Following Elias

What Is Right Before My Eyes

I don't usually let myself do this.

Imagine if Elias were born full term and healthy. No list of diagnoses. The ability to fully communicate. To walk without the help of canes. To make eye contact. To put on his own socks. To use the toilet.

A boy on the cusp of teen-hood: strong, capable, opinionated, wild--emerging into his own.

I thought about it this weekend, as Nick and I gathered wood from our clearing to heat our cabin, as Olive carried logs to the truck, and Elias leaned on his crutches with a scowl wondering when we were going back inside.

I thought about it as I watched another boy, a year older than my son, help his parents with Thanksgiving dinner, responsible for cooking the turkey, a boy on his way to becoming a man.

I thought about it as I learned this same boy can babysit his kindergarten-age sister, and I flashed to Elias clawing at Olive, screaming: "I want to hurt her!"

What if Elias protected his baby sister instead of trying to maim her? What if he played games with Olive and helped her with homework? I can see them sitting at the table together, Elias helping Olive sound out words, him teasing her in a playful way, the admiration in her big brown eyes.

"Elias doesn't ever have friends over," Olive said to me this weekend and in my imagined world he would invite his buddies to come sledding down our driveway.

And instead of needing a ride up on the snow machine, he'd climb the hill with his muscled legs, laughing with the other boys as they pulled the runner sleds behind them, as they threw snow at each other and elbowed ribs.

I'd worry about the speed of their descent as they rounded the corner towards the s-curve; instead of worrying about leaving my twelve-year-old son alone with his sister and her friends, as they waited for a snow machine ride, and I trudged back up the hill on my own, alone with my "what if" questions, like generals, beckoning me to battle.

The Elias of my imagination would carry his sister on his back, would be adept with our axe to chop wood for the fire, would watch and imitate his father as he built dreams out of lumber, nails, and screws, would explore the woods and mountains and shores by our home on his own, climbing, paddling, hiking further and further each time.

You can see why I don't usually let myself go to this place of imagined alternate realities. The boy in these pictures is not the son born to me.

It does me no good to linger in a state of longing for something or someone else.  Elias can't be that kid; and for all I know that boy might have broken my heart in a thousand unknown ways anyways.

What if instead of holding his Mom's hand as we walked up the driveway, he refused to be seen by my side?  What if he took that s-curve too fast, lost control, donning only the invincibility of youth and he hit a tree head on?  I can hear him saying before the ride: "Mom I don't need to wear my ski helmet for sledding anymore, come on I'm almost 13!" 

So I let go of this mirage of a child I don't know.

All those "what if" questions a deep dark hole that once trapped inside, its hard to find footing, a handhold, to climb back out to the safety of what I know.

What is real. What is right before my eyes.

Picture this:

Elias sledding down the driveway on a purple plastic sled as his mom holds the rope from her matching sled, the two attached like a train, smiling, as he weaves back and forth behind her, until his sled turns backwards, and she lets go of his rope, and he lands in a ditch, lying on his side, laughing, in that full-body way of his that makes her laugh aloud every time.

Regardless of what happened the moment before.

Elias choosing the steeper path to climb up from Spruce Creek, undaunted by the rocks, the boulders, the milestones, in his way.

What is real. What is right before my eyes.

Thankful for...

...the sun that rises, even when I'm sure it will fall and I can't catch the ball of fire, when my only desire is darkness, to sleep beyond morning, a yearning to block out the day, to stay in bed with my tired pillow, my down blanket-- a shield between me and reality.

I see hate snaking out of the shadows, emboldened, like fog, creeping across the valley, seeping into pours, infecting the land between shores, and yet the sun still rises,

and so do I.

The sky changes as I rearrange my mind to see the beams of light coming from every angle, slicing through the gray ghost with the soft edge of truth, of connections between groups, of story, of the beauty that emerges,

even in the darkest of nights.

I'm thankful for the voices of Jewish, Muslim, immigrant, refugee, GLBTQ, Native, disabled, poor, youth, female, elderly, non-white, and more, rays of light, like a web, that keep the great star we all circle from falling.

Found Elevator Poem

While looking through some old poetry files, I found this one I wrote long before I knew Elias or his preoccupation with elevators:

 

Leave Tracks

 

Deep in a peopled forest

I read dead trees to pass the time

its a long river ride to Brooklyn

so I camp in my seat

kick litter leaves

think about dishes washed in a glacier-fed stream

not surrounded by mountains of concrete

northern lights like wildfires

not tunnels or traffic lights

like moonshine

reminding me of midnight skinny dipping--but

that’s not my stop.

 

The city beckons me to her glen

where waterfalls

of prosperity

pin me

down

down

where all trails lead to a mirage of elevators.

*************

 

(Elias and Olive waiting for what Elias likes to call "the weird elevator" at the Fish House in Seward)

I Repeat, Not Our Enemies

The truth is I'm not Ok.

I wake in the mornings and remember the election results and my stomach twists. I feel heavy. I want to stay asleep.

I keep hearing Trump's words:

"I moved on her like a bitch."

Not ok.

"I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."

Not ok.

"Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

And I'm 13 again, intoxicated, locked in a piano room with an older boy who told my friends, "I know how to sober her up."

They pound on the door but he doesn't let me out, not till they threaten to get my big brother Andrew, a popular junior athlete at the boarding school campus.

And its my fault for drinking too much. My fault for being attractive. My fault for being a girl.

Boys will be boys.

Its just locker room talk.

Or as one female Trump supporter said: "My whole life I've heard men talk that way, I mean really, if you are a man and you haven't said comments like this then shame on you."

Shame on you.

But its more than talk.

Its a belief that women's bodies are free for the taking, the property of men, not the domains of our own minds and souls.

A belief that now holds the king's chair of the oval office.

And its literally making me feel sick.

But I am a fortunate one.

I'm white. Married to a white man.

Ancestors of mine came over on the Mayflower, immigrants as well, but according to the alt-right, the right kind of immigrants.

I do not fear racial slurs when I walk out my door. Or worse crimes of hate perpetrated against me and my children. 

I'm not rich but I'm not poor. I fall into the professional class, even if I'm currently not working, I hold multiple post graduate degrees.

I'm heterosexual and my gender identity fits the body I wear, a body without complications, challenges, disabilities, like that of my son.

My son.

I see Trump standing on his podium mocking a reporter with special needs and again I am 13.

Only this time its me who pretends to walk "funny", toes and knees bent in, arms folded out, hands dangling awkward, a voice that is not mine but a mockery of the kids who wait for the short bus, calls to my friends: "Wait for me!"

An older boy pulls me aside, points to a kid I like and says,"Thats not funny, his sister is handicapped."

He tells me later he was kidding but his words worked. I swallowed shame with lunch that day as it dawned on me that the person I mocked could be a sister.

A child.

Mine.

My son Elias.

We are all flawed humans making a mess of this world as we try to navigate time with our limited understanding.

I know I have friends and readers who voted for Donald Trump, and I do not write to judge your decision; I do not disrespect your life experience that brought you to fill in the dot next to his name.

I ask that you denounce the "othering" in our midst, the inability to see the humanity within and beyond peoples differences.

I ask this of Clinton supporters as well, because I know that liberal and progressive does not necessarily mean we see our own privilege or the way bias affects our views.

Yesterday, I had the honor of listening to Teresa Gray, a retired paramedic from Anchorage, as she shared her story of helping Syrian refugees on the shore of Lesbos Island in Greece.

Her pictures and anecdotes brought to life the human catastrophe that, until now, I have been able to push a button and read about something else.

I couldn't look away as I sat in a folding chair surrounded by Seward middle school students who also seemed to take in the photos and words of the volunteer effort to assist the millions of people feeing war-torn Syria.

One student asked, "Why hasn't the Red Cross or the United Nations helped?"

Gray's answer: "I don't know. Except for maybe that their Syrian."

If white christians were fleeing air raids would we respond differently?  And how has the term "Syrian refugee" been used almost simultaneously with  "suicide bomber" to distill fear and misinformation?

The men, women and children walking across Turkey, clinging to the side of a dingy, carrying everything they own on their backs, are not our enemies.

Not our enemies.

I can't turn away from the image of countless broken rubber boats and empty life vests torn on the rocks beneath an ancient lighthouse. All once filled with people who didn't make it to shore.

The knowledge that the Turkish smugglers charge the refugees extra for the life vests, around two hundred US dollars, and yet they are often only orange shells stuffed with newspaper, packing peanuts, baby shoes, that don't even float.

That don't float.

We are world that sells life vests to children that don't float. We are a world that demonizes people without a home. We are a world that looks away.

"They are not refugees they become refugees," Teresa Gray said.

I can't look away.

And I also see the photo of the three Greek grandmothers, or yayas, who spend their evenings knitting tiny hats and slippers and their days rocking Syrian babies in their withered arms, crooning lullabies that, no matter the language, can soothe a child's cry.

This is our world too.

A world in which Greek grandmothers sing to muslim babies, hold their soft brown skin to their wrinkled cheeks and lull them to sleep with love songs that don't require language to understand.

I don't trust the president elect of my country-- but I have to trust there are enough of us willing to put love before hate. Not just with safety pins and signs, pledges and posts, but with active engagement across community lines.

I hope we listen to the stories of marginalized groups and continue to reexamine the ways, as people of privilege, we benefit from the oppression of others.

I may not be Ok-- but I don't think I'm alone.

So I'll listen to the Avett Brother's song "True Sadness" on repeat.

I'll take the dogs for a walk and look into the eyes of anyone I meet.

Look into the eyes of anyone I meet.

“The Talk”

I sit between my two children on the futon, on a Sunday morning, with a book I remember from childhood in my lap. 

A book I remember sneaking out of my father’s den to read with friends, and I wonder now, decades later, how many kids did I teach about sex through the cartoon illustrations in “Where Did I Come From?” 

I remember the sperms dressed in bowties and top hats swimming towards the egg, the pictures of the frumpy husband and wife standing naked as the book described the different aspects of male and female bodies, the page that shows them in bed, the man on top--as if that’s the only way-- the way I felt when I peeked at those pages, a mixture of curiosity, embarrassment, excitement, and dread. 

And now, with my daughter almost seven, my son almost thirteen, but developmentally behind his sister, I plan on opening their minds to the true story of where they come from.

I want them to hear about sex from me and Nick, not from the whispered words of peers at school, not from a google search gone astray, not from a dry curriculum designed to inform with a subtext of fear, and so I ordered this childhood book of mine, with its familiar pictures and words (“Dad got me from the saloon” under an illustration of a baby in a beer mug pinching his father’s big red nose) as a guide to start the discussion.

Nick and I had our own “sex talk” first, mostly thinking of Elias, a middle-schooler now, surrounded by blooming adolescents, with bodies maturing, and minds open to whatever happens to fall into them from social media, television, older siblings, church, conversations overheard, and we realized we needed to have “the talk” with our first born before someone else does and he comes home parroting someone else’s words.

 “Mom, mom, do you know what a pussy is?”

(Oh wait, he might have heard that from me..)

“Its another name for a cat. Your Dad’s allergic. Lets move on…”

At first we didn't think Olive was ready. Too young. Too innocent. And yet the more I contemplated it, especially in the current political time of sexual molestation minimized, of “sex” as a dirty word in the news, I thought, but sex can be innocent too, in the way that anything natural can be, and so why not introduce her to the beauty and science of it while she is young, and save the more complex conversations for another year.

So here we sit, with the secrets of sex awaiting. “This book explains how you both got to be in my tummy,” I say. “Its ok to ask questions as I read.”

Neither of my children appear nervous or worried or embarrassed. 

(Feelings that still linger in me when I attempt to discuss sexuality, along with the feeling of shame— butt-loads of shame that I’ve slowly shoveled over the years.)

And why should they? They don't yet know to be. They haven't absorbed our society’s mixed messages about sex. Use it in every advertisement. Don't talk about it. Men want it. Women embody it. Don't teach children about it. Blame adolescents for getting it wrong.

I begin to read Peter Mayle's words: We wrote this book because we thought you’d like to know exactly where you came from, and how it all happened… 

I turn the pages, adding text of my own when the perspective seems too male.

(Mayle writes: By this time the man wants to get as close to the woman as he can, because he's feeling very loving to her. I add: And she wants to get as close to him as possible because she's feeling very loving to him.) 

My children listen, Nick sits on the edge of the futon, and we only have to clarify that you can’t actually see the sperm, like tadpoles, in the semen without a high-powered microscope, otherwise, when the book closes, Olive returns to her cartwheels and Elias his specific comments about elevators, and the earth never shatters, nor their sense of themselves in the world, just a deeper understanding of a normal part of who we are as people who love, who procreate, who evolve to accept sex as an expression of living.

Good as it is, you just can't do it all day long.

I know more complicated discussions await. I’m just happy we started the conversation. And if Olive ever sneaks the book from the shelf to show her friends, I hope their parents will forgive me.

Supported by a Community of Readers and Writers

Last night I had the honor of participating in a reading at an incredible local restaurant, The Cookery, hosted by an Anchorage-based journal called Cirque.

Nothing like stories and poetry to distract one from politics.

We each had five-minutes to share and I chose two short pieces, one of which took on new meaning as I practiced reading it the day after the election.

It was originally a post on my first blog, From the Moutain Top to the Valley Floor, that I revised for the night.

Here is what I read:

Um…

Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank screen, a white page, with so much to say you can't start?

Or do you halter start? Write and delete. No that's not quite it. Not right. Not what I meant. Delete. Write.

Or do you find yourself wondering why you're even writing in the first place? I mean, what’s so important you just had to say it? 

And who are you talking to anyways? 

Every English teacher will tell you you need to know your audience to frame your words, but what if the person you write for was cut from your womb, four months too soon, and you write to discover where you end and he begins?

You write to know. You write to feel. You write to remember. You write to let go. 

You write to navigate this bramble called life, thick with Alders, Devil’s Club and fallen Hemlock. 

And you write to hold hands in the dark with people who get it. Who understand that grief, when spoken, allows your lungs to release trapped air, and only then can you smell the honeysuckle, low tide, the slice of an onion sauted just right.

You reach your arms across the Atlantic of your youth, Harding Ice field of your present, to graze the fingertips, the heartbeat, the breath of another. 

Till you find yourself writing to more than your son, but to people who, whether they are parents or not, understand that unconditional love does not mean constant lullabies, but also the muffled sound of sobs in a pillow late at night. 

It means waking at midnight, 2:00, 4:00, to bring a crying, sucking, needing barnacle to bed.

It means folding yourself into the soft milk-stained curves of response to others, stretching, until the shape of you shifts into another. 

It means restraining, gently or not, a tornado of a boy hellbent on hurting his baby sister.  

It means swallowing your seasoned dreams of family, so you can carve the rare meat served to your particular plate of parenthood.

It means forgetting to eat while trying to convince your two appendages to take another bite. 

It means the earth opens and swallows you whole, you shatter, but not endlessly, till you crawl from the dark throat, reconstructed, with increased compassion in your light sensitive eyes. 

It means fear. 

It means the loss of fear.

It means the permanent loss of the false sense of freedom this country wears like a sword. 

The revelation there is no island.

No on your own.

So you write.

*************

And I look towards the mountains for the strength to persevere.

 

Love to all the readers and writers of the world. The artists, poets, and beauty seekers.

Keep on, keeping on...

The Day After the Election

The sky cries with me.

"Its OK Mom," Olive says this morning, when I tell her Trump won. "Hillary Clinton can always try again."

How do I tell my six-year-old daughter that my sorrow is not just about Hillary's loss, or a political election between too broken parties, but about the rise of mysogony, racism, xenophobia, narcissism to a leather swivel chair in the oval office, complete with a gold pen for limiting the rights of just about everyone without a surname of Trump. The male ones that is.

We will be kinder, stronger, more brave, I tell my children, as we eat breakfast without the background chatter of NPR, like usual, a decision Nick and I made the night before when we looked at each other and knew: The kids will be scared too.

We listen to music on the dark drive to school, avoiding the potholes and rocks from a recent slide on Lowell Point road which snakes around Resurrection Bay on its way to town, all four of us silent, even Elias, who seems to understand we aren't in the mood for questions.

Nick and I choose not to go to a coffee shop for work, not ready to overhear political discussions at Rez Art, we return to our quiet cabin, with the fire we neglected to light in our early morning stumble, where I rebuff my blankets' lure, the calling of a pillow over my head to muffle sobs, and agree to take the dogs for a short walk on the beach before we sit down with our computers to work.

We weave through the alders in our backyard, cut through the woods of Miller's and Silver Derby campgrounds towards the smell of salt air. 

As Tonsina and Lola run across Spruce Creek towards the incoming tide Nick says, "I'd kind like to be a dog."

Yes please.

Turn me into a mountain goat, an orca whale, a sea star, a muscle.

One of the thousands of jellyfish, at the end of their life cycle, that have been floating to shore for weeks, dying in mass, the way salmon do, a collective last gasp, before bodies that glisten in the sun become earth again.

To be the kelp at my feet, to not worry, to not anticipate, to not question.

The eiders, crows, and gulls flee from our pups who run after them, purely engaged in the chase, the feeling of paws on stones, black sand, the salted water of the Pacific.

Two seals emerge about twenty feet out from the sand bar where Nick and I stand, four sets of eyes looking back at ours, as we look out towards theirs, curious, breathing, as the day after unfolds.

When the news of our new president came to our cabin in the woods, the sobs just fell out of me, like a waterfall, an unexpected deluge of sorrow, of fear, for the next four years.

To be kinder, stronger, more brave, I first need to let myself grieve.

So we return home, and I wrap myself in blankets, and I turn off my phone, and return to "Blue Iris", a book of poems and essays by Mary Oliver.

I read and reread her words:

"Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them the daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen... Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion." --Mary Oliver from Upstream

Living here, at the end of the road, where pavement turns to gravel, which leads to a foot trail, beneath the Kenai mountains, along Resurrection Bay, its easy to turn my attention to to the green world of moss and ferns.

To lose myself in the broken shards of seashells and the way an eagle soars.

To show my children tidal pools, climbable spruce, squirrel nests with their mysterious tunnels underfoot.

How to connect all the country's children to our living home?

How to replace fear and hate with an understanding we are all connected by the verdant thread of breath, by trees, by the water that rolls down my windowpanes, my cheeks, as my dogs lay, unquestioning, by my feet?

There is work to do-- so much real, hard, life affirming work to do.

Brick Red, Wisteria, Wild Blue Yonder...

Elias sits at the kitchen table, watching a YouTube channel hosted by a man who takes videos of elevators in hotels and office buildings.

(If I could assume, I'd say he's on the spectrum too.)

Elias now knows the different sounds of Dover and Schindler dings. He can tell if an Otis elevator is a Series One from the shape of the buttons. He refers to "classic Otis leveling" when we reach our chosen floor and looks to find the carrying capacity posted inside.

He has taught us about less known names like Kone and Thyssenkrupp, laughing uncontrollably at his Dad when Nick mispronounced the second name in a short iPhone video he sent to us from Anchorage-- Elias's giggles infecting me, till both our eyes watered, mine for the pure sight of Elias's unabashed joy.

Elias smiles to himself at something the YouTube host says, his head bent close to the screen, absorbed in a world of silver boxes that rise.

Olive sits next to him, cutting out an indigo butterfly she drew on a piece of white printer paper. "Mom, I'm not going to use my iPad all this year. Can I sell it?"

I smile at the contrast between my kids. Olive an endless aquamarine pool of imagination and action; Elias a fern and dandelion sponge for information, no detail too specific for his file cabinet mind.

While reading The Night of the Dragon, #55 in the Magic Tree House series, Jack or Annie referred to a past adventure that I couldn't recall, despite feeling as though I've read all the Treehouse books to my son over the past five years, as he resists a new collection of books, the repetition and predictability of a return to the Frog Creek woods a comfort to Elias in this chaotic world that is not in number order.

"I don't remember that one," I said.

And without a pause, without even looking up from the page, Elias said: "Its number 14. After the volcano and before the earthquake."

I just looked at my boy, awed by his numerical memory.

He later corrected himself and told me that "Viking Ship at Sunrise" was actually number fifteen and the earthquake story came later.

And I forget where I put my burnt orange coffee cup almost every morning, the names of my old teachers, my license plate number, the face of someone I've met-- files scattered across the sepia floor of my mind, unretrievable, especially when called.

And then there's Olive, whose creative impulses turn our cabin upside down, the living room a stage, kitchen table an art studio, her bedroom a tumble of stuffed animals, papers, and clothes, with no structure to the heap, no empty space on the floor, no map, no boxes, no lines.

No wonder my children clash.

No wonder a four-wheeler tied to a trailer left on the top rung of the ladder can turn a playground into a battle field. A sweet boy into an unthinking storm of fury and will. A strong girl into the hunted, seeking somewhere safe to hide.

Me in the middle wanting to rewind.

But time only moves forward, not back, each second adding to the space between. Between events, between memories, between night and the goldenrod dawn of a new day.

When Olive doesn't feel tired at bedtime, we let her keep her light on and draw. She often fills multiple pages in her sketch book before falling asleep next to her box of crayons-- sea green, periwinkle, mahogany, tumbleweed, sunglow, robin egg blue -- that tip and scatter across her lavender flowered sheets. 

Last night, after an easy Sunday, that included a walk in the woods of our new home, through a "Devil's Club jungle," over fallen Spruce, along a mossy bank, into a new part of the verdant forest, with Olive moving with ease as the leader, me in the middle assisting Elias as he worked twice as hard to navigate the bramble, with a body that doesn't receive clear directions from his brain, after we successfully returned to our clearing without injury or mishap, without tears or anger, after both children ate their plates clean and showered and lay their contrary heads on separate soft pillows, after Nick and I stayed up talking and connecting the way husbands and wives can, we found this picture on Olive's chest... 

the word "love" written in violet, broken in two, within the square lines of the skateboarder's shirt, her arms spread wide, as the canary sun clearly shines over the magenta mountains and shamrock trees that, without question, rise.

 

The Monster Within

Sometime during the eighth inning, when Ohio and Cleveland fans sat at the edge of their seats, I stood on the precipice of hurting my twelve-year-old son, my body between him and his target, my daughter Olive, half her brother's age, as he clawed his way towards her growling: "I'm gonna get her!"

"Go downstairs Olive. Now!" Which in our cabin means climb down a hand-built steep ladder, with the rungs too far apart. As I looked back to make sure she made it safely, Elias swung and slapped me hard in the face with a hand that is now more muscled than my own.

It took every ounce of motherhood not to swing my arm back at my child.

"Elias, that hurt!"

I could hear Olive crying on the ladder, still watching, not able to pull her eyes away from the beast, as Elias swung at me again, as I deflected his assault, as he fell to the ground-- and in other homes friends and family gathered around the television cheering on a batter: Come on, hit it, hit that ball!

Nick was in town at a fly-tying event, hosted by local fishing guides, a chance to connect with like-minded folk, and I wanted him to have an evening without a text or phone call saying: "Come home now!"

I never expected this to be my life.  

Never hit by my own parents, never saw them hurt each other, never assaulted by a partner, slapped in the face by my son. Who knew I would be attacked by my own pre-teen child because his kid sister reclaimed a toy car he didn't play with from the give-away box and tied it to her plastic trailer.

But this is my life.

I could see it in his eyes as he struggled to untie the little four-wheeler, the storm cloud brewing, blighting the sunshine of moments before, when we played throw-Olive's-stuffed-animals-up-to-the-loft and my boy laughed and bounced and clapped his hands. "Are there more?" he asked.

As he sat on the floor, frustration mounting, determined to pull the vehicles apart that were never meant to be connected, as Olive whined about her toys, my zen-mama failed to emerge, and instead of humor or redirection, I said in my oh-so-adult voice: "Elias if you don't change your attitude the piece of Halloween candy is coming out of your lunch bag."

I know, call me Mother Dearest, how dare I threaten to take away his damn Dots.

Let the eruption begin.

Bring on the hurricane.

Claws get ready to rake skin.

I've been here before. The boundary line struggling to contain Elias's wrath. A moving wall between siblings, punctured by fingernails.

"Mom stop pushing me. You can't push me." Elias said, as I grabbed his hands from my face, my neck, my hair.

"I'm not pushing you Elias, I'm defending myself and your sister. I will not let you hurt her."

In these moments, it doesn't matter what I say. My boy no longer resides in his frontal lobe, he falls through the crevasse of emotion to his brain stem, where his monster mind tells him: FIGHT!

And I too can teeter on that ledge, falling back into anger, I screamed at my son: "Stop hurting me!"

I yelled louder than I've ever yelled as an adult, and not a child full of my own fury, but my raised voice only scared Olive more and didn't stop the beast from swinging his muscled arms in my direction. So I hauled myself out of the dark primitive tunnel and returned to a thinking place where I remembered the words of a dearly respected colleague.

"Elias, you know what Mrs. Justus told me? She said I could call the police when you act like this. Its called assault."

And whether it was Mrs. Justus's name spoken in the town of Seward, over a hundred miles from Anchorage, or the mention of the police, my boy emerged from the place he goes when I can't reach him. That dark hole where his injured nervous system explodes, the alarm bells clanging in unison, where he is more savage than civilized. 

He sat on the ground wiping his tears and I walked over to Olive and wrapped her in my arms: "I'm sorry you heard me yell like that."

"I don't like it when Elias acts like that Mommy."

"Either do I. Either does he."

The air in the cabin felt thick with adrenaline, exertion, and the the heat of the wood stove. "It's hot in here," I said, as I opened the cabin door.

Elias laughed, more of an exhale than humor, and said, "Yeah, it is."

Olive and I left Elias sitting by the fire, with his thoughts I'll never know, and climbed back up the ladder to the loft.

I apologized again for yelling and told her I was hoping to snap him out of it by doing so-- and yet I know I was all emotion in that moment, no logic.

"Like when you opened the door and said it was hot, that made him laugh."

"Yes, like that, that actually worked." Thank goodness for heat and for my body needing air.

Olive and I spent almost an hour safety planning. I showed her how to make an emergency call on my phone. She drew a a map of Lowell Point for the police. We came up with a code word we can text to a friend and neighbor which would mean come pick  Olive up now. We talked about taking a self defense class together.

I made sure she knew I'm not trying to hurt Elias when I appear to throw him on the ground, just deflecting him from hurting me, his impaired balance often helps with the fall. I could see the light returning to her eyes and she told me about her map and chose an emoji to go with her secret code.

She asked if I'd tell Dad, and I told her I would, and she can too and she can talk to other people about it, as I know I'll write about it, as this is how I cope, how I make meaning out of mayhem.

"Mom, are you still going to take the treat out of his lunch?" she asked.

With no walls between us and her brother, only height, I put my finger to my lips and nodded, not wanting the mere mention of candy to poke the bear.

As the World Series paused for a rain delay, the game tied in the tenth inning, I sat between my children reading a book of Olive's choosing, and Elias reached for my arm, pulled it to him so he could see the blood marks better.

I paused and looked at him as he studied the scratches.

"I did that," he said.

"Yes, you did. How do you feel about doing that?"

He let go of my arm and put his hands in his lap, rolling them across each other, head down, eyes lost to me. "I feel bad."

"Thanks for saying that. I feel bad too."

And I think what is harder to bare than the scratches, the red cheek, is the not knowing when he'll sink into that swamp again, the way I can't fully breathe, even when the sun shines within our home, when my children's laughter fills the cabin, when everything appears just right, because the monster lurks in the closet, under the bed, the monster that lives within our own evolving heads.

And I understand how it feels to love someone who can be violent. And to want them to change.  And to believe they can. And to act as though nothing happened after the tornado destroys the calm day, because the mere mention of the fury may make it return.

And I can't just leave, as people often say to victims of domestic violence, as if that is an easy option for anyone. But impossible when the person who strikes out at his family is my dependent son. My heart outside of me, derailing the tranquility, erupting into splinters, as I try to hold the pieces in place.

And I can hear the voice that says put him away. A home. An institution. But this voice doesn't see all the hours in-between aggressive meltdowns, the days I don't write about, when our family is as close to normal as I know.

This voice doesn't know that Elias holding my scratched arm and saying, "I did that," shows a level of understanding not there months ago, progress, hope: the string that leads me from the dark recess of my mind to an overlook... 

 ...where light filters through the cracks, where the prospect of evolution rises like dawn.