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You don’t have to go it alone…Sometimes you can’t make it on your own

“Don’t be silly,” she said to me.

It was an act of mercy, in the face of my child who was very much losing it at her, for no ostensible reason–but here, reason is not a requirement. The underneath is understood. We who have lived in the trenches–which is all of us, really, though some are trying really hard to redecorate their way into a more filtered existence above-ground–know all about the underneath. The layers. The not-readily-apparent.

So anyway, she understood. And as I walked with The Kid back to our cabin to uncover what was underneath the tears, she showed mercy; she gave a kindness born of our similar struggles and comparable journeys. 

We’re at autism camp. It’s not as common a thing as basketball camp, or drama camp, or that camp where they let your kid pretend to be in a rock band for a week, but it exists, and we found it (or it found us?), and we’re here. “Here” is many things: a hinterland setting (that’s “in the mountains” in Australian), a rustic cabin with lumpy mattresses and a tiny shared bathroom (Jesus is testing me), morning and afternoon programs for TK and Little Brother and their assigned caregivers and new friends, free time for me and The Husband. A nine-hour drive split over two days to get here, the same to get back. No wine. 

Here: surrounded by mountains and kangaroos and people who have stopped redecorating their trench, who no longer try to claw their way out of it, but who have begun to look around and make it a home, and in so doing realise that the walls are actually moveable and the roof retractable and there is more space than they originally thought, more ways for the sunlight to get in. And–would you look at that?!–it’s actually above-ground.

Last night, our fourth out of five here, we found ourselves not out on the grass playing tip/tag as usual, and not on the tennis court playing the game TH invented that now all the kids (and some of the parents) know better than real tennis, but inside the lounge area with our eyes glued on The Bad Guys. Thirty or so of us, never having laid eyes on each other before Sunday, now talking and watching and sitting and just being together, feeling very much like some sort of family. We don’t need the name tags anymore.

With spotty internet and kids otherwise engaged, I’ve had time to read. When I’m not delving further into my comfort zone of the wives of Henry VIII, I’ve been nodding/crying my way through my friend David Zahl’s new Low Anthropology, and yesterday by the pool, before the current rain kicked up, I celebrated the gift of being seen and understood—a theme for this week.

If we want the rewards of being loved, we must submit to the terrifying ordeal of being known.

The redhead whose mum showed me mercy, regaled me with poop jokes last night at dinner and calls me “yo mama” and tells me that I laugh too much. The surfer guy who is another kid’s carer asked TK this morning to remind him of which rock you use to break through a portal in Minecraft, just after the other surfer guy who is not his carer recounted the story of TK jumping on his back when their canoe tipped yesterday. LB is called “American Dude” by the kid he calls “Dutch Boy.” 

A low anthropologist is freed to interact with their fellow anxious wrecks out of compassion for a shared predicament rather than out of inferiority or envy.

This morning at breakfast, I was pouring coffee when I heard TK. “Sorry for yesterday,” he told the merciful mum (with no prompting from me!), and we all sat down together to eat our shared food over our shared stories. ”Don’t be silly,” she had told me the day before, and “it’s okay,” she told him now, as the different-than-but-similar-to-tennis game raged outside and I forgot whose kids were whose, and which families were which. “We’ve all been there.”