All the words I’ve been reading/have now started the act of bleeding
So I walk up on high/and I step to the edge
And I laugh at myself/while the tears roll down
‘Cause it’s the world I know/oh it’s the world I know
Monday was magical.
It was the last day of school holidays (or so we thought), the end of functional, if not actual, summer. The weather was meant to be awful: thunderstorms all day. But that’s not how it went. Instead, the rain stayed away and the sun broke through and the boys and I headed to the beach, where the waves were big but kind, and smiles were everywhere. It felt like an unexpected gift, one that followed us home and buoyed us through the organising of school supplies into pencil cases and pencil cases into backpacks. We were ready for the first day of school.
Until we weren’t. During a movie that evening, Little Brother turned to me and complained of a sore head and stomach. I inwardly rolled my eyes because I’ve fallen for that shit before, and I asked him if maybe it was just start-of-school nerves. He rejected this proposal, rejected it all the way to the bathroom where he unleashed the fury of a stomach bug out of one end then moments later didn’t make it to the bathroom at all before puking all over the wall.
You have GOT to be kidding me, I thought to myself, or God, or whoever was responsible for this fresh hell that definitely did not fit into my plan for the week, and I doubled up on that thought when The Kid’s nightly toothbrushing prompted his own avalanche of barf into the bathroom sink. I tripled and quadrupled up on that thought throughout the night as both boys, and their dad, popped out of bed periodically for further relief sessions.
So they didn’t make the first day of school. Instead, they camped out on the couch and I did laundry, and we survived. (Until I get it, at least.)
Before The Virus, before the beach, we went to TK’s speech session, and as LB and I sat outside together, he laughed at what he heard through the door. “It’s so cute to hear James,” he mused like the eight-year-old-going-on-teenager he is, while TK peppered his responses on the other side of the door with NFL chants. “DE-FENSE!” he intoned as LB told me knowingly, “He’s making learning funner.”
This is the kind of wisdom typically imparted to me by my children–these succinct observations that open my eyes to a whole new way–or maybe an old way I’d forgotten–of seeing. I’d been wondering if I should tap on the door to encourage TK to be respectful while LB recognised the harmlessness–the beauty–of what was actually going on. Just like he had the other night, when he asked me how I knew so much about autism. I told him of the books I’d read and he asked if James should read them too., then pondered, “I guess even if he read the book, though, he’d still do the things he does,” which was such a beautiful illustration of surrender in the moment: he had wanted to suggest a way to “fix” the things about his brother’s behaviour that he didn’t like, then realised–like I did after I read Babywise then actually had children–that reading a book isn’t what changes you.
Kids are used to this, I guess: forming ideas, trying them out, having to abandon them in the face of new knowledge. They’re much better at it than we adults are. In the throes of gastro, though; in the throes of studying for a dental exam by cramming four years’ worth of material in four weeks; in the throes of waiting to find out which teachers and friends the boys have in their class this year, of waiting to find out if I get to sit on/near the toilet for my own 24-hour stint; in the throes of life I am given these unexpected days, these gifts-that-don’t-always-appear-to-be-gifts, these moments that go beyond what any book could ever teach me: this forced dependence on something, someone outside of and greater than myself. The word that all the others in the books are superseded by and bleed into, this rhythm that lifts and lowers and takes and returns, this grace that may be unpredictable but has always proven to be good.