scribblechic

Tomorrow is your fifteenth birthday and today I am confessing wishes and worries as I celebrate the shape of your experiences with my own uncertainties. Remorse or reminiscing my mind is caught on the places I might have mothered you differently.

I wish I could go back to the beginning of your young life and change little ripples in the future with different words of encouragement and support. So often I worked to challenge you to reach your potential within the suffocating context of generic social assumptions when I might have worked more diligently to inspire others to reach further outside their comfort zone to fully appreciate the simple joys and acute disappointments of your experiences.

We’ve come to live in the margins of misinformation. The news is quick to capitalize on personal narratives of Autism that either demonize or celebrate the extremities of your diagnosis without the shades of gray that speak to your individuality. In the discourse of your days we expect an assumption that you do not understand the hierarchy of privilege that dictates your conformity over others’ compassion. I wish others would seek to understand your differences with the same diligence you aspire to understand others’ assimilation.

Just once I wish you were allowed to be exceptionally average without a premeditated gesture of inclusion to dictate your place. When did we cease to assume equality when teaching children the value of community that we must extol what should be an expectation rather than the exception?

Some days I wish your spectrum of needs were noisier that other’s might lean more attentively into gestures of care. Other times I wish I could guard your from the sharp edges of ignorance for which you are not calloused enough to disregard. My grief tastes like contempt for discontent; my greed selfish in light of my good fortune. For every complicated worry I harbor, there is a hidden blessing I wish others knew.

The challenges are outweighed by my joy. I laugh a little louder, love a little gentler, fight a little harder, and try a little more each day to become a better version of myself by your example. Quick to befriend and to play, to speak honestly and embrace curiosity recklessly. For all the ways I might change our past, I wouldn’t change who you are.

Love, Mom

{I am tossing this rather raw draft into publication. I wrote this in a moment of vulnerable unrest when my emotions dictated the shape of my words. I was tempted to press delete and forgive myself the negativity, but I think there is a greater sense of self in owning the uncomfortable pieces of my truth.}

Tagged: Musings, Son