Today, August 25, 2014, we are only one day from 90 days clean and sober!  Today Zachary Simons starts college!  Today Zachary has his life in front of him, full of possibilities as he plunges into his hopes and dreams.  I have to admit that I find it odd that it is so much easier for me to talk about the heartbreak of this journey than the redemption. 

I live in a state of holding my breath.  It’s so beautiful, so miraculous, so glorious that to speak of it might jinx it.  This of course is ridiculous, but truthfully spoken.  Going through a season of grief unimaginable makes you suspicious of hope.  I’m guarded…and that means I miss out on some of the glory.  I have to trust in the process.

I am convinced that to not share this glory is to rob you who have followed this story for so long.  To rob you of faith that comes from watching your prayers for him be answered.  Please forgive me.  Rejoice with me, my friends, my son who I had given up for dead…who was wrapped in grave clothes has burst forth from the tomb…Spring has come, praise God.

You CAN'T heal, from what you won't FEEL.

Grieving...a topic that for many of us has been in the forefront of our minds, as we watched a broken hearted family in our local church bury their six year old daughter. 

The title of this post, "You can't heal from what you won't feel," is a phrase some of my "*Mops" moms and I repeat as we walk along side our sons on a path fraught with pain. The refusal to grieve is always a temptation.  Often, it is a survival technique; during the height of our son's crisis, when heartbreak came in unrelenting blows like a nightmarish carnival ride that refused us exit... it was simply too much.  Denial is a valuable, self-protective mechanism that provides a temporary stop-gap solution for pain that threatens to topple us headlong into oblivion.  It is, however, a tool, among many, that when abused can leave us emotionally arrested.  If we're not careful, we may find months and years that go by while we sit in an emotional stupor.  Other tools include, avoidance, self-anesthetizing, detachment, and distraction, and on and on. 

My personal favorite is detachment, I became amazingly skilled at this as a child.  I was particularly sensitive as a preschooler; I cried a lot. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of good reasons to cry, but around six, I figured out that this wasn't working for me.  In fact, in my six year old mind it was beginning to threatened my very existence.  "I'll give you something to cry about," "crybaby," and a general sense of rejection were the byproduct of my emotionally labile personality. My memories from six on have a dry, heartless quality to them; my feelings had fled for safer haunts.

What is my point in all this?  I have come to realize just in the past couple of weeks that even though I have survived the past 18 month crisis mentally intact, and physically whole, I have become detached from my heart, not completely, but like a poorly abridged version of a classic novel I have gaps.  I grieved a great deal as I crawled through this dark, cold valley, but at times it overwhelmed me and I checked out.  I'm contemplating what it means to go back and process.  Why?

My Barometer for whether I have grieved thoroughly is my God sense.  When I shut down parts of my heart to cope, I shut down my ability to sense God.  It is the only faculty we have built to receive things of the spirit.  If I don't take care of my heart, my spirit suffers.  Without the spirit, there is no capacity for joy.  We become the dreaded, and strangely popular zombies that have taken over the entertainment industry, haunting the emotionally living, hoping to suck some kind of life from what they seem to have...endlessly frustrated.

I don't want to be a zombie.  Now to the business of grieving.  But how?  any suggestions?

*MOPS is a nationally recognized program for "Mother's of Pre-Schoolers." My friends and I hijacked the name to mean "Mother's of Pot Smokers." (It's the little things.)

Are you cold-hearted?

Empathy…the ability to feel compassion for what someone is experiencing without judgment.  How good at that are you?  I have to be honest…my natural response, the unchecked knee, has a “Get a grip, suck it up, try harder, you’ve got to be kidding me!” jerk reaction.   I’m sure there are many factors that play into this, but I’m confident of this, I need to change. 

Why is it that for many of us, our first thoughts are not of sorrow for the person suffering, but what they did to deserve their lot?  As is the case with so many of our human foibles, I believe there is a self-protective motive behind it.  We are always trying to reassure ourselves of our invulnerability to suffering…if the person did something to put themselves in the situation, well then, we will just be smarter, morally superior, or more disciplined and avoid it.  Also, I think if we can find a way to blame the victim then we  won’t have to feel so much sorrow, or ask the hard questions of God’s fairness.

I believe this tendency is exponentially worse when observing someone suffer from a mental health diagnosis or substance abuse.  

What words come to mind when you see a homeless man;  lazy, junkie, nut-job?  Next time give yourself  a moment to engage your heart, could it be he is; tortured, afraid, trapped?                                                             

A brave mom's journey.

There are many harrowing details that I could relate…and will probably get around to sharing the highs and lows of the last 18 mos., but I want to re-address the purpose of this blog. 

When I asked Zack’s permission to write about this journey, we both agreed that bringing understanding to the general public about the realities of mental illness and how it relates to substance abuse was our greatest desire.  We also have a passion for helping people in the Christian community grasp the truth about this topic and grow in their compassion for those that suffer from it. We as Christ followers have been woefully ill-equipped to minister to these individuals, and are often the most guilty of heaping condemnation and stigma on those that suffer.  Mental illness is on the rise, and with the legalization of marijuana and the drug tolerant attitudes that come along with that, we should expect it to skyrocket in the near future.

I recently met a mom who’s courage and fortitude in the face of unfathomable pain has left me in awe.  She agreed to allow me to post this newspaper article on my blog, because she too has a great passion for bring understanding for the mentally ill.  Following is a story that was published in the Seattle times that very well could become commonplace in our community if we continue the path we are on.  This tragedy occurred in Washington State…known for two things, a highly tolerant drug culture, and the second worst mental health care in the nation.

SEATTLE TIMES

On a Sunday morning in June 2011, Jordan Anderson’s mother knocked on his bedroom door to gather him for church.

Lorena Taylor-McPhail found her son dressed for worship, but also spread-eagle on his bed, seized by psychosis.

“Mom, it has started again — the war between good and evil,” he told her. “I’m burning up.”

Among the cruelties of severe mental illness is the fact that it often descends in the bloom of young adulthood. In Jordan’s case, he was 21, thinking about starting an automotive-parts business, a skilled BMX racer, handsome enough to model.

And then he was suddenly sick.

There is finally urgency in Olympia to reform mental-health care. One lawmaker after another has heard harrowing first-person accounts of scant treatment, denied at critical moments. Those who haven’t can hear it from Taylor-McPhail, who is telling her son’s story at legislative hearings Thursday.

Jordan’s story underlines the costs of our last-in-the-nation ranking for community psychiatric beds. In the last decade alone, the tally of beds certified for involuntarily committed patients dropped by a third.

Jordan’s first psychotic break came Jan. 14, 2011. His hallucinations were religious-themed — he was a prophet sent to save mankind from earthquakes and poisoned air. Suicidal, he jumped out of a moving car and was involuntarily committed.

But he stayed at a West Seattle psychiatric hospital just hours. He smashed a third-story window with a table and leaped out, according to Taylor-McPhail and other family members. Taylor-McPhail said Jordan was apparently left unsupervised when staff took a break.

Jordan crushed his heel during the escape and spent about a month at Harborview Medical Center, healing his body and mind. He left under a court-ordered treatment plan, but got permission to visit his dad in Arizona. “He did great. Fantastic, really,” said Ted Anderson, who lives near Peoria.

As Jordan’s 90-day treatment plan was expiring, Taylor-McPhail said she called his case manager because Jordan stopped taking the meds, but she was ignored. The delusions crept back.

She resisted joining a National Alliance on Mental Illness support group, and didn’t tell Jordan’s friends. “It was the stigma,” she said. “I was feeling the shame: What had I done as a mother?”

By the time Taylor-McPhail found Jordan sprawled in bed that Sunday morning, she was exhausted, isolated and desperate. She called 911 hoping he could go back to Harborview, but was told seven other patients were already stacked up in its ER.

Instead, he went to a Federal Way hospital. Records aren’t available, but Taylor-McPhail and her ex-husband, Anderson, have the same recollection: A King County psychiatric evaluator determined that Jordan wasn’t an immediate risk to himself or others, and suggested he spend a night in a homeless shelter. Because of mental-health confidentiality laws, the evaluator couldn’t take into account Taylor-McPhail’s concerns.

What frustrates me about this story is that the Legislature in 2010 passed a law to deal exactly with this scenario.

House Bill 3076 loosened criteria for the Involuntary Treatment Act, allowing evaluators to consider a patient’s history, including statements of family members, before deciding whether to civilly commit a patient.

But the start date was delayed twice — to 2012, then to 2015 — because it would require hundreds more hospital beds, at a cost of about $11 million a year.

The Legislature is now considering speeding up implementation with Senate Bill 5480. Gov. Chris Gregoire’s budget set aside $7.5 million for it, and Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, gave it a hearing last week in the Senate Human Services and Corrections committee.

When Jordan wasn’t involuntarily committed, he left the Federal Way hospital with just a bus pass.

He found his way up to Seattle the next day, June 13, 2011. In the early afternoon, almost five months to the day after he was first committed, Jordan jumped off the 11th floor of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. He died instantly.

Taylor-McPhail didn’t cry in our two-hour interview, but I suspect she did the moment I left. She said she felt powerless: She couldn’t even tell the evaluator what she knew. “The hardest part is, as a mother, you have all the responsibility and none of the power.”

The first domino falls.

Now that I have given a brief overview of the backstory  perhaps a detailed description of how we came to the current crisis is in order.

Jan. 20^th 2013, I approached the family PC as I had a thousand times before, and yes, my son’s Facebook page was open, as it had been numerous times before.  Normally, I would ignore it and close it down, but a word leapt off the page and caught my eye; suicide.  He had left an instant message with another teenage boy open.  Any thought of privacy went out the window as I saw myself as potentially responsible for reporting any possible danger. I was admiring my son as he was trying to talk this boy through some tough feelings, even quoting scripture and encouraging him to reach out to God.  The conversation, however, quickly changed; the boys began to talk about a previous interaction involving pot. 

My feelings quickly shifted from admiration to devastation as the undeniable evidence unfolded before my eyes.  Our son who had been taught from an early age that his mind was precious, beautiful, if not a bit fragile, and that he needed to take all precautions to protect it from substance abuse, had decided to ignore all warnings and engage in the very behavior that he had been told would wreak havoc on his mind.  Strangely, I just happened to be on the phone with the one friend who could talk me through these first shocking moments.  She dropped everything to be with me, and her presence was the first of many evidences of God’s faithfulness in this journey. 

The act of crying is such a strange, vulnerable experience.  Sometimes tears sneak out corners and slide down cheeks completely against our will.  We quickly wipe them away with embarrassed swipes of our hands, looking away to avoid the continued feeling of being laid bare.  Sometimes, however, there is a wailing that is so raw, so unprocessed that any thought of how naked and exposed you are has been overridden by immensity of the grief.  This is where I found myself. 

A prince in Austria is shot.  Storm clouds gather in the Atlantic.  A tendril of smoke rises in Waldo Canyon.

It’s rare for us to recognize the first domino to fall in a line of events that will spell out tragedy, and for those watching this unfold,  the grief I exhibited may have seemed disproportionate and superfluous, however the repercussions of all that this one decision represented was painfully obvious to this mom who had watched this boy struggle for so many years.  This was the beginning of a hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Fluorescent Hum

This excursion has had many unforeseen turns, many trials I never thought I would have to face, but I always believed in some type of arrival point.  In the last two months the destination has become unclear…a fog hangs over the tracks, and the next stop  may leave me in some foreign land, where I don’t know the language.  It has taken me a while to come to terms with this uncertainty. 

I left off in the story of Zack at his seventh birthday party; a foreshadowing of the mental and spiritual battles we were yet to face.  The space this incident rented in my brain was minuscule, but its presence would resonate perpetually like the hum of a fluorescent bulb; a sound I usually can push back in my consciousness, but the tension of its effect is always with me.

 The nagging of this continuous hum drove me with a maddening fervor toward a one woman mission;  if the track that was laid out in front of us appeared to be headed in a direction that I didn’t want it to go then I was going to start ripping out railroad ties, and prying up steel rails with my bare hands.  I believed that if I could just help Zack to embrace his strengths, they would eventually outweigh his weaknesses. 

Music was the most obvious strength.  He had perfect pitch, and adored music.  He memorized all the composers, the era in which they composed, the pieces they composed, and could easily hum the main theme of these pieces. One of his favorite games was "guess the composer." In the car he would set the radio to the local classical station and attempt to guess the composer before the end of the song.  Often it might be a piece we had never heard before, but he could often guess correctly simply by recognizing the style.  I played clarinet in the Marine band so it was an easy choice when it came to choosing an instrument.  He excelled quickly. 

Geography was his next most obvious strength.   At five, from the place-mat he ate dinner on, he memorized all the states and capitals with an effortlessness and joy that was mind boggling.  Soon after, we bought him an atlas that he hauled around with him 24/7.  It didn’t take long for him to memorize the entire globe, the capitals of every country, their currency, and their anthem.  He entertained  and stunned adults with his knowledge.  He seemed to gain a great deal of pleasure from this skill.

There was a deep seeded flaw to this approach however.  First of all, weaknesses rarely disappear, even in the face of great strengths.  Only with hindsight am I able to see the kind of therapy that would have benefited Zack greatly.  I now preach to parents with struggling grade-schoolers, even pre-schoolers, to get help sooner than later.

The second flaw to this approach is that it put a lot of pressure on Zack to perform.  As much as I may have tried to shield him from my own anxiety about his condition he understood that being successful in his strengths was very important to his mom.  By the time he was in 8^th grade he was the 1^st chair clarinet in concert band, 1^st chair sax in jazz band, performing with the Colorado Spring Youth symphony, and participating in all-state concert band.  He had also won his school’s Geography Bee and was headed to D.U. for the state competition.

And that’s when it happened, he maxed out, red lined, the pressure was just too great,  and he broke.

The first time it happened we thought it might be the result of too much caffeine.  He said he felt excited, couldn’t calm down, couldn’t sleep.  We were at his grandparent’s house where Mountain Dew was a great treat, so we brushed it off and told him to stop drinking so much soda.  The second time it was more alarming, followed quickly by the third, fourth and fifth.  He was having panic attacks.  It progressed from alarming to terrifying in 72 hrs.  He was having 15 to 20 panic attacks a day.  When he was seized by one he would grab my hands with icy fingers, his face would go flush, and I could literally watch his pupils dilate as he gasped for breath.  It was enough to give me a panic attack.

Regrets? I didn’t get him help. My worst nightmare;  I would take him to a doctor, they would pronounce him mentally ill, cursing him to a life of pills and hospitals.  I foolishly thought if I could avoid hearing the doctor make such a declaration, pray through it, hold his hand, I could somehow stop this train from running us over.  I was in full blown denial.  No one could have told me the truth at that point. 

In the last two months I’ve had to face the reality that this will probably never end.  I didn’t realize that this is what I was pinning my hope on until this came to light.  I sense that mysterious unknown things are taking place in my heart, mind and spirit, that I have no more control over than my own heartbeat. It's as if my foundation has been morphed from solid bedrock to not quite set Jell-O.  Who I will be when all is said and done? This is yet to be seen.

apologies

For those of you waiting to hear the rest of the story I am sorry for not posting for so long .  We are deeply in the thick of things and I think that I might have something important to say but then we take another horrific turn in this journey and I don't know what I believe .  This is the essence of living through this however, I think I know something about God, about mental illness, about substance abuse, about parenting only to find out I was yet again mistaken.  Pray for me that I find some sure footing, and the voice to continue to speak.

The following is the letter I sent to the Govenor of Colorado.  Perhaps nothing more than a therapeutic exercise, but maybe a first step in speaking out against what I believe is destroying a generation.

Dear Governor Hickenlooper,

I thought perhaps in this debate over the legalization of pot you might appreciate the perspective of a parent on the front line.  I do believe if the voices of moms and dads who understand the dangers this issue poses to our youth were heard, an overwhelming “NO” would echo down the Front Range.  My own sons are now 17 and 19, and my influence is coming to an end, but if I had young children, I sadly would say farewell to this most beloved state, escaping to safer haunts to raise my children.

As I write this letter I entertain a group of nine teenagers in my basement.  I occasionally make my presence known, bringing them snacks and staying keenly aware of what is going on in my house.  They are having a goodbye party for my eldest, because tomorrow he will be leaving for a two month stay in a residential drug rehabilitation facility.  The hell that has led us to this place I never imagined I would be called to live through, let alone survive.

Because of a sad history of addiction in our families, my husband and I determined that our house would be a “dry” house.  We have set the example for our sons that we can live a full, exciting, rich life without the help of substances legal or otherwise.  Our sons were raised in the church; private Christian schools and home schooling gave them a good supply of friends that knew how to pursue life with all the richness that Colorado promises.  These boys climbed mountains, mountain biked, rock climbed, and anything else they could dream up to do outdoors, until substance abuse lured them to an existence of simply seeking the next buzz.

Our son’s first job was at Taco Bell, where within the first week he was offered pot.  Within the first month his manager was offering him cocaine so he could close faster.  Within two months he had done acid and enough pot that he was experience psychosis on a daily basis.  Four months later at a new job was the first time he did meth, again so he could work faster.  Three months later he was doing heroin so that he could sleep. One year, that’s how long it took for our son to go from smoking pot, to doing meth and heroin.  He has been hospitalized three times in six months for suicide threats and attempts.  He has hitchhiked across the country three times either under the influence of drugs or the delusions that resulted.  During these excursions he has been held up at knife point, panhandled, slept in a park in downtown Omaha, and nearly died of dehydration while he waited six hours for a ride outside Albuquerque.

Bill Maher was recently quoted as saying, “People will realize that we can legalize pot and the world won’t come to an end in the next day or the next year.”  I say this is unfathomably shortsighted.  How long will it take for our society to reap the consequences of this?  I wonder if anyone will be keeping track of statistics such as:

1.       Increases in the number of people on welfare and food stamps.

2.       Increases in the number of children introduced to the foster care system

3.       Increases in the mental health hospitalizations.

4.       Increases in overdoses.

5.       Increases in driving under the influences of drugs and the accidents that result.

6.       Increases in the use of more dangerous drugs such as meth and heroin.

Everyone is so excited about all the tax revenue that is being brought in by this decision.  My response…it’s a good thing, because the state of Colorado is going to have a lot of things to pay for in the future! I understand that my son didn’t use a drug that was bought from a legal recreational marijuana dispensary, so why do I believe that legalization is so wrong?  It is the culture that legalization creates.  Colorado has become a drug tolerant state.  The use of marijuana is seen as the norm, and anyone who doesn’t agree has fallen off the far end of the cool chart.  Legitimization of the use of this drug by the government increases its use…legally and illegally.

In closing, I have had many thoughts about leaving Colorado in disgust.  I even did an internet search for housing in other states.  But after giving this some thought, I realized that wouldn’t be a very wise business decision.  After all, I am currently pursuing my Master’s degree in Counseling.  My prediction is that in a couple of years, business will be booming, I’ll have more clients than I know what to do with.

The people have spoken, it’s true, but is it not our government’s job to protect its citizens, especially our youth from destructive influences?  We currently are fighting obesity in children, but at the same time sabotaging their future by making drugs easier to access.  This just doesn’t make sense.  Thank you for your time and attention, I hope this one mom’s voice adds perspective to this debate.  

                                                                                                         Respectfully,

                                                                                                                         Kristen Simons

Epic Battle

An epic battle is raging atop a birthday cake.  Luke is doing his best to fend off Darth's mighty blows but slogging through icing is proving to be a challenge to his elusive fighting style.

I am so grateful for this house teeming with sprinting, howling, sugar-crazed boys.  Zack is turning eight and God's grace is surrounding his life.  He is attending a private Christian school with high standards for behavior; teasing this socially awkward, painfully quiet boy, will not be tolerated.  Not only was he not teased, he was embraced.

Things are looking good, his teacher adores him and she constantly seeks to understand and develop ways to encourage Zack's success.  Surprising, however, that she would call in the middle of his birthday party during the scavenger hunt; and yet it is always like this, always without warning.

Here it comes. Churning, churning, its rhythmic pursuit coming for my heart.  Its dragging me into its  relentless grinding teeth.  Huffing, huffing, can you feel it? The stinging heat from the steam.  It's almost here.  The whistle threatens to blow its terrifying voice.  It's pulling into the station now, time to climb on board for yet another harrowing ride to places unknown, guaranteed to be dark and desolate, on a track that has no end.

"Satan is talking to me, he says he's going to kill me.  He put a snake in my desk."  It took her less than five seconds to repeat the words my son had spoken that would shake me to my core.  Zack would rather pluck his own eyeball out than raise his hand in class, but on this occasion it just couldn't be avoided.  His second grade teacher approached; he needed to talk to her in the hall.  His recounting of this terrifying experience on a sunny day in May sent chills down this young enthusiastic teacher's spine.

Phone still in hand, I gaze out the sliding glass door.  An explosion of excitement, the boys have found another clue.  They go charging off toward the next destination.

Somehow I made it through the birthday party and allowed Zack to bask in his birthday bliss.  The next day however, he was questioned.  Zack would explain that the snake was very real; it was a Black Mamba and it was striking at him over and over. He recounted how he needed to use one of his pencils to fend it off.  An epic battle is raging, with an enemy far more daunting than Darth Vader, and I feel as helpless as Luke Skywalker slogging through icing.

 

Choosing Hell

Last week I broke from my blogging routine.  Why? I was angry, I didn't feel like adding to the narrative that might produce compassion for a lost boy.

In this 15 mos. journey emotions have come in like blustery weather systems; squalls, sudden and fitful, only to blow out again.  This current storm front has a quality that scares me. A polar vortex has dipped low into regions that had yet gone untouched, and it threatens to stay well beyond seasonal norms.

Why is this time different?  He looked at me with soulless eyes while I pleaded for his life and said in not so many words, "I choose destruction, I choose Hell." He was so rational about it.  "There is no God, there is no beauty, there is no redemption in this shit-hole of a world, substance abuse is the only choice that makes sense."

We've experienced the death of our son one little piece at a time; pieces stolen by mental illness, or substance abuse, but this piece he removed with the very hands we have so desperately tried to hold through this horrific journey.  Spring will come, but it will be late.

Testing…testing

The evaluator’s job, unpack how this three pound package of lobes and folds crammed with 100 billion neurons is functioning or not functioning.  How does he do this? Testing; long, arduous, sometimes boring tests. Balboa Naval Hospital; at the moment, it seems to be going well.  No problems, Zack is compliantly answering their endless list of questions.  This portion is an assessment of his verbal I.Q.  At this point, I am a proud mama, he is obviously brilliant.

His high verbal abilities made him easy to be captivated by, he sounded like a little professor with a cherub voice.  A couple of months after starting pre-school, when he did decide he was ready to talk to his teacher, he sidled up next to her on the playground, and almost inaudibly said,  “The Madagascan hog-nosed snake is mildly venomous.”  Sunny kitchen, taking care of household chores, I would frequently hear this three year old cherub voice calling out from the living room, “Is it territorial?,” “Is it dangerous to humans?,” “Does it live in the United States?” I lived with this constant parade of questions about animals, and then music, and then geography, and on and on for all of Zack’s childhood.  He used words to understand his world. He visited his cousin’s Kindergarten class and when asked where he was from he replied in his distinct, perfectly articulated, little professor voice, “The planet Earth.”  Why would anyone suspect that such verbal giftedness could be a sign that something was wrong?

Zack is tiring of all these questions, he complains.  The tester, in a very patronizing voice begs, “Just a couple more.”  Zack, in a very not so three year old voice says, “A couple means two.”

This looks simple enough, take these three one inch square tiles and make an “L” pattern with them. This portion of the evaluation is testing his performance I.Q.   I wait, in anticipation for him to continue his obvious brilliance. His pudgy hands reach for the tiles; he doesn’t seem to understand the instructions.  Again, the tester makes the simple shape for him to imitate.  Zack takes the tiles and pushes them toward each other but seems to be blind to their edges. He’s pushing the corner of one tile into the edge of the other. He can’t do it. Now the tester pulls out a piece of paper and draws two parallel lines, and asks Zack to do the same.  Whoa! Not looking so brilliant now, as his lines look more like a couple of rivers running their course through the Alps than parallel lines.   Last, an easy puzzle.  A cow, separated into three parts, head, body, butt.  I look on incredulously as I begin to see what is not working in my son’s brain.  He has no capacity to take these pieces and put them together in a way that makes sense. The tester asks me, “Does he ever play with construction toys, puzzles, draw, or color?” No, no, no, and no. 

Each one of our brains seems to hold a great mystery; each one as unique as our fingerprints. When we look in wonder at the multiple ways that these distinctive differences can be expressed; musical prowess, physical dexterity, mathematical aptitude, we rejoice in how beautifully knit together we are.  How we enjoy watching the ice skater fly through the air and land the impossible jump.  It makes us feel strong just watching them.  But, how do we feel when we come in contact with someone whose differences are not expressed in beautiful ways, but in ways that appear weak? I ask this, not in a condemning way, but in true sincerity.  Personally, I feel repelled by weakness…I want to run away.  I await your honest replies.

Beautiful Boy

If I had been paying closer attention, I might have noticed the sound of the gravel under my feet as I stepped out of my car on that fall San Diego morning, but the sun was so pleasing on my face, and the air so perfectly infused with sweet ocean and foliage, I simply walked blissfully toward the preschool where I was to pick up my three year old from his morning class.  If I had been paying closer attention, I might have noticed the smell of tar soaked railroad ties, or the gleaming white iron tracks that marked my path toward the door of a seemingly innocuous preschool classroom.  There was a train awaiting me in there, and I never saw it coming.

A stone faced preschool director informed me that we needed to talk.  She took me aside, never a good sign, saying something like, “There is something wrong.”…Something wrong, something wrong?, SOMETHING WRONG!, with my beautiful boy? But how?, he is so obviously exceptional; spoke early, first word nine months, full blown sentences 18 mos., reciting poetry with effortless memorization at three.  She begins to describe his behavior in the classroom; no eye contact, never speaks, doesn’t play with other children, lays down in the corner and stares at the wall when things get loud and overwhelming.  And here it is, the first time I hear the word Autism associated with my child.  “I think he may have PDD, or Asperger’s,” she says, “It’s a form of Autism.”

Nauseating reality shifts my mental equilibrium.  I am spiraling downward as my mind begins to recount a slide show of moments, each revealing the obvious. This cold, unsmiling, messenger has spoken truth.  Denial, 1^st time mom, whatever the reason, only now could I pull the pieces together to form a clear picture.  The spinning, poor eye contact, and repetitive behaviors, like a specters bony finger pointing to a sign that reads “Autism.”  “You should get him tested,” the director suggests.  I have no memory of what I said to her in response.

I walked back to my car, hand in hand with my beautiful boy.  A lifetime has but a handful of moments in which one remembers so distinctly the shift in trajectory that an event casts. This was one of those moments. I walked into the classroom one person, with certain goals, beliefs, and dreams, and walked out an altogether different one.  No longer did the sun shine so blissfully on my face, for now my eyes were fixed on the gravel under our feet, and the seemingly endless steel track that was laid out before us.