I like lists. Usually I scrawl them by hand on a notepad. I picked up the habit from my mom — she always has a small yellow pad on her kitchen counter-top. Our handwriting is so similar I sometimes look at [...]]]> Last night I sat down at the computer and made a List.

I like lists. Usually I scrawl them by hand on a notepad. I picked up the habit from my mom — she always has a small yellow pad on her kitchen counter-top. Our handwriting is so similar I sometimes look at something and can’t remember if I wrote it or if she wrote it.

It must have been all those notes in my lunch box, five days a week. I <3 You.

Her lists are always her daily errands. Or around the holidays, a longer list of gifts and recipients. I make work lists, grocery shopping lists, places to go lists, names and numbers of doctors lists, packing lists, recipe directions.

I didn’t hand write the List last night. Instead, I opened up my word processor and a few tabs in my browser and I started typing the Things That are Wrong With my Kid.

Okay, so not really. Not really wrong even though at 2 am when your kid is standing next to your bed calmly explaining the logic behind why his buddies have informed him that they need to sleep alone and that he’ll just have to sleep in Mama and Daddy’s bed your mind swiftly drifts to what is wrong with you and then you think about that Where the Wild Things Are movie and you remember Max looking all crushed and kicked when his mom yelled that and you end up unable to fall asleep. And instead you just listen to your son breathing beside you.

rapid mood changes (gets very angry, hits self in the cheek/ear)

aggressive/violent/hurtful to the baby without remorse (or laughs about it)

repetitive play: arranges cars over and over, rolls cars over and over, puts together playset a certain way, moves everything from one place to another

“squeezing” (stereotypic movement disorder/chronic motor tic dx by neurologist/developmental ped) ( between 10-100 times a day depending on activity, for example less often if we are out on the go all day, more often if we’re at home or he’s uncomfortable in a new place)

doesn’t seem to pick up on annoying/bothering other kids (won’t stop chasing, follows around, stands very close, repeats questions over and over and over)

The List isn’t a big deal in these little  chunks. Oh that’s totally the way preschoolers act!

Then it grows and spills from one page to the next and slowly creates a jagged mosaic of Quirkiness that might be nothing and might be everything.

Then my heart races because what if in the morning, the doctor says good news, these things are all normal. What then?

I don’t want to make a List. I want to take snapshots of my beautiful, complicated, child.

**

“Mama,” he cries, walking up to me. “Those kids won’t play with me.”

“Babydoll, walk up and tell them your name. Introduce yourself and say, ‘do you want to play with me?’”

“No, I will just walk by them again and again until they notice me.”

He doesn’t walk. He runs. Arms rigid by his sides. He sways into the momentum of a flock of children playing tag and then slides back out of it. Rounds the playground twice. Runs back and forth and back and forth by the boys playing with cars. Runs up onto the playground and bounces beside two older kids. Runs away again, runs and runs.

**

Sometimes I don’t bat an eye. On those days, I’m convinced I’m That Mom, that I’m just convincing myself that my son is different. Special.

Then my husband gets home and we try to eat dinner together and we can’t speak to each other because he yells at us for talking, comes up to me and touches my face and grabs my chin and makes me look at him instead. Tells us that he can’t hear when we’re speaking. Runs into the couch full tilt over and over and over until I’m scared he’s going to break his neck. Bounces and shimmies and shakes and makes his fingers go rigid while he stares at them and growls and my husband and I glance at each other. Stare at each other.

My List is more of an outline I guess, a foundation so that I don’t choke with all the “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” that I feel.

It’s just a pre-screening thing, to see if they want to see him again. I’ve waited four months for this appointment and more than two years since his first visit when he was too young to tell for sure, just keep an eye on him, you know him best.

I wonder, I wonder.

We are storytellers.

We write, we cook, we take photos, we craft, we vlog.

We set the storyline, we direct, we edit. We’re the producers.

We have the unique power to decide exactly how we present ourselves and our lives and our families to others.

We have absolute control over the way our stories are told.

The [...]]]> We are bloggers.

We are storytellers.

We write, we cook, we take photos, we craft, we vlog.

We set the storyline, we direct, we edit. We’re the producers.

We have the unique power to decide exactly how we present ourselves and our lives and our families to others.

We have absolute control over the way our stories are told.

The control we have is priceless. It’s priceless if we have 20,000 readers. It’s priceless if we have 14 readers.

**

No one is allowed to make a fool of me but me.

I decide what to share about my children, about my spouse, about the people around me who shape my days and shape who I am.

This is my story—the way I choose to tell it and when I choose to tell it. With all the purple prose and extraneous commas and unpopular opinions I want.

Following a different path than usual, I walked by a yard with a twisting tree and thick grass. [...]]]> It rained all day yesterday. When it stopped, I went for an evening walk around the neighborhood. (Actually, I tried to go for a run, but experienced the evil cramp of Chinese take-out. Again.)

Following a different path than usual, I walked by a yard with a twisting tree and thick grass. Between one footstep and the next, I felt a brief impulse to run. The yard wasn’t well maintained or lush or must be hard to mow. It was simply full of opportunity.

I was nine years old and barefoot, playing baseball in wet grass, making paper boats to send down the gutters, building dams with dead pine needles, pulling frogs out of the sunken utility meters, climbing a tree, skinning my toes until they bled, crying over a fight with the neighbor girl, jumping off a dock to dive for pieces of concrete.

And then I was 30 again, walking, listening to Ben Folds, trying to wind down from an hour of frustrating refereeing at home during dinnertime. Feeling a little like a cliché.

**

Can you remember when a yard or a field or a tree or a path made your toes itch? When a full-tilt run felt like flying?

The heartbeat-quick impulse to play made me realize that as much as I always said I’d never grow up and never forget what it felt like to be a child, I did grow up. I turned unfair and oppressive, I became the voice of “no you can’t” and “put your shoes away.”

I’m a grownup.

Even when I don’t feel like one.

Even when I’m running away from home one gasping footstep and suburban block at a time.

(Only to turn the bend and hobble back, sweating and huffing and practical.)

I think this is why I ask, relentlessly, how my son’s day was when he’s away from me. I want to know what games he played, who he spoke to, where his imagination took him. Was the yard a jungle? Does he make-believe? What makes him laugh? What does he worry about? What does he want?

**

I’m reading this book about parenting and one of the first things it explained was that a child’s day belongs to him. It is one of the only things that truly belongs to him. We can’t—shouldn’t—take that away. We can only hope to be someone our children want to share things with, sometimes.

We can only hope for brief glimpses of the long-forgotten heart-racing potential of wet grass.