When Does the Sorrow Ease?

I was cutting onions tonight, and thinking about my boy. The tears from the onions turned into real tears of sadness. He returned to us from a year with his father and step-mother; a bit of a vagrant-looking young man. Longish hair, shorts that didn't fit (indeed were so tight he could have posed as a young male prostitute), soiled clothing (they left B. to do his own laundry - disaster), ripped tennis shoes and sandals. It tore my heart. What did the child support go to, if not to care for B? How could they not see, hear, infer what he needs?

So - a quick trip to the stores, some $200 dollars and an appointment for a haircut later, he is looking cared for as I define it. And his half-sisters have been hugging him so much he's had to ask for breathing room. Cared for, absolutely.

But having him here again, a certain despondency has returned to me, an all too familiar emotion associated with my son. B. has a manic energy, indeed he cannot stop moving until asleep. He even paces while he eats, back and forth at the edge of the table, half-moon steps retraced over and over while he inhales his sustenance. I wish for him to feel calm, to sense the flavors in his food, to feel the relief that comes from easing your body into a space that holds loved ones, good tastes, plenty.

He cannot. He is not made, wired, formed, synaptically able to do so. "Just breathe," I admonish over and over, but I think I say this for me AND for him. Because I hold my breath, I tense when he is here. I see him as he is - the mania, the arrested emotional development, the inability to stop himself from obsessing over when we are leaving, what we will be doing, where we will be going. And I hear him as he talks to himself, dismissing his thoughts before he voices them, because he knows he's said it already and it just becomes annoying to everyone else. And I feel him, only two steps behind me all day long, so that if I turn around suddenly I'll bump into him. Just. Breathe. Stay. Calm.

I don't know if he longs to be like the other kids his age - he doesn't say. That would require a level of reflection and introspection he does not possess. But I see him hanging just on the outskirts of the other kids' interactions, like today at the pool where he recognized some of the other teens, and he hung onto the edge of the pool just out of their grouping. Was he hoping to be invited in, recognized, accepted? Or was it enough for him to just look on? I don't know. But it broke my heart into a million little, tiny pieces.

I've been to the "support" groups for other parents - it was mostly either a complaint-fest or an arena where one born-again whatever professed that they were so happy their child was afflicted with this syndrome, it had taught them so much. Bullshit. It sucks. For me, for him, for his father who ONLY has this child to parent, who will not know as I do that it IS a different experience with a neuro-typical child. I have never accepted; I have always mourned what is not to be. I would give a limb, an eye, whatever this world may ask to have him complete, whole, normal, the B. I dreamed of when he was inside my womb.

Perhaps if I accepted there would be no more sorrow for me. But I see. I hear. I cry. I love. And we go on.

Definitive definitions undone

Two posts in one day. After a year. What does that say? I have been mulling these things I write over in my head for months, unsolveable problems that haunt my dreams. Literally, I blog in my sleep, turning to writing pages in my mind to figure out emotion. How typical to analyze what I cannot understand in feeling.

So, what defines a friend? And when is a friend no longer truly one?

I thought I had this one down.

I have only a few real friends who know my history, my life, my thoughts, my feelings, that I deny feelings. I cherish them, respect them, tease them, celebrate their successes, mourn their losses, keep up with the mundane and profane of their individual lives, worry about them, check in on them, support them, remember their birthdays, their children's names, their anniversaries, their peculiarities that make them unique, endearing.

I do what I expect from them, in short. Because it is who I am. Because it is a symbiotic relationship - one in relation to another always needs and gives, in full or part, as required to keep the organism of the created bond alive.

But what if a friend stops? What if they never really started, but you let them in without realizing? Gave your heart, your friendship, and now it is too late? The caring is there, the distorted bond formed?

I don't have this down.

Out of Step

I have what is termed a "blended" family, his, mine, our kids. The term suggests we could be whirled together and come out a perfectly homogenized group, our cell structures broken down and joined into something new. But after almost nine years, I'm prepared to say it is as far from a whirlingly perfect, bonded unit as it ever was. And I don't understand, but am feeling defeat.

My step children are each interesting, bright, engaged, hard-working adults. One has married and started her own family, her two children just a few years apart from my youngest two girls. We should have much in common. But I'm out of step with my steps. And I'm not sure the dance was ever one I could have joined, as I came late to this particular party where the music stays the same.

What does it mean to be in a family but not OF a family?

I'm neither mother nor friend, not confidant nor enemy. I'm somewhere in the vast between that is tolerated, but mostly treated, even if unintentionally, as a non - non-important, non-person, non-family; not ME. I'm smiled at, talked a bit to, but it was over 6 years before my step-son asked if I had brothers or sisters. That is how little interest I hold. I am the Wife of the Dad. That is my place, my definition, my sum total. And I thought I'd eventually carve my place out in the family I joined, but my tools have failed to make a visible mark. I've failed to make a difference. And why escapes me.

Sure, they visit us; we visit them. There are pleasant times. But there is past that looms large in every visit, every conversation, especially those I don't participate in. They have a shared history, experiences I don't know and cannot judge. I respect that. I anticipated it. What I didn't anticipate: the fact that somehow their Father, in their beliefs and memories, failed them in their childhood and young adulthood, wasn't the person they wanted or needed him to be, and that impression, that mark, that wound has not healed - in fact it is exacerbated by me, and the family I started with him, since they see him acting as the Father they think they never had.

So out of step. Each of us, with the other.

Yet I know as I entered adulthood, I came to understand that my parents were people, flawed people with wounds that caused actions and emotions both hurtful and deeply damaging to me and their other children - but they did the best they could with the lessons they learned from their families, the tools they had at hand and chose to use. Were there resources they ignored? Yes. Were there things they could have done differently if they were more enlightened, more insightful, less gutted by their own losses and disappointments? Yes. But they didn't. And I forgave them and chose to take them as they are - as human beings with a past, a present and a future that still had dreams for them. A person entitled to be taken as they are today, not the person of 40 years ago, but the person who survived and lived those years, changed, shifted, learned, grew. Not entirely different, but significantly not the same.

I wish they could each get to this point with their own Dad. Realize they did have the core of him, even if the years have taught him, as they have taught me, patience, perspective, acceptance he didn't possess when young. And then maybe, just maybe their steps would fall into place with his, and then there would be a new dance, new memories, and new bond that extends to me, as a complete and full person with my own past, my own lessons, my own family, my own life that I have strived for, fought for, dreamed of, earned.