(Written long-hand in my writing group and Mom, I can write this only because our relationship is nothing like it once was. I love you.)
I've been wanting to write about my life prior to Elias but it seems my mama-mind won't let me travel beyond the emergency c-section that brought him into the world. This time of parenting small children is so all-consuming that it is hard to remember a life without little hands. Who was that woman who knew nothing about the ache that comes from loving a sick child? Nothing about the weight of a life that depends on hers?
What can I tell you about my life before Elias? My pen stalls and waits for memories to spring forth and yet no part of me fully remembers. Not in complete sentences at least. Thirty years. Out of focus. Maybe I need to be right here in the art room at the Senior Center with my left elbow on the table, head in hand, surrounded by white-haired women, all writing, all trying to capture the words, lasso their thoughts and put them on the page. I wonder if they are doing better than I am, if they dove right into a subject instead of splashing around on the surface, hovering, unsure how deep to wade.
The truth is I didn't always like my mother. (As I type this, I want to change this line, to soften it and explain more, to ease our way in, but as a teenager I was quite clear in this regard. And though my mom never stopped loving me I'm sure she did not always like me.) I spent years wishing she were different, wishing she would change. I use to lament that she didn't see me as separate from her.
But I understand this now. This inability to separate one from another.
Elias sits in my lap and I talk about him as if he is a third arm and not a child of his own. I see him as an extension of myself and the part of me that chases perfection-- the part I want to cut out with a steak knife --views his disabilities as a sign of my failure. As if I lost some pre-destined game when I drew the card with Elias.
But not Elias. This is not his world-view. For him the world has always been unsteady so he knows to hold onto a ledge, a railing, a hand.
"Find your balance, " he mimics as I work with him on standing.
"Find your center," he says.
"He's the happiest kid, " Audrey said last night as Elias giggled on the floor while Nick tickled him. Elias laughed and kicked his legs as I carried him to see the "little house": Audrey and TJ's outhouse at their Bear Valley cabin. Elias loved it.
"More toyet. More toyet," he pleaded until I took him back to see it again, all giggles and flailing legs.
Later, I held his hands so he could walk on the gravel road, a road with mud puddles, rocks, and deep tire marks. I walked behind him with his hands wrapped around my pointer fingers. Instead of holding my arms steady and guiding him forward as I often do, I moved my hands with his body, stumbling with him and sometimes following him to the ground. By doing so he had to rely on his muscles more than his bones, his skinny legs and weak trunk had to work to navigate the rocks and puddles.
I am not the leader of Elias's life. As much as I want to keep him safe and dry I can't. I can't remove the rocks from his path. Just can't. Just as my mom couldn't remove them from mine.
I started feeling angry at my mom in 7th grade when her rules about good girls and bad didn't keep me safe at Swift Junior High. As if she knew what I would find in those hallways, so foreign from her own. As if she had eyes and ears at every crossroad. As if she...
We all cross rugged roads and forbidding hallways, and if we are lucky, somewhere along the way, we let go of blame. Even if its a slow process, a sprinkling of bread crumbs we gradually leave behind.
When I finally stopped blaming my mom, I blamed boys; until I pardoned them and pointed my finger at patriarchy-- or the socially sanctioned support for "boys will be boys." But this left me perched in a corner where I swatted at an ever-present but invisible enemy, holding my victim cards by my fingernails, waving them in the face of strangers. Or holding them high above a compassionate crowd.
I turn in my cards. All of them. Not as a resignation but as an acceptance that I am not only acted upon. I act. I decide. I direct.
As will Elias.
And something greater than all of us will light the way.
Elias's new walker finally arrived, heavier and wider than the loaner one, with large front swivel wheels. He's a wild-man with it. He over-swivels and weaves down the long hallways of the mall like he's drunk.
"Watch out," I think, as much for the people standing in his way, as for Elias.