Plans In Pencil

“I do love our adventures.” –Countess of Grantham (Cora Crawley) to Earl of Grantham (Robert Crawley)

Last Monday I took advantage of two kids in school and one dental career on the backburner to hide out in a movie theatre and watch the Downton Abbey movie. My favourite way to see movies has always been solo (other than in a recliner-laden cinema with table service and The Husband), and weekday movies are gloriously empty. On this day, I shuffled in with my tub of popcorn just as the previews were beginning and sat amongst a dozen or so other patrons, all in an age bracket beyond my own, to watch the movie that was nearly four years coming.

I still remember watching the first episode of the show: it was the summer, one year after TH and I had moved from New York to Atlanta. I was three months pregnant, hot, uncomfortable, and nauseated. For an hour, the residents and servants of the Abbey took my mind off how much the first trimester sucked, and I was hooked for the next four years. Returning to the story after four more felt both novel and familiar, just like returning to New York feels now: things have changed, but the original heartbeat is still there. It still feels like home. Different, but home.

We are permanent residents of Australia now. This is not as…well, permanent as it sounds. We didn’t have to make a declaration that we would never leave (even though some days we feel ready to give that vow). Our citizenship in America holds fast and has not been transferred across the world. We get benefits like not having to pay for public school, and queuing in the non-tourist line at the airport. But mostly, the change is a symbolic one: we’re staying for at least two more years, and now we have the paperwork that solidifies that commitment. After our own side of the paperwork was submitted (including the documents ensuring the Australian government that The Kid would not unduly burden their coffers with his diagnosis), we were informed that a decision would be rendered in five business days. So we waited.

It was twelve business days, actually, and we felt every one of them. Our house in Atlanta in going through the final motions of its sale, and our furniture and books and other possessions are making their way onto a boat headed west any day now. What a cruel joke would it have been if we’d have had to scramble, houseless and couchless, back to America? I didn’t put it past God, who has pulled tricks like that before–upending my declared plans–and secretly TH and I wondered if we’d made the wrong call; if we weren’t meant to stay after all. The clock ticked, and I tried not to think about bulletproof backpacks.

Then a text came through on Friday morning from TH, full of Australian flags. And after that, we found out that, had we not been stalled by TK’s diagnosis–had we sailed through the PR process as quickly as it initially appeared we would–that the sale of our house in Atlanta would have hit us with a monumental tax burden to pay. It was almost like the whole thing was held up for a reason–a merciful reason that just felt hard at the time.

Turns out there was more to it. We just didn’t know.

Now, when we go back to America in December, it will be for a Christmas visit and not the return we planned on three years ago–the return that, when we moved to Australia, I was counting on for my own sanity and hope. That summer flight from Sydney to winter in America will be a round-trip one. We will go back to one home, then come back to another.

So much of life is about leaving, and returning.

The boys are obsessed these days with photos of their younger selves. They pore over such pictures and bring them to me and TH, asking how old they were in each one. TK has taken to propping the frames up in various places: in front of his seat at the breakfast bar, against the window where he’s playing, alongside his pillow as he climbs into bed. They love going back, returning, to the people they used to be. I think they want to be reminded that their story has been going on for awhile now, that they have always been loved.

They go back to the same questions, over and over; the most frequent being “Why?”, along with queries about King Henry VIII and North Korea and Alexander Hamilton and duels. Their need for retellings, for repetition, for returns, is exhausting. And yet it establishes them and makes them feel at home. 

We venture out to new places–the snow last month, the Great Barrier Reef soon–even as we plan returns to familiar yet changing ones. We return changed: more lines and wrinkles; long, skinny boy limbs that were, three years ago, short and chunky. We have more stories to tell. More words in our arsenal. Returned, but not a regression to speak of. Different, but home. Wherever we are.

My kids, man. My kids.

Not since The Husband’s sock-strewing antics has any one person, let alone two of them, instigated such opposing feelings within me: tenderness and rage, love and frustration, peace and anger. And oh how they, in their doubled need, in my own need to teach them and prepare them for the world–a need that turns into an obligation that turns into a weight that turns into anxiety–surpass socks thrown on the floor and send me into another realm entirely, a realm populated by cuddles and shouts, apologies and forgiveness, cynicism and hope, and all the other opposing yet connected feelings they bring.

This morning, the rain pounded outside as I settled The Kid into his classroom, Little Brother having pushed me out the door of his own school. TK had already secured my promise that I would remain until the bell for him, and I looked over his shoulder as he sat among his classmates and their magnet building sets. I saw him holding two of the magnets, puzzling over their inability to connect, and we all started talking about polarity and repulsion and attraction and in light of raising children doesn’t it all feel a bit ON THE NOSE, the way the pushing and pulling can happen among the same pieces?

I woke up with them this morning and they regaled me with stories as they are apt to do when I am exhausted and they are wired, and today’s tale was about the saltwater crocodile.

“Did you know that the babies come out of eggs?” LB asked, his face pressed right against mine. “And that the crocodile puts the eggs in its MOUTH?”

“Yeah,” TK jumped in. “It’s to move them around and keep them safe. That’s how he holds them.”

Now I’m not going to do the research to find out if this is true–though they know more about animals than I do, so it probably is–and I’m reasonably certain that if any crocodile is doing this, it’s the MOTHER, can I get an amen? But once again, and nearly with the sunrise, I was reminded of the double-sided magnets that my children are, that we are to each other: piercing and protecting, teaching and tiring, critique and mercy.

“That’s how he holds them,” he said, and I thought about that egg nestled safely atop the crocodile’s tongue, in between teeth that would end its life before it began, how it would look without knowledge of the situation: a vicious animal taking an egg in its mouth not for destroying, but for rescuing; Jonah and the whale, the object of danger actually being the object of deliverance.

When TK was first diagnosed on the spectrum, I received an outpouring of responses, mostly intended for comfort. But I like to read between lines whether there’s any fine print there or not, and I quickly assessed that many people’s reaction to the news had more to do with themselves than with us. “It’s hard, but you must be relieved to have an answer” (Now you can stop living in denial and accept the subjective assessment of a professional who doesn’t know your child at all and let that be your peace from now on). Others seemed to take more comfort than I did in having a label for him–which had been my fear all along, actually–that people would see the label and not him. I think their palpable and over-verbalised sense of relief was and is indicative of most people’s need to fit the world and its contents into categories so they can be easily managed. I tried to handle their “help” graciously, talking shit about them only behind their backs or on a blog; secretly seething every time someone tagged me in another mother fucking post about autism as though I didn’t already have enough reading material on my hands, thank you, and next time could you just email me that privately rather than making a public show of assistance that feels more about your needs than mine?

At first I was afraid the diagnosis would change us. Then I realised I was afraid–for good reason–that it would change the way people treated us.

Because it did…but not always for the worse. There were–are–also the people who didn’t try to help or fix but just saw–and didn’t see the diagnosis, but saw through it. To The Kid himself.

I have a couple of friends here like that. One was over recently and we were talking about TK’s history and diagnosis. She was essentially questioning it and the whole idea of the spectrum–its one-word conflation of way too many different types and profiles–in the way that I did in the early days of this journey.

It was wonderful.

“James gives me more eye contact than a lot of kids their age,” she told me, then cited a number of other things about him that are perfectly typical. And while it doesn’t erase the label or perhaps even the need for it, it reminds me that the label is so insufficient to describe TK. And that there are always people who will see him, and LB, and all of us, beyond how the world would summarise us for its own ease.

“It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, as long as it was deep,” wrote Ric Ocasek of The Cars, who died Sunday. I don’t know what our life together is and has been if not deep–and wide, and long, and extending in every other direction, often seemingly opposing ones that somehow land us back in the same place: being seen, and held. So many dangerous-looking saviours, grace with a million faces, delivering us from where we were to where we were meant to be, and holding us the whole way.

Every first of September, I get a Facebook reminder of the trip The Husband and I took to Sydney three years ago: the exploratory venture across hemispheres and time zones to find out if this could be our new home. (Spoiler alert: it could.) I see the post about wearing my power blazer to a school interview I would leave crying because of their dismissal of The Kid based on labels only; I see the photo of the Opera House taken during my run through the botanical gardens; and I feel the excitement and trepidation that accompanied me on the plane here and back, through the halls of that school, on that run. I think of how full I felt my life already was then, before I met any of the people who now populate it, back when the idea of Little Brother and The Kid turning five and eight here felt eons away and is now happening, like, tomorrow.

We’ve gone through three houses and nearly three years here, and we are in the same place we were when we got off the plane yet somewhere totally different.

We are planning five- and eight-year-old birthday parties–on beaches and in parks, Spider-Man and Hot Wheels ventures–and going through lists of friends to invite, names we had never heard three years ago.

We are going out to Mother’s and Father’s Day lunches to the same restaurant, the tourist trap that we love because everything is filled with cheese and our bogan (redneck) asses are HERE FOR IT, a place whose menu has an entire section of fried desserts and where I see a bottle of Moet being delivered to a table and wonder if that’s like ordering a salad at Macca’s (McDonald’s); where TH gets a free beer on his special day and the waitress delivers it while “Thong Song” plays in the background, to be replaced by “Push It,” and we waddle to the car by way of the beach.

We are driving home at 7 am Monday mornings from a weekly hike with my Coastrek team, relishing the BBC News update that covers the entire world, not just the corner I live in, because now the world is bigger than it ever was, as so often happens when one leaves that corner.

We are venturing through the part of the library that has books on North Korea and borrowing both of those books because TK is currently obsessed with a country whose dictator sets the rules, as it falls into his fascination with good and bad governments. We are trying to convince Little Brother that, while an Alexander Hamilton party would be fun for him, he might also want to read the room and go with a more widely-known character.

We are renewing our own obsession with the Tudors and reading historical fiction and finding, on a venture into Kirribilli for a women’s group that feels just right, that their local theatre I’ve been wanting to visit is performing a play about Henry and his last wife, which dovetails perfectly with the book I’m currently reading, and I book tickets to go with a friend who loves most of the same things I do.

We are going on bush walks (that’s what she said) against protests by TK and while TH enjoys his Father’s Day couch-nap and coming to find that we love them, even though LB tests my anxiety with his climbing and TK tests my nerves with his (maternally-modeled) worry over each tricky step.

We are finding a slip of paper in the book I keep filled with the boys’ quotes, a paper that has a list of Fears about Moving that I wrote and prayed through three years ago, and I scan down the list to see how each fear has been lovingly dealt with by grace: therapy network for TK (now answered by a team of people who know and love him), my mental health (dealt with by medication, meditation, and brutal honesty with myself and others), our marriage (that resentment I feared I’d feel after being dragged across the world? nonexistent), water safety (two fish with three pools to their credit), making friends (they now feel like family–just yesterday a note was left on my car that featured a drawing of a penis–insert heart emoji), TK regression (ha)…the list goes on, and is exhaustive and completely ANSWERED.

We are going on daytime beach walks through the sand while the kids are at school, feeling the sun growing stronger here as it wanes on the other side of the world, things different yet similar because both are somehow home. And we–I–walk as far as I can one way then turn around, making footprints then seeing the same ones leading me back to where we began.

The boys have been playing together so well lately, in between fights and tears over one calling the other mean, and their current top activity is creating imaginative lands full of Hot Wheels cars (The Kid) and Lion King Ooshies (Little Brother). They give these lands names and governments and citizens, and in the process give me time–to cook, or read, or just listen to them.

Every sentence seems to begin with the phrase “Just pretend” delivered as an urgent preamble: “Just pretend that there’s a bad government here and the good guys came and threw them out?!” “Just pretend that Simba ate all the hyenas and the Dodge Challenger came and picked him up?!” It’s not at all the dolls and tea parties I grew up with in my own pink bedroom but I love it. I love the imagination required to create something out of nothing, a land where one didn’t exist before. I don’t care if anything they’re saying makes sense (it doesn’t); luckily, that’s not a requirement for make believe.

It’s also not a requirement for life.

When TK was three years old, we took him to a psychologist as part of a process to have him placed in a special-needs preschool. I was biased against the whole thing from the start: it seemed we were chasing paperwork meant to categorise and define this boy of mine who defied categories and definition, and I didn’t want what was written on those pages–by people who knew him not at all–to follow him around the rest of his life. When the psychologist showed up an hour and a half late and reeking of B.O., I was almost as livid as when we received her report a few weeks later. Her appraisal of TK’s intelligence, receptive language, and capabilities were both dire and ridiculously inaccurate. I remember my exact position on our couch when I was reading it through sobs.

Now we’re chasing paperwork again, this time for a different reason–the pursuit of a second home–and The Husband and I found ourselves in another psychologist’s office last week to hear her appraisal of TK. This time the report was delivered face to face, though, without B.O. and on time, and with something else missing from the last one: humility. Or at least humility as I define it, which is not the “I’m so humbled to have five thousand Instagram followers” brand but the “I can see that I am possibly completely wrong” kind. She went on to describe the results, which–again–did not paint a promising picture. They also–given the five extra years we’ve had with TK to know him and for him to prove his ability to kick ass–were, as she admitted and due to assessment limitations, inaccurate.

Here’s a brief station break to address what often pops up at this point in people’s minds and gets cast about in furtive glances–that I am in denial about TK’s abilities, that it’s a bit sad, isn’t it, that I can’t just accept a quantitative assessment of his level of function? And I guess the answer to that, after “Fuck off unless you know him like I do, which you don’t,” would be what I’ve found over the years as life has debrided me of my need for a black-and-white, manageable, small existence, which is this: the truth about people is allowed to be complicated and layered and to not always make sense. It can’t always be neatly assessed and rendered in a purely numerical form that everyone spouting statistics is comfortable with. It’s more than that when the person is more than that.

Because the long and short of it is that there is not an assessment that has been, to date, formulated that accurately reflects the abilities of people who learn differently. Of the neurodivergent, if you will (and I will, all. day. LONG.). Which is a bit of a farce when you consider that the world is populated with all kinds of people who don’t “test well”–and as a mother who, in her day, tested fantastically, this is both hard for me to understand, and brilliantly freeing.

I am being forcibly freed of the structures and definitions I used to have in place that allowed me to define the world in a way that made sense to me. Now I have to see that world in all its messy glory and admit–humbly–that I may have been completely, utterly, wrong. And that this is a beautiful thing.

“There’s the quantitative and the qualitative,” the psychologist told us in regard to assessments, and TK, and don’t I know it: my world used to fit into formulas and now it’s painted by words, which are so much less certain and more subjective…and more poetic.

Ben Folds writes in his memoir of his early creative spark in a working-class upbringing and how easily it could have been dismissed except that his mother would not allow it. Someone suggested she take Ben to a psychologist because of the hours he would spend sitting in front of the record player–“hyper-focused and unable to cope with interruption” (sounds familiar). The psychologist assessed Ben as being developmentally challenged. His mother, in my interpretation of what Ben wrote, was all “Aww HELL no” and let him sit right there by the record player, then started him in school early. He writes, “She saw my flunking of the doctor’s test as proof of my imagination.”

He’s doing fine now, in case you were wondering.

And this is how it is for those of us whose lives are demanding a bigger perspective than the safe lines of predictability: we are called to see things that others don’t, to fumble about in the darkness for what we believe is there. To walk about with this new vision we never asked for but were given anyway, the kind that sees all sorts of things that don’t make sense–but that are more real than everything that does.

For the past few days, the four of us have been away on one of our domestic holidays here in Australia, meant to expose us to more of the beautiful country that is also home (and to serve as an alternative to getting on yet another plane). We (The Husband) drove from Sydney to Canberra, the nation’s capital, then on to what Aussies refer to as “the snow,” an area comprised of a few towns and a few mountains and a lot of cold.

The whole journey takes about six hours, but since none of us can stand to be trapped in a moving vehicle together that long (and given, as The Kid and I are, to bouts of motion sickness), we split it in half on the way there and back by overnighting in Canberra, which meant we bookended our trip in the same hotel–the one TK referred to as “luxury” when he announced that it “totally rocked out, man.”

We began watching Coco there, and we finished it there. We got takeaway breakfast across the street (by which I mean, TH fetched it while the boys and I sat in the room): same order twice. We slept in the same kind of bed in the same kind of room and I luxuriated in the same kind of bathtub and it was all unfamiliar then familiar, foreign then known. Returning can be a beautiful thing.

Especially when you’re loath to leave your comfort zone, a movement TK and I especially struggle with, but we’re all sort of becoming…experts at it? I mean, when you consider that we’ve moved across the world and are traipsing across what was a brand new hemisphere and country and is now…a comfort zone.

“It’s okay, James, we’re trying something new!” Little Brother tells TK when he hesitates, which is often, on the entrance to a path of unfamiliarity, and though I’m sure he heard it from either me or TH, I’m equally sure I need to keep hearing it from him, mascot of encouragement and adventure that he somehow is (he doesn’t get it from me).

When we were picking up gloves for TK at the ski store in the snow, the clerk observed the boys then turned to TH and me. “Asperger’s?” he asked, nodding toward TK, and I nodded in return, already facing the battle of getting two kids up a mountain and not up for discussing the intricacies of the most recent iteration of the DSM and its erasure of that part of the spectrum. I braced myself for whatever he would say next, but I didn’t need to. “I have three boys on the spectrum,” he said. “And if it weren’t for different, you wouldn’t have Einstein…or me!” he concluded with a belly laugh, and I thought about how, no matter the distance we travel, some things are always the same.

They’re the points of recognition: people who are strangers yet know us because our storylines connect, be it through a spectrum or a nationality or a shared struggle. The scenery tends to repeat itself: at one point in our drive, TH commented that we could’ve been in California. (Also, those green signs on highways? They must have some central manufacturer who distributes them to the entire world.) And small towns, don’t they always look the same? (“Quaint,” some call it. “Dire,” I reply.)

LB has been coming up with his own interpretations of God recently, which has proved endlessly endearing and entertaining. “God’s story…it’s so long,” he told me last night while he was fighting sleep. “It’s so long it never ends.” I was not expecting to be hit in the face with this profundity, especially since I was still reeling from TK’s request, moments before, that I not die before him.

But he’s right: this story is so long, wrapping around on itself and repeating so many of the same plot points and themes. Like how, no matter how many times we wanted to throw each other off that mountain, we still ended up together, in the same room, piling up in bed together and waking up that way. Or how, each year, TH and I celebrate the day we made each other promises we had no way of understanding. Or how a hot bath and a glass of champagne are a reliable short-term cure for pretty much anything.

TK gets annoyed when I tell him something I’ve already said before–like how the Spit Bridge is going up, or the traffic-changing truck is driving by, or that I love him. “I already know that,” he says, yet often, afterward, he will burrow next to me without another word. And I need it too, to keep hearing and relearning the same truths: that we can never venture so far that we are not loved beyond what we deserve and covered by a grace that always bring us home.

Last week the boys and I stepped onto the sidewalk from The Kid’s speech therapist’s office and TK was nearly run over by a biker. As I was catching my breath, he turned to me and grinned. “That bike almost ran me over!” he marvelled. “But…I’M STILL HERE!”

He was a way of putting things–they both do, he and Little Brother–that makes me look at the world a bit differently than I did before. Like a few days ago, when he was lamenting the fact that some kids get dropped off early for school. “They may not even have time for brekkie!” he told me, “And kids NEED brekkie so they can grow into self-sufficient adults!”

Whoa. I turned to him, this little miracle, wondering where exactly that thought came from. Or why LB thinks Alexander Hamilton’s name is actually Stanley Templeton. Or what led to TK’s recent proclamation of something being a “crackerjack idea!” Or how LB got to be so funny that, at the zoo as he’s waiting for the red pandas to show up, he calls out, “Cheeky little panda, where are you? HELLOOOOOOOOO?!”

But this “I’m still here” business–that one has stuck with me past the time I wrote in down in the quote book I keep both for my memories and eventual bribery material. The truth of it lingers through school days with and without therapists, as we fade back on the shadowing because his independence has shot through the roof lately. He has been here, still, through surgeries and therapies and evaluations and assessments. He perseveres, and brings us along with him. We are all still here.

Last week his year performed on their recorders at the school assembly, and I sat waiting for them to enter, my insides twisted into familiar knots: is he anxious? Will be resist this stage appearance? Have they put him near the end in case we need a quick escape?

Then, the entrance, and his grin, which persevered along with him and our eardrums through their song, and I looked over to where the teachers stood and saw two faces smiling back at me–his therapist’s and his teacher’s–and for a moment I thought–how lucky are we, to get TWO faces?

Yet there is the letting go that comes with every relationship, especially the parental one, and the million small steps it involves, and as we fade back on school help and therapies I realise how much I have come to depend on all these faces. I have to remain while backing off; let go little by little and fade out while not going anywhere.

So I’m still here too, navigating my own path, backing off meds then finding a balance there, and yesterday, on my birthday, I exited the cinema after watching a movie by myself and listened to a voicemail from TK’s occupational therapist, who had observed him at school that morning. She had had a hard time picking him out from the group, she said, and exclaimed over how well he’s doing, how it surpassed her expectations, and the tears sprang to my eyes with a quickness that assured me no meds have disappeared me, have robbed me of my edge or emotions. I’m still here.

And every day, when I arrive to pick them up from school, they are there: LB with his standard run-and-jump-onto-me greeting, paired with “Mommy!” As though it’s always a wonderful surprise to see me. We are all still here, with and for each other, as grace underpins and flows through everything we do, both making and keeping its own promise: I am here. And I will stay.

I was reading an interview with Matthew Quick in a little magazine I occasionally write for called The Mockingbird (maybe you’ve heard it from my PERIODIC SELF-PROMOTION?)–anyway, Quick is the author of Silver Linings Playbook, among other stories, and he said this:

“Even in Hollywood, some of these super-famous people that you see in movies as utterly confident and polished have told me behind closed doors, ‘I totally deal with all of these issues,’ or, ‘Look at the meds I’m on just to be on TV every day.’ There’s even a family in this. I’ve learned that this suffering is universal, that my problems transcend me. It’s great to show other people they’re not alone. Maybe there’s family to be found right there.” [ed. note: emphasis totes mine]

I’ve always thought of the various population subsets of which I am a part (the anxious/depressed, the parents of kids with superpowers/special needs, the gingers) as a kind of club. Specifically, The Society of I Didn’t Ask for this Shit. But now I can see it as more of a family, our common experiences binding us in a way that goes beyond (or around) genetics, that ties us with something that’s not blood but is still thicker than water.

And now I read that there actually may still be a genetic basis for some of these similarities, as a specific gene has been found that is involved with serotonin levels in the brain, with the end result being that those who have the shortened version of this gene were originally thought to be predisposed to more negative emotional responses but, it turns out, are simply predisposed to more emotional responses, PERIODT. In other words, they (WE) are what you might call sensitive.

The Husband and I took advantage of free tickets and suite access to go to the Hugh Jackman concert here over the weekend and while I drank free prosecco, Hugh belted out his hits and provided some unexpected catharsis. We haven’t been to Sunday services in a few weeks due to sicknesses/birthday parties/couch callings, and I was not expecting to have my ass taken to church by Wolverine, but there we were, my short allele getting all kinds of verklempt over renditions of “This Is Me” and “The Greatest Show” and Hugh’s throwing around of quotes like this one from PT Barnum:

“No one ever made a difference by being like everyone else.”

It reminded me of a similar line that hit me between the eyes when I took the boys to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory over the break:

“When a boy has just a touch of odd
And he walks the streets without a nod
He should know that odd is a gift from God…”

Of course I thought of my own boy, of both of them, of myself when I was their ages, of all the moments that led to my feeling like an outsider, an observer…and how all those moments fitted me especially for writing, for moving, for landing in places that are so far from home and yet are home, to people who are so far from family yet are just that. Connected not by limbs on a family tree but through suffering and laughter, through stories that may not have been lived together but are still shared.

There were the passers-by on the New York sidewalk to whom I never spoke but were there for the same reason I was–because they couldn’t not be. There were the people at the one concert in my life I attended alone, sitting at a bar by myself but not really, because the music and lyrics had engraved themselves upon my soul over years of hearing them, and this can lead to a certain kind of bravery. There were the people at Hogwarts who were too afraid to say Voldemort’s name and the ones who banded together to fight him–because there is a particular kind of magic that always leaves traces.

Because what is family, if not this: sitting at a table together, speaking with eyes when words won’t do, knowing you belong right where you are? Or, as it was for me last week, on a pier out in the ocean standing with a group of people I’ve never met, all gazing at the dolphins we happened to be in the spot, right then, to see? For one moment, or for all of them, a group of people looking in the same direction, at the same thing, seeing it for the wonder it is.