The Never Normal

I carry my camera almost everywhere I go, so it was on hand today when I went to check the mail and saw three tiny, miraculous patches of what I think are crocuses.  Here’s one of the patches, pushing out of the brown, dead, winter-packed ground.

According to the weatherman, by Friday night they’ll be buried beneath a blanket of snow of as-yet undetermined thickness.

I don’t mind.  It can’t beat us down now, can it?  At least not for long.

It might do those crocuses in, though.

Yesterday Andy picked me up at work and we went to the meeting at Jonah’s School with the people from Springbrook, who had evidently arrived an hour or so before us to observe Jonah in his classroom setting.  I guess he did pretty well while they were watching him and attended to whatever task he’d been given, with just a small swat thrown in for good measure.  We stopped at the nurse’s office to sign permission for them to give him ibuprofen for his leg (he’s been limping a little on and off lately, something else we have to get to the bottom of)…and in the hallway there lingered the unmistakable aroma of poop, courtesy of our beloved child.

At some point, evidently after the Springbrook people left the classroom, Jonah either needed or requested the safe room and then decided to shit, dig around in his pull-up, and retrieve some of his freshly-pressed play-doh to smear on the walls.  I’m not big into text-speak but WTF?

We got the big-time aggressor.  Can we at least not have the shit-smearer too?

So while they cleaned him up and kept him occupied, Andy and I met with Wildwood staff and the Springbrook folk in a small office and they asked us questions about Jonah and we asked them questions about Springbrook and at first they kept directing all their questions at me

funny how people automatically turn to the mother for the answers about a child

and I told them Jonah was living with his father, and Andy was articulate and honest in speaking to them, and I emphasized how hard this was for Andy, and they nodded a lot in empathy and understanding, and I told them we liked their place best, we think

and I asked if they would tell us if and how and when they would take our son to live and be educated and nurtured and please love him some hour and a half away from us because we can’t do this thing anymore

and we never thought this would happen to us

and we feel torn and confused as hell,  sometimes guilty and often frightened, usually stressed

and almost always anxious

but they have to go back and have a committee meeting and they’ll probably be contacting us by the end of the week to let us know

and then we all shook hands and smiled

and Andy and I got back in the car.  I asked him if Springbrook accepts him, is that where you want him to go? and he said yes and we were quiet mostly as he drove me back to work.

As I walked up the stairs to my office, they were just about to sing happy birthday and serve goodies to the two March birthday peeps.  I smiled and dug into my cake with the rest of them, allowing the worry to fall behind me.  It’s something I have learned how to choose, a defense mechanism in my brain keeping me sane and functioning.

I usually can shed intrusive thinking like a dead skin; I’ve been led to understand that all that matters- all that can matter – is right now.

The end of the week will come, and they will either take Jonah or they won’t, and if they don’t, he’s been accepted at Tradewinds, and it will all happen the way it is supposed to happen whether I worry about it or not

in this soon-to-be-snowy shit-smeared spring of ours.

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