from here to there and back

…which does not instill quite the same work ethic as writing in the library, but on this grey day I find that I am very comfortable on my perch with my latte by my side and the Bose sending out the rhythmic and soothing sounds of Somebody’s Fool by Eddie Skuller. I sometimes think if my novel had a soundtrack, this would be it.

We don’t see movies when they are released. Because the quality of the experience in an actual movie theater leaves much to be desired, we tend to wait for those little red envelopes to come in the mail.

I am in charge of our online movie queue. I can’t say why, but I have a good sense for this stuff. Very often we’ll get a movie and James will look at me with raised eyebrows and say something ridiculous like, “I don’t watch movies with ‘Darjeeling’ in the title,” which is why this latest movie sat on the dining room table for a solid week before I finally took a stand and turned on the dvd player. More often than not—in fact, we recently estimated my success rate at a solid 90%—he winds up eating humble pie for his movie snack.

Friends, last night we took a ride on The Darjeeling Limited. I highly recommend you do the same (if you haven’t already). It’s a wonderful story of three unlikely brothers on a spiritual journey through India. It is touching, irreverent—funny in a sweet, sad way—and it has an amazing soundtrack.

James, who was highly skeptical of this film, loved it, bumping my success rating up at least three points.

Spring soccer. It’s a bit of a misnomer here. It is, after all, 39 degrees.

But he couldn’t wait to get to the field. So I bundled him up—fleece pants, turtleneck, soccer jersey, gloves, hat and winter coat—and sent him and his father on their way. The calendar claims it is spring, but it doesn’t feel much different than it did on the last day of the fall season, when the calendar claimed it was winter.

There is a single purple crocus that fights its way through the soil in our front yard every year. It is the first of what we always hope will be many blooms. It is a shout out for what’s to come. I don’t know who planted that single bulb. It is in an odd place, just shy of a walkway that leads to the side of the house. But there is something about its persistence, the simple fact that year after year, with not a drop of water to nourish it but the rain and snow that falls in the yard, this bloom finds its way to the light.

My son was thrilled to be heading back to the soccer field this morning. He’s been practicing. In the backyard, during gym, however and whenever he can. He doesn’t play well, and I’m not even sure he understands the rules of the game, but there’s something about the movement, the action, being part of a team, that appeals to him.

He will never be a child who is spread too thin—one whose sports and activities overlap so that on any given Saturday he must make the choice between hockey and lacrosse, soccer and little league. For now, for the immediate future, he has chosen his sport. And he has chosen well.

I’m beginning to understand how soccer is a great equalizer. Sure, there are kids who shine, who stand out in their ability to control the ball and score, but right now, at this age, my son’s challenges and physical delays are lost amidst the chaos on the field. He’s just another kid running after the ball.

Like that single crocus in the front yard, he’s doing it for himself, fighting his way to the light—he’s persistent. And I can’t help but say, I am in awe of the little boy he is and the bigger boy he is about to become.

My son is obsessed with this show. I don’t remember when it started, but a while back he caught maybe 10 minutes of it before bed one night. And that was it. He was hooked.

He doesn’t always remember when it’s on, but when he does and we let him watch, he is all a-giggles. From 7 to 8 p.m. EST on Sunday nights, the boy is quite seriously, rolling on the floor and laughing out loud.

Last week, he figured out how the show works. And now, he wants to send in a video. Of us. Being silly.

I may have mentioned this before: I don’t do silly.

Sigh.

I was in the library today, tucked into my favorite corner between the stacks of periodicals, when the librarian walked over with a young man and his mother. They must need guidance on a school project, I thought.

But then I looked at the clock. 11:30 a.m. It didn’t make sense that this boy wasn’t in school. And then the librarian started pulling piles of magazines off the shelves. Soon there was less than an inch of space between my laptop and her piles.

The boy sat down in a chair next to me and the librarian began to explain how he was to sort the stacks. I noticed that his body shook and his feet were tapping in an uncontrollable way. But his voice was steady when he spoke and that surprised me because I expected to hear the shudders in his voice the same way I saw them running through his body.

“Would you mind moving your things?” the librarian asked me.

“Not at all,” I said. “I can move to another table.” And I meant this kindly, and sincerely, despite the fact that I had been there first, that I liked the long table in the corner and that the only seats left were exposed, in the center of the room, out in the open where I hate to be.

Since becoming GP’s mom, I see the world a little differently. Things are not as black and white as they used to be. There was a time I would have taken a stand, refused to give up my seat, made a case for being there first—but none of that seemed important today.

There are many things mothering my son has taught me. But perhaps the most important thing I have learned is how the kindness we extend to others will come back to us in spades.

I can’t begin to know the story behind the boy and the stacks of magazines. But that isn’t what is important here. It isn’t about the boy. It is about me, what I’ve learned. And what I hope I can teach my son.

My son has a book—The Three Questions—based on a Leo Tolstoy short story. The young boy in the story wants to be the best person he can be, but he is often unsure if he is doing the right thing. So he poses three questions to his animal friends: What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?

By the end of the story, the boy learns the most important time is now, the most important one is the one he is with, and the right thing to do is good for the one who is standing at his side.

Sounds right to me.

I think the worst part about yesterday—the back-to-back therapy after school, the running around, the exhaustion—was the headache I got from anticipating how difficult the day would be. The truth is, the day was fine.

As he so often does lately, my son surprised me. He had a great day, and it carried over from school to vision therapy to OT. It was, however, one day. So I am trying to keep it in perspective. The schedule is not ideal, but I am hoping another spot will open up and we can eventually separate the two activities—assuming, that is, that we stick with the vision therapy.

When I asked him how VT went (mercifully, I got to sit in the waiting room), he said the computer “games” were fun and the rest of it was just okay. We have two activities to do at home for the next week and I am curious to see how that will pan out. As I’ve said, and as the take-home literature clearly states, this cannot become a battle between parent and child. Somehow, some way, he needs to be motivated to do the homework (which is a lot of tedious repetition of reading with patches and special lenses and manipulating a Brock string) every day—or really, what’s the point?

But I’m not going to think about homework now.

Right now, I’m just going to enjoy the fact that yesterday went well. That the eye doctor is writing a report to help support our request for services at the IEP next month. And that our private OT is “in awe” of what a great job the boy did yesterday.

All things considered, not a bad day at all.

One final note: GP’s teacher cornered me in the schoolyard yesterday to tell me about Autism: The Musical. She wasn’t sure if I had heard about it, and she wanted me to know she planned to watch it.

I can’t help but feel my son has touched the heart of his classroom teacher. I hear it in her voice, I see it in the notes she sends home, and I sense it in her concern over his placement and services for next year. All things considered, this is, perhaps, the thing I am most proud of. The fact that she sees him. She wants to understand. And she wants him to succeed. I didn’t think we’d get there this year.

But then, I tend to underestimate my son. And, clearly, I shouldn’t.

But it’s not.

Maybe it’s because my son went back to school today. Or maybe it’s because I am anticipating a rough afternoon (we have our first vision therapy session followed by an hour of OT). Or maybe it’s simply because I’m tired and the house is a mess and we have no groceries, save for what was leftover from Easter.

I’m listening to the Jumping Monkeys podcast with the lovely Susan Etlinger of The Family Room. Susan is an amazing advocate for her four-and-a-half year old son, but also a wonderful spokesperson for autism awareness and education. If you haven’t listened, go here.

I was honored to meet Susan in person a few months ago and I am lucky to count her among my friends. Susan has long told me that she sees shades of her son in what I write about my son, and I’ve felt the same in reverse. As I listen to her interview, the overlap is clear. The words she uses to describe Isaac are exactly the ones I would choose to describe GP.

So much of what Susan says during this podcast strikes a chord with me today. As I sit here thinking about therapy and remediation and the school year to come, I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t make sense to shake things up a bit.

I’m not sure yet what that means. But he’s growing up. He’s changing. He’s walking out into the world to meet a whole new set of demands and I think it’s time to really consider how well the tools and the therapies we have now are working and whether or not we can tweak some things to be more effective or to simply be more fun and engaging.

It’s a silly example, but last week my son’s teacher assigned what I thought were some pretty tough spelling words. She gave the kids three days last week and all of this week to prepare for the spelling test. Our homework has always been to write the words, alphabetize the words, use them in sentences… Truly boring stuff that has met with really limited success.

But we didn’t do that this time. This time we talked about the words. Discussed what they had in common, what made them unique and practiced spelling with flashcards and memory. We pushed aside the pencil and paper. We turned it into a game. “If you can spell height,” I said, “you can play on the computer for 15 minutes.”

I wrote a note to the teacher. I said we did it differently this time, so she would understand why his notebook was empty. Today is only Tuesday, but he’s ready. He really knows these words. He gets these words.

Again, it’s not the best example. We don’t always have the luxury of a long weekend to catch up on homework or to get a head start.

One thing, however, is clear. The challenge for us as parents will be in figuring out how to motivate, how to intervene and how to ensure that as time goes on we are learning and growing and changing right alongside this child, this gift, this light.

So that not everyday feels like Monday. To us. Or to him.

Those truly linked don’t need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, their friendship is as true as ever. —365 Tao

I’m finding old friends everywhere. And they are leading me to other old friends. Names and faces from another life. Recently, I’ve stumbled upon friends from high school, college, my first real job and every job since. From days and times my brain has trouble rewinding to remember. The internet is the facilitator of all this connecting. Google, classmates dot com, email—the path to the past is littered with links and URLs.

I am no good. I don’t keep in touch. I compartmentalize my life. I close the book on chapters that have played out. I don’t hold on. I let people go. But here’s something: More and more I find myself thinking about the ways in which we are connected. Today I am less interested in closing chapters than I am in seeing the book through to the end.

I want surprises. I want to open myself up to plot twists and cliffhangers. I want to taste my youth and know these old friends again. And I want them to know me. I want to sit outside at a long table on a warm night, drinking wine and eating spaghetti with my past. I want to watch our kids skip laps behind our mismatched chairs, blowing on dandelions, chasing fireflies. I want to gather the tribe, bring everyone together and tell all those remember when tales.

We all let go. We all try to dodge and ditch bits and pieces of our lives. We turn our backs, walk away, but the truth is, just because we let something go, doesn’t mean it’s gone. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find that it’s right here, waiting, exactly where we left it.

Sometimes what they say is true. Sometimes what we’re looking for are the things we’ve always had.

.

I was fiddling around on the computer yesterday afternoon and James was sitting across the room, reading, when our son wandered in and asked, “Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking?”

“What’s that?” we asked, as we exchanged raised eyebrows and grins over his adorable, bobbing head.

“Toys are us,” he said with authority. “I’m thinking Toys are us.”

I love talking to my son on the phone. But the very nature of our days, the fact that when he’s not at school, he’s with me, doesn’t give me much opportunity.

Yesterday, however, he spent the afternoon at his grandmother’s while I ran some errands. Around 4 o’clock, I called to see if he was staying there for dinner or coming home. Using his best phone manners, he told me he would like to stay for dinner.

Later, when I called back to ask if he was ready to be picked up, he said, “Not yet. I will call you.”

And he did. An hour later, the phone rang. “Mom, can you come get me, now?”

You know how everyone sounds the same, but different, on the phone? As we made arrangements for the pick up (“clean up your toys and I will be there in a few minutes”), I heard the boy at 10, 12, 15 years old. And I had a flashback to the countless phone calls I made to my own mother asking for a ride home.

In that brief moment, I saw my future. And it looked like somewhere I had been before.