Benjamin is escalating. The screaming that led to him being hospitalized eighteen months ago is creeping back. Four in the morning. Late afternoon. Running to the bus.
But my compassion is not tethered to it.
Over Christmas break he got angry enough to poke himself perilously close to his eye
socket. He looks like half a raccoon.
I asked, though it is mostly futile, why he was upset.
"I don't want to go back to school! I want to stay home." While I could take this as a compliment, I was mostly annoyed that he is sullying the time he has doing what he ostensibly wants. Although he was sitting in a chair not two yards from mine, I felt a hundred miles apart.
It's not that hard to stop
yelling. Look at me. I can do it so why can't you?
I used to wonder at my mother's outbursts. This mania. Couldn't she tamp it down if she wanted? Was she really trying? Perhaps it is excusable that I was skimpy with empathy, since she was my mother and was supposed to be taking care of me. Not the other way around. But this time the logic has more holes than a sieve. I am Benjamin's mother, and autism is reason enough to cut him
slack.
It seems that life is rife with these riddles. If I can do such and such, why can't you? Or just as painful, if you can accomplish x, why can't I?
But those metrics leave everyone isolated, as if being Self Sufficient were the Ideal.
Maybe marriage, motherhood, friendship are all sneaky inroads to a place where needing one another is neither an imperfection, nor cause for
shame.
