Susan Senator

Fall is the empty nest time of year; even the trees must deal with the fact of their seeds dropping off to start new lives. And I am an old mother, dealing with my children’s departure for years. My son Nat has lived away from us for eleven years. But this particular autumn I find myself unable to shake my sadness, the feeling that there has been a permanent shift, and that I’m not ready for it.

Like many families, Nat, who is my oldest moved into a residential school at 17. Unlike many families, this was a school for students with severe autism.  The move out of the home is so dreaded by most autism families that it even has a special term: going residential. For right or wrong, sending your autistic kid away feels like you failed him somehow.

For years I fought this feeling. I told myself that Nat “had to go.” He was out of control. He acted wild, like a stranger, he reminded me of the Warner Brothers Tasmanian Devil, a whirlwind of scary biting and terror. I’m sorry, but this is how I remember it when I think back. That, and I wonder if his brothers weathered it okay, and I cling to the memory of how easily he left us, how quickly he was absorbed into that group home community.  “So he must have needed a different environment,” people reason. They believe this, it is easier for them to decide that because Nat’s difficult behavior subsided, it means that he found peace in the strict schedule of the residence, comfort in the consistency and similarity of school/home routines.

But now that Nat is an adult, I experience him differently. He has learned, over time, to stretch out the moments between the spark and his response. There is space between us now, where I can now see how he is feeling, and not simply that he is feeling.  He has developed a wisdom and the strength to pull back and let me see him. He has learned how to be vulnerable and dwell in that particular discomfort that used to cause him to erupt.  When did this happen? Why did this happen?

I look back and I see the memories of my time with Nat, and the conclusions I made back then. One particular memory that I make myself look at is the night I cried out, “If you keep hitting people you won’t be able to live here.” To which (I think) he answered, “you be good.” Even if he did not answer that way, what I remember is that he took it in. It didn’t change anything; he went on lashing out at us without warning, until finally my husband and I decided we needed him to move out.

Was that the moment when he suddenly realized he was not a part of me, that Mommy was not Forever, and that he might find himself alone?  Over the years it has broken my heart to think, yes, maybe. I did the worst thing a mother can do: I threatened abandonment.

It is not just with Nat. I remember when my middle son, Max, wanted to sit on my lap, which was occupied by his infant baby brother Ben. And I told him, “You have to be a big boy now.”  Snap.

I hate the cruelty there, those moments of being only human, because I believe with all my heart that my children deserve better than that.

But lately I wonder. Do they also need to see the grotesquely flawed parent? Is it possible that children must somehow experience that break with their parent, in order to separate later in life? Max is now 26 and living in New York, working in the film industry. He is and always was a peaceful, accepting soul. When he’s around I feel a sense of comfort and easy joy. So it must be that his separation was healthy.

So there are times when I really worry that Nat’s separation was born of that horrible threat I made. Or maybe it occurred when he went residential. In those dark times, like during the rapidly shortening autumn days, I would see Nat’s independence as a sad thing, something he doesn’t quite understand, something that might actually feel like a punishment.

And indeed, he anxiously insists on staying at our home on the weekends, even now that he’s living with two wonderful young women who love him like a brother. I have no doubt that he adores Elaine and Miyabe right back; and yet he must stay with us on the weekends.

I’m leaving out something really important here. Two years ago he came back home to live with us for nine months. Nine months — the time of complete human gestation. You are born after nine months.  In coming back home to live, did he experience some kind of rebirth? Some kind of very old healing? He certainly healed on a physical level — the reason we took him home was that he showed up one weekend with mysteriously broken ribs. I took him back and got to know him all over again. And he me.

He’s settled happily with Elaine and Miyabe. But there is still that insistence to come home on the weekends. And at the same time, though, there is this new breath he takes when he is becoming upset, a short, flappy moment where he is able to look at me and wait for me to understand what’s wrong. His faith in me makes me calm and confident and then I actually do understand. And then we work it out.

Last week, when we were creating his calendar with Elaine and Miyabe, we floated it out to him that he was not going to sleep at home Saturday night. He listened intently. I then offered that the week after he would sleep at home the entire weekend. “Okay,” he said.

“Wow, he was so chill,” exclaimed Miyabe in that Millennial way of hers. He certainly was. And I’m wondering about new Chill Nat. Or is it old Chill Nat, who went residential calmly — successfully, at the age of 17? Maybe that really was good for him. Maybe my stupid moment of threatening him was not the fateful moment of separation. Did his time away teach him that taking space was really okay, not a punishment? For in doing so I believe he learned to take a moment — a chill moment — and work it out with us. He learned that he can come back anytime, and so he doesn’t have to.

And a new possibility occurs to me, a phoenix risen from the ashes of all my doubt. The smokey plume of hope, that this empty nest of mine is never completely empty. He can always come home again. Because now Nat and I trust each other.