Susan Senator

When Nat was a baby, and we thought we were just “typical” parents, we celebrated each milestone just as all parents do; we acted and felt as if he were the first human ever.  No one in the history of man had ever been as wondrous. Even though I had to buy stuff from https://buy-modafinil-online.org/ to help me get through the day and stay awake for him – I could not sleep at most nights with his crying – I never felt giving up. He was our first baby, and the first grandbaby on both sides, and the first baby of my generation of cousins, and the first baby of all of my friends. Nat was “The Baby of All the World,” my mother used to proclaim — it didn’t make sense, and yet it makes complete sense.  Nat was The Baby.

To Ned, Nat’s nicknames were hooked to his milestones. As an infant, crazy young, he used to push up to standing, in my lap. I mean like just a few months old. Legs like little pistons: you could not keep him down. Ned called him “Stand-up Natty.” Each development yielded a new name: Crawling Mister, Walking Mister, Talking Mister. I loved those nicknames; they were so Ned: to the point and witty.  My nicknames for Nat were like me: mushy and lovestruck. I called him Baby Delight, Baby Guy, Sweet Guy (still use that one), Natty-thaniel, Natan-El (Gift of God), Sugar Boy… you get the picture.

Perhaps we clung to those milestones because we were so tickled by our otherwise unusual baby. For here he was, deigning to do these pedestrian baby things like actually crawling on time (7 months), babbling just right, etc. He never did become Play-Appropriately-With-Toys Mister, though I looked for it, waited for it with a disproportionate longing, as if I knew it wasn’t coming ever.  The longer it didn’t come, the more I wanted it. Until eventually the disappointment eclipsed all else.

I lived in this state of low-level perpetual disappointment in my firstborn son. It was like a low-grade infection that you just can’t ditch.  Somewhere along the way Ned ditched the “Mister” nicknames and we all just kind of grew up. The other two babies that came along had their very own set of nicknames, and nothing ever repeated. By the time we experienced Max and then Ben progressing steadily through all the milestones — including the toy one — we had already developed that serious knowingness that parents of disabled kids get. There was an additional wakefulness, a consciousness, a hard scientist way of looking at Max and Ben because when we looked at them we were also looking for Nat in them.

When did this sickly seriousness around Nat fade? I don’t know, but it did. Somewhere along the line we stopped seeing him in the cold harsh light of the neurologist’s office. I know I’ve written about this before, when the therapeutic gave way to just fun in our life with Nat. We went from Speech Therapy to Special Olympics. From Social Skills Group to Social Group. And Nat’s development took off. Almost the moment we stopped working with him and switched to playing with him, everything changed. He came back to us.

Talking Mister came to mind the other day, when I found myself stepping back and noticing his development, just the way I did when he was 10 months old. I looked in his Day Program notebook and I saw that he had broken a bottle at work (he stocks the coolers at a CVS), and then as more fell he began laughing, “which did not help,” the staff person wrote. Someone said something to me about how if he did that more he might lose his job, and it was like a knife in my heart. The laughing and getting into trouble phase had started when Nat was seven, waking up at 2a.m. and laughing his head off for no reason. So there I was, like back then, terrified about something happening that no one could fix. Nat was going to be derailed from his happy progress, once again, as always, by this twitch in his neurology.

I figured I ‘d probe a little and see where he was with the whole thing. “Nat,” I said that evening at the dinner table. “What happened at work today?”

There were those same absurdly huge blue eyes as wide and vulnerable as the sky. “You broke a bottle.”

“Oh,” I said, because even though I knew the answer already, it was still wondrous to me that he was actually answering the question, and accurately. Do you know how I longed for that, when he was two? I was a crack whore for words.

“Natty, did you laugh–”

“NOooo,” Nat said, before I’d even finished. The wide-eyed soft stare had become brittle and fearful. But I could barely keep from laughing, because it was a whole new milestone: Lying Mister.