Ready, Set, Match

Ready, set, match!

This Time, This Time of Year Makes Us Consider More than Plans in a Home Depot Commercial

This time of the year embraces the notion. Walk with me through your Sunday morning routine or where you are in your “go time”; you’re “ready, set, match.”

It’s Sunday morning. Perhaps you grab your coffee. You could use the single cup, Keurig, for your caramel flavored coffee. You watch your sugar intake, so you use Stevia or another sugar alternative. For a moment, you consider those late nights in the 1990s, mid-2000s, or 1980s at the pinnacle of hair spray, Geometric earrings, and puffy sleeves. You think: Maybe I could do it again. Go to a party. Drink those shots.

But the sugar replacement is a quick reminder that no you can’t whatever like you used to, or maybe you grab your coffee from your favorite local spot. After all, the family feel-good coffee brands from the commercials just don’t hit the same. You prefer those unique coffee blends.

Or, perhaps you’re like me where you use a regular pot of coffee, press the button, and go. As you go through your morning routine, you think of yourself, your family, and friends. Maybe you consider the state of the world.

Maybe you think the United States is heading in the right direction. (Stay with me.) Or you fear for the lives of others. You want to be aware and stand up for what is right, but you’re unsure. You tell yourself that “No, I have not entered a time portal, and ventured to 1930s and ’40s Germany” only to find echoes of the past are real now.

I love my Mom and Dad so much, and I have thought about Mom a lot lately. I struggle to say these thoughts to her because my often realist cover with a shot of satire disallow me. The nightmares, headaches, and fear of touching anything emotional, which might cause the rock to break, in connection with my PTSD witnessing my daughter, Corrie’s death, sometimes keep me from expressing the words.

“She Get It from Her Momma”

Mom and Dad have taught me to keep friendships with people of different backgrounds and beliefs. Mom taught Criminal Justice and Law Education in high school, and I wanted nothing to do with it. One reason I have thought of her a lot is because my son is currently at the same school as me.

My son has hit some bumps; many of his own making. I know I was not easy on my parents, yet my actions occurred in a different way through a girl with depression, eating disorder, and aching loneliness of what was wrong with me before I understood that I was neurodivergent and likely autistic. As I have written before, my parents did not want this diagnosis for me in the early 1990s. It would have been considered socially embarrassing because at the time mostly boys were diagnosed, and to this day, many girls are still under diagnosed.

I have and never will blame my parents for this because they raised me with love. In fact, not knowing I was neurodivergent until I was 35 made me stronger. (I do not support this for everyone, but I say this is the case for me.) I looked through the paperwork of my four to five-year-old child psychiatry evaluation. I read through language and saw how my Kindergarten teacher disliked me, and how the doctors viewed me as an object. There were many things they said I would never do.

For example, I would never be able to communicate at the same level as my peers, and it was questionable if I would perform on grade-level.

I am now working on a doctorate in education.

Mom had me at her school. I have my son now at my middle school. Knowing myself, I am intensely loyal to those teachers who worked and formed a bond with him. This does not mean they gave him everything. This means they did not give up on him. If he is considered below grade-level or cannot do, I just give a smart ass smile because I know the words said about me. I think: That’s okay. My boy will prove you wrong one day.

My Mom taught law and famous court cases, such as Brown v. the Board. Echoes of her lessons entered my childhood and teen years whether I wanted them to or not. Then she taught me the color of one’s skin should never matter. She brought Holocaust survivors to her classroom to teach.

Where is Humanity?

I refuse to erase friendships over their differing political opinions. I realize that this is an unpopular view right now in some Democratic and even moderate circles. But you cannot become the creature you despise, such as the current leadership. (Not my friends.)

Some of those friends were with me during my darkest hours when I lost Corrie and John was diagnosed with cancer.

When a friend asked me about the individual, who I refuse to name because that person wants to drip in media and people’s attention, just cut the US Department of Education. I can hope that the judicial branch my mother so believes in will work, but I am also a cynic. This action would cut laws that protect the rights of children and teens like my son.

I will cherish my friends. I will love my family members. But I love my son the most! My son takes actions, like other boys his age, and ones that are affected by his autism. John and I hold him accountable. He also has the sweetest side to him when he makes a fruit bowl for me because he knows I can’t eat certain things. When he brings his sister’s picture off the fridge and says, “Can I keep this for right now?” my heart melts.

Ready, Set, Match

We are on the precipice of decisions that will affect our families and country for generations to come. We all must decide as we drink our cups of coffee or hot tea between “what is right and what is easy,” as Dumbledore says to Harry.

Hayes, my name for my son on social media, is battling anger. I battled it in the two years after Corrie’s death. His anger is the heart of his struggle with her loss and the fear of losing someone he loves or admires. It does not make certain choices of his right. A part of his anger is seeing how society treats people with autism.

He knows how the individual in the highest office made fun of people with disabilities. He has seen that mocked by other students. A teen at a high school in a city near us attacked another with autism.

My son sees and knows. He also knows history of the Holocaust, and believes that some Americans want him to disappear.

My son is scared that he will be sent to a camp.

My 14-year-old son believes he is not desired as a part of the human experiment. He named another kid diagnosed with autism. He said, “What did [this person] do to deserve to be diagnosed with autism? I know why I am. I am bad and evil.” In other words, he associates autism with bad.

I have also seen the vaccine debate about more vaccines possibly causing autism. I do not invest support in this falsehood. Again, the evidence is physical and real. It does not require a news outlet that supports your current belief system. I decorate and care for the graves of about 40 babies, children, and teens in Corrie’s cemetery. I started this in July 2020, two months after we lost Corrie. Most of those graves are children before 1960. Walk along in the old part of the cemetery, you will see a child or infant every four graves. One family has five babies and young children. Another family lost eight children.

The view of autism as a curse, increased because of vaccines, or other view implies that children like my son are unwanted or cursed. When I was growing up, I wanted a family of five children. I wanted a large family. I had Charles, Corrie, and a miscarriage. God has not seen fit to allow me to keep my other two. Yet, the child I do have on this earth must stand before some in this nation as a testament of who and what is unwanted.

I do not write from tears I have wept in 2020. I do not write now bleeding on paper, any more than I write from “Oh god, she’s talking about her daughter again.” I write from the perspective of what made me a lioness in the first place.

Ready. Set. Match.

The part of my mom that hates confrontation and wants to please people still lives beneath my skin. I have often thought. “Don’t speak. You’ll upset someone.” But I know from my experiences, I will make someone unhappy anyways. I’ve had to deal with uncomfortable situations from the time my son was two and no longer invited to birthday parties while my daughter received an invitation everywhere.

There is A Lot to Do

My son will undergo what I call “service projects” for certain recent behaviors. One of them he completely understands, but dreads the work for. He is going to prep the ground for an autism-themed garden on our property with composting done over the course of one year in place. It will take at least one year before he places the first plant. By that time, he will have taken his first serious agriculture class, and he will learn more from the farming, tractors, and garden prep he does with his father, grandfather, and me. The goal of this garden is not only responsibility, but visibility of him as a person. I will not dictate what goes in, as it should be his work.

There is a lot to do. In the meantime, I am getting ready for multiple garden projects, beds, and the last of the seeds for this season. I am set about which plants I need to go and where. I will match the beauty of other gardens, and the energy it will take to raise my son to complete manhood without his sister.