The months’ events blend and pour together, watercolor spills on pages. I want the resulting mix to form a picture or a tale to tell, but it’s really just a sloppy mess.
That medicine…the Clozaril…it seems to be working still. Kind of. But nothing has been able to exorcise the aggressions. He might be attacking less often, but he’s still attacking.
Meanwhile, seemingly all his interests – everything that’s provided me with amusing anecdotes to write about for the past five years – have faded away. There’s no more asking for “Oompa Oompa” and laughing hysterically at the indignant passion of Grandpa Joe. No more begging to walk on the dock by the river and then jumping in to swim, all silly and happy. No more wanna go park, always choosing the first swing, asking for more push, jumping off to head down the path and explore. No more watching YouTube videos of trains, entranced by the rush of movement and sound.
Evidently it’s become too much to expect Jonah to enjoy doing anything at all, and that’s a hard truth to swallow.
Yesterday, Jonah’s new psychiatrist called me. She was in a team meeting with Jonah’s nurse, case worker and a few others. She told me they want to increase the dosage of Clozaril. I asked questions I suspected she couldn’t answer, but I asked them anyway. Can they make the aggressions go away? Will enough Clozaril stop this? Do we need to trade his entire personality for it to happen?
My questions are jokes with shitty punchlines. I have learned not to hope anymore. Hope gets smashed too many times and expectations are brought down so many notches that I find myself beneath the surface where it’s always cold and dark and still.
Andy and I had one baby. We dreamt of all the things he could be and do…all those wonder-filled possibilities taken away, one by one. We dealt with it. Okay, so he isn’t going to converse. And okay, so he isn’t going to make friends. He isn’t going to play on softball teams and tell ghost stories at sleepovers and fall in love.
I could always see the bright side. I’d say to myself: At least I don’t have to deal with competitive, gossipy soccer moms. I won’t have to find a way to comfort him when world events are frightening. I don’t have to watch the inevitability of innocence slipping away from him as it does from all of us who grow and learn and mature in the land of normalcy.
But then the possibilities taken away began to outnumber those left over. Because he became aggressive, he wasn’t allowed to attend the beautiful autism summer camp in Altamont with the giant pool anymore. Because he attacked others, he could no longer go to the fun after school program at the Center for the Disabled. He’d had to leave his wonderful local school. His mama and daddy. His home. And now he is too aggressive to stay at the residential school which he was sent to for being aggressive. He is there today only because there is nowhere else for him to go.
On Sunday mornings, My mother and I drive down and meet Andy at his apartment. We drive to Jonah’s school and we call Jonah’s residence (I can never really call it his house, let alone his home) and someone walks him out to us. We are usually able to get back to the apartment without incident and sometimes Jonah will get out of the car and come inside. Usually my mother has brought him something yummy to eat. Usually he eats it, making a mess, occasionally throwing some of it at one of us. Always he asks for car ride or mama in the front. My mother stays in the apartment. Once the three of us are in the car, there is no stopping or getting out of the car. Jonah requests music and the volume of said music. We take “loops” – specific cyclic driving routes past quaint restaurants and a giant fairground and the famous home of a president’s mistress.
If we are lucky Jonah does not attack us. If we are lucky we do not need to pull over — and if we do have to pull over, we are lucky if nobody calls 911 when they see us and we do not have to explain ourselves to the police. If we are lucky we will return to the apartment and Jonah will go back inside for a short while. If we are lucky my mother and I will drive home a few hours later without tears, without bloody bite marks or bruises or a burning scalp. Andy’s arms are a permanent criss-cross of scratches and scars.
I do not write about it for attention, or to seek sympathy. Those things are useless. I do not write about this to complain. Complaining implies that someone can do something, that there is a repair that can be made. I write because I started something when I innocently typed out my first post in August of 2010, and people have told me they are interested and they care. People are dealing with similar shit and need to know they are not alone. I don’t think it’s fair to disappear. Yet in the midst of what feels like limbo, sometimes there just isn’t a lot I want to say.
Ours is a purgatory from which deliverance is, finally, neither expected nor anticipated.
I am grateful that Jonah is safe, and well cared for, as happy as an autistic child, plagued by aggression and drugged into God-knows-where, can be. I can’t speak for Andy but I do know he is grateful too, and also uncomplainingly resigned to his fate. He is Jonah’s father before everything else, and he has chosen that life, and it has been tremendously difficult. It would have destroyed most other people I know. At least he has a girlfriend and they are in love. He deserves the best in this life.
I think about Andy lately, wondering at the wreck I made of his life. I think about how he was my husband and now he isn’t, and how if I could only go back I would honor the intended lifelong bond of that and stick with him no matter what. A few weeks ago, I bought the kind of shampoo he used when we were married, to capture even just the scent of that lost life. Am I romanticizing it? Am I wasting my time with if only? Yes. Yes, of course I am.
For a long time I’ve grasped at ways to manage the emotional toll of both my own choices and of circumstances over which I’ve had no control. For what seems like forever I’ve grasped. And I know better than to grasp – hell, I’ve read plenty of Thich Nhat Hanh. But I have so often not been healthy, or wise, or even rational. Some of those grasping ways I shared here – attempts at relationships, vacations to new places, things to build on or look forward to. Places and people from which I sought excitement and happiness and hope.
But sitting here now, today typing this, I feel like I’ve finally, conclusively broken.
Too many cracks have converged – in Jonah’s life, in my life outside of him. In the whole world. As I type this, the death toll is still rising from the latest almost daily violent tragedy – this one a terrorist mowing down dozens of people with a fucking tractor trailer. My oldest friend is 91, and it’s gotten to the point where I envy her for being on the way out of this world.
Should I be at the end of my blog if these are the things I am typing now? Who wants to read doom and gloom? It’s what I’ve felt for a while, so I haven’t been posting. I’ve been writing the posts, though — dozens of blog entries, all alike, all deleted. Maybe I’ll actually publish this one.
Maybe it’s just today that I’ve run out of ways to spin it.
There was one miracle, though. I saved it – the best – for last. it’s Jonah’s school photo, taken by Life Touch, where he looks positively beatific. See for yourself:
How they got him to sit still, let alone pose and smile, is the mystery of the millennium. In my life and under our current circumstances, I call that a miracle. I pull the photo out constantly and look at my beautiful boy.
I love him more than I am broken, even.
Maybe that’s the very thing that keeps me pushing on.
I love you, I miss you.
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What a beautiful photo. Thinking of you.
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He does look beautiful. Not sure what to say that hasn’t been said, except that I’m broken too. Thank you for not deleting this blog entry. I needed it ❤
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Of course I am a rotten non-believer, but if it turns out there is a god, he has much to apologize for. Heck, the brutality of the food web alone is enough to condemn him to the hell he created.
In this theater of the absurd, I like to pretend I’m merely an observer. It doesn’t help much.
I have recently been thinking that Creedence’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” should replace the tripe that passes for our national anthem. What do you think?
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A gorgeous photo, and it is as true as all of the rest. Like the 100% human being that you are, you are being painfully hard on yourself and your choices. Are you seeing a good therapist who can help you keep moving forward? Along with, of course, the times we all need of screaming and throwing things in totally reasonable frustration.
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This resignated with me on so many levels. My heart goes out to you. Thank you for sharing. I know it was hard but this is our reality. My son is aggressive also. He’s in a special school for aggression. Also on Meds.
Hope there is comfort for you. I know there are days it’s hard to seek but we have to find some good. Hugs
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My own brother was only violent against himself. He was the first child of my parents (1949). I don’t know why they decided to have more children, but they did. Two more. I know the trauma of being a sibling of an autistic, nonverbal, low functioning person, but I can’t imagine the world of a parent. I have often thought of what their life was like before. My brother was sent away when he was 13, we used to visit. but it is hard to think of what he was subjected to in those days in the early 1960s, when autism was practically unknown.
Neither of my parents got over it.
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There’s a lot of broken out there. You know about yours and sing its blues like only you can. Craft and s sweet nobility through defeat. Strong.
Please keep singing.
Some of us need it, believe it of not.
Peace someday.
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Sending my love every time I think of you, which is often.
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I think of you and Jonah so often. I keep the picture you gave me of him amongst my favorite family photos and when I look at those photos all I see is love. In a world where so much is broken I read your words and cried for your pain. I wish there were easy answers to make all of the pain and heartache in the world disappear. Love and miss you very much. I never flip by Little House on the Hallmark channel without thinking of you 🙂
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Amy, some day when you are a little unbroken I would love to see you. Is it strange that I have fond memories of 4W? Donna has cancer…no cure…and I need to be with someone who will not try to cheer me up, or tell me about other cancer patients. Just someone I can hold, and be held, and cry at the awful world this turned out to be. I love you, kiddo, and whenever you are ready…
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