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.