The Never Normal

Not writing here feels like holding my breath.

Jonah has been largely aggression-free for a while now.  I say “a while” because I don’t think of time in terms of hours days and years anymore….at least not in the way I used to.  Boo’s every moment is a possibility; his focus flits and alights in bat-like erratic patterns of flight.  He soars and crashes.  Sometimes, when he is soaring, I feel a superstition of sorts – as if not writing about him will protect him from the pendulum’s swing.

Boo ridlle-y.  On Saturday he laughed and spun, ate well, sang a little, watched train-on-TV, and rode happily in the car, rocking to his tunes (he enjoys Emancipation, daddy’s double album CD by Prince right now) and making funny, silly, happy faces:

All I want is his happiness.  That’s really ,when you get right down to it, all I want.

I am grateful for it.  I take pictures of his happiness, over and over, to remind me it is there even when I cannot see it.  I am grateful today for so very many things.  Boo’s school & caregivers.  His daddy.

For the fact that I woke up free of pain and able to breathe and see and walk and write.  For the incredible freedom of working from home – to be able to write and make a good living of it.

And I am grateful for Boo’s right eye, for we were all wrong about the left.  He’s nearly blind in it — maybe he can see shapes but that’s about it.  He had cheated on the other test.  In almost every picture of him now you can tell his left eye isn’t quite right.  The amazing thing is Jonah seems not to mind so much.  I think maybe this is yet another blessing for those on the more severe side of autism:  Maybe these individuals have no expectations from life.  They just live it and react accordingly to stimuli, perhaps even instinctually, in whatever way they can in order to move through what must seem a very foreign world.  There is joy for them here, and there is sorrow, but it is not the same as ours and never will be.  Theirs is a pure innocence and a soul unsullied by envy, shame, jealousy, guilt, bitterness… so many wonderful things to be without.

I think maybe I need to try harder look at things from Boo’s perspective – to watch and listen and tune-in to him more, instead of being so reactive (something I’m almost body-trained to be from his aggressions).

I am looking forward to Saturday.  My hope is relentless, week after week, in the face of any possibility imaginable.  If that is the definition of crazy then there it is.  I can be that kind of crazy.  I can be anything I need to.  I am pliable, lithe.

Thank you is my prayer today.