I used to worry

I've spent my time in COVD isolation trying to make peace with all my missing pieces.

I've spent a lot of time trying to mend my broken heart.

I've spent a lot of energy trying to make myself whole.

I've mourned my dead, figurative and literal.

I'm working on forgiving myself all my shortcomings.

I cry tears lately over my younger son. Lots of reasons. Mostly because his brother is the bigger, louder, more obvious presence. Energy spent there is energy I didn't spend on younger.

Forever, I thought he didn't need me. He did, but in ways it wasn't obvious. I can list in my head all the times I came up short for him. I found myself in tears so many times this past week, driving past places where I had a visual in my head where my failures of him took place.

This week we cooked together. We made muffins together a little while ago.  While I was on a teleconference, he came over and left this for me.

 

And I can't stop crying, because this is what grace looks like. He gave me a piece of what was his, because he loves me, and because that's what he does.

And then I think that in all the wrongs I've done, I have done something indisputably right.

This Autistic Life

I think it's safe to say, in retrospect, I was more autistic than both my kids at their respective ages.

During my therapy session last week, I told my doctor this. He seemed somewhat surprised. He, like many people in my life, don't see autistic me. They see ME.  I'm quirky, smart, funny, and quick with a comeback.

I wasn't always this way.

In fact, the me that exists now is a fairly recent creation, or re-creation, of the self that I always aspired to be.

I would have gotten on my own nerves, the child, teenager, young adult, middle-aged mom I used to be.

I'm not sure how my own mother didn't kill me in my sleep. Oh, right. I didn't sleep.

Neither did she.  I didn't let her. I thought my insomnia would kill me, so I made sure she stayed awake, too. I didn't want to die alone.

My memories take two tracks, I told my doctor. I remember things as I experienced them; viscerally, sensorily, if that's a word--sights, smells, touch, sound, taste--but I also see them now as an adult with language to wrap around those memories, and make sense of all the emotions I felt.

I spent my whole life watching other people, wondering why some people got away with murder, socially, for some of the crap they pulled, whether they were chronic liars, or chronically late, or (to be bold here) overtly plagiarized my work, while I seemed to run afoul of everyone for the slightest infraction--usually not meant in any offending way. I remember one former friend telling me all the stuff I did wrong after the fact, and then saying we couldn't be friends any more.

I wondered at the time why that person didn't stop and correct me at the first infraction. I hadn't realized I was doing anything wrong.

I had another call me on the fact that I didn't send her a sympathy card. At the time I was a young(er) mom who didn't sleep, had a very colicky baby and was trying to balance work, baby and life and not doing any of it well.

Instead of apologizing, like I should have done, I threw the card out. I'm sorry I did that. But that was 20 years ago.

But that's okay; I had internet friends. I fell in with a bunch and some wanted to write. I made the mistake of sending my novel off to them.  One of them published parts of it (like, whole passages of dialogue), plus title under her name. And I was gaslighted and banished from the group.

She and another writer used mine to pad their own writing. I saw scenes I wrote show up in both of their books. In a way, it was kind of flattering.

But I stopped the fiction writing at that point. I had one story to tell, and that was it. In a larger sense, they did me a favor, because I could never have published that story in a million years. The whole point to me writing it was therapy, because by that time, I needed it and wasn't getting it.

So I stuck to scientific and medical writing, because I could and because it paid a lot better, and because by that time, I had two kids with diagnoses and couldn't really afford to fuck around.

In the meantime, there were real life challenges. I deleted Sharon's taunting emails without reading them because I had people who were brave enough to be assholes to my face, and I needed to spend my energy on defending my kids from them.

At some point, I stopped caring about what other people thought of me. I hated the fact that people were kind and praiseful to me one on one but gave me their backs when they were in a group. I hated that they spoke well of my kids to my face, but their kids excluded mine.

Sometimes, I imagine myself in warpaint doing a haka on my kids' behalf.

I wish things were better for them. On the other hand, neither of them are afraid of being themselves, or of standing apart.  They know how. Because they learned from the best.

It's 5 o'clock in Nova Scotia

So I have a beer open and am enjoying it. :)

SO the boys and I were on a 3.5 mile geocaching adventure this pm.  Wow, it was a workout and a half. Even though the state is in shut down mode, the trails elder takes us to are very sparsely traveled and scenic.  Including a few pics from today's adventures. He found a presidential dollar in one of the caches and made some swaps. He's happy.

And so am I. Younger is hard at work, and we live to fight another day.

Scenes from Isolation

We're hanging in there. Getting out and hiking whenever we can, pretty much every day out geocaching and going a few miles. Also doing a lot of cooking and baking.

Online schooling also begins today. We'll see how it all goes.

Semi Feral

I'm finding this time of self isolation suits me just fine.

I'm not thrilled. I don't love it. COVD-19 is pretty fucking scary.  But we're already self-isolating, so as a collective, I think we are doing a collective exhale.

I'm listening to the boys talk between themselves, and I think this unexpected hiatus from having to figure out what is and what isn't socially appropriate, while not exactly convenient, has some unexpected silver linings.

Like not having to people.  Or keeping the peopling to a minimum.  We've been hiking in the woods and geocaching the last week or so, but now, with the new stay at home orders, we're limited.  I send them on their own around the neighborhood for walks (that "There's the mom and her retards" comment stinging all these years later) (No, I will not get over it. You don't call my kids or ANY kids retards. Ever.) I keep my sorties to the bookends of light each day to minimize my own contact with the world.

This unexpected hiatus in the everyday has given me a little time and space to reflect on my own autism journey. It wasn't all that long ago that my own gullibility led to someone claiming my work as her own, and then being gaslighted for it.  Led to decades of psychological abuse, only to have my sanity called into question. Goodbye. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

My younger guy's first job interview kind of brought me here unexpectedly. It didn't go great, but in this time of scary health crises, I'd rather him not being a conduit of this virus, either coming or going. But that aside, I had observed to hubby that the person who interviewed G was, and I quote, "a social clod."

So elder, who was on the other side of the house but has ears like a bat, materialized in the kitchen. "Mom, what do you mean social clod?  What does that mean?"

After dad and I busted his shoes for eavesdropping, we asked him what we possibly could have meant.  He shrugged, "I dunno, socially awkward, doesn't know what to say?  Makes social mistakes?"  We agreed that these things qualify, and he went back to whatever it was he was doing in another part of the house.  And I observed to hubby, "He's trying to figure out what we already know."  And in saying that, I realized that I came about all my knowledge about the social contracts in pretty much the same way--asking questions.

Except....I had a shit ton of relationships end because I violated some unspoken social rule and whatever friend had dumped me didn't have the time, patience or interest in our relationship to tell me what it was I did wrong. Or how I could have fixed it. So a lot of my knowledge came by making mistakes. Lots of them. Over decades.  The trail of carcasses stretches for miles over multiple jurisdictions.

Work, too. The same applies to work relationships and situations I had come across over my decades working (now in my 5th and counting, having been working in some way or other since age 11). I had to screw up an awful lot to learn all the things I know now.   I could probably fill a book. And maybe I should.

So even though I worry about these two and wonder if they will be okay and eventually find their way, I remind myself of everything that I needed to learn on my own, and am comforted in the fact that I am still here to guide them and coach them. And while I know they will both need to make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons, I also know that they won't be doing it alone.

They have us. And they have each other.

And that is a beautiful thing.

Outside, Looking in

This describes my whole life.

I've spent most of my life being neither this nor that.  I find it a bit of mixed blessing in that sometimes, it would be nice to be included, but most of the time, I'm just as happy not to be.

I didn't always find it thus. I've spent untold quantities of mental, physical and emotional energy raging at the machinery of social and professional circles (often with quiet demureness at the outside of the latter, but mental and emotional energy expended, nevertheless).

If I can get outside of my ego, though, it's been enormously to my advantage to be outside, gauging loyalties, strategizing my own (later, my boys') place(s) in the world. I see both boys playing the same game, studying the rules, then figuring out how to beat the world at its own game. It's hard wired into who we are.

Having the emotional struggles is something I can dispense with altogether. It's not convenient.  It gets in the way of clear thinking. And when that happens, I do exactly what I did in the fourth grade.  Stationed near the door, I would sometimes throw a pencil out of the classroom, steal out of my desk ostensibly to retrieve it, then perambulate around the school. It was a small school, a single hallway stretching down two levels of classrooms. But I would circuit up one set of steps, wander down the upstairs hallway, sometimes peering into the faculty lounge, meander down the front fire tower, then back up past the learning center and younger kids' classrooms, then slip back to my own classroom and my own desk.

I was only caught once all school year.

The school is closed now, as is the parish. I hear about my younger guy sometimes circuiting his much bigger school, comfortable in his own skin (and hair).  I see my older guy, recently disappointed in his own pursuits, trying to figure out his own way forward.

They have me to lean on. And I have them.

And together, we are inside. Looking out.

New Horizons

The best part of getting older is the realization that nothing is forever.

I used to worry a lot more about things that don't matter much in the grand scheme.  And I still tend to get anxious about small things. But distractability works heavily in my favor for the most part, since there is always stuff that needs to get done, phone calls that need to get made, and general stuff that comes from living the life on the edge of the spectrum.

Lately people tell me more than they think they are telling me--it's not the how much, but the what.  For example, elder's teacher all but came out and told me he's not hireable. He's certainly employable, but that whole autistic thing is going to get in the hiring way.

I know that. I knew that. I think back to the young lady I wanted to hire 22 years ago and how my boss at the time negated my hire.  The young lady who came in her place was a different kind of lovely (I called her Little Flower, because she was), but the other one, who was shy, had a limp, was certainly on the spectrum, haunts me because I wanted to give her a chance.

And likely my sons will find themselves in the same bind.

And here's the other thing;  I was not overwhelmed by the students chosen to rep at the open house yesterday. I wondered why Nic wasn't selected. Did he opt out?  He says so. I wonder if he talked himself out of wanting to partake. After all, is a young man on the spectrum what they want to represent them?  Well mannered or no, he's still not "normal" even though people hasten to assure me normal is not all that.

Normal gets you in the front door. I passed for normal my whole life, and I know that owning my own disability won't do me any favors because we're not living in that world.

Plus I'm old(er). That definitely doesn't help.

I need to devote my energies to helping my guys find their places in this world.  No one else is going to help.