I can’t seem to get to Nat lately.\u00a0 It feels kind of blurred and rough around the edges whenever I focus on him.\u00a0 He is like a big anxious bird, hopping along ahead of me, his new haircut all rumpled like golden fluttery feathers because he never brushes his hair.\u00a0 Easily startled, like when my dear friend Jody recognized us downtown.\u00a0 “Hi Nat!\u00a0 I haven’t seen you in a long time,” she said, so happy to have run into us.\u00a0 I said, “Nat, say hi to Jody!”<\/p>\n
He wrenched his neck up, like a great ostrich lifting his head from the sand, and, eyes stretched wide open, said, “Hi Jo-ey.” The effort to go public — for him, not me — is painfully obvious during phases like this.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n
This kind of weekend prompts a great deal of sadness in me when he goes back to the House on these Sunday afternoons.\u00a0 When I can’t quite connect to Nat, I can’t help but feel like I’ve failed one of the most important goals in my life. People tell me, when they sense I am too overprotective, that I am not him.\u00a0 But when you have a child who exists in the world in an apparently very different kind of consciousness, or at least a very private space, from others, it is hard to know where his edges are.\u00a0 It is hard to know when he ends and you begin.<\/p>\n
I hate it when people tell me I’ve got to let go.\u00a0 Even the kind ones say it to me.\u00a0 F off, all of you, you just don’t know what I know.\u00a0 All of Nat’s life I have been so afraid of not standing next to him, or these days, behind him, as he walks through the crowded streets.\u00a0 When they first told me I had to send him off to a preschool, I rebelled inside.\u00a0 I couldn’t believe that was the thing to do!\u00a0 Rip a little boy from the comfort of his mommy, a boy who did not like being in new places, around new people?\u00a0 Why wasn’t the answer something like, “You have to hold him even more!\u00a0 More hugs!\u00a0 You’re doing it just right, now you have to do it even more.”<\/p>\n
Well, there was no boy who was hugged more than Nat.\u00a0 This was one Refrigerator who was constantly overheated.\u00a0 You could have said I was a Furnace Mother, for sure.\u00a0 But all my hugs weren’t doing any good.\u00a0 He was still so anxious, overly alert one moment and clouded in cotton another.<\/p>\n
I learned, after his success in school, that my instincts are not always right.\u00a0 That’s the problem with instinct.\u00a0 It feels<\/em> right, it comes right from the center of your being:\u00a0 your gut.\u00a0 But we are not just gut.\u00a0 We have minds that inform us.\u00a0 And outside of our minds, are other people’s minds who might know even more than us. The problem is, that the best course of action is sometimes a bit of both, or 20% one, 80% the other, or 32% one, 68% the other — and so it is nearly impossible to get it right.\u00a0 We only know by looking backwards, after it’s over.<\/p>\n