A Picasso Shade of Blue

I included a read aloud with this one, and it is dedicated to my son.

Born with a different kind of mind–
and not the etch-a-sketch kind with
the straight edges and directions to
flow–is like sitting on the steps
of the shallow end without a clue
of how to swim or where to go.
There isn’t a color or easy guide.
When you’re born with this
kind of mind, maps were stashed
in a secret place, and friends are
like the lightening bugs you try and catch,
and maybe you do, but how soon they fly; 
how quickly the light fades and dies. I know, Son, 
what it’s like to live with this different
kind of mind, and when I was growing up,
the doctors didn’t want to label me. 

They left me alone for time unending
to stare at big white walls while they observed
me through another glass to find out why I don’t 
respond the right way to: “What do you do at 
the grocery store?” Ever slow to reply, I said,
“Go to the store.”  They said
I was “echolalic,” and my
Kindergarten teacher wrote,
“She starts stuff with the other kids.”  She never 
saw me getting hit. I was just trying to make friends. 
But they never did exist in the beginning 
of a mind made of Picasso’s
darkest and brightest shades of blue.

Growing up as a girl
in world not specially designed 
for this kind of mind, the other
girls played their clap-clap games
as I sang for the joy I felt inside
just as you, Son, make the noises
and sounds to make people
laugh, but they don’t because
we have to learn when and
where to sing, and you—like
me—must learn in time to
curve your mind into the
etch-a-sketch line.  I know
how they laughed behind my
back when I was your age.
I can still hear the words they’d
say. I “was not normal,” and
“something was wrong.” I was
not in the deep end of the 
pool with cool kids from 
school, and in truth I never
wanted to go back to a place
where a brain must forgo
its natural shade.

Sometimes I must step back from the edge 
of Picasso’s darker shades of blue pouring
as waterfalls into where indigo meets
ebony because not only did I have to
earn a neurotypical license to move in 
the straight lines of this world, I had
to learn to live without my little girl.
I witnessed her death. I dropped my
faith. I put myself on the witness 
stand, and judged myself as a parent
without much of a plan, so …

... no wonder I’m angry. No wonder I’ll
fight, kick and scream even if it’s only
the cobalt blues shooting through the
skylight of my mind. I’ll fight to keep
you strong, Son, moving and alive. 
Let them say what they want about 
me now because they don’t want my pair
of shoes, and 
                    I’ll try to be as strong as you.

You let the words other kids say
float through you like a boat on a 
sky blue lake on a June day. You call
me several times when I turn away
hearing a little girl–in her swimmies–
cry because she’d gotten in the water too deep,
but her mom was helping her older sister.
I tell myself to stay because she wasn’t mine,
and I hear you call me; almost a cry.
I look at you again, and pick up our
ball in the pool to throw to you.

At the end of the day, I'm glad we live
faraway in the countryside where I can
unmask, and let what's past hitch a 
ride to the other part of town, or to 
another mind made for banks and 
business or coffee houses and 
city bars.  One woman said, "In the
garden, you can be yourself," and I 
find it's true because there's no 
one calling my name, and none 
calling you. The whistle of the wind
rushes through because soon the
grasses will begin to grow, and the
colors are popping through to a 
gentler shade of blue.