Following Elias

Damn Kids

Olive reminds us at dinner, as she does every night now: “Let’s all hold hands!”

We put down our forks, move our plates slightly and reach for each other. “”Ok who starts?” asks Nick.

“Me!” both kids say.

"No me," Olive says and Elias defers.

Olive speaks so softly I have to lean my head towards her to hear. She says something like: “I’m thankful that we are all holding hands and for my whole family, for Mommy and Daddy and me and Elias and Tonsina and for the flowers and the candles and I’m thankful we are all eating dinner, I’m thankful for my yogurt and blueberries and carrots and noodles and that Daddy is eating dinner and Mommy is eating dinner and Lias is eating dinner and I’m eating dinner, ok, I’m done.”

She laughs when she is finished and puts her head down to bite the carrot on her plate, her hands locked in ours.

When it's Elias’s turn he says, “I’m thankful that my Mom is my school counselor.  And that I had a good day at school today.  And for the flowers and the candles and that we are all holding hands.”

Oh, its hard to stay stressed surrounded by such gratitude!

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Or what goes down must come up.

Right?

Eventually...?!?

Happy Fuckin' Friday

Its been a long week.

And its a rum and coke night.

And all you need is for your children to go to sleep; but of course, Elias chooses this night to explode.

To freak out about a broken hoola hoop.

"No its not broken, its not!"

"Bud, its alright."

"No!!!!"

And when you curtail the evening activities for bedtime: "No I don't want to go to bed!"

Swing of the arm. Scratch of my eye lid. (Yet Again.)

Animal grunts and door pounding.

The taking away of privileges. The questioning of how to respond. The desire to pour another drink.

And just when you think you might burst, the release of air.

The stillness after a storm.

The loving little boy who sweetly says, "Mom do you not want to go to bed?"

"I do, I really, really do."

He lets you undress him and pull on his fleece jammies. He follows you to the bathroom where you brush his teeth. Elias still can't spit, so you wash the toothbrush with water and brush his teeth again.

And then, like nothing ever happened, he climbs into bed.

"I love you Bud. Even when you are angry. Even when you make hurtful choices. I always love you."

"Can I tell you what the temperature is?" he asks looking at his bedside thermometer.

"Sure." Forget emotions. For your autistic son, its all about the numbers.

 "Its 6 degrees."

"Burr. That's cold." You rub his head. He looks down at his digital screen. "Alright, Bud, Good night. I love you."

"Good night." he says, never looking up.

And you turn off his light, close the bedroom door, and finally, exhale.

 

Beyond my Control

It doesn’t matter how well you do your job, or how much the children need you, you could be fired at the end of this school year because you haven’t worked for the district as long as other counselors.

Deja Vu?

Yep. 

Here we go again. Budget cuts in the oil-rich state.

And you can say to yourself, don’t think about, stay positive, you didn’t get cut last year, you’ll hold onto the job you love. But if you don’t prepare for losing it, your family’s screwed. You’re the breadwinner. The girl with the graduate degrees, the Master-Master, the only one in the house with a paying job.

And yet you can’t just come home and sulk, or work on your resume, because there is “school” to play with Olive, followed by “doctor”, and you need to sit at her little plastic Dora table and eat a wooden fried egg and carrot.

And then there are pages of numbers in your head, percentages, yards of them, all below normal, not a surprise but always hard to see, Elias portrayed by tests and assessments. You had his three-year eligibility meeting today, where you sit around a table with all your colleagues who work with Elias and review his scores to determine if he still meets the criteria for Special Education.

Which of course he does.

But when your lives are controlled by bureaucracies, you fill in bubbles and hope you don’t get fired at the end of the year.

You sob in your gutted bathroom thinking of all the children you care about at Airport Heights and how you don’t want to be another adult in their lives who just disappears. You swear you will tell them it’s not your choice, you don’t want to go.

(But you know when it comes down to it, you won’t burden them with your story, with the politics of cutting educational support to the bone while demanding more from our teachers-- as if teachers can possibly cure societies woes.

As if teachers have power over poverty, consumerism, abuse, the media, divorce, neglect, wars, suicide, prisons, celebrities, oppression, video games, the death or a parent way too young.)

And yet if you are let go, you know you will hug your students one last time and return home where your own children will force you out of feeling sorry for yourself by their constant need for your presence.

Mom. MOM!  MOMMY!!!!!!

You will get down on your knees and play school, where the student teacher ratio is two to one and no one ever has to fill out any forms. Where after a warm lunch, cooked on site, everyone naps, nestled with their favorite pillow and teddy bear.

You will say to yourself: It was beyond my control, it was beyond my control, it was beyond my control...

Anatomically Incorrect

Olive sits on the tiolet after I finally pick her up and put her there. She whimpers, having not wanted to stop playing, not wanted to take a minute to pee.

She's constanly holding it in, squeezing her legs together, leaking a little, not wanting to stop.

Must. Never. Stop.

"Mommy, I a boy," she says from her perch.

"Really? Like Daddy and Elias?"

"Yeah, and Tonsina."

"I think you're a girl." She's about 60/40 nowadays on whether she's a girl or a boy with her female side coming out more often. I'm a girl like you Mommy, she'll say, and we're both sisters. Not today.

"No, I a boy."

"But you have a vagina, like me." We say it like it is here. No cutsie names.

There was the time, when Olive was a baby, and Elias pointed at her privates and asked, what's that? And I called it her labia and regretted this when a month later he pulled out the term in perfect context.(Could have been worse, I could have said, vulva) Vagina, though not really anatomically correct. nor the prettiest of words, is more the norm.

And well, my boy doesn't need anything else, even the proper name of a body part, to make him stand out.

"No I don't have a gina." Olive shakes her head, all serious and sly.

I reach for some toliet paper. "You don't?"

"No I have two bottoms. Two butts!"

Um...

Happy Friday Everyone!

And now she's 40

Not quite sure how I got this far...

Family photo

(I just wish my Mom and Dad lived closer so we could spend more time together.)

On this Friday night Elias and I fold laundry.

He grabs items out of the basket and hands them to me; but not before holding them close to his face, trying to see what’s in his hands.

“Here’s something fancy.” He hands me a tired white t-shirt I wear to bed.

“Thanks.”

“Is this mine?” He holds a pair of Nick’s work pants.

“Nope those are your Dad’s.” I fold Nick's Carhartts and put them on the top of the couch.

“Is this Olive’s long underwear?” Elias holds my old undies in both hands, stretching them, twirling them around a wrist.

I grab them from him. “I’ll take those.”

"Is this mine?" He holds up another pair of my underwear that mates with one of Nick's grey socks.

I reach my hand to his. "No, not yours." I find a matching sock in the basket and fold their tops together. I place the socks on the top of Nick's pile.

“This is a church shirt.” Elias says too softly for me to hear.

“What?”

He twists the soft top of my pink pajamas. “A church shirt.”

“I’m sorry,” I lean in close. “Say it again.”

“A shirt you’d wear to church, in Palmer, with Grandma and Pop.”

Well, not exactly. A different kind of church.

Happy Friday Everyone!

And Then There Are Moments Like This

Or So It Seems

Elias scratched Olive above her eye tonight. And pulled her hair.  All over whose turn it was to do the USA puzzle next. He just grabbed her face with his almost-man hands, with me only a few feet away sitting alongside them on the floor. I had to grab my son and pull him off her, and then scoop up my crying little girl.

“I’m scared Mommy!”

“I know sweetie, I know.”

Me too.

What if I wasn’t right there? What if he actually got one of his nails in her eye instead of above it? What if...?

Oh these questions could kill me.

Kill. Me.

I walked Olive away from Elias, to her room. I sat down on her bed, her legs straddling my waist as our noses almost touched. “You know Olive, your brother loves you. I’m sorry he doesn’t always use his words and that he sometimes hurts you.”

“Whats this?” Olive grabbed the chord to my Taft sweatshirt and put it in her mouth. She leaned back, pulling it further out one side, already moving on.

Over it.

This is her life. The younger sister of an unpredictably aggressive brother. A big brother who plays near her one moment and hurts her the next. And because it's all she knows, she is less fazed by it than I am.

Or so it seems.

“I wish I didn’t do that,” Elias said to his Dad when they discussed what happened. And this time, I believe him. I believe he felt a tinge of remorse and he wasn’t saying this just because his puzzle was now out of reach.

When I walked out with Olive, I asked him if he had anything to say. He leaned against me and put his arms around my neck. “Sorry Mom.”

“Bud, its OK to be angry with your sister. You can be frustrated and mad. But Elias, look at your hands.” I hold his hands in mine and he looks down. “They are strong. And when you use them to grab or squeeze or hit it hurts. I know you may not think it hurts but it does.” He leans into me again.  “Who do you think you need to say sorry to?”

Olive has been standing behind my back, and she steps forward on cue. She looks right at her brother with a look that says I know I've been wronged and I'm waiting for you to make it right. Elias looks up from the ground, “I’m sorry Olive.”

Me too. And if I could shield you, Sweetie, I would.

But the sweet irony of parenthood, is being utterly responsible for beings that are completely beyond your control.