“Mommy, What Does Love Look Like”: Stories Imagined and Stories Told

of chutes and ladders

Of those who remember the preschool game Chutes and Ladders, I have often felt like I was always on the chutes.

In Monopoly, I would stay in jail round after round.

As a child, I never found a “place” where I fit.

Just like my son.

I felt somehow I was a soul lost without guidance in a social order. I yearned to fit in. I wanted so badly to be accepted. As I’ve written before and will again, the world is still a struggle for those of us who are neurologically diverse or nueroatypical:

Being born without the part of the brain that immediately clicks with social cues and orders.

So, as my son does now, I lived by the words of books, songs and my maternal grandmother, Mimi–the only person who ever made the world make sense to me.

The knock down

Grief works the same. I’ve gotten better with working through chutes and ladders of social cues and rules, but now I find myself swinging back and forth between climbing rungs. I’ll climb two rungs.

Then something knocks me down. I’m on the chutes again.

For a variety of reasons, this week sent me to the bottom of the game board.

To the jail on the Monopoly board.

To the places where nightmares smile with disaster in their teeth.

When people ask me, what do I do to take care of myself? Of Hayes, my son?

“Nature, quiet … but most importantly, we listen to, read, tell and write stories.”

On a Saturday morning, I feel the first pinch of autumn, my favorite season, I watch the green everywhere. I remember my daughter running up to me all of the time with these words:

“Tell me a story,” she’d say because Corrie always identified me by my truest identity, the storyteller.

There is a place beyond the social protocols of the world made by chutes and ladders and Monopoly, where as Tolkien wrote, there is “a far green country.” There, stories imagined and stories told exist, so I tell a story to my daughter.

Stories imagined and stories told

“Mommy, what does love look like?” she’d say with a necklace from one of my cousins on her neck as she fiddled with my second engagement ring, after I’d lost the first.

“It depends on the person,” I say.

“But, Mommy,” she’d say. “What does love look like?”

“Love exists in the eyes of some and in the hearts of others,

Those who’ve walked the Earth before and know that

gold and diamonds were solitary things …”

“Mommy, what does solitary mean?”

“Alone,” I say.

“For those who pull out the wedding

magazines from the age of eleven, they view love

through the weighted things of cupcake cakes

and the photography package. Oh, never

become a bridesmaid unless you understand this

world’s social protocols …”

“What are protocols, Mommy?” she asks as she twists the first engagement ring on my finger found behind a chest of drawers when we moved to the country.

“Rules understood by many people without them ever saying them to the few,” I say.

“Love can be many things depending on the person who

looks its way. Some see it in the jewels on their fingers

and wrists, or in promises easily broken like an apple

pie’s crust. Some see it as a confirmation, and some

wait for heroes based on fairytales they think are

fairytales having never read those dark pieces of work.

To me, love was in the man who gave up everything for an infant son and the woman he loved.

Love was the ability to hold hands as we walked down a sidewalk without a care after

many years when others stared because he was much older than me. I saw in his eyes my

mate when others only saw the age, but all ages pass. Then the actions are revealed as the

mountains to others too blind to see when the mist shrouded them. Love was acceptance

that his son was not the same as others, but just as beautiful when he joined parent teachers

as a father to teach others about children who were often placed on chutes instead of ladders.

Love was the day we rushed across town to take you to the hospital when you were

diagnosed with pneumonia as an infant. Love was the moment I looked in your face and saw

his face. Love was the time he built me a desk in our small apartment upstairs after we’d lost

our home, so I could work and write. Love was the acceptance that the writer’s hand would

always type across the screen and scribble across the page. When the world changed to a darker

shade of black and I was tired of battles people pretended not to see, he took me to a place where the

land was green and in the fall, the leaves, gold. When the virus came, I taught his son as

best I could while I also worked from home, and he had mown a path in the fields for

us to walk …”

“Mommy, we took the puppies, too,” Corrie would say. “Remember, we were teaching them to walk around with us?”

“Yes,” I said.

“When your father held my hand after your last hours and the sunset seemed as if it would never

reappear, he held on as the tornadoes came on. We held your hand together, and in it placed a toy.

In such a dark hour when others consider cupcake cakes and rice tossed on a road and the flowers

soon to die; his hand kept me rooted to the ground. When one in the crowd screamed above the

rest that nothing could ever please her after I’d labored hours for her own, your father’s hands held

mine. How mine have come to look as weathered with time. I took off my second engagement

ring, and buried your body with it on a necklace around your neck beside my mother’s cross.

Love came when I recorded my voice to sing you a song after you were no longer there to ask

me; a time long after I’d taken any stage. Then your father came to speak in his hour of your

forever kind of strength. When the darkest hour was not done and the mud fell from the

mountain, yes, I slid. The tears came, and my anger, without a mercy for which a

Christian sinner prays, set ablaze for those who demanded when they’d received,

I collapsed upon the green shores where you once played and asked for such stories of

mine. Then your father came home with your brother, and found me quiet, without

anger or energy to cry. He said, ‘I’m going to the flea market to find you more yellow

tomatoes.’ There it was, and then I smiled, for they were the only food I’d desired

to eat; the last of summer’s trophy to the country soon to turn from green to

gold and orange. This is what I know of love after the darkest hour came.”

“Mommy, I love Daddy, too,” Corrie would say.

“Yes,” I’d say. “always.”

For John …

By Rebecca T. Dickinson