Susan Senator

Max has gone off to college.  I am missing Max in a soft way, a quiet but constant awareness that he’s not here.  For the past year — his gap year — he was here so much, even though he was also away so much, using his newly-earned driver’s license, hanging out at with his girlfriend (also not yet in college) and friends who went to college nearby.  He was simply part of the family, though in a nineteen-year-old’s undependable way.  I never knew when there would be only the three of us for dinner (Ned, Ben, and me) or six for dinner (Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and his friends Yaz and sometimes Sam).  Sometimes — when Nat was also home —  I had to tell Max that any more than one friend, they were on their own.  An impromptu dinner for seven, when two of those people are vegetarians?  I don’t think so.

My feeling of missing Max is compatible with my feeling of Max, his entire life.  He came along when I didn’t know Nat was autistic, but I did know that things were not going well with my firstborn.  Those days I thought that the problem was me.  It made sense to me that I would not have been a very good mother; I hadn’t done a whole lot yet in my life except marry and get a master’s degree.  The only books I’d written were unpublished novels that I knew were not very good.  I hadn’t held any real jobs and it seemed unlikely that I would in the next decade.   I had not separated psychologically all that much from my parents and so I lived in a kind of emotional dependence on them merged with a teenage rebellion/angst even in my late twenties.  Predictably, this mess ran over into my relationship with my sister, with whom I would have bloody, visceral fights from time to time.

I was so uncomfortable in my own body that it was pretty much impossible to be comfortable anywhere.  Two months after Nat was born, we moved into a crappy but fairly charming little house in a shitty part of a suburb of Cambridge.  I spent the next year of his life figuring out that we had made a mistake leaving my beloved Brookline, and trying to convince Ned of this.  I also spent that year figuring out that something was wrong with my beloved Nat and trying to convince Ned of this.

Both were exceedingly difficult to come to terms with.  Who wants to move out of their first house only a few weeks after moving in?  Who in the world examines their new baby over and over again, obsessing about every nuance, interaction, or lack thereof?  But I, a nascent obsessive compulsive, spent my first years of motherhood in a miserable state of knowing something but not knowing it. Knowing something but not having the credibility because I lacked confidence and experience, because my husband and parents didn’t know how to deal with this progressively painful situation.  I was Cassandra, I was the prophet of doom, but I had no street cred with my loved ones.  So the pain just bubbled and boiled.  Susan was unhappy, Nat was an eccentric baby, why couldn’t she get fixed and enjoy her life?

She could not.  But when Max came along, something changed.  There was a lightening, a softening for the first time.  This easygoing baby responded to me with wise eyes that believed in me.  He depended on me, and I mothered him, and that was the deal.  Simple, straightforward.   This relationship gave me my first experience of confidence as an adult, though I didn’t know it at the time.

We say that we shouldn’t compare our children, but I think we should.  This is the way that we learn about childhood development.  But we should not compare our children so as to judge the value of one against the other.  In my heart, Nat occupied so much space, and yet, there was just as much room for Max; this seemed wondrous to me.  There was no comparison, only learning.   So much hurt about Nat but did not hurt about Max and I needed to know why.  One boy informed me about the other. I could see the miracle of normal development in Max and I rejoiced in the beauty of even the most mundane things with Max, such as problems with sharing, getting muddy from the rain, getting him eating vegetables.  And then, o joy, there were the most amazing things, such as Max himself:  his mind, his quick intelligence, his fun.  The way he spoke like Woodstock, in all exclamation points.

They say that happiness is the absence of pain, like when you are sick and finally you are better, how beautiful that feels. One aspect of my happiness in Max will always be about the relief of normal development, the absence of fear.  But the other aspect of my joy in Max is purely about Max, my calm and confident baby who grew into this calm, confident, beautiful young man.  His leaving for college feels right and timely.  His absence here is omnipresent.  Everywhere I look I think about Max, how he would come right into the livingroom with us as soon as his friends went home.  How he would open his laptop like a treasure chest and pull out cool things to share with us. How every once in a while he would start talking to me, this quiet smiling son, releasing torrents of thought and information so that I’d have to grab hold, like to a branch in a rushing river, but at the same time  hope that it wouldn’t stop coming at me.

I don’t want to cry, I want to sigh.  I want to breathe and think and look around and picture him, constantly, in his new life on his own without the friends, girlfriend, effluvia of his family.  What is that boy like in the world out there?  I feel a bit of maternal worry but mostly just a missing him — with pride.