They never tell you what it’s like because they are still struggling with that realization themselves.\u00a0 Tell you what it’s like?\u00a0 I got my own problems!\u00a0 So we all have to find out.\u00a0 We all do, over time.\u00a0 Maybe autism is your first time.\u00a0 Childbirth itself was the first thing for me that made me realize down to my bone marrow that life was not going to the way I had planned.\u00a0 Autism was the second thing.\u00a0 I hadn’t even planned, actually; I had expected.\u00a0 In my mind there was a semicircle of things spread around me that were possibilities, back when I was pregnant with\u00a0 Nat — little girl storybook things like “he’ll look like me; he’ll look like Ned.\u00a0 He’ll be into school; he’ll be kind of bad.\u00a0 I hope he won’t become a criminal.\u00a0 I hope he doesn’t have a disease.\u00a0 I should breastfeed him so that he’ll be healthiest.\u00a0 I’ll research the stroller safety, the crib bar distance.\u00a0 I hope the cat will like him — what if they don’t get along?”\u00a0 So adorable!\u00a0 I was a baby, too.<\/p>\n
Once Nat was born, the semicircle became a circle, stretching behind my back, to things I couldn’t see.\u00a0 I had no idea, before his birth, how the worry about his pure survival would give me a permanent feeling of anxiety; it just would not go away.\u00a0 How in the world could such a soft pink hairless boneless creature survive?\u00a0 What?\u00a0 It’s all up to me?\u00a0 That’s just crazy<\/em>.<\/p>\n But I got over that, inured to it, callused.\u00a0 So I could just do what it took.\u00a0 Become a young mother, no longer a carefree girl (well, let’s face it, I was never carefree.\u00a0 There’s always something to worry about, after all.\u00a0 As a fourteen year old:\u00a0 will that boy like me?\u00a0 As a ten year old:\u00a0 will that new girl be my friend? As a six year old:\u00a0 can we go to Old MacDonald’s Farm for my birthday?<\/p>\n So the young mother sloughs off some of that flawless youthful skin and suddenly has circles under her eyes.\u00a0 Give up the damned dream of breastfeeding because how could it be the right thing if he howled like that, clearly starving?\u00a0 No no, it could not be right.\u00a0 So they were wrong about that.\u00a0 The bottle was better for this baby.\u00a0 What else were they wrong about?<\/em><\/p>\n Guess what else they were wrong about.\u00a0 This baby was not progressing the way all the books said.\u00a0 I could not interest him in anything.\u00a0 Yet he was clearly happy.\u00a0 Was it the case that babies were not all alike, that they did not all watch Sesame Street or delight in rolling a ball?\u00a0 That they didn’t give a shit about other babies?\u00a0 Like people, they were all different!<\/p>\n Gradually, I figured it out.\u00a0 Or in sharp ugly bursts of awareness.\u00a0 Oh.\u00a0 Oh God.\u00a0 It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person.\u00a0 It really is.\u00a0 My child has something wrong with him.<\/em> What now?\u00a0 Penelope Leach and Dr. Spock and Brazelton had no answers for that one.\u00a0 Neither did my doctor.\u00a0 All the people I’d looked up to, suddenly the mask slipped and I saw that they were as young and stupid as I was.<\/p>\n When you see that, you lose years of life.\u00a0 So I became a much older woman at that point.\u00a0 I was “seasoned.”\u00a0 I was seasoned so much I was like Cajun food.\u00a0 My flesh became plump and yet not all that juicy.\u00a0 I was completely thrust into the mother phase of life, where my job, my identity became all about being strong for someone else. I had to take extra special care of this child because he had something.<\/p>\n I became old beyond my years, as they say, and because I eventually figured out how to survive that stuff, I was deemed wise.\u00a0 I was wise simply because I was not dead, and neither were my kids. There were more ugly surprises along the way, rabid bite-in-the-ass kinds of surprises, like sleep disorders, manic behavior, aggression.\u00a0 Traumatized siblings.\u00a0 But there were other issues, other tragedies, completely unrelated to autism.\u00a0 I didn’t know that things could be even worse.\u00a0 Terrible mistakes, irrevocable scarring. Things wrong with people, not just Nat.\u00a0 Nat turned out golden and beautiful, strong-limbed but flexible.\u00a0 Brilliant in his own way.\u00a0 Max and Ben, they struggle, they are scary, too.\u00a0 Children grow, all of them, no matter what they “have.”<\/p>\n And here’s the thing:\u00a0 People leave.\u00a0 They leave you, in all kinds of ways.\u00a0 I find that now I am increasingly grateful for the ones I still have:\u00a0 children, husband, parents, friends.\u00a0 Life.\u00a0 We never know for how long.\u00a0 We forget, unlike the cavemen or the poor desperate Medieval folk, that we are completely vulnerable organisms.\u00a0 As soon as we know that, once I knew that, I became old, like the boy wizard who read the Book of Knowledge and overnight had a long white beard.\u00a0 I am on the other side, an older mother:\u00a0 aware, all too aware.<\/p>\n The part of me that is wise, though, is not that I know so much.\u00a0 It’s only that I now know it won’t last forever, and whatever it is, I am damned lucky to have it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They never tell you what it’s like because they are still struggling with that realization themselves.\u00a0 Tell you what it’s like?\u00a0 I got my own problems!\u00a0 So we all have to find out.\u00a0 We all do, over time.\u00a0 Maybe autism is your first time.\u00a0 Childbirth itself was the first thing for me that made me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-p9","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1560,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions\/1560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}