by Kristen -

Somebody That I Used to Know

Daniel58

Evidently I’ve been seeing myself all wrong.

This was made clear two days after my last birthday, as I stood checking my phone for emails while waiting in line at the post office.  There, a woman about ten years older than me swept in and called out cheerily, “I just love seeing seniors using cell phones!”

I received this news better than you might expect.  Too dumbfounded to take offense, I replied mildly that I had indeed entered official seniorhood just that week, but still thought of myself as young, hardly a grown-up at all.

“You know,” I continued, leaning forward confidentially, “besides using a cell phone, I still listen to rock and roll!”  I cocked a sly brow.  “And Eminem is, like, totally awesome!”

I’m afraid my hipness failed to register, but at least the woman next in line got a chuckle from my response.

That encounter made me wonder, though, if the self-image I’ve carried for years bears any resemblance to how others see me. My son’s recent move to a new living situation has me wondering, too, what impression I’m making on his care team, a vulnerability I didn’t anticipate after years of these transitions.

His case manager has advised us to expect a change in our relationship with Daniel, as he responds to a more challenging, stimulating environment, and we give up our roles as day-to-day caregivers.  We’ll gain freedom to enjoy more satisfying interactions, and be part of our son’s life on a deeper, more meaningful level.

“Your relationship won’t be better or worse,” Aaron has said a number of times, “just different.”

It’s a spiel I imagine him giving all the newbie parents letting go of children whose needs have so dramatically shaped their lives. For our children’s development to be successful, we parents must adjust just as they are doing.  It seems to be Aaron’s gentle way of telling us to back off now, and let them do their jobs, so our children can flourish in adulthood.

Yet I fear sometimes that his parental pep talk is aimed specifically at me, that he senses my longing to reclaim the boy I relinquished to residential care over seven years ago.  I imagine Aaron watching me, wary that I’ll sabotage Daniel’s progress through my neediness, my grief at having lost him once already, a grief that has never fully healed.

Does he see a woman clinging to an ideal already gone, the boy Daniel still was to me when he left home?  Back when I was the one who knew him best, the person he needed most, the one he sought, in his singular fashion, to comfort him?

Does he see a mother, whose son has spent nearly a third of his life away from home, pining blindly for the day he’ll come back? A mother threatened by her son’s move toward maturity, who fears losing more than she’s already lost?

As Daniel transitions into a new life, and the future I want for him actually seems possible, my relationship with him feels more tenuous than ever, and I know I am that woman, whether Aaron sees me this way or not.

It’s taken me the two months since his move to acknowledge that my relief and joy at Daniel’s encouraging start is tempered by an ache for the days when he was truly mine, before autism tore us apart; when his days began and ended with my voice, my touch, my assurances of a love that would last forever.  I recognize that a part of me has been waiting seven years to get him back, even as I’ve known this will never be so.  The son I once knew is gone for good.

I want to assure Aaron that he needn’t worry, that I’m an old hand at this:  I know all about letting go, the wrenching loss of doing what is best for my son.  And I know, too, the blessed, coveted freedom from the demands of caring for him, the opportunity to breathe again, to have my life again as my own.  I know that freedom, and I know its cost.

It is the gradual unraveling of our relationship, the fabric of our lives worn thin by time, by distance, by the insidious disorder that brought us to this place.  It is clutching the frayed edges of a bond that in all its mystery was once close and touchable, woven thick and warm and comforting through years of ordinary, intimate moments spent together, routines we made uniquely our own.

It is the recognition that in many ways my son is now a stranger, that mere visits couldn’t fully bridge the gulf between us as Daniel grew from child to young adult, miles away from home.  It is the sense that the best days with my son ended seven years ago; it is fearing that the lyrics of the Gotye song I so often listened to on my drives home from Wisconsin now apply to my own child:  Now you’re just somebody that I used to know.

Maybe Aaron sees me as a mother desperate for a time gone by.  He wouldn’t be wholly wrong.

But I am also a mother who has transitioned along with her son for over 20 years, a mother able to do so again.  I’m a mother profoundly grateful for this fresh chance, willing to learn a new way of connecting with my son, ready to be whatever he needs me, now, to be.  I am a mother who understands that love is not always enough, yet love remains more powerful than grief.

It’s Aaron’s role to ask us to step back and let go, to allow his team to guide my son toward the goals we believe he is capable of achieving.  And it’s my role to do so, to let go of the boy of my memory, and embrace the young man he’s become.

But there’s letting go, and there’s letting go.

My heart will not surrender all that has shaped our lives together, or my most cherished role as his mother.  That woman will always be right there, behind him.

I can’t see myself any other way.

by Kristen -

One True Gift

Holding hands

As the parent of a teenager learning to drive I was an utter failure.  When Natalie took the wheel I was such a basket case that she soon banned me from accompanying her.  Instead, my husband took over, guiding her on trial runs in the St. Patrick’s Church parking lot, hopeful, perhaps, that God would protect them both.

Natalie proved to be a fine driver, however, while I remained a lousy passenger and unhelpful critic, clutching the dashboard and hissing in alarm as we neared other cars.  It’s a testament to her self-confidence that Natalie learned to drive at all.

She’d had her license for several months when she offered to take Daniel for ice cream one evening.  I stood on the grass as she backed down the driveway, shouting advice and directions, gesturing like a crazed traffic cop as she veered toward our neighbor’s lawn.

“You’re not helping!” Natalie yelled out the driver’s window as she inched toward the street.

“Be careful!” I cried redundantly.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” she yelled back, waving me off.

“Both hands on the wheel!” I bellowed in reply. “I mean it now!”

As she shifted from reverse into drive, I observed Daniel in the passenger seat, eyes scrunched tight and hands over his ears, desperate, no doubt, to block the din of our banter.  But as I teased Natalie later, it was as though he couldn’t bear to watch as he placed his life in his sister’s hands.

Eighteen months later our mood was less jovial as we moved Daniel to a residential school an hour and a half from home.  He was fifteen years old.  Seven years ago today I let go of my son, placing his welfare in the hands of people I barely knew, relying on faith that we were doing the right thing for our cherished, special child.  It was the most painful thing I’ve ever done.

I had several months to prepare, to accept that he could no longer be educated through conventional special ed channels, or safely cared for at home.  The school we’d chosen was highly regarded, known for its success with students with behavioral issues.  We toured and met the staff, asking every question we could think of.  I talked to friends whose own son resided at the school, comforted by their positive experience.  We were as confident as we could be that we were making the best decision possible under difficult and heartbreaking circumstances.

Yet there was no real way to prepare Daniel for the life-change ahead, to explain that our actions had his best interest at heart, that we’d done everything we could and it was still not enough.  Words could not convey to our non-verbal child our profound love as we left him, in an unfamiliar place, his care now in the hands of others.  My dark fear that he’d believe we’d abandoned him almost broke me as I clung to the fragments of my tattered, trembling faith.

After Daniel’s move I rarely practiced that faith, traveling to Wisconsin most Sunday mornings to visit him.  In truth I was glad for the excuse to leave the church behind.  My parents were both gone by then, their memories filling the space they helped build before I was born, the church of my childhood now imbued with more sorrow than comfort, awash in reminders of all that was lost too soon, the old hymns and liturgies haunting in their constancy, vestiges of what I once believed invulnerable.

A few weeks ago my nephew Ted was scheduled to read scripture at that church, which he attends regularly now, and Andy and I went, too, to be with him.  It was the first time I met the new pastor, installed just six weeks earlier.

“They say ‘America’s Got Talent,’ but I beg to differ,” she joked in her sermon, noting that reality TV rarely depicts a truly useful skill, a precious gift, or a worthwhile endeavor.

“The high school teacher who makes algebra come alive—that’s talent,” she continued.  “The farmer who coaxes seed into food.  The musician who brings tears to your eyes.  The parent whose children know they are loved.”

I missed much of what came next, suddenly back seven years to the third night after we’d left Daniel in Wisconsin.

We’d spoken every day to his floor manager, Kip Kussman, whom Daniel had taken to immediately, learning of his first days without us.  So far he’d adapted remarkably, Kip told us, better than most new residents.  We’d been advised not to visit for thirty days, but Daniel was adjusting so well that Kip thought we may be able to come sooner, possibly for Christmas.

My voice broke with relief and gratitude as I thanked him.

“Daniel is going to be fine,” Kip assured me.  “He is secure in a way I don’t see very often.  This is a child who knows that he is loved.”

I doubt Kip will ever understand how much those words meant to me, that they remain the most meaningful thing I’ve ever been told.

For all the ways I felt we’d failed him, we had given Daniel that one gift.

He knew that he was loved.  He knew that we would come for him again.

It’s been a turbulent few years with my son.  I wonder sometimes if he still knows the depth of my love for him, how I treasure him despite the distance that separates us, if he remembers the love I could once demonstrate each day, waking him in the morning and seeing him to bed at night.  I wonder what my weekly visits evoke in him, if they are like the old liturgies of my childhood, stirring memories of faith once held without question, the melodies now echoing both loss and promise.

Does he know me, still?  Does he remember?  Have the seven years he’s been gone blurred his sense of me, or do I remain one thing he knows to be true, to be constant, no matter what?  He asks for me, but what is he seeking now? Does the memory of my love wound in my absence, or is it one true gift that distance cannot diminish?

I don’t know the answers for sure.  But I keep faith that he does know, that he has always known, that I am with him, that he will always, always be loved.

by Kristen -

Farewell, dear friend

Kimball July 2012

An old friend of mine died last week, a man I hadn’t seen in 25 years until we reconnected briefly two summers ago.

Our lives went in different directions after a tumultuous relationship in my early twenties, though I’ve thought of him many times through the years.  I didn’t anticipate how deeply I’d feel this loss, as I knew he was ill, had known for weeks, in fact, that he was dying.

I was living in the city when I met him, sharing a tiny apartment above a travel agency with a sorority sister from college.  Our place had four cramped rooms, little natural light and virtually no closet space.  But at the corner of Clark Street and Belden Avenue, we were in the heart of Lincoln Park, and that’s what mattered when we were 23.

It didn’t take us long to discover Neo, the new wave, post-punk dance club just a block north on Clark, accessed through a graffiti-covered alley, a scarred metal door, and a bouncer with a couple of safety pins through his lip.

It fast became our go-to venue, close enough that we could run up the street during freezing Chicago winters without coats to worry about losing once we’d made it inside.  The music thrummed, pulsing and frenetic, driving the dancers who pitched and surged across the sunken dance floor.  The eight-foot aquarium behind the bar cast an undulating glow on the eclectic mix of habitués, patrons of the club “serving Chicago’s underground since 1979.”  We were thrilled to be a part of it.

A fight erupted one Friday night on the sidewalk in front of the club, between a guy I’d been talking to and another man, both drunk and throwing ill-timed punches as I stood by uselessly, shrieking at them to stop.

Kimball appeared from the alley then, a Neo regular I recognized from the club but had never met or spoken to.  A large man, massive, really, he moved with surprising, graceful fluidity, breaking up the flailing tussle without so much as raising his voice.  He picked a leather jacket up from the ground where it had been thrown, and gently handed it to my acquaintance, who took off down the sidewalk in humiliated rage.

I took off with Kimball.  We were together for two and a half years.

We couldn’t have been more different, he a self-described “fat Jewish kid from Skokie” with barely a high school education and no family of consequence, a Tai Chi master who wore the full-length robe of his discipline wherever he went.  He worked, at times, as a bouncer, but was often unemployed.  That didn’t matter, though: he was an artist, a painter who conjured mystical tableaus reminiscent of Salvador Dali or Hieronymous Bosch; a reader of Kafka and Ayn Rand and Mad magazine.  He was a storyteller who captivated, a listener whose attention made you believe you were the only person alive who mattered.

Everywhere we went somebody knew him, or wanted to, or pretended to.  He had a mystique, a charisma which attracted men and women alike.  Everyone wanted a piece of Kimball, had a story to tell of his exploits, his outrageousness, his larger-than-life personhood.

And I was his girlfriend, a diminutive blond from the North Shore with an expensive liberal arts degree, a new white Mustang and a 9-to-5 job at a dental association.  Insecure but hiding it, I was often called beautiful but never believed it, a girl of “privilege” desperate to claim my own place, to escape the repressive shadow of a stunning, accomplished mother who had and did it all.

Kimball offered that escape.  I didn’t realize then or care that I was simply trading one shadow for another.

It was doomed, of course.  The bond we’d fashioned from our incongruous lives was not destined to withstand the differences which drew us so compellingly to one another.  I don’t think either of us ever truly considered relinquishing enough of ourselves to accommodate the other’s expectations, our unformed yet firmly ingrained perceptions of what our real lives would be.  When it ended, undramatically, I felt more relief than sorrow.  But I never forgot him.  He was part of me, for a time, back then when I was young.

I recall one summer afternoon, near the end, when Kimball and I waited out a sudden, violent thunderstorm, huddled together inside my car as the rain pounded the roof and sluiced across the windshield, blurring the world beyond, sheltering us, for a few sacred moments, from all that waited on the other side.  Elvis Costello was crooning mournfully on the radio, and I remember the sense of melancholy I felt then, the certainty of impending loss.  Kimball held my hand and sang softly out of tune:  Alison, I know this world is killing you.  Oh, Alison, my aim is true.

He comes back to me now in snatches of memory, his broad face thrown back in laughter, his farcical antics with my roommate’s cat, his confidence, worn like armor, disguising his own scars, the detritus of a broken childhood.

And with him comes a yearning for those impetuous, unencumbered days when I was young, and still believed in limitless possibility, before I grew up and adulthood fully claimed me.  Those days when my parents were still alive, the home base I could run to; before I understood the mercurial nature of happiness, when inconsolable loss was as yet unimaginable, when I was still insulated by the arrogant gullibility of youth.

We saw each other two years ago at a reunion of Neo’s old guard, a gathering of regulars from back in the day I surprised myself by attending on a hot summer night in July.  We told each other we hadn’t changed, which in his case was true.  He was still robust, despite the disease which was slowly, inexorably taking him.

He reminded me of our attendance one Sunday morning at the church of my childhood, which I recall as a sort of last-ditch effort to find some spiritual middle ground on which we could build a future.  My mother was horrified, embarrassed by her daughter’s choice of boyfriends, and bringing him to church, no less.  Although he’d left his Tai Chi robe at home, Kimball’s blue hair was probably too much for her to publicly bear.

But Kimball was intrigued by the service, following the liturgy so familiar to me but utterly foreign to him.  He was touched by the unanticipated sincerity of those bourgeois suburbanites who welcomed him, and asked him to come back.

He told me that was the beginning, the spark that eventually brought him to God, and to a community which embraced him, and became his family.  I smile at the irony, he donning the comforting veil of faith as I suffered the loss of it, when my prayers for my son went unanswered, when I doubted so bitterly the belief I’d never had reason, before, to question.  I’m comforted now, knowing he had a doctrine meaningful to him, which, in a small way, I helped him find.

He was larger than life, larger than my life could hold.  Yet my memories of him evoke a simpler, less complicated time, an unguarded time.  We experienced that together, before the world crashed in, before I learned what I was capable of, what I could hold, when I needed to.

Farewell, dear friend.

Farewell.