Susan Senator

I am amazed by how true is the cliche that time heals all. It is interesting that our emotions either grow numb, scarred, or perhaps they deepen with time. Pain is difficult to recall, unless you find triggers that lead you right back into the space in your brain where the memory resides. We can’t remember the pain of childbirth, for example, but if you watch someone else giving birth — the pushing, the screaming, the panting, the thrashing — it can flood back to you pretty strong.

When I first began writing Making Peace With Autism, I knew that what I would have to do is go back. I would have to find ways to transport myself into the pain of Nat’s early days, when I didn’t know what he was all about. I pulled out old journals that I had kept, which oddly did not talk too explicitly about what Nat was and was not doing, but rather they contained the raw pain I was feeling in those days (when I was 27 and 28). (My emotional stew back then was centered around my need to become an adult, to become independent from my parents, believe it or not. I think I was delayed in that area, and it was not until I had my first child that I had to deal with breaking away and growing up. This dealing took on some very ugly guises and forms: horrible fights, horrible OCD, depression, fear. It’s a wonder my parents still speak to me, and it’s a tribute to the strength of our love that we are as close as we are. I guess maybe they knew somewhere inside what was going on with me and they just withstood it until it passed. And, I think they grew with me, too.) I think the reality of Nat helped us all grow much larger and wiser. At any rate, those journals transported me to my past frame of mind and heart, so that the pain memory helped open up the Nat memories, which I could then access and write down. But that was so hard, and it made me see that I was no longer in that place.

Anyway, I am learning that when change is upon me, like moving from being childless to being mother, I freak the hell out. I take my pain out on everyone around me, and on myself. I am caught inside it like a caged animal, unseeing and utterly confused. And so, I think that another reason it has been so hard to let Nat go live at The House is what it means about me.

If Nat is now at a phase where he can live somewhere else, among others, and go out on weekends with 10 friends and two chaperones, then that means that Nat is pretty much a grown-up. How did that happen? How did that boy become a man? Suddenly one of my children no longer lives with me, and that stark reality hits me in the face. If Nat is old enough to live in a group home, hang out with guys his age most of the time, food shop, do household chores (laundry, vacuuming, meal prep), and come and go here easily, that might just mean that Nat is pretty much an adult.

I have a child who is now an adult. He is not a child. I am not a young mother. I am old enough to have a kid who is an adult.

That is something that has really been bothering me, all these months. How can I be that old? I search the mirror to understand. I see small changes that I don’t like there. All of that.

I realize that I am in a new phase of life, just as Nat is. Aging has been thrust upon me, just as motherhood once was. And that is not easy.