The Greatest Gift Given

We all have something we want.

Something we yearn for.

Maybe it’s wrapped in red and green paper.

Maybe it’s in pink bows wrapped around a white and pink present.

My Aunt Sharon wrapped the most beautiful presents ever imagined. She made the holiday season, department store wrappers, who set about in a competition for the most beautiful wrapping, jealous.

She still does.

Aunt Sharon makes the ribbon curl like my daughter’s hair as a toddler when they were natural, but brown, Shirley Temple locks.

I loved the look of Aunt Sharon’s presents, but she made it like a lock without a code to unwrap.

But she is one who has given the one of the greatest gifts … time.

Sometimes the greatest gifts given come unwrapped.

The greatest gift my parents ever gave me was green space in which to play, and which shaped my imagination. For a child who was suspected by some pediatricians in the early 1990s as high-functioning autistic with characteristics of echolalia, the greatest escape my parents could give me was a green space in which my imagination could unravel and not feel the constraints of attempting to button a button for the four hundredth time.

At the time between the ages of two to six, I was tested by the childhood experts and teachers. It was not popular to have a child with a newer medical term, “autism,” so my parents left this part of the testing alone. My mother gave me all the paperwork in mid-spring of this year before Corrie’s travel to heaven.

I went from childhood through adulthood often misunderstood, depressed and lonely because I did not have the part of my mind that came so naturally to others. The part of the brain that came so naturally to Corrie as she bonded easily with adults and other children. Because I could not understand what “social norms” meant or what they looked like.

My parents gave me another gift, probably far greater because it released my imagination from what felt like the bondage of everyday, mathematical, and unaltered human activity: green space.

She said to me, “I’m glad you’re doing better since the break,

but you never ask about me.” I said to her, “I made Alfredo

for you.” With the shut of the door, she went away. Another

friend as lasting as autumn before a New York frost. The

words, they sit. The pain, lingers, as the stench of burning

limbs in fall. I really cared for her, my friend, but I could

not express in the ways and musings of minds unlike

mine; the social laws of typical minds. So, from her I

I learned, to attempt to zip up my thoughts, hide my

feelings, and to always ask, “How are you?”

minds unlike mine, by rebecca t. dickinson

As a young adult, I attempted to live by the social laws of minds unlike mine. I never seemed to get it just right. Only in my walks through nature did I feel myself heal. Only in writing and reading did I feel understood.

As the years passed, step-by-step, I attempted to close up all parts of me, so to a world so dominated by typical minds I did not offend.

Then tragedies and heartbreaks of different natures occurred starting with a son so much like me and his diagnosis.

What could I give this son who some said showed echolalic qualities? What could I say when other adults looked at me and said, “What did he say?”

I had learned the safest notion was to gradually pull away from the world, and go into the green spaces with just my children. I perhaps never felt happier than when I was in a green space and with my children and husband, John.

With Corrie’s departure from this place, my emotions have unravelled, and I’ve opened up to other adults more than I have in years.

I still tread gently. `

Despite the challenges my son, Hayes, John and I have faced being seen as different in more ways than one, we enjoy a great gift given to John from his father: green space.

When our minds are tired of places where we feel constrained, when we’re scared to let our guard down, and when we’re weary of other people who don’t know us or our minds; we find comfort in the green spaces of our world.

My son, Hayes, has recently dealt in anger. He purposely broke his iPad while waiting for me to help him. I have never been one to excuse his behavior due to being abled differently. John and I decided to teach him that problems cannot just disappear with Mom and Dad’s money every time. It is a consequence, we feel, that must be felt in regards to his choices.

But he still has a place to escape … a green space where we let our minds out …

where he can release his dreams of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis,

and I am rereading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien who always worded tragedy, sadness, light, dark, and heaven better than any person I’ve ever met or whose work I ever read.

Words and photos (except the last one above the quote) are by Rebecca T. Dickinson