Following Elias

Pumpkin Love

Olive draws about twenty different pumpkin faces on separate pieces of paper to prepare for the big evening of pumpkin carving. She helps cover the table with newspaper and sets out bowls for the seeds and guts of the pumpkins. Nick brings out the knives and spoons. I finish the dinner dishes and Elias asks questions.

Why are you putting paper on the table?

Are we carving pumpkins now?

Will we put the seeds in the bowls?

What time is it?

Are we carving pumpkins now?

In years past, the kids drew the faces and then Nick carved them out while I worked on separating the seeds from the pumpkin innards. This year Nick gives the kids the pumpkin knives and let them carve their own faces.

 

Olive chooses one of her drawings and offers her other samples to Elias and Nick for their pumpkins. Nick picks one of Olive's pictures and makes it come to life on our third pumpkin.

"Do you like the heart mouth?" Olive asks.

"I love it."

Olive needs a little help with her squiggly mouth, but otherwise manipulates the tools to carve her own pumpkin.

"Look I did it myself Mom!"

Elias draws two different sized round eyes, a triangle nose, and a lopsided smile. Nick helps him get the little saw-knife in his pumpkin but he does the rest of the cutting of his first eye himself. And his second eye.

And then he just keeps cutting away while the rest of us focus on our own jobs.

"You know why I cut that piece? To let more light in." Elias says.

"Mmm," I answer, without seeing the face of his pumpkin, my hands orange, and my bowl of separated seeds growing more full.

"Is mine scary?" Elias asks.

I look up from my bowl of seeds and slime and lean towards my son.

"Woah, yes, you cut off your pumpkin's face."

Elias laughs and Olive comes over to peek. "It looks like a sitting dog." she says and then points out the head and tail.

I cock my head to the side and say, "Its different. I like it."

And I'm not sure what I love more, that Elias carved his pumpkin all by himself, or that when we lit the candles our boy said, "Didn't mine come out great?"

 

Questions at Bedtime

Olive and I lay in her bed on a school night, and all I want is for her to be asleep, so I can be Christy and not Mom or Ms. Christy, School Counselor.

"Mom, when we grow to be 100 and then we die, do we come back as babies?"

"Wow, that's a big question." Her words gets me out of my head and make me focus on my five-year-old girl, force me to really see her as the person she is and not as an appendage of mine thats keeps calling my name.  

I tell Olive: "I don't know the answer, but I like the idea."

Olive continues: "Yeah, I think we grow and grow and get older and reach 100 then we get young again."

She tells me about a friend's grandmother who is already 100 and not dead yet and I realize she may think its pre-determined for people to live one hundred years, without any understanding of all the myriad ways we can die before a century's end.

And I'm torn between wanting her to hold this image of a hundred given years and wanting to prepare her for the inevitable losses ahead.

"Well, not everyone lives to be 100, Olive, some live longer and some live less. Some people die too young."

"I know," she says, "Even babies can die. Like how Elias almost did. Remember?"

"Yes, I remember."  

Imprinted on my identity as a parent are these words: He's alive but I can't tell you he's going to survive. Like a tattoo inked on my worldview, I still catch myself checking Elias's breath at night, wondering if another stroke is imminent, or if his heart will stop again.

I look into Olive's brown eyes and say, "And I remember how the doctors and nurses saved him."

At times I still imagine Elias dying, eleven long-short years later, and I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if he hadn't been resuscitated.

But I can no longer picture myself as a parent without my NICU initiation.

I don't know the woman I would have been.

"Did I almost die when I was born?" 

"No, Sweetie, you were born full term and healthy."

And I'd love to tell her she will live a hundred years only to die peacefully in her sleep and return as a baby with ten fingers and ten toes. I want to wrap my arms around my girl and protect her from life's losses, encompass her heart with sunshine to shield her from the darkness, and yet I know that it is the act of surviving that which we think we cant that develops our strength of character, enriches our soul, and teaches us compassion for the world. 

I can give her tools, but I can't erase the hardships ahead. This may be one of the hardest lessons of parenthood-- and one forced upon me as I watched the doctors and nurses repeatedly save my son that I couldn't yet hold.

When you almost lose your child, again and again, you lose your sense of control over a world that never planned to incorporate your expectations into its master plan anyways.  We can pray, we can hope, but we can never manipulate all the variables. We just aren't that powerful.

Olive and I talk a little more about her birth and the difference between hers and her brothers, before I lift the blankets and remove myself from my daughter's bed, returning the covers so they nestle solely around her growing frame.

Before I leave her room, I bend down and kiss Olive's forehead, "Goodnight Love. See you in the morning."

"Goodnight Mom, I love you."

May we all wake to another day, with love as our guide, even when it seems inaccessible, like water in periods of drought, especially then, may we holdfast to the promise that our thirst will be quenched again.

The Year Elias Grew

Just look at his shoulders from one school picture to the next. 

Elias 5th Grade:

Elias Grade Six:

That's what happens when you walk like a rower. 

And yes, I can no longer call Elias little.

The Weight We Bear

I wanted to tell you about the bridge.

Not about me kicking a kitchen chair across the room, not about pulling Elias off Olive as she screamed, not about throwing him on the floor when he came at me claws raised, not about the marks he left on Olive's wrist and about the way she said: "Mom, I'm not hurt, I'm just scared."

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, we were getting ready to bring Olive to her Learn to Skate program at the Dimond Mall, my Mom called, before we could even get past hello, I heard Olive scream.

"I gotta go," I said, my words traveling from Alaska to Cape Cod before I hung up and threw the phone on the counter.

Elias's nails dug into Olive's wrist before he grabbed a blue plastic cup from her hands and ran it to the sink.

Turns out she was doing "a trick", turning the cup upside down with a paper-towel over the mouth and Elias thought the container was full. In his concrete world there is no reason for a cup to be upside down over a paper-towel.

My defense was down after weeks of relative calm in our household. Its been awhile since my son has raged.

And what set me over the edge was when I thought he'd settled, that he understood she had a right to her creative endeavors and that it was ok for her to dump an empty cup on a paper-towel, she reached for another square and he leapt from his seat and tackled her to the floor.

This is when I threw him off. And when he came after me claws raised.

"Olive go to our room!"

I pushed him away from me and he came at me again, hitting me in the chest, grabbing at my face and I pushed him down. And in that moment, I understood completely how a parent could hurt a kid. I wanted to retaliate.

So I kicked the chair.

"You can't do that!" he yelled.

"I dont want to do that! You can't hurt your sister! You can't try to hurt me!"

Elias stood up and sat on the bench, a sign he was calming down.

"Bud, I don't want to push you. I don't want to hurt you, but I will defend Olive and myself when you act like that." He looked at the floor, tears in his eyes. I could hear Olive crying in our room.

"I need you to breathe, just sit there and breathe, so I can check on your sister."

No-" I walked away before he could finish.

Olive and I snuggled on the recliner in my room. She looked right at my face--there is so much we communicate without words, our eyes able to reveal our feelings, so different than all my moment of mother and son.

"Mom, I'm not hurt I'm just scared."

"I know, Babe, me too."

"I was just doing a trick-"

"Olive, you weren't doing anything wrong. You can be creative. Its Ok. Your brother just sometimes has a hard time when things are used in different ways."

We talked for a bit more about what happened and what she can do when he gets like this. "I thought I could go to another house. Like Grace's?"

Grace lives two doors down, daughter of dear friends, she's known her since birth, "Yeah, there may be a time when I tell you to run to Grace's house."

She sits up: "Can I now?"

At this I know she's moved on from her brother's assault. "No, we have to get ready to go skate."

When we return to the kitchen and I try to talk with Elias about what happened I only get "I don't know" and "No I didn't" as responses. His lack of ownership for his actions and zero sense of remorse act like sandpaper on my heart, slowly rubbing away at my core.

And we still have to go to hockey, the three of us, as Nick flew to Washington for a conference, when all I want to do is close myself in the room and cry.

And so I do, cry that is, in the driver's seat on the way to the rink; and when we wait for the light at the corner of Northern Lights and the Seward Highway, I catch eyes with a young homeless man. I wonder what he thinks of me, this white woman silently sobbing as her two children sit in the back of our Honda Element. I look at him again and this time he looks away first. And then the light turns green.

I fake it through the rest of the day, giving the kids more screen time than I usually would in the afternoon, opening my first beer a little earlier than normal, and I've almost forgotten the ordeal by the time we all snuggle on the couch to read another Magic Tree House story.

But I need to write about it.

Because this too is what it means to be Elias's mom.

 

This and the bridge.

I doubted that my son would be able to construct one when I learned his class would be building them out of popscycle sticks. Since he struggles to work in groups due to his tendency to grab all the materials and crush works in progress, his T.A worked with him, gluing the sticks together as he made the design decisions.

You can imagine my surprise when I learned that on their field trip to UAA's engineering building, of all the bridges made by the 30 plus kids in his class, typical children without rap sheets of diagnoses, without enough labels to fill the board with hundreds of letters mixed together to spell all kinds of limiting words, Elias's bridge held the most weight for its size.

Elias won the contest.

First place.

And of course kids grumbled: But its not fair he had an adult helping him...

No, Ms. Karen stopped them, he made all the decisions, I was just his hands.

And I want to stand up on the rooftop and shout: Not fair, my ass, everything is harder for him, communication, movement, vision, emotions, breath, and yet look what he did, his god damn bridge won, it held 105 pounds before buckling--that's a lot of fuckin' weight to bear.

"Do you like my triple supports?" Elias asked me the night of the field trip, when we sat his bridge on the kitchen table and admired it.

"I do. Was that your idea?"

I hate that part of me still doesn't believe that Ms. Karen didn't design it for him, just like the kids in his class, I can also see him through a lens of incapable.

Elias takes a long time to answer, as he studies his bridge. "No, I heard Ms. Becker suggest it, so I thought I'd give it a try."

And this, the idea of him listening to his teacher, thrills me even more than if the idea came from his own head. I know he's intelligent, but listening and following directions, whew, those are some lofty goals.

My boy built a bridge in a class of typical kids and it boar the most weight.

No shit.

Of course it did.

 

Tonight, as I added toppings to frozen gluten-free pizza, Olive made dance coupons by cutting up the tag to her new witch hat, coloring the back and writing her name on each piece.

"Mom, when you get one of these you get to go in the other room and dance. Which one do you want?"

I chose a blue colored one and walked back towards the Notre Dame game I'd been watching.

"Mom, go in there," she pointed toward what we call the the romp room instead of the livingroom with the TV.

"Oh, I can dance and watch football," I said, shaking my hips as I leaned against the back of the couch, not really in the mood.

Olive went into the playroom where she blasted Free to Be You and Me and before I knew it, I was dancing around in circles with Olive, singing louder than I normally do:

Mommies are people, people with children
When mommies were little, they used to be girls
Like some of you, but then they grew...

Elias looked up from his ipad, from his latest explorations somewhere in Spokane Washington where his Dad flew, but instead of joining our circle as he often does he chose to return to the more predictable world of google maps. A world he can control, where out here in the real one, all we can do is respond, and hope we choose well.

Hope we bend instead of breaking when the weight multiplies, and that at the end of the day, even the hard ones, we find someway to express it.

What We Find When We Look

Elias gets frustrated if I walk ahead of him on our way to school in the morning. Its ok if Olive does, she can skip or puddle splash in front, but if I dare to stride past his canes he speeds up and starts repeating my name till I slow down. I can walk next to him, but he prefers me behind. 

Following Elias. As always.

When we break trail through the woods up at David's property in Seward, I often grow tired of dawdling behind my son, eager to forge my own path over the fallen trees and through the Devil's Club. When I take the lead he always asks, "Mom, can I go in front of you?"

And well, when you have a child on the autism spectrum, who can meltdown when his world is not as he expects it to be, you pick your battles. So I walk behind my son.

This past weekend we took Friday off from school and drove down on Thursday night. The only problem with this plan was that I wasn't able to follow up with a student who had a hard time on Thursday. One of those kids who I often wish I could take home and show him what love looks like, what peace sounds like, what safety feels like...

He was on my mind as we ventured through the woods on Friday morning.

"Look Mom, a mushroom," Olive points to the ground.

The boy from school, who I carried with me, has been teaching me about mushrooms ever since he shared that his happiest memory was searching for them with his Dad. I told him I wanted to learn more about them so I knew which ones we could harvest. So he brings his Alaska mushroom book to school and often shows me a picture or two at recess.

I pull out my phone and tell Olive: "I'm taking a picture of it."

"There's more over there!"  She says, and so my mushroom documentation begins.

I text a couple pictures to our school nurse with a request to check on our student, and suddenly, the slow pace in the back of my family pack feels perfect, as I scan my surroundings for signs of shrooms.

Its amazing what kids can teach us if we stay open to the possibilities.

Go slow.

Take time to notice our surroundings.

Get down on our knees.

Look up. 

This morning when I met with the boy in my office and we compared my photos with those in his book, he said: "Seeing your mushroom pictures makes me feel happy." 

"Well, it made me feel happy to take him," I told him. "And I owe that to you."

Bread Bones

Fire Island Bakery opened up a new store two doors down from our house last week.

We walk past the small shop in the morning on our way to school. I walk past two more times on my lunch break, and again at the end of the day on our way home.  Often I leave school before Olive, and then return to pick her up from Campfire, which adds two more trips past the smell of warm baked goods.

"Can we stop at the bakery?" Olive asks on our way home from school tonight.

"Not today."

"But I want to Mom."

"I know. I want to take a nap." Olive's hand swings in mine. "And I can't get what I want."

Its been one of those days, you know the ones, when you just want to climb back in bed, pull the covers over your head, and pretend you're young again on a Sunday morning with no plans in sight.

No responsibilities. No awareness. Just your breathe keeping you warm in a cocoon of down and fleece.

"But Moooom, I want to get some bread."

I had a meeting about meetings after school and left a long note on my desk with kids I didn't have time to get to today and need to follow up with tomorrow. "I want to get home and see Elias and your Dad."

"But I'm hungryyyy..."

"Good, we're going home for dinner."

It doesn't help that the friendly bakery owners gave Olive ample servings of free stuff while they worked on getting their shop ready--my girl who told me she was "allergic to gluten-free" who loves carbs, bread, cookies, cupcakes, you name it--or that, at five, the concept of money looks more like Santa Claus mixed with the Tooth Fairy than like sitting at a kitchen table late at night wondering if you'll ever get out of debt.

"But," Olive turns on the tears: "I waaaaant to go to the baaakeryyyyyy..."

I'm not sure which is worse. The sound of her whine or her tears manipulated to get what she wants. Both kill me. Little daggers up my back that make my head turn, shoulders twitch.

Especially on days when there is no break between the end of my day as a school counselor and the start of my evening as Mom, when I carry a backpack overloaded with stories of impoverished children, children who act out, children who grieve, invisible children, children who steal, children who imitate the worst of TV, children who ask for help, children who hand me gifts from their pockets and tell me: Keep it, its yours.

This is why I need to run after school, to release the contents of my work bag before the threshold of home.

If not I feel like my own kids get the tail end of me. The picked over bones with all the best meat carved off by other children. Whittled away as I respond to the behavior of other people's kids.

I hear the tone of my voice when I speak to Elias and Olive sometimes and cringe.

I dont want to be that Mom.

Just as I don't want to spend seven bucks on bread and cookies every day after school.

Ah balance, or the search thereof, the persistent bane of parenthood.