My pride in my 18 year old son, standing by the sink peeling potatoes, is as brilliant and sharp as my sadness for my 21 year old son, banished from Ned’s stepmother’s kitchen.\u00a0 In the past years both have learned their way around a kitchen:\u00a0 Max from his girlfriend who studies and thinks deeply about the existences of all living things, and Nat from his group home where everyone is expected to pitch in with meals.\u00a0 Max is embraced and pulled into the gravity of family excitement and anticipation, his large, capable hands grabbed and filled with gifts and tasks.\u00a0\u00a0 Nat is a force unto himself, walking with knife-like strides through the family clusters, making his route, a long flat figure eight from living room to dining room to sitting room.\u00a0 The eight should include the kitchen, but this is not allowed.<\/p>\n
I am having a beautiful afternoon, bruised by this one thing.\u00a0 Why is the kitchen welcoming to Max and not to Nat?<\/p>\n
I don’t know why I so often see things as what one has and what the other one does not.\u00a0 I come from a family of four; we were two girls only 19 months apart.\u00a0 Many families do the “X-sister and the Y-sister” thing, convincing themselves that whatever one sibling is, the other one can’t be.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to see things this way because such thinking diminishes both children, actually.\u00a0 Outwardly Max gets to be the ultra-accomplished child, so easy to be around and to love, in contrast to his puzzling older brother.\u00a0 (And I am not even going into the dynamic of the third brother, 12-year-old Ben.\u00a0 Not in this post.)\u00a0 Seems like it’s great to be Max, but what if Max wants to fuck up?\u00a0 Does Max get to be a pill?\u00a0 Does he get to be a gloomy teenager, someone who makes you frown sometimes?\u00a0 What does it feel like to be so easily loved by the world?\u00a0 Is there a downside?\u00a0 Probably not much, but emotions and situations are never simple, never unblemished.\u00a0 I want Max to be able to be ugly if he needs to be.\u00a0 No living person should be beatified.\u00a0 We all need our uncertainties, our flaws, our disabilities and our inabilities.<\/p>\n
I completely understand that we all figure out our ways to make it through life, to navigate our way around the many strange and varied souls we come across.\u00a0 And that this is what was happening yesterday with Max and Nat and the kitchen; it is easier for some to go with the apparent flow of Nat as “out of it” and someone to manage and maintain, rather than to dive into his depths and see what there is to grab onto.\u00a0 I float lightly around him myself at times.\u00a0 But I can’t help it, it hurts, it really does, to see others making assumptions about Nat that are so ignorant.\u00a0 I understand that they don’t reflect Nat’s reality at all.\u00a0 Still, I don’t know what he might feel about being viewed this way.\u00a0 Maybe he doesn’t notice.\u00a0 But what if he does?<\/p>\n
What is cutting into me is that maybe I could have helped with all of this but I did nothing about it.\u00a0 I did not know what to do about it.\u00a0 I wanted to enjoy myself, with Ned’s sister Sarai, and her baby Willie, and everyone else.\u00a0 I did not want to upset anyone or ask awkward questions, like, “What are you afraid is going to happen if Nat wanders into your kitchen?”\u00a0 I did not feel up to being a teacher, and saying, “hey, did you know Nat could help with the potatoes, too?”\u00a0 Or maybe I could have merely shown everyone, taken the Teaching Moment to say, “Nat, please help Max by rinsing off those potatoes.”<\/p>\n
Here’s the crazy-making thing:\u00a0 I also wanted Max to have his star moments of being this great guy helping out.\u00a0 Look how far Max has come; he used to be just like Baby Willie. Blond, beautiful, pink-cheeked, laughing, running, breaking stuff, spilling, proudly telling us the colors and the noises of each animal.\u00a0 Filling up everyone’s hearts with Baby Goodness.<\/p>\n
And so did Nat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My pride in my 18 year old son, standing by the sink peeling potatoes, is as brilliant and sharp as my sadness for my 21 year old son, banished from Ned’s stepmother’s kitchen.\u00a0 In the past years both have learned their way around a kitchen:\u00a0 Max from his girlfriend who studies and thinks deeply about […]<\/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-1844","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-tK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844","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=1844"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1845,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions\/1845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}