For a lot of today I was walking around feeling a little like my skin hurt–that’s how bad I felt about Nat’s situation. I called my Mom after I dropped him off this morning and I was barely coherent. I could not figure out why I felt so bad, and I was pausing a lot while talking to her. I know she was getting pretty worried.<\/p>\n
So what was it that had set me off? I think it had something to do with our arrival this morning. We were waiting outside the building because we were early. Two clients, a young man and a young woman got out of a van and were so excited to see me. They had that look that many have in Nat’s circles: stained buck teeth, pimples, fat. But their faces lit up when they saw me — and they didn’t even know who I was. They asked who I was; they shook my hand. The young woman kept saying it was time to go in, but the staff person did not want her to come early. But he did let Nat and me in, which was odd. I told myself not to read into it. I went around smiling and shaking hands with clients and staff, and tried to remember names. I wanted to ask question after question: what does Nat do during the day? Are there forks and salt or does he have to bring it? What is he like there? Do people understand him?<\/p>\n
I got some answers but I felt so many more questions filling me up, but it was too much and so nothing valuable came out. I kept hearing my thoughts:\u00a0 this is so familiar, so familiar.<\/em> Same phlegmy and raw stuff in my throat, dry pain behind my eyes, making my forehead wrinkle. It’s that deja vu of leaving Nat somewhere kind of drab; kind of ugly, leaving with a cloud of uncertainty. The thought Institution sucking out my soul like a Dementor. Like The House at school, like school itself. When back then what I thought I wanted was for him to just be with me, my boy in a bubble.<\/p>\n I think what I wanted, and what I’ve wanted all along was to fix Nat’s life. I see myself as a powerful, capable, bright person. Time and energy on my side, a beautiful husband at my side. Why can’t I create something better than this?<\/p>\n So those thoughts were taking bites out of my insides most of the day. Sometimes while I was riding they cleared away and I healed a little. The Beethoven helped. And the sweet, sweet creamy coffee. I also made myself grade a lot of papers, to make me feel like a Woman With A Purpose, rather than just a watery blob.<\/p>\n I dropped Ben at an appointment and sat in my car with more papers to grade but I didn’t. I cried a lot, so much that my tissues disintegrated. I let it evaporate and went to get Ben, grateful for the dark in the car so he wouldn’t see. In the house, I lay on the couch like a sloth and talked to Ned about what dinner should be. I’m not sure when it was in the conversation but at some point he said, “You know, Sue, that room they’re in? The whole thing; it’s a lot like social group, you know, at the Eliot Center? A lot of guys running around, a kind of dingy old room, some are chatting, Nat’s walking all over the place, and they’re maybe painting pumpkins. This is at least as good as that.”<\/p>\n Social group! Yes. Oh my God, yes.<\/p>\n Sometimes you’re just looking at something and not seeing it at all, like those optical illusion paintings, where first you see the vase in the center and then you look again and you see the two profiles on either side of it. Once you see that you can never not see it again. Here I’ve been telling Nat that DayProgram is work.\u00a0 Or that it’s like school, kind of.\u00a0 He tried calling it New School once, but that didn’t stick. That wasn’t it, and both he and I knew it. The thing is, it’s not school. It is much more like social group which we all know is Nat’s absolute favorite place to be.<\/p>\n With that new paradigm in place, I found the energy to get off the couch and start pulling out leftovers and salad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a lot of today I was walking around feeling a little like my skin hurt–that’s how bad I felt about Nat’s situation. I called my Mom after I dropped him off this morning and I was barely coherent. I could not figure out why I felt so bad, and I was pausing a lot […]<\/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-2231","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-zZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231","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=2231"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2237,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions\/2237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}