bed, instantly cold and sorry for myself. I pull him out of his crib clutching Bluey the blanket, and I take his quilt for me. We assume the position in the nursey chair, and I hastily wrap the little quilt around my shoulders while he tucks Bluey around his own body, laying on his side across my lap, mouth open, waiting for the booby, and blump, there it is. It seems to fall out of my pajamas these days without even being asked.

Eyes closed, he latches on with quiet relish, one hand delicately holding the ribbony edge of Bluey and stroking it a little with one finger, while in the other hand he keeps his binky, at the ready to replace the boob when he's finished. I feel his body settling into mine, and my body, into the chair, curving around him, warming up under the little quilt and M's skin, weight, heat.

The light outside starts to change; I've no idea what time it could be, but make out, squinting through a camouflage of random baby socks, nearly 6, on the digital clock. It's perfect. He's sleeping later these days, 6 is a luxury; but it's still early enough that I don't have to transfer him back into the crib and start the day right this minute. I stay where I am, drop my chin to my chest, and doze off with him, inhaling him, relieved, and greatful.

Half an hour later, he's still deeply asleep, and I decide to risk all this peace for a major indulgence; would he stay asleep if I carefully deposit him back in his crib, would they all stay asleep long enough for me to watch the news and eat a bowl of cold cereal.... all by myself?

I sneak my arms under his shoulders and hips and gingerly lift him up, then over the side of the crib and in, laying all 35 pounds of him out as gently as if he were 3 weeks old. I tuck Petey-Pie Penguin under Bluey, and M's arm creeps out to pull Petey even closer; he presses himself down into the mattress. My good boy. My beauty boy. For a moment I consider getting in the crib with him; B has done it, it's a good crib.

I want the news. Even for just ten minutes, I'll take a traffic report, weather, anything.

But as I tip-toe toward the door, Little H stirs; she only moves in her sleep if she's about to wake up. I wait, foot in the air; maybe not this time? Maybe she'll just shimmy a little and burrough back in?

"Wheeeeee," she croons, pitched just like a kitten, and without opening her eyes she sits right up in her gigantic big-girl crib, lower-lip protruding in insult, her face hot, smelling of camphor and sunflower lotion, her cheeks red and velvety. I scoop her up quickly, tuck a binky back in, and deposit her into the big bed alongside B, and cover her up.

Shirtless and stretched out for miles, his long, curly, mauvey-gray hair fanning across the blue pillow, the dawn light on him, he looks like a rock star; I poke him. He opens one blue, confused eye. I point at Little H, who is just about back to sleep next to him, laying on her side with her nose in his neck. I touch my finger to my lips. He nods, and crosses an arm over her, draws his legs up a little to make a bumper of his body. She works her binky for a moment, then lets out a little foal-whinny, the binky falling out, her little lips breath in angelic o's.

I look at them.
I turn and look at M.
My goodies. My goody darlings. They are so good, all three. How lucky I am. How the sight of thier faces feels like a kiss on my heart, on the real inside of my body.

I step out of the room on the floor's sweet spots that don't creak, and close the door all the way. I continue to walk lightly into the kitchen as if for good measure. There is my favorite cereal, cereal being my single favorite food in the world. This particular one looks just like dog food, but it's so crunchy and yummy. I could eat it a box at a time. I pour a huge bowlful and drown it in milk, I pick out the good spoon, and take a big, cold, delicious bite. I crunch and crunch, and munch along into the living room.

And who greets me there but my sad-sack Pit Bull, ears pressed back to her head in welcome, twisting onto her back in the big chair where she lay, her smooth, white, ropey-muscled chest open for my hand, her flat head upside down on the armrest, pink chin in the air, her rhumey eyes say, 'I am good, you know, I am. Give me something...'

I set down my bowl, kneel, and press my cheek to her chest, rubbing her side hard with the back of my hand as if starting a fire. I kiss her pink, musty old dog chin. I deposit one ring of cereal into her yellowing sabre-toothed chops. Her tail thuds consistently against the upholstery.

"Can I eat my cereal?"
'Ohh, all right.'

It's light out now, but softly so. I open the blinds, and turn on the tv; news. Luscious news. Hillary is ahead. A healthy baby girl was born in the Midtown tunnel and will be named Hector. No one died in any of the night's shootings. The market closed up. The Grand Central is wide open coming in and out of the city right now, and the forecast has a spot of rain for the morning, but otherwise, looks good.

Fuck 'em If They Can't Take A Joke

2007-08-29T12:14:00.003-07:00

Apparently my last couple of postings scared the crap out of everybody; and I thought it was comedy! Whoops! But the flood of concerned emails has been downright heartwarmimg. Here are a few faves.

Mommy-pal Kiersten gets Babyweekly, an e-newsletter that had this mind-boggling wisdom to offer on stressful moments, and she forwarded it to me thusly;

“I thought you’d get a kick out of this."

There's a reason parenting is called the toughest job in the world, and everyone has bad days. But if you feel as if you are at the end of your rope or you might take your frustrations out on your children, take a break. Put your child(ren) in a safe place (such as the crib) and take a moment to calm down. Have a friend or relative stay with them while you visit friends, sleep, take a hot bath, or go to the gym-whatever will help you recharge. Even a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood can do wonders for your state of mind. Reach out to others if you are at your wit's end-never take your frustrations out on your child.

Amazing, Kiersten and I agreed, how it’s all so simple!

NOT!

I also got this concise and compassionate note, which I loved, from the wise and stylish Cousin Flora, a nodding, knowing….

“Ah yes, I remember those days….hang in there.”

From my devoted once-and-future shrink Ruth:

“I’ve been following your blog. Listen, Super Mom, or Super Jew, or whatever it is you’re trying to do over there; how about coming in for a few sessions?”

And finally, my favorite, from Fabulous Friend Kelly Kay Griffith, regarding Chapter 5, the car-screaming-episode:

“Jesus Christ. Are you alive?”

I have the nicest people! My kingdom for a podium at which to stand and wring the hem of my ball gown as I look with dewey eyes upon you all, proclaiming, “You like me! You really like me!”

Meanwhile, I am making arrangements for the fates of my detractors, the worst of whom is a relative who called Papa the Red to insist that Minky appears to be “overwhelmed” and “having problems,” and who FAILED to call Minky directly to offer support, or perhaps a few hours of free baby sitting (you see, the trouble with advice articles is REALITY,) that Minky might go and have a hair cut or a cup of coffee and a newspaper or, heaven forefend, an evening out with poor old B. No… that was not offered. Only belittlement and superiority were offered. So helpful!

NOT!

But more to the point; any parent who asserts that they have never had something comparable to the afternoon of screaming I had with M, or a bout of clop-cup-en-vant such as was caused by the nightly game of Musical Sleep Deprivation that went on here, is either:

High
Drunk again
Not taking care of their own kids
Or
Lying.

But who cares about them, especially when I have the champ that is Papa in my corner, whose response to the relative was:

“You don’t understand. She’s not writing to complain. She’s writing to tell the truth. She’s writing to tell other mothers how it really is, and to not be alone.”

I could stand up clapping and do one of those cool, macho, long whistles right now, or in lieu of that, I could hoot like TV talk show audiences do; “Whoooo-hooo!” I say to Papa, “Tell it, Mister! Tes-ti-FY!”

I LOVE that man.

And as for the arrangements; I’ll probably go with this week’s special at my x-husband’s drive-thru contract service, ‘Bludgeon King.’ They get it done with your choice of a marble ashtray, Cricket bat, or my all time favorite… I love writing this almost as much as saying it… the Ball-Peen Hammer.

THAT’S A JOKE. THAT BUSINESS DOSEN'T REALLY EXIST.

Christ!

Life With M, Chapter 5

2007-08-19T21:19:00.000-07:00

We went to the beach with Papa, and probably shouldn’t have; it’s awfully hot outside. M and Little H’s cheeks turned a near-pulsating red within minutes of setting up our spot there. But I had promised M, and Papa, and couldn’t bear to reneg. They’d have forgotten about it eventually, but I couldn’t have tolerated the guilt, or the boredom of another long, long, sweltering afternoon.

They three sleep most of the way back and wake up in foul moods on Queens Boulevard. We drop off Papa and begin to search purgatory for a parking space; we circle, and circle, and I start to get jittery for caffeine and a snack; it had been too hot to eat lunch.

M and Little H are hungry, too, and need a drink. “Bwown dwink,” M announces, meaning chocolate milk. “Bwown dwink. Bwown dwink.” Little H just whimpers for a nurse.

“We will definitely get a drink at home, guy, we just have to park our car. Try to be patient,” I say, deliberately leaving no room to negotiate.

“Bwown dwink,” M insists. “Bwown dwink! Bwown DWINK!” He wants it right now, but he’s playing, too, his tone teasing.

“We’ll have it upstairs,” I say, seemingly unable to control my compulsion to answer every utterance he makes. It’s not a discussion, he has to wait, so why can’t I shut up?

“Bwown DWINK! Bwown DWINK! Bwown DWINK!” he yells, grinning in panicky sadism; he doesn’t believe me. Why? “Bwown DWINK! BWOWN DWINK! BWOWN DWINK!”

I hit the brake and turn to the 5:30 position, steadying myself by grabbing M’s car seat, and not M’s arm. “Please stop saying it, sweetheart, mommy’s trying to park the car and then we will go up and have the drink. Can you please wait quietly?”

“Yesh.”

“Thank you,” I say, and hit the gas a little, continue to search for a space, my fingers tapping the wheel because I know it’s coming-

“BWOWN DWINK! AAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!” M screams in mania, mouth open and smiling with cruel glee. “AAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!” he screams again, this time so loud that Little H bursts into terrified tears, and I yell out in shock from the actual pain of noise slicing through my skull.

I pull over with a screetch and turn abruptly again to grab the car seat, all in slow motion; my rage at his screaming shoots down through my arm and the impulse to finally, just this once, slap him, is powerful; I don’t do it. I know I won’t. But I feel like I could.

Nevertheless I let out a bellow of anger so loud and alien I’m not sure it’s come from me at first; I sound like a man. I stop us all cold. M is momentarily stunned, and looks at my reflection in his backward-facing car seat mirror.

“STOP THAT SCREAMING! KNOCK IT OFF OR YOU GO RIGHT IN THE CRIB ALL ALONE FOR THE REST OF THE DAY. I MEAN IT!”

I don’t mean it, but the standoff is quiet, and I seem to have gained leverage. None of us move. After a moment, M’s frightened face relaxes, he smiles, laughs at me, and screams again. I put the car in park and bang my head on the steering wheel 17 times. Little H cries and cries.

“I quit,” I mutter, and pretend that it’s so, just for this moment. I am totally at sea. I’ve lost my way. I have no idea what to do with us now. But a parking space opens up, and I take it. I don’t say another word. M screams a few more times, looking for my hilariously angry expression in his reverse-view mirror, but I don’t engage him. I start to unpack the car, yanking out the double stroller and smacking it against the curb, it springs open with a flourish, hanging toys and cup holders flopping brightly out like flowers from a top hat. Diaper bag over the right handle, my mini knapsack purse over the left, M’s sandals in the bottom basket, smash the towels in there, too; the plastic bag of wet bathing suits and the beach toys can cook in the damn car for the rest of the hot afternoon for all I care right now. Fuck it.

I go around and extract weeping Little H from her deep car seat, and immediately she begins to calm down. I love her so. She is so sweet, so good natured, so passive; I wish I could protect her from this, whatever it is that goes on between me and M. “I’m sorry,” I whisper into her peachy ear, and I bounce her gently around for a moment before laying her back in the rear of the double stroller.

M watches all this closely and on his face I see a new confusion. “Boobee,” he says sweetly, trying a different tack. “Mommy,” he goes on, smiling at me. “Mommy mommy, boobee. A bink a bink, see mommy, go upstas, pway, mommy pway? Wead books!”

As I pull him from his car seat he gives me kisses on my chin and neck. I kiss him back one time, and sit him in the stroller’s driver seat, and I crouch, and look him in the eye. “You know that the rules are no hitting, no pushing, and no screaming. When we go upstairs, you’ll have a time-out in the crib, because you screamed. Got it?”

He nods, and looks away.

In the elevator, Little H falls asleep again. And inside the apartment, I leave them both in the stroller for a moment so I can pee in peace. I splash cold water on my face, take a deep breath. I undo M’s stroller straps and let him out for a moment. As I turn to take my beach shoes off, he runs around the open back of the stroller and slaps Little H on the head. She screams, and cries, and I shout, “That’s it! That’s it. TIME OUT!” He was getting it anyway, how do I make it mean more? I yank his binky out of his mouth and throw it on the floor.

I stick him in the crib and go back to the stroller, scoop out Little H, rock her on the sofa till she’s calm, meanwhile M cries like hell.

I nurse Little H, while M cries. I change her diaper. I set her up sitting in her Boppy with a baby video to watch and a heap of little toys. I wash M’s binky, and go back to him.

“Bink!” he demands on sight of it, still crying.

“You can have your binky when you say sorry to me for hitting and screaming.”

“No! Bink!” he says, and cries again. We go around and around with this for a while, I leave once or twice, he cries more, I come back, and eventually we get it together.

“Sowwy, mommy.”

“Okay,” I say, and we make it up with hugs and kisses and a bit of boob. We talk it over. “I’m sorry that I yelled at you,” I tell him. “We both have to work on keeping our voices down. Let’s both try to be quiet like butterflies, for the rest of the day, okay? And gentle.”

“Buddafwy,” he says, leaning exhausted against my chest.

“I love you,” I tell him, and he nods. “Pway,” he says, and climbs off my lap, runs out to the living room, and I’m after him like a shot, because I just feel in my bones what’s about to happen, but I don’t make it in time, and as I careen around the corner into the room, he smacks Little H on top of her head, she lets out a shriek of insult and pain, I lunge for him, and we start the whole goddamn thing all over again.

Life With M, Chapter 4

2007-08-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

I sit on the playground bench next to my pal, a Russian grandpa who takes care of his granddaughter all day. The granddaughter, a little older and a little taller than M, is ‘sharing’ his trucks; meaning the two have been peaceably dividing the trucks between them for about twenty minutes and are now eyeballing each other in preparation for a good cathartic fistfight. M grabs, the Russian girl swings and lands one truck on M’s head, he shoves back, snatches away the truck of contention and comes flying at me in dismay, and I open my knees and fold him back into my body, my arms all around him, his yowls muffled in my sand-bag breasts. I hold him.

He should defend himself, but this time he really started it. “Why did you grab that truck from her?” I ask him. “You have enough. You were sharing so nicely.”

“NO-O!” says M, up into my face, as if I’m missing the point, and I probably am.

“Okay,” I say, “but we brought a lot of trucks. That’s your friend. Can you play some more?”

“No,” M says, burying his face in my thigh now, and anyway the grandpa is prying trucks from the little girl’s hands and getting ready to leave. My heart falls, and I imagine the grandpa to be disappointed in me, for some reason. I like this friend for M, she gives him a run for his money. She cries angrily and stamps her foot. M watches. I can’t tell if he cares.

“I’m sorry,” I say to the grandpa as he steers her away.

“No worry,” he says, “see you.”

Little H, busily chewing a velour duck till now, starts to cry.