Take a Giant Step

 It's been a week. I'm so grateful for my peeps.

For the longest time I had one friend outside hubby who I confided literally everything in. I sensed her pulling away because one crucial matter over which I had been struggling a long time was one that she could simply not relate to. 

I guess I have been in a years-long process figuring out the solve for this while life itself has been going along and providing solutions at the ready for the moment I came to this week.  Seeing as I can be torturously slow on the uptake and that penny can take FOREVER to drop, it was kind of amazing that my solve came during younger's goal update last night.

He and I have more in common than I think at first blush. I always think of him as his dad's kid, from looks to general demeanor. I've discovered that he has a deep love for the arcane and can wax poetic for hours at a time about some random fact he stumbled upon by way of a video or something he heard over NPR (which is on all day, every day, except for those days I can no longer stand the news and switch off to the Original Cast Recording of Hamilton. But anyway.)

One of his goals was to find more common ground in casual conversation (wish I had this as a teenager), and right then and there I had my solve for my problem--the WHO I needed to have a conversation with. 

A year ago about this time we headed to NYC to meet up with virtual strangers to spend a weekend. The son is a good friend to both my boys, and his mom was a wild card.  I knew her from when my boys began league bowling almost a decade ago and wasn't sure if she remembered me, since I didn't think she liked me. 

Anyway. We got on like a house on fire. We took to texting and calling, not regularly, but certainly more often than I text or call anyone else.  She became family because she got our lives, and we were never any less because of who we were.

So, she was the person I called last night. 

It was the right call. 

She has a unique perspective that my other near and dears don't have.  But I am understanding now that my near and dears all dovetail nicely in my life, the way I must in theirs.

Not showing these cards. The only important thing to note is that my boys had visceral negative reactions, and M pointed out that They Know. 

At one point yesterday, I had burst into tears, cried it out, recovered, and went in to talk to elder, who was doing his school work. He looked up and asked me what was wrong. This is the kid who shares my wiring and always knows when I am struggling to keep it together. Well, that did it. There I was, crying on his shoulder for a hot minute until he became impatient and pulled away. I asked him if he thought I was overreacting.

"Yes and no."

"Explain"

"Well, yes because I'm fine, and you worry too much. And no because," he paused, shrugged and shook his head. "You are sensitive, and that's okay."  Then he went back to his books. 

I went back to work, but not before texting M and asking her for an audience. 

This all ties into my previous post. There's so much to unpack, but in the end. I've decided to leave it packed and in the rear view mirror. My boys have spoken their piece and counted to three. My life is in the here and now. 

And I have work to do. 

All Over But the Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

 Oh my, this has no shortage of applications today, no?  Where does one start?

We'll whistle past the graveyard of past being prologue. Stuff I feared four years ago is coming to fruition, but aren't our worst fears the things that have already happened?

I'm in the process of reorganizing the inside of my head. It's been a lifelong process, but unlearning what you have been taught often is. I keep weighing reality as I know it against reality as I perceive it. This is the work of living with depression, constantly working against one's perceptions. No matter how astute they might be, they are also mightily subjective.

Life goes on, whether or not you choose to participate. People live and die, and all this is in the background. Until it becomes present, urgent, needs to be fixed right now. 

Except:  after a certain point, one needs to accept that not everything can be repaired. And just because you can, does it mean you should?

Thinking about a former friend and his wife. Every time hubby and I got together with them, we had to win over the wife. Literally. Every freaking time. It was like rolling that boulder up the mountain. If she allowed us to get to the end of the evening, she was relaxed, and hubby and I would look at one another and say "Oh, good.  Next time should be better."

Except next time, we were back to square one. And some days she decided we didn't get a whole evening. Or if we did, she'd be squirreled away in a corner where she didn't have to deal with us. 

This is analogous to the stuff I am working through. All the phone calls where I was put on the defensive, because a certain someone "needed to address" whatever the fuck was on her mind at the moment, and all the time I was expected to apologize for hurting her feelings, breaking some unwritten rule or some other vague wrongdoing.

If I were keeping score, same person hurt me, intentionally, time and time again over decades. I let the transgressions pass, because I was expected to, for the sake of everyone's peace and comfort, regardless of what it cost me. 

And good Lord, if I looked askance at anyone, I would be summarily banished until I came cowering, quivering and apologetic to the door. If I questioned, I was admonished for questioning. Or, there would be the blaming of the victim. I was so often asked "So what did YOU do?" As if I deserved whatever abuse came my way. 

It took telling my therapist all this to make me see, through someone else's eyes, that this is bullshit. 

This last time, I apologized one last time, and was still in the wrong.

So? I'm done. 

I still have my moments of grieving, but at least I know peace now. 

Utility Grass and Other Random Thoughts

 Utility grass is stuck in my head as a dream remnant. Grass that is useful.  I was thinking this as a distraction from something else in the dream.

Which brings me to the current moment. Eight months into this lockdown, I am tired. I have watched time and solitude erode all the progress my elder has made, and thanks to that erosion (among other things), we are off to a GI doctor because of elevated enzyme levels. Second time in four years we are in a crisis owing to eating. 

He's not even insanely heavy. He's wired to rebel when his weight moves beyond a prescribed threshold. We're there now. Trying to convince him to do better for himself is impossible; after all, he doesn't feel sick, so what's the problem?

The problem, my dear, is that you can drive yourself to a way early grave. And you might not get any warning. 

I talk to a wall. 

I know where my energies need to go right now. And I need to make that happen, no matter how difficult for me this is. 

But?  I am tired. This is my third decade into this and it is not getting easier. 

I am running out of time. 

I need to help him figure this out. 

Breadcrumbs and Microaggressions

 My bandwidth isn't what it used to be. 

I've circled the wagons and hunker down with my core of four (of which I am one). I've determined who loves me and who doesn't.  And I proceed accordingly. 

I've spent a majority of my life pleading for what really should have been de facto mine all along. It's taken me decades to realize that the only place I ever really came up short was with the very people who should have withheld judgment but thought withholding love was a better plan for me. 

These same people never lose an opportunity to think badly of me.  

Meanwhile, me and mine were expected to take whatever got shoveled our way and be happy with that.

I've learned that I am worthy of love. So are my boys. And that people love us and support us.

So that's where our energies go now. 

Whatever others think of us is none of our business.

My son, the deconstructionist

My younger guy is a deconstructionist.

As a grad student, I hated deconstruction. I didn't get it. Every time I thought I got it, it eluded me. 

I got a B for the literary theory class in grad school. Deconstructionism is largely to blame. 

My bigger problem, I realize now, is that I thought too much about it.    Because when I was my son's age--younger-I literally pulled apart sentences, looking at every possible definition, and realized early that sentences could actually mean their exact opposite meaning. 

He asks me repeatedly what things mean. Lots of things. And he remembers my responses. And compares them.

This is the kid they tell me is slow. Takes more time to process.  But he asks questions that no one else thinks to ask. 

The other night he quoted Mussolini at the dinner table. My husband, an Italian by birth, knew the quote, but couldn't imagine how his offspring knew it. 

(He reads. He researches. His wikipedia adventures include editing entries. Since Age 12.)

I'm trying to find comfort in this. I'm trying to make peace with a lot of missing and misunderstood pieces. This is who he is. 

I am so proud of who he is. 

But I wish the fates had better things in store for him. He deserves better.

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.