Broken

The other day, I was reading a blog I adore by a lady who has a son with Aspergers (both of whom I am sure I would also adore if I were to ever meet them).   The post was about the blogger’s child, and one of the comments read something to the effect of  “I love how you don’t write about your child as if he were broken”.   It was a nice comment for a nice post, but it bothered me, nagged at me, stuck in my head and followed me around.

I thought about that comment for more than a week, turning it over in my head when ever Timothy did something odd.  I thought about it as I sat at the big round conference table at the school last week.  I thought about it when someone asked me for my blog address.  Do I write as if my child were broken? I wondered.

I write about Timothy because I love him.  I love his quirks, the way he knows random facts about almost everything under the sun, the way he squints when he is thinking hard.  I love the way he hoarded a billion paper tubes and turned them into an army of Paper Tube Monsters.  I love how he has “Steno pads and yellow pencils” on his  Christmas list.

I also write about Timothy because his behavior and other people’s reactions to him are hard for me some times.   It’s hard for me to talk  out loud to people  in my Grown Up Life.  Your kid smashing himself in the head, having a toddler-worthy melt down in school or asking if Hasbro makes adult sized sit-n-spins is not really water cooler conversation. Sure I can share with pride his stellar grades, but do they want to hear about how he has been wearing the skull & cross-bones ear wrap for two weeks, daily, even to bed?  Do they want to know  why I am on a first name basis with most of the school staff?  I think not.

It’s me that’s broken, I realized.   My heart breaks every time the school calls.  I feel like a little bit of my soul cries when I look at the old photos… Timothy in a full Elmer Fudd type hunting cap for  months worth of photos… and then look at him now with those damn ear wraps on.  I hate going to the school.  I don’t like calling people, arranging services, ferrying Timothy to therapy and appointments all over the friggin state.  I hate choosing between sounding like  “one of those mothers”  or explaining the real reason why I go on every. single. field trip.    And I don’t like it when people look on us with pity because Timothy “has issues”.   Yes, I am broken.  I feel shattered some days.

But other days, I feel blessed.

My child is whole, healthy and bright.  He is polite, compassionate and generous.  I tell myself, look at Bill Gates.  I bet he wants to sleep with a heavy quilt all year. I talk to the young man who owns the book stand at the market.  He spent hours arranging all of the books by an invisible Dewey Decimal system and know exactly where each one is.  I ask a heavy-set man in a black duster (who looks oddly like the love child of Comic Book Man and Silent Bob) about advice on graphic novels and listen as he launches into an unstoppable diatribe against Manga while piling books into my arms.

It is not Timothy who is broken.  Timothy will be just fine.  But it seems to be a mother’s duty to feel she has failed in some way, and mine just happens to come in a neat package with a label.

Hindsight

When Timothy was 3 and Sarah was a newborn, there was a problem in play group.  One of the mothers had an unpleasant, violent  child.    To make matters worse, the mother rubbed us all the wrong way from the get go (she was fairly new to the area) and people were leaving the group because of her and Bam Bam.  I had invited her to the group, so the general feeling was that it was up to me to say something.  If it were my child, I would want someone to tell me, I reasoned.

I should have waited to call until I had calmed down  to dial – maybe a whole two days after Bam Bam gave Timothy a black eye with a Buzz Lightyear doll.   Predictably, the conversation did not go well.   I asked if she thought perhaps her kid was too rough for our gentle, attachment parenting,  boob loving group.    She claimed Bam Bam was just “being a boy” and all of our boys just needed to “toughen up”, which horrified me.    I asked her if she had noticed his speech was delayed.  I asked her if she noticed any difference between her child and the other 3 year olds.    From there it got a bit ugly.   There were a lot of tears.

I am not proud of myself for that call.  Even though Mrs. Bam was not my cup of tea, it could have been handled better.  At the time, I felt that not sugar-coating things was the easiest way to go.  In hindsight, maybe someone with tact would have done better.

But…

Maybe not.

I read everything about Asperger’s and Autism I can.  I read medical texts, magazines,  blogs, novels, memoirs and biographies from parents and people with an ASD.    Over and over I read How could I have not known?  How could I have missed this?

I thought that too.    Exactly that.   After the shock wore off when we got the official diagnosis, that is what I said to everyone who would listen.   To read this statement, written in countless blogs and books only a few different ways, is so sad to me.    It makes me feel a tiny bit like less of an ass, but not much.  Cold comfort, misery loves company and all that.

My mind goes back to Timothy at 2, reading on the sofa.  “Hyperlexia” never would have occurred to me, but “Gifted” did.   Who thinks precocious reading could be a symptom of something else?   An early reader myself, I did not.  As I was boxing up his old Duplos for sale this weekend, I found the little yellow back to the dump truck.  About as big as my fist, it was pretty much a cube with one hinged side.   Timothy loved that when he was 2, and would spend hours putting a little toy cat inside of it, then opening and shutting it.  He would also line up his wooden train track in one long, winding road and rarely touched the trains.   He had a knack for reciting lines from cartoons and commercials.

One day at  play group, the same  play group Mrs. Bam was asked to leave, the host mother came and told me Timothy was playing with the ball track in the play room.  Alone.   For 30 minutes.   I smiled and said something about how he was such an easy kid.  She said, Is he always like that? I blew her off.   I was happy he could entertain himself.   None of these behaviors seemed odd to me at the time.

When Timothy was in  second grade, I was getting sometimes more than three phone calls a week from Timothy’s school.  Finally, they called me in… the principal, the teacher and the counselor.  I went alone.  Timothy was just “being a boy” after all, and all normal, active boys wiggled around a lot.  All kids were clumsy at some point.  Not everyone is born an extrovert I said.  He was quirky, smart and polite.  I felt like they had slapped me when the principle leaned over and gently asked if I had ever thought about Autism.  It’s a broad umbrella, she said quickly, please think about it.

Years after that terrible phone call to Mrs. Bam, I ran into her at the mall.  She had Bam Bam, his new sister and a woman she introduced as Bam Bam’s aide with her.  She cast her eyes down and muttered that Bam Bam was diagnosed with slight MR and PDD-NOS.   We looked at each other.  She looked like she might cry.  We wished each other Happy Holidays and parted ways.

Falling

I have always loved Autumn.  As a child, I always loved returning to school – even when I “hated” school  the fact that I would see my friends, be out of my house and be back in a regular routine in a place where I could excel if I chose to do so was comforting.  I love the way the air smells, the colors, the migrating birds flocking overhead, the crisp crunch of leaves underfoot.   I enjoy the turning from  verdant, lush summer to cooler weather  as a respite from the sometimes crushing rush of the fleeting warm weather.    No more weeding, mowing, or trimming for 4 or 5 months.   Winter is a lovely time to read garden porn and plan next year’s garden.  The anticipation of spring tints the cold winter green.

This year, as the leaves fall, Timothy has been raking them up unprompted.  This is A.Maze.Ing,  given that there is very little Timothy does in the way of manual labor without much cajoling.     In the summer Timothy hates being outside.  He hates the sex crazed bugs crashing around, the female mosquitoes thirsting for blood, the pollen everywhere, the sounds of the neighbor kids screaming in the pool next door, the heat and brightness of the sun, the prickly feel of the grass, the sweat that trickles down his body.   In the fall, all of that slips away.   Timothy rakes the leaves into huge piles and, as long as they are not wet,  buries himself under them.  He only uses the leaves from the two giant Norway Maples  in the front yard, where the  dogs never make their stinky doggy messes that might contaminate a leaf.    I showed him how to rake the leaves onto the big blue tarp and how to dump them on the compost pile when he was done, assuring him that there would always be leaves in our yard to pile up, and he has done just that for the last two weekends.  Unprompted.  For hours (and by that I mean two, which is still incredible).

I had a slew of meetings last week, most of which were unremarkable.  One, however, was pretty darn good.  Timothy and I went into the City to meet with the Support Staff.  I am getting more comfortable with these meetings to discuss my son with approximately half the town.   The Big News that came out of this meeting was that the SS feels Timothy can “titrate down” Greg.   (The mysterious Greg was not present, but he sent along several colorful graphs & pie  charts to show just how well Timothy has been doing)  The other Big News was that Timothy had gotten the “most improved student” award for the semester.   Awesome!!

Soccer season wraps up this weekend, which means I will not have to drive Sarah all over creation again until next summer.  However… Sarah got a spot in the City’s holiday extravaganza, and is delighted beyond belief.     For the next month, this will replace her billion soccer related things.  January and it’s influx of garden catalogs cannot come soon enough.   I am going to deny my little singing soccer sensation any more activities until February (when she wants to try out for the County Junior Idol again).  I am so proud of her I could burst, but she is exhausting.   Seriously, I have no idea how people with more than one “Normie” have time to breathe.

Aldo and I are limping along;  literally in his case and figuratively for our relationship.    He has come to accept, as much as one can, that he is truly disabled.  He is still depressed, but things are getting better.

Everything is falling into place, and not a minute too soon.

Harriet the Spy & I

When I was a little younger than Timothy, I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.    I got the book as a gift at the end of the school year.  As soon as I finished reading the book, I rode my bike  over to the drug store/stationary place in town and bought a black and white marbled  notebook.    Then I went over to the library,  checked out Through the Looking Glass and memorized The Walrus and the Carpenter.

I identified with Harriet so strongly… she was a little weird, she was lonely, she had a nanny who she spent more time with than her parents  (although I had an outside-the-home full-time babysitter named Frenchy,  at 10 to me it seemed just about the same).   Harriet’s hair was never neat, she climbed trees, and she wanted to be a writer.   She was brave and noticed all kinds of stuff.    She said all the things I never knew other kids thought.

That fall, I started sixth grade and Frenchy was let go.   My brother and I became “latch key kids”.   Lonely and bored, I threw myself into a fantasy life that relied heavily on Harriet and “spying”.

I carried the notebook everywhere, and when that was full, I bought many more.    I wrote during class about everything that happened.    I wrote at night about my father and step-mother,  my parent’s friends and their snotty kids who I had to be nice to… I wrote about every bit of ten year old angst you could imagine.     In my excitement over  playing Harriet… I forgot what happened to her and her notebook.

Of course, you know where this is going.    One day  I came home and my step mother was there.  I have no idea why she was home, but whatever happened, as soon as I came home I knew I was in trouble.  BIG trouble.  I went straight to my room and looked under the mattress for my notebook.. which  was gone.  My heart sank.  I remembered what happened to Harriet in one big, sickening rush.

It could have been worse I suppose.  One of my classmates could have found it like Harriet’s.  But… maybe that would have been better.  My step mother, never a very nice woman to begin with, freaked out.   She screamed at me for hours.   She called her friends and read what I wrote about them and their children.   She put a lock on her bedroom door and took my house key away from me.    She told me the government tortured and shot spies and she should turn me in.  My room was subjected to random searches for diaries or notebooks from then on out.

My step mother allowed that since my father was responsible for me by law,  I could stay in her house and they would feed me until I was 18, but that was it.    I was not to be in the same room as her ever again.  She insisted I made her sick to look at, and so  from then until I left at 15 I was to eat all of my meals in my room alone.   She changed the phone number and did not give it to me so she would not have to speak to me for any reason, even accidentally over the phone.

It makes me so sad even now almost three decades later to think about how crushed I was, how things just took off into a downward spiral from there.  I was sure I was a horrible person.  I threw away Harriet the Spy and jumped feet first into middle school with an eye on self-destruction.

Last night,  the movie version of Harriet the Spy was on.  The kids wanted to watch it.  I sat with them,  emotions washing over me, horrified and sad for Harriet.  I was so thankful when they were shocked Harriet would commit breaking and entering, and that she would write such mean things down.    They were disappointed that she did not try to help the people she spied on.  Obviously, they took away a much different message than I did.    Timothy surprised me by reciting most of the Walrus and the Carpenter.   I cried.  My children are so beautiful, and I am so grateful.

Children in the Mist

Timothy has a TSS worker this year.  I put up a bit of a fight against Timothy having what I think of as a personal assistant, but the school won.  They fight dirty,  all finger pointing and hair rending, threats of  “special schools”  and teacher break downs.    Alright, so the hair rending and finger pointing was mostly me, but still if this had been a street fight the school would have kicked me in the groin, poked me in the eye and made me cry Uncle until their mama came and dragged them home.  Needless to say, I felt a little more than coerced into this whole Therapeutic Support thing.  What kid wants an adult following them around all day!?  I feel that Timothy needs to learn how to get along in the social world with some coaching and not hand holding… and if I am completely honest I feel that most schools  today mainly are there to groom a child for office politics  (and how to take tests, but let’s not go down that path today).

The week before school started, Timothy and I went to the school to meet the lady who was supposed to be his Help.  At the end of the meeting (with every single teacher in the school system, a few counselors, the principal and I think the janitor), the Help looked up from her notes and said “Um, school starts at what time?  I can’t be here until 10!”  I was pretty pleased, thinking that perhaps Timothy could start the school year without Help.

The day before school was to start, the counselor called the house.  There was to be a new young man at the school to help Timothy.  Greg, whom I have never met, was to meet Timothy after breakfast (our school has “universal free breakfast”) and stay with him until lunch.

Two weeks into school, Aldo asked Timothy how things were going.  Timothy said things were fine.  I asked him how Greg was.  Timothy said “Oh, he’s alright.  He just follows me around all day with a clip board taking notes.”  Aldo snickered.  It’s like Gorillas in the Mist he whispered.  If I am quiet enough, perhaps the children will come to see me as one of their own..

After a bit of probing, we found out that Greg also helped Timothy learn his locker combination and how to decipher the middle school map.  Greg ties Timothy’s shoes, writes all his assignments in his planner, reminds him to take his hoodie off  and puts his books in his back pack.  All of these last things Timothy can do.  By himself.  Seriously.   There are children out there in the mist that are falling through the cracks, children that seriously need Help and are not getting it, and we are getting a heapin’ Helpin’ without really needing or wanting it.

I am thankful the school is so vested in my  child, but  they act like helicopter parents and it gets under my skin.

The Girl

The phone rang at 7 am, jolting me awake and flailing, sending the phone skittering onto the floor.    I didn’t worry about it breaking, it was a five dollar phone and only fell about 6 inches from the frameless mattress to the dirty carpet. 

A heavily accented voice demanded Is this Laura?    Angry about being woken, pissed that someone was calling me and sounding so pushy I grumbled something bitter and demanding sounding right back while I searched the milk crate nightstand for a cigarette and a light.    You The Girl?  The voice persisted, I got your number here on the cork board.    What?   You come to work for me?  I need a Girl.  Today, you come, we talk, you wanna work or what?

It is and is not as shady as it sounds.  The heavily accented voice belonged to the new manager of a Family pizzeria I had left in a fit of rage a few weeks prior, screaming obscenities and threatening to slice off the pizza guy’s balls with a dough scraper.

 For years, I worked in the food industry.  I worked at a mid-range restaurant as a server in a posh part of the city (where the chef screamed at me for eating a dinner roll and the line cook guys screamed at him on my behalf), as a day shift manager at a high volume chain pizza place (where I was poached to work at the  Family place by the first manager), at a deli making sandwiches for nice construction workers and pissy secretaries,  and – very briefly to get some quick cash together for a two week drive to Key West – I worked flipping burgers.     Mostly, from high school and past college, pizza was my life.    Aldo and I ate pizza or pizza related items almost daily.   I weighed about 120 pounds,  worked 12 to 16 hours a day (except Sunday, when we were only open half days) and made more money than I do now even though we lived more or less in squalor. 

In all of those places except the deli, I was the only woman in the back and Not The Girl.   I was a terrible waitress, a horrible cashier, a fair to middling manager, a decent dough tosser and fry/grill person  and a damn good prep cook.   I went back to Family on the condition that I was NOT a Girl.  The Girl was the one who looked like a lumpy mattress in her full while apron, who answered the phone politely and took orders, the one who waited on customers, the one who usually ended up giving blow jobs to the boss in the walk in or on flour sacks in the storage area.    I was not The Girl, did not want to be The Girl, never in my life had any desire to be The Girl.   

A lot of people think kitchen = woman.  Not so.  In the service world, it is all testosterone.  To work with these guys, you need to be able to joke that, yes, your penis is indeed bigger than theirs (and be prepared  to show it), to curse like a trucker, drink like a sailor on leave, and shut the hell up unless you are bleeding or on fire (and even then no one wants to hear it).    

 I learned a lot working in those places.    I learned how to stand up for myself and how to trash talk.  One time, I walked in on some of the crew taking bets on the shade of my nipples.    I ripped open my dishwasher shirt (those snap buttons are a real plus for strippers I would imagine) to settle the bet right then and there.   I listened to countless conversations about how to get a woman to do anything you want, not once being asked my opinion.  I listened to endless banter about balls, dicks, boobs, beer and drugs.   I learned kitchen spanish from the Guatemalan dishwashers.   I learned how to fold pizza boxes at the speed of light, which parlayed nicely into shirt folding once I started doing wash for 4.  I learned how to use and clean the grill, ovens and Hobart, how to make dough from start to slap, and how to ID kitchen scars and types of cockroaches.   

I still miss it.  Working in an office is nice, but women are much more bitchy and back stabbing.  In a kitchen, the guys will just tell you exactly what the problem is, usually laced with plenty of colorful curses and punctuated by waving something sharp around.    Then they quit or get over it.   Mostly, like in my case, they did  both. 

 Some days, after a bad day in the office or after reading a cook’s memoir (currently Cooking Dirty), I get nostalgic and think maybe I could find myself a nice prep job… maybe doing buffets or something.   I think about the long lasting bonds I made and still have with some of the old crew members.  Then I think about the long hours, the time it took me to retrain myself to have a  conversation without using expletives, the smell in my hair, my skin, that never came out.   I think about the injury I got from lifting the dough bowl that never quite got right again, the long, thin  scars from hot hotel pans and run ins with pizza ovens on my arms that made a teenager ask if I was a cutter.    I think, and I think… and I think I am too old now to do anything but remember the good times.

Not so Suburban Soccer Mom

Sarah wants to be the next Mia Hamm.  She is a force to be reckoned with on the field; a bundle  fiercely competitive  sinewy muscle with boundless energy.  She has that amazing combination of pride and sense of team that makes her perfect for sports like this.   Every time she makes an awesome pass or scores a goal, she looks for me sitting on the sidelines.  Look at me Mom!  Look!  Did you see?

This year, the parents have thinned out and are not the screaming rah rah rabid fans of their offspring they were last year.    Some of the parents, like me, bring books, magazines or newspapers.   Some of them just drop the kids off and leave.

The other day, I was talking to my Sister In Law Em.  She was telling me about my niece’s soccer team.  I listened, and could not help but make comparisons of our lives once again.    Our daughters are 5 months apart, but their lives are vastly different.

In Em’s world, the kids pile into minivans and SUVs to go to a quick dinner at a drive through on the way to  well lit soccer fields just outside of town.  She passes neat little homes on postage stamp lawns and a mini-mall.  The moms take turns car pooling.  The concession stand sells ice cream, fountain soda and pizza.  The moms do that complex dance along the line of bragging and complaining; Oh, my Josh  is SO involved, I have to take him to five sports and his advanced viola lessons.  I just had to spend $100 on new soccer shoes for Kaitlin.   I  have to eat out three nights a week because there is just no time to cook. The multi-cultural children all have salon hair cuts, brand new soccer cleats and mouth guards to protect their newly aligned teeth.  It’s the picture of Soccer Mom Perfection.

Here, I listen to a mom scream at her pre-teen daughter to shut the fuck up before she gets a punch in the mouth.   The kids,  98% white, arrive in mainly beater cars, pick up trucks and old, boxy SUVs.   Practice is two towns away,  and it ends at night fall because there are no lights.  On the way, we pass coal breakers, wind turbines, and small crumbling coal towns.   The concession stand serves french fries, hot dogs and  deep fried perogi donated by the local Big Factory in town,  water and soda donated a case at a time by each soccer player’s family, and ice pops.    Most of the little boys have short cropped hair, and  almost all the kids are wearing hand-me-down uniforms.   The moms call home; Did you turn the oven on?  Will you be right home after your shift?

The divide is real between us.  I cannot put my finger on exactly when I stopped being able to relate to Em’s life and she to mine.  I go to her cul de sac,  lined with almost identical homes,  and admire her life.  But it is not for me.   She comes here and enjoys the views and the pretty drive, but this is not for her.  I don’t deny there are parallels either… I am sure there are moms scrambling with split shift child care in the suburbs just like I know there are moms here brag/complaining about spending gobs of money on school clothes.   I don’t feel that the different paths our lives have taken us make us any better or worse than the other, but there is no denying it.    To both of us, I am sure, each other’s lives seem somewhat foreign.

Sarah will go on to be a big fish in a small pond, I am sure.  Really, is that such a terrible thing for the next Mia Hamm?

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

Oh won’t cha come with me, and walk this land?

I know it won’t be a long walk, but since I have posted quite nearly nothing at all about my own beloved gadda da vidda this summer…

This is my little container garden.  It’s made up of  freebies from the garden center (a perk that I cannot deny enjoying to the fullest).  From left to right; eggplant, peppers of undetermined hotness, 2 sad Park’s Whoppers tomatoes, a geranium and some basil and a sad Better Boy.  In front are Blues and Begonias in the round containers and white wave petunias in the long one.

Jack Be Little pumpkins planted on specific request from Timothy who says “They are just delicious baked with a little butter and some salt”.  Atta boy!

This year the sunflowers did not reach amazing heights.  However, the tomatillos did.  They are nearly 6 feet tall, having grown a good 10 inches since this photo was taken.  Amazing.  I harvested about 5 pounds off two plants yesterday.

This photo is 3 weeks old, like the sunflower picture above.  The tomatoes have really taken off with the sudden onset of summer (at long last!).  Since then, I have mowed the lawn at least twice, but I digress… this is supposed to be illustrating how nicely the Florida Weave method of corralling tomatoes is working, making the tomatoes into a  wall o’ maters.

And here is the view from the upstairs bathroom about two weeks ago.  As you can see, I did indeed mow the lawn.   The flowers mingled in the sunflowers on the bottom left bed are seeds saved from Mrs. Girlfriend’s bridal shower when she was just Girlfriend way back last year.  They are wild yellow cosmos, and are just stunning.   One of these days I will remember to take a photo of them!

A sign

“What’s wrong with your kid?”  The question startled me.  The little girl, about 7 or 8, peered at me behind long blonde bangs.  Her wide set blue eyes blinked rapidly in her dirt smudged face.  She was thin, and dressed in a Sarah-esque manner… multi-colored polka dotted black ruffled skirt, striped socks, plastic high heels and a stained tee shirt patterned with red and pink hearts.  I wanted to scoop her up, take her home, wash her face and feed her something nourishing. 

I looked around for her parents, but the waiting room was empty save for the girl, Timothy and me.   Timothy, pacing the floor,  appeared not to have heard her question. 

I cleared my throat.  “Why do you ask?”

The girl nibbled her hair.  “I’m here because I can’t act right.  My behavior, you know.  It’s bad.  I have Oppositional Defiance Disorder.  I have to take pills, but sometimes I don’t swallow them.”  She walked over and opened a cabinet holding brochures.  ”… And I am too bossy and snoop and ask questions too much.  Why is he here?  Does he have to take pills too?” 

I could see Timothy was paying attention to the girl now.  He tilted his head towards me as he made the loop around the room. 

“There is nothing wrong with being curious,”  I said to the girl, trying to put a positive spin on what she had said,  ”and leadership skills are good to have.”

“My mom says I’m gonna give her the stroke”  she replied, shutting the cabinet.  “What’s up with that kid anyhow?” she jerked her thumb towards Timothy.

“Nothing.”   I said as Timothy took a seat next to me. “There is nothing wrong with this kid.  He just looks at the world a little differently.” 

A smile flickered over Timothy’s face.  The girl looked thoughtful.  “Me too.” she announced with a smile.  The door to the office opened, and a woman came out.  The woman leaned on a cane in the doorway to the waiting room and looked at us.  She barked at the little girl to come with her already, she didn’t have all day.  The girl grinned at me and patted my hand.  “It will be alright.”   she said, and dashed out the door after her mother.

Happy Thoughts

“Remember, think Happy Thoughts!”  trilled Betsy as Timothy just about skipped out of the office waving a paper plate, yarn and feather dream catcher.  Timothy said good bye unprompted and even added “see you later!”.

Betsy is Timothy’s new therapist.  She is a pretty woman of about my age, soft and approachable looking in a not-too-matronly way.  The first time we met, Betsy made fast friends with Timothy by telling Timothy about her farting, burping, snoring, stinky bull dog.  Everyone knows that even if an 11 year old boy does not like dogs, they think farts and burps are hysterical.  Timothy thinks she is great and spent the whole hour talking to her.  They do art therapy, which is right up Timothy’s alley.  The dream catcher project was a nice segue into talking about intrusive thoughts and reoccurring bad dreams.

When I left Timothy and Sarah in the waiting room to go sign what seems like billions of papers (stating we were indeed there, that I am still his mother, that it’s ok that he use scissors and  other seemingly incidental CYA sorts of things), I answered Betsy’s questions like I answer everyone else’s.  Yes, things are fine at home.  Yes, the medication seems to be working well for Timothy and the child psychiatrist was very pleasant.  No, we don’t need any referrals for family counseling or other services.   No, Timothy’s verbal tics have not gone away, but seem to be occurring less frequently.  Nope, no self injuring behaviors this week.    Yes, yes, everything is going swimmingly and sure we will let her know if there is anything else she can do.  Think Happy Thoughts!

After dinner, I called my grandmother.  She is 92, and lives on the other coast in her own condo.  She is fiercely independent.  She  told me about her daily walks, the hot weather, my cousins and aunts and apologized for not sending winter hats and mittens for the kids yet because now her fingers “don’t quite work as well as they used to”.   She told me that my father, who I have not seen in 23 years, was out to visit her for four days.  I was silent.  Gramma picked up the slack;   “How are things?” she asked.  “Fine, fine Gramma, things are just great!”  I replied.  Happy Thoughts, Happy Thoughts.

I hung up the phone and cried.  Things are not fine.  Things are bad and picking up steam to worse.  Aldo and I fight.  A lot.  We never fought before.  He keeps saying he will leave because I am miserable to be around.  And… I want him to just go.  It kills me to admit it, but I wish he would just go and lay on a sofa in a different house away from me, leave his socks on someone else’s floor and get tobacco and coffee all over a different coffee table.   For the first time in 20 years, I actually told Aldo to go fuck himself.

I am miserable.  I am tired.  I find myself being short with the kids.   I am fat because I comfort myself with food.   I am broke even though I work 6 days a week.  I knew this would be hard, but never in my life did I imagine how much Aldo’s debilitating pain would impact almost everything.  I don’t think I can do this anymore with Aldo, but how can I do it alone?  Who will watch the kids while I work if Aldo leaves?  Who will take me, my two kids and my three giant dogs if I lose the house?   Where on Earth would we even live?  I fantasize about running away to Maine and hiding in my friend’s house for a long, long time…  weeding her garden, baking cherry cobbler and maybe working on some of the short stories I never seem to get around to penning while our kids and dogs  run free  in the vast wooded wilds.

I cried for all these reasons, then, like any good crying jag should,  moved on to other equally depressing things.  I cried for my lost relationship with my own father and the possibility that my kids might have the same thing happen to them.  I cried for Aldo’s chronic pain and suffering and the loss of all he finds enjoyable in life.  I cried because we had to medicate Timothy to stop him from saying he wants to die.  I cried for what might happen to us, what is happening to us, and then I cried some more because I was a blathering, sniveling mess.

Mostly, I cried because I feel like I am losing my very best friend to something I cannot do a damn thing about.    And now, I am crying because Aldo is at his super-part-time job and I know that his young, unmarried co-workers (two of whom he has already informed me have propositioned him…)  are patting him, soothing him, bringing him coffee and giving him cigarettes while  telling him I am an ungrateful, unsupportive, stupid fat bitch.    I know this because if I were a single twenty-something working with Aldo I would do the same thing.    And here I sit, eating chocolate and pouring out my heart to anyone who stumbles upon my blog while smiling and saying “Fine, Fine!” to anyone who asks in real life.

Good God, I need a sign.  Please let me know this too shall pass.  Please let it all be alright.   Please help me.   Something needs to happen, because it can not stay the same.   Happy Thoughts, Happy Thoughts.