It’s Little Brother’s greatest fear: getting lost. Or, more specifically, being left behind, forgotten. I don’t know if it comes with the terrain of being the youngest, but it’s a pressing concern for him–an off-limits topic of jokes for one who loves to joke.
Yesterday, we met friends at the stage show of Mary Poppins and for an instant (real time: three seconds) as I approached the concessions stand with The Kid in tow (he is not one to wander when popcorn is involved; neither am I, when it’s champagne), I turned and couldn’t see LB. “Where’s Will?” I asked his brother, who only had eyes for buttery salty goodness, and in that second I spotted him: LB with his furrowed brow, eyes in panic mode. He saw me, ran over, buried his face in my side. Found.
Sometimes you just have to look around. It’s good advice that’s hard to follow when the walls close in on you: look around. The trick is knowing whether to be still or move while doing it.
Last week The Husband and I saw Top Gun, and the nostalgia was almost as good as the popcorn (and champagne), and a couple of days later I listened to a podcast about a plane that went missing in the 1940s. Dead reckoning as a strategy was mentioned: using your previous location, plus factors like speed and direction, to determine where you are now. In biology, it’s called path integration. In Moana, Maui describes something similar–wayfinding: knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been.
All of this is only helpful, of course, if you admit that you don’t know where you are. That you’re lost. Thankfully, I lost all my dignity (feigned or otherwise) associated with knowing where I am and what I’m doing long ago. Shrugging my shoulders is both a perpetual act of honesty and a great way of relocating them from their anxiety-positioned home around my ears.
I remember stepping out of the subway in New York and just moving before I figured out which corner I was on because I didn’t want anyone else knowing I didn’t know. This led more often than not to backtracking, repositioning, circling a block not to be seen. Kind of pathetic. Sometimes, moving isn’t the answer.
It strikes me that these tactics–reckoning, way finding, path integration–well, first of all, they don’t always work. But also? They require information beyond what we know; a source of guidance outside of ourselves. A reorientation of our own position, or someone else’s.
Also in New York, I found home in TH, about a year before he figured out the same of me. It’s not always the lost who have to be still and wait. Being found doesn’t happen on our own time.
But it does happen.
The boys did a basketball camp last week. It was TK’s first camp ever, and there was much to discuss after. And before, like when he ran up to the coaches at check-in to enquire whether they are nice to autistic kids. Or the next day, when he asked the coach not to touch him while teaching him. We give our kids a home, a place, so that when they’re out in the world they know where they are by knowing who they are. His teacher told me the last day of term, how adept he is at advocating for himself, at saying what he needs. I think of this one thing I’ve done right that I never could do for myself when I was his age, and in that moment I am found: I am right where I’m supposed to be.