Following Elias

We Too Shall Rise

Or the Start of a Letter I won't Send

Dear Elias,

I am late in writing your birthday letter.  I keep putting it off because 12 is not easy, it comes with mood swings and hormones and upheaval and unrest-- and I find myself looking at you as a different kind of being than the little boy I once held to my breast.

Who is this child with hands larger than mine? This boy who can eat four salmon salad tacos for breakfast and still have room for salami and toast. Who says thank you without prompting one moment, and smacks me in the gut the next.

Elias, I write about you often, and lately my posts have been more brick than air. More hurricane, less rainbow.

And yet despite the weight and the wind, I won't stop loving you.

Not now. Not ever.

You should just send him away, someone essentially told me through Facebook. Stop feeling guilty and show some compassion for yourself and your daughter.

And oh, Elias, how her words worked their way under my skin, into my nerves, through my veins, and settled in the chambers of my heart, only to make me want you here in our home to the tenth degree times all the questions you have ever asked multiplied by the number of times I have said your name.

The morning after I read those words, you sat on the bench, brow furrowed, saying, 'I don't want to go to school today."

And I embraced your resistance with the patience of a thousand elephants, for I saw you not in the light of stormy weather, but as this miraculous almost teenage boy finding his way in a world that will never be easy.

And yet here you are, rising in the morning, all on your own, to start another day.

Even though its hard.

 And I too shall rise.

Happy Friday

(Olive and her buddy Grace making their way along the trail.)

So Here We Are

Please tell me I'm not the only parent who (at times) dislikes their own child.

I love Elias.

But I don't really like him right now.

Not when he has our family on high alert for a possible explosion. Over a Leggo piece on the floor that his sister Olive dares to pick up for him.

Or a new thermometer that Olive attempts to open and he wants the torn pieces of cardboard from the package back on RIGHT NOW!

Man hands swinging, claws out.

"Mom," Olive says to me after an especially aggressive episode, "I wish we had a different brother who wasn't born so early."

They refer to kids like Olive, without special needs or disabilities, as typical-- but how normal is it to live with an older brother who is part invalid, part charmer, part terrorist, part companion, part stalker, part audience, part mystery, part grenade, part comedian, part Jekyll, part Hyde, and part of our hearts.

Olive's life is anything but typical.

"It's always going to be hard," Nick told Olive tonight, after she fled from the kitchen and her brother's rage, and sat scrunched on the blankets stuffed between her bed and the wall, with tears in her eyes, trying to explain that she was just trying to show Elias how to fix his Leggo plane when he grabbed her arm and pulled it really hard.

Its always going to be hard.

This we know.

I live in my own heart of hardness, my bricks of worry, my stones of what might have been; I get so lost within my own walls that I forget to see my daughters view, from her own barricade, of this family we call home.

And then what about Elias?

How is it for him to have his little sister, six years younger, half his age, telling him he's doing it wrong--that's not how the piece goes, here let me show you, let me do it-- see how easily my hands and eyes follow my brain's commands.

No wonder he sometimes just wants to squeeze and yell and hit and kick and hurt the people he loves the most.

I can't imagine what it would feel like to be unable to control my own body, and to fully understand that I can't, but be unable to express how that makes me feel.

Trapped.

A lion in a cage.

No wonder he roars.

Believe me, if I could have kept him in my womb for that third trimester, I would have bargained with the devil to do so. I would have laid on my left side for another sixteen weeks and given up my freedom of movement for the health of my boy.

No soccer, no running, no stretching, no dancing, no foreplay, no sex, no movement.

A mattress my only arena, like the lion, my space limited to a box for days on end-- but I can't go back.

This is it.

My life.

Olive can't have another brother.

Elias can't have a body that listens to his brain.

So here we are.

Un-likeable-- and in love.

"I don't know," Elias's stock answer these days, like an eye-roll, a turning away from conversation, from connection, from childhood, my boy whose hands have finally outgrown mine.

"I love you Bud," I say every night, with my hand on the doorknob as I reach for the lights.

The Other Tooth

As I reach for Elias's covers, I spy a small white object on his bed.

"Elias, did you just lose a tooth?"

"No."

I hold one of his baby molars in my hand and ask, "Did you lose it this morning?"

"No."

"Last night?"

"No." He lies down and waits for me to cover his skinny frame with the seven blankets he keeps in his loft bed. I figure he's in one of his "no--moods" where no matter what I ask those two small letters will rise from his mind to mine.

No.

"I lost it on Monday."

 "Monday? Its Thursday Bud. You lost it Monday?"

"Yep."

"And you didn't tell me? Let me see." He opened his mouth and sure enough I see a space where one of his back right premolars once stood.

No running to tell Mom.

No casual mention at breakfast Monday morning: Hey look Mom I lost a tooth.

Nothing. Not a word.

"Well, do you want to put it under your pillow for the tooth fairy?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"That's creepy."

He has a point. What does the tooth fairy do with all those millions of baby teeth collected over the years? Has she built a small city out of pearly whites? Constructed a ladder to the heavens from the decaying teeth of children long gone? Circled the world with tracks made from porcelain veneers? Filled the sky with stars made from molars, canines, and incisors polished till they shine?

Creepy is right, and I don't blame my concrete logical son for not wanting his yellowing molar to lay underneath his head for the night.

So I let go of the myth, and kiss my boy goodnight.

How often must we let go?

Is this our lesson to relive and relive, like a Ground Hog day of epiphanies hammering us in the head every time we grip too hard. When we dare act as if we know the script, as if our memorized lines will carry us through this play called life the curtain rod falls on our noggin, knocking us to the floor.

Elias is changing as I sleep.

Olive grows older with each breath.

I can't keep them in any known form, like dough molded in the pan, they are more like mist, shape-shifting with the North and South winds of biology and experience, the East and West winds of nature and nurture.

They are beyond my influence, beyond my control.

Like many girls her age, Olive loves to sing, "Let it go...let it go..."

She butchers the other lines of the song as she emulates the characters from Frozen.

"Mom come look!" Olive yanks on my arm, pulling me down the grocery store aisle to the yogurt, band aids, and cereal with Anna and Elsa plastered across the packaging.

"We don't need those Olive." My standard response.

But what makes her think we do? What is it about princesses and marketing that captures our girls?

"Mom, when can I get high heels?" She's been asking me lately, even though I don't own any except the bright blue ones I wore under my Mom's wedding dress, which have not graced my feet since 2003.

Olive's six. What am I going to do when she's 13?

And god help me if she's anything like me!

And then there's Elias.

Who will he become as he enters adolescence?

As an adult? Where will he be?

Last week his class participated in a pine car derby. With the track set up in the hallway right in front of my office, I couldn't help but join the 62 kids cheering on the handmade cars as they raced along the track. Ms. Karen helped Elias make his car-- you could claim that as advantage, or you could see it as par for the course considering the challenges Elias faces just to participate. And besides,  Elias wasn't the only student who asked for assistance in the design and creation of his wooden race car.

And guess who won?

You got it, my boy:

You just never know what to expect do you? We can't pre-write the story.

All we can do is drop our preconceived notions and go along for ride-- as we teeter between holding on and letting go.