Back when we lived in Atlanta, before Little Brother came along, I was in the throes of first-time newborn motherhood with The Kid and would preserve my sanity by wheeling his ass all around our hilly neighbourhood day after day. Certain familiarities emerged over time: the Area Where I Saw a Dead Snake, the Man Who Walked Around While Reading a Newspaper, the Frantically Driving Tennis Players Late to Their Matches. In particular, there was a woman, maybe in her twenties, who had a bouncy gait just slightly off from coordinated. She wore big headphones and, after the first time we crossed her path, greeted me and TK with more familiarity than I felt was due. An awkward conversation would ensue (awkward for me, because I am awkward at conversation; she seemed perfectly at ease)–she had a bit of a speech impediment and her topics seemed to wildly veer across myriad subjects. I would beg off as quickly as possible, citing naptime as an excuse, and wheel TK back home where I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Back to my comfort zone, where it could be just us and no them.
In the years since, I’ve thought of that woman and how I tried to avoid her; how our own lives have veered wildly across myriad topics and territories; how it’s likely she faced some of the same challenges that we have faced alongside TK since he graduated from newborn status. The more topics and territories we cover, the more I realise there is no them anymore, only us. All of us.
The insane grace that dragged my diarrhoea-plagued ass to a New York City stage year after year. That pulled me through denial and into the spectrum and onto an Australian primary school stage last week. That threw us across the world to Australia. That opened my eyes and ears to the point that, from residing on one side of the political spectrum, I now get emails from the DNC and think that maybe Rush Limbaugh wasn’t such a paragon of perfect wisdom after all (GASP). That led me to wonder if maybe people whose preferences were different from mine might still be humans deserving of rights (GASP GASP).
This grace that brought me from writing a research paper on autism (thinking I therefore knew everything while actually knowing…nothing) and into actual life with it, my heart enmeshed with its intricacies and difficulties and beauties. That took my older-child sensibilities and threw them in with a younger child whose awarenesses and humour both contradict and mirror my own.
We are all over the place, flung around by grace into wild and unpredictable landscapes among people with whom we never would have identified with back when we resided solely in our comfort zones. The fringes, the marginalised, they are no longer they, they are we.
There’s a reason the cross was located outside the city gates.
The other day, TK was trying to get The Husband to buy him something (classic TK), and he decided flattery was the best approach. “But Dad is the head of the family,” he said, ‘He holds the pillars up.”
Reader, I GASPED. I balked. I reared back my head while TH laughed and I said, “Oh I don’t think so. We are partners,” thereby negating everything I grew up being taught in well-intentioned but incompletely-exegized Sunday School lessons, flung wildly as we have been across (and out of) church spaces.
Travel is a privilege–I get that. Not everyone can do it. But virtual travel? As in, being open to visit and even inhabit spaces different to your own? It is life. It is grace.
On Friday, TK goes with his grade to surfing, at a local beach. Last week, the boogie-boarders made up the bulk of his class, so he basically had an instructor to himself for an hour. After about a dozen trips to the ocean, they came in and the instructor and I started talking and it turned out we speak the same language: words like apraxia and dyspraxia and speech delay. We traded stories as TK recovered on the sand next to his friend. All on a beach ten thousand miles from where we started. That’s so us.