Once I held anger close as a child holds a teddy bear
until my daughter taught me not to cling to despair.
I went back to school to help provide for my
husband, son, and me. I went to pumpkin fests,
and I confess, I wanted nothing more than
to stay at home with my son, my first born.
Things happened we could not explain
like why he cried whenever we encountered
crowds or when the bathroom toilets flushed.
Mothers looked at my son as the source of their
child’s storm. I knew anger, and it took hold.
Something no mother of a child with
autism waits to expose. My anger was well-known
and naked when it appeared my last year
at grad school when
teachers and experts wished to discuss
moving my son to another school, and a
professor, one of the only ones with whom
I’d disagreed, told me how I was failing in my
commitment to the university if I attended
a meeting for my son’s needs over a long
ago forgotten meeting at the university.
Anger swelled like an eye after it’s
punched, and I held tight to anger.
I’ll show her a working mother,
of a child with special needs,
who she doubts can make it
out of this university. I held on to
anger. Boy, I’d prove her wrong.
I enhanced the ways I taught
flipped learning. See the
stations in my classroom.
Watch my students. See my
son grow. But, I’ll tell you
a secret about anger when
you hold it like a teddy bear:
Sure, you can make it. You can
prove others wrong, but after I
laid my daughter down in the
ground at only five years old,
I let my anger at other mothers
who once said things about
my son and the got-to-prove
her wrong go. I see my
students build, create,
and explain everyday.
I’m the kind of teacher
my grad school sought to
create. I’m the kind of mother
who sits down and talks about
the working realities when
you have a child with special
needs. When the snow covers
where my second child rests,
it chills the anger in my chest.
For every moment I felt anger,
Corrie gave me fifteen more of
the kind of joy you get in May
when your child spots a nest.
I hear her laughter, and I
smile wide because in her
way she’d say of the anger,
“Nevermore,” and then dance
away in my old high heels.
By Rebecca T. Dickinson
Corrie's Season 