“What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen.” –James Baldwin
Before the boys were born, I read books–several of them–about generalised topics: sleep training, what to expect when you’re expecting, mommy brain. Now that they’re older, I’m still reading books, but these are more targeted to the realities we’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis: emotional intelligence, neurodiversity, what to expect about puberty (we’re reading that one together, and you haven’t lived until you get your kids to say the words vas deferens).
And autism, natch. The upside to this book I’m reading now is that it elucidates so much of what The Kid goes through every moment, as he can affirm when I recap it with him. The bad thing? I get to see everything I missed over the first decade of his life, which in turn allows me to see how many moments I mishandled.
This is a grieving process. But with grief, there is hope. Death and life so often come hand in hand.
My Amazon purchase history and wish list would, I am convinced, have scared the shit out of Pregnant Me. How to manage meltdowns? Middle grade fiction about being different (actually, I could have used that one myself, growing up)? Stories for kids with autistic siblings? That was never covered in Babywise. (Then again, neither was “what to do if none of this shit works, your baby won’t sleep, and you yell at your husband that you want to kill either him or yourself.”)
I did not order the nights that come with yelling and apologies and tears over being constantly misunderstood, but with them and their heartache comes a healing I never ordered either, one I never experienced until now: the aftermath. The moments cuddled together in a single bed passing forgiveness back and forth; the new understanding (you might call it new life) after hard conversations, the breaking-through to new dimensions of relationship, the opening of new doors within my heart just when I thought it couldn’t grow any more (or that I couldn’t endure it growing any more).
I don’t have any of those books I read when I was pregnant. But the ones I read now? I know I’ll keep forever.
I have become teachable by encountering all I never knew back when I thought I knew everything. I have been pushed, ground, birthed into a new way of being, of breathing, of believing. The world is so much more terrifying and beautiful and big, and I have seen so much more of it. My eyes, which had to be torn away from all my certainty, now willingly roam and scan for everything I might have missed.
I am more, before becoming so much less, afraid.
“I miss being right about everything,” DL Mayfield tweeted the other day. “But man, that is one toxic drug.”
Same, girl. Being right was like a warm quilt wrapped around me at all times: comforting until it was stifling, warm while choking out the sun. Now, admitting I’m wrong? That’s yet another door to freedom.
The other day, the boys were reluctant to enter the school. One anxious, the other sad. Nerves and tears. And these kids of mine, who would make my life so much easier if they’d just be like the others and walk in without all the feelings? One watched as his teacher came to the gate and walked him in. The other waited until the bell rang and the principal grabbed his hand, and later he told me that they spotted a rainbow together on the way to his class.
You don’t get that service if your kid walks in on their own.
Pregnant Me would have felt guilty that the staff had to take such pains for her kids, but now? My vision being forcibly changed, I can see beyond what I would have chosen into what is and I know that this gift of being wrong, this life-after-death teachability, this hard-won freedom from fuck-giving, this seeing what was unseen is faith. Which is also hope. Which is also love. And all of it is wrapped up in grace.