Estée KlarTo Get To The Other Side

I’m not talking about relationships. I’m talking about Adam’s third night at his new home. After letting him explore, be tense, be happy and then settle, he spent his third night in his own bed.

The past two days when I’ve picked Adam up from school he has been running into my arms with a huge grin on his face. I have to admit that his hugs and grins are like Valium — the moment he does that my entire body relaxes. As his mother, I am happy when Adam is happy. Adam is happy when I am happy.

One thing is for sure as I watched his face searching mine this morning and on his way out the door to school is that for Adam, I am home. This is home because I am here. For all the worrying I’ve been doing, it dawns that I am the most important person in Adam’s life. I am the most constant, the most present, although, of course he has many people who also love and support him.

Below is a little snapshot of Adam when he came home from school as I let him relax. It doesn’t show the exuberance that came afterward — and the searching for mommy in order that he could snuggle in the crook of my arm for me to read him his favorite books (Little Ms. Shy and Mr. Quiet, no less). As I watch what Adam does and how he does it; as I pay attention to the books he brings me, he is telling me a whole lot. I say this as I am also skeptically reading about a cuddle drug for autism (Adam is the best cuddler and most affectionate child). It can be frustrating when I am worried about Adam and he cannot communicate everything that’s on his mind. Considering all the issues with autism and communication, it is those moments when I step back and pay attention that I can really appreciate Adam and the many things he has to say. Thank goodness for autistic behaviours for they are telling me so much! Adam is telling me how much he needs me and my support. He is telling me how much he loves me!

We are home.

Here’s the little after-school video:

VID 00039

I’m filing. Yes, it sounds tedious but I’m trying to approach this with a new zeal. Moving into a new home is one thing. Moving into a new life after a separation where all of a sudden I have to learn things like personal finance among many other nitty gritty things once shared with a spouse can be a little overwhelming at first. There are no secretaries to do the filing for me. No one to make that call or file that paper. I am taking care, for the first time in my life (believe it or not) of everything. I mean, I am a capable human being, but what is it about suddenly being on one’s own to encourage this level of emotional stress? Ah, right. It was loving someone. It was remembering when someone used to make me a cup of tea and when I helped that someone with other tasks. It was sharing.

Now, it feels like all I have are to-do lists for Adam, the house, for me… for EVERYTHING that it resembles Santa’s Wish List from all children around the globe.

I have to admit I am getting cranky. I felt guilty about that until I read (in a Toronto service for divorced people) a check-list for stress. One of them is being irritable and easy to set-off. The stress is pretty heavy. I’m trying to transition Adam and forgot that I am also still transitioning myself. I’ve gained weight (I am the kind who puts on weight when stressed out). I haven’t been looking after me — something that most moms of special needs kids talk about a lot, never mind adding divorce stress on top of it. Maybe it’s a little feminist of me to suggest that maybe I let other people take care of me a little too much. I resemble the capable, intelligent woman who deferred many of these tasks to a man. Yet I also don’t believe that sharing the tasks is a bad thing at all. It’s not learning and not knowing how that can be dangerous. When confronted now with sorting new things out in life, it feels foreign and I need to map it out.

To my surprise, Adam was very happy last night exploring the new house and making quite a mess of it — opening doors, taking things out of cupboards and I figured that as long as he was safe this was important for him to do. Like discovering routes (yes, intended pun), my little Autie is making himself feel at home. Who am I to tell him to put everything away when I’m trying to make him as comfortable as possible? He needs to know what’s behind all those doors. He needs to sort out his new environment. Many an autistic person will attest, like Adam, that routes and familiarity are very important.

So the house was in shambles this morning. I tidied up after Adam left. Putting things away leaves me with a sense of order and peace that I’m looking for in my transition right now. I’m trying hard to slow down instead of rushing forward. I have decided today to take breaks which is something new for me — the kind of person who always always ate lunch at her desk. And yes, I’m filing. It is helping me think. Everything has a place and there’s a place for everything, as the saying goes.

My life is out of the boxes, but it’s going in files. It is helping me understand my new life as much as Adam needs to empty out all the closets.

I just want to report that little Adam came to his new home. He was quiet. Grandma, grandpa and mommy all gathered around him and ate dinner and he just looked and looked. He hadn’t been to the house in the evening before. The lights cast a gentle glow. Evening is a time when everything feels strange. The day is ending and dusk is uncertain.

“Raindrop,” he said of my lamp that hangs like that in the corner of our living room. “Bubble lamp -” we named our chandelier over the table. His eyes were focused on the light.

We all snuggled around him after dinner on the couch and watched a quiet video of photos of Adam’s family and this past year that grandpa had made with classical music. Adam enjoyed it and was also content to read the books and look at the toys I had placed in the room. We went gently upstairs and he climbed into the “snuggle chair” I bought so that the two of us can read together. With very little struggle, he then fell asleep.

He knows everything has changed. Yet I’ve done my absolute best to make all the time leading up to this transition as smooth and as positive as possible. As you readers know, I was quite worried about all this, and even though I’m somewhat relieved, we still have some days ahead of us that I cannot predict.

But now the first night is done. And it seems we’re off to a good start.

It is Valentines Day. Aside from the red commercial hearts and roses we will buy only because the storefront displays will beckon, I wonder if people will remember fragility. The red hearts may be plastic but the real human ones bear no resemblance.

Today is my official final day in my old home — the home I built with Adam’s father. I did move from it a few days ago — I don’t think leaving precisely on Valentine’s Day would have been easy because my mind tends to brood over such Hallmark things, despite my keen awareness of plasticity. As I said I would in a previous post, I ritualized in my own way. I said goodbye to the rooms, picked out a stone from the backyard. But I couldn’t stay long. It was just too painful once all of my things were gone. My memories are still too recent — Adam and I there snuggling just a few days earlier.

“Someone else lives in the house I thought I’d never leave. And the life I’ve lived in that house, I now speak of in the past tense….The keys now belong to someone else. I can’t open that door anymore, and the place beyond it is now as inaccessible to me as all the life I’ve lived there, retrievable only in photographs, story and memory. Still, while I lived in that house it seemed that my life would continue there forever, that it was as substantial as the sofa I settled into in my study with a cup of tea at the end of each day.” (Excerpted from Louise DeSalvo’s On Moving: a Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts And Finding Home Again.)

I created The Autism Acceptance Project in that study. Now, I’ve created a new study where you see me sitting now. I am moving on. Aside from organizing a few things, I am trying to settle in my new home. I feel like maybe I can get back to deadlines, TAAProject and my writing. This evening, my friends and family will gather in my new dining room to help me toast a another new journey in another new home. Again, I believe rituals are so important.

I await Adam to return on Monday afternoon from his mid-winter break so I can help him adjust here. We saw the neurologist last week who believes his spasms have more to do with transitions than anything else. Yet, to be prudent, he must still have the EEG to ensure this isn’t something biological. My suspicion, however, is that Adam has been just as stressed as I have been. According to that infamous “top-life stresses” list, moving and divorce are right up there. Dash in a few other things over the past two years and the plate, as they say, has been pretty full. Being in the new house and taking it in for a few days on my own helps me calm with it, and I need to be calm for Adam. He feels and takes on every emotion I have. As his mother, it’s hard not to feel guilty, but I try to fend that off as it is such a waste of precious energy. I have to teach Adam many things two of which; 1) I am human and, 2) that the only reason we are here is to make the best of what we have. I believe these are good things to teach autistic children — the children we so often say need consistency and structure. While I believe that to be so true, it’s not always the way life goes.

Saying that, I’ve also learned an important lesson on the fragility of the heart and of the roots we think we build. In fact, I think the lesson I was meant to learn was that of impermanence. We all want our children to feel stable as it is an important factor in healthy growth, but I’m beginning to believe that an important gift we can give to our children is to also teach about how things change. “Paint peels, plaster cracks, and gardens, of course, are the most ephemeral constructions of all.” (Louse DeSalvo p. 149). I know we are supposed to keep structure in our children’s lives — particularly autistic children who are so prone to anxiety — but the fact of the matter is that all of life is outside of our control. We take what we are given and polish it. And it’s definitely okay to cherish it too.

“The gleam of a loved house lasts only as long as he who loves it can keep polishing.” (p.149) This goes for all the people we love too.

Happy Valentines Day.

This post will be brief as I am living in the moment of moving homes. Adam came to our new home today before he goes on a mid-winter break with his dad. His body-jerks have returned and he cries in his new room. “Are you scared,” I ask.

“Are you scared?” he echoes back with then a slight delay. “Scared,” he says forcefully.

We have made numerous visits to the home, but because Adam can understand what he cannot express fluidly with words, he is reacting. It is strange. He knows the move is now imminent. He is experiencing the stress that other children experience. He has experienced so much.

It brings me back to the time when I was six years old and my parents moved homes. I remember when they looked at it, when they purchased it — my dad and I put the “sold” sign on the front yard. So new was the house, the lawn was not yet in and we perched the sign in the dirt. Dad made a big deal out of it, I remember that much. He was proud. It’s amazing what impressions we retain from out childhoods. It wasn’t much longer after that — I returned from a weekend with my grandparents to sleep (all of a sudden) in my new home. I believe there was even a stuffed animal waiting for me in a newly erected brass mailbox by the front door. It was summer. The “welcome committee” was ready to do its job and make me feel right at home. That committee was my parents.

I remember that arrival and how strange it was, but I’ve lost the memory of sleeping there my first night. I’m certain my extremely attentive and loving mother did everything she could to make me feel I was at home. Yet, it didn’t feel quite right. I couldn’t ride my bike around the house in my old neighbourhood where a garden was planted and grass was laid and my good pals were gone (I was particularly close to the boys I punched in the stomach — it wasn’t my idea… it was my father’s. He tried to make me into a tough girl and STILL relays that story proudly to anyone who will listen…kind of embarrassing at my age). Nope, they were all gone and all I had was the bike and the dirt for my early introduction. The plumbing still wasn’t working in the block so new, that we had to use the model home down the street to take a pee. Indeed, that was a strange feeling.

My parents are still around and are extremely loving grandparents to my son, not to mention incredibly supportive of their daughter who is now not only a single mother, but also their only-child having another life “adjustment.” Let’s just say that they mean the world to me and I’m certain to Adam. On Monday, when Adam returns home from his break with his dad, those same grandparents will be the welcoming committee to his new home that he will settle into with mom.

Adam is only a year or so older than I was when I made the major move. I try to appreciate how strange this all feels on top of parents who are no longer together. I think of how confusing that must be; how stressful sometimes, and because Adam is autistic, he manifests that stress in physical behaviour. It is the only outlet he has. Even though we are all doing our best to help him along, Adam has been expressing how he feels about the matter.

Expressing boldly without words.

I now play a video I made with Adam’s grand-dad a few years ago. I love the little guy more than words can say. This is a look backwards with gratitude while also hoping the future will bring us both peace.

It’s the final countdown. Adam and I will move in several days. I’ve written a lot about it. Tomorrow Adam sees the neurologist. Last Saturday Temple Grandin’s story was aired on HBO. It all reminds me of Adam’s anxiety and how I found him two nights ago in his underwear drawer (closed) in a fetal position at 5:30 in the morning. The change is very big for such a little guy.

It manifests in his senses. I think his body jerks and desire to be in tight dark places have a lot to do with change and his parent’s separation. I certainly believe my little boy is telling me how he feels without words.

I really believe it. It’s why it makes me a bit frustrated that people think that autistic behaviour is “abnormal.” What’s the difference between a neurotypuical child who tantrums versus an autistic child who can’t tell me that he’s confused but seeks a drawer to find security?

Without words, Adam speaks volumes.

All I can say is that I look forward to putting some security/regularity back into Adam’s life (and mine). By next week I shall be posting from our new home.

Please wish us luck.

Of course I heard this song on the radio today transporting stuff from one house to another in my car:

We are moving, Adam and I. Thirteen days and counting. Leaving the home I built with Adam’s father (literally — I’ve uncovered stacks of my working notes while building the house I am moving out of) and I ache. My back aches from moving boxes, my feet ache from running up and down stairs, and well, the heart is complicated.

Houses are more than what they contain. They are more than walls. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t drive back to the homes we grew up in, or show our boyfriends and girlfriends where we went to school. We wouldn’t go back to tree where we carved our names, or try to find the homes our grandparents lived in to imagine what history had happened to bring us to this very moment. We traverse back all of the time. We try hard to conjure up the memories, the conversations, Fred Flintstone and Campbells Tomato Soup, or maybe the sounds of children running in for lunch. Even though we can’t relive them in actual time, the moments live within us.

I remember when we started planning to build the house I will say goodbye to next week — the first day we ripped down the old structure that stood on this land before we built; Adam was a baby then and I had taken a walk from the other white home we lived in — the one I’ve written about in The Perfect Child, with black shutters and a huge maple tree, to witness the first dent the demolition crew made. We were building something and I was exhilarated.

It took us eighteen months to build this house we lived in since 2005. Every week, I’d walk Adam over in his stroller — getting him used to the new place; already worried about that thing I always talk about: “transitioning.” We walked by. Then we walked in. Then we could walk up a ladder that took the place of stairs. Then we could walk up stairs until finally, we played ball in the kitchen that was still being built. My mother accuses me (in the nicest possible way) of living in the future since I was a very young child. As Adam’s mother I imagined all the games we would play in this house, the guests we would have. I don’t knock imagination in the age of the Power of Now. We can breathe life into things!

When Adam was three, we moved in. Leaving Rosemary (the white house), was difficult too. It was the home Adam’s father and I began to build our family life and where I became a stepmother. It was the place where I brought Adam home two days after he was born — April 13, 2002. I will never forget how it began to rain and that strange feeling — that the house I left was not the same house to which I returned. Adam, of course, changed all of that. The moment I put him down in his car seat in that front hall and I was overcome with the new life that I now cannot imagine living without.

I returned to Rosemary with toddler-Adam asleep in the back of my van soon after we had moved into this home which I am about to leave. I had to run in to fetch the bassinet my mother had refurbished for him — the one I also slept in thirty-some years earlier. It was “heaven’s bed,” or a “Himmelbett,” as they say in German. My German grandmother made it by hand just for me. Adam also deserved to lie under the same protection of the heavens and the angels.

As I walked into Rosemary it was about to storm — still so quiet and dark. I stood lingering and silent in each room. I had to think about everything that had happened in those rooms and all of those conversations. Although it was empty, the walls seemed to be whispering among the dust balls — remember when, remember when….

When I was ready, I wrapped my arms around the bassinet and put it quietly in the back of my van, Adam still sleeping soundly, the thunder just beginning to gently roll towards us. I sat in the car and looked one last time. It was hard, but I had to say goodbye. I put the car in reverse and decided not to go back for awhile. A couple of years later, the new owners demolished that house and built a new one. I still drive by.

Saying goodbye to homes and a life I shared with someone is an important ritual. Just because some things don’t last does not mean we must abandon them in our hearts, our minds or with sour words. We must honour an ending as much as a beginning, for all our stories have them. I believe we have to approach such goodbyes with gentle regard for all of those days, nights, hours and years. All of those words spoken; all of those hopes and dreams. We build. We move. We demolish. We build again.

I have created a new home and it’s also lovely. Adam loves his new room, and I have created another piece of Himmel over his reading nook, where he has only visited but looks about curiously and tries to find his comfort.

Like everything else I do, I will get this done. I will say my prayers and my goodbyes as I stand in each room listening to what the walls say. Then I will take a rock from the backyard that Adam loves so dearly — where Adam’s father brought home his first big trampoline; where the grandfathers worked so hard to put it together. Our backyard was Adam’s haven and we spent many summer afternoons swimming and playing. At first, that rock will be difficult to look at, so I may put it away. I have a feeling, however, it will later become something I will need to look at. Something to cherish. I have to remember. For all those years were worth it. They are my story and, while it may come with some ache, I am proud of everything that was created over the past thirteen years. While my imagination is already working on my new home (and yes, my future as well as Adam’s), this is my way of saying goodbye.

Review of Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Elizabeth Gilbert
Reviewed by: Estée Klar

I’m a separated single mother. Last night, having dinner à la Sex in the City with my three long-time girlfriends, I realized that I am the only truly single lady at the table. My girlfriends may have had the recipe for relationship success right all along — they never, ever got married. They may be single, but they are all in long-term committed relationships.

This is not to say that I’m against marriage now just because I am separated, but since I feel I have not yet been successful, and in fact — let me borrow Gilbert’s own words –  “gutted” by the entire process, her new book may have come to me in the nick of time. Perhaps not just for me. Judging by the hot topics of discussion out there — like “All Kinds of Families” upcoming on television with Rosie O’Donnell,and the hit HBO series, Big Love, and Desperate Housewives, well, Gilbert definitely knows what is on our minds. So long Ozzie and Harriett, Little House on the Prairie and Leave it to Beaver; these times…they have changed!

Gilbert acknowledges that she is no scholar of Western marriage, but her research makes us rethink our beliefs. Woven in between her own personal journey — falling in love with Felipe at the end of her Eat Pray Love journey, living with him on his three-month visas into the U.S. and vowing never to marry each other –  we learn a little bit more about her and how and why we think such things about finding soul-mates and marriage partners. “Sentenced to marriage,” because her partner Felipe will finally be deported out of the United States if they do not marry (no more three-month visas allowed), Gilbert decides to research almost out of terror. She has already been divorced. She has no children. She writes, she travels. She seems to covet her freedoms. But she has also fallen deeply in love with Felipe.

So she embarks on her next quest which manifests in this newly released book. Expecting the world from our partners to “make us eternally happy,” she cites an important, maybe crippling, contemporary theme — that the only quest worthy in life is to find happiness. “It’s the emblem of our times,” she says. “I have been allowed to expect great things in life. I have been permitted to expect far more out of the experience of love and living than most other women in history were ever permitted to ask. When it comes to questions of intimacy, I want many things from my man, and I want them all simultaneously….We Americans often say that marriage is ‘hard work…’ but how does marriage become hard work? Here’s how: Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.” (p.48).

Of course, Gilbert can’t be excluding the same expectations of men who stake their happiness on a woman. Honestly, if I were to wager an un-researched guess, men have more difficulty in our culture being without a woman than women do without a man. If it’s a popular topic of discussion of our times, it does not belong exclusively to women-kind. But she does note that her father seemed to have fewer expectations of his 1950’s marriage than her mother: “…while it’s true that my mother has given up more of her personal ambitions in marriage than my father ever did, she demands far more out of marriage than he ever will. He is far more accepting of her than she is of him.” (p.197). So while Gilbert seems to identify in part the “shackles” that women find themselves in when they enter marriage, she also acknowledges that it can also be a repressive tool against men. “It’s an ancient truism across countless different cultures that there is no better accountability-forging tool for an irresponsible young man than a good, solid wife.” (p.198.) She cites Robert Frost who says, “in traditional societies single young men have a global reputation for squandering their money on whores and drinking and games and laziness: They contribute nothing.” (p. 198). But ask a thirty-something year-old single man, and I’m not so sure he would or wouldn’t agree. As woman have changed, I am hopeful that, since Robert Frost’s time at least, men have too.

Among the Hmong people she sets out to interview, where marriages are arranged, the women she attempts to probe about love don’t seem to have any expectations of their men. It is set up more for civil function and child-bearing, and the woman remain with the women during their days, and the men — well they are off doing God knows what. When Gilbert asks the Hmong women about how they felt about the subject of marriage, she was greeted with laughter and confusion. Of the Hmong grandmother she said, “Neither the grandmother of any other women in that room was placing her marriage at the center of her emotional biography in any way that was remotely familiar to me. In the modern Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world.” (p.35). In Canada, where the person we link arms with is an important choice that reflects who we “are,” whether I like the idea or not, I would have to agree.

Gilbert’s chapters are separated to many aspects of marriage: Marriage and Surprises; Marriage and Expectation; Marriage and History; Marriage and Infatuation; Marriage and Women; Marriage and Autonomy; Marriage and Subversion and finally Marriage and Ceremony where she ultimately makes peace with her “life sentence;” albeit with a lot of soul searching and research! It seems to me that she finds her success in being “separate” while also devoted to and a part of Felipe. It makes me realize how utterly lucky I am to have time to myself, to be alone at this point in my life before launching into something too fast and too soon. Maybe I can call it my Eat Pray Love kind of year — the eating and praying part for sure and the love I am gaining for myself as well as a recognition of an enduring love for my son. Maybe we all need at least one of those years in our lifetimes. It seems to be our fear of being alone and that stigma prompting the fear that may be the saboteur of a peaceful path to coexistence.

That stigma of being single looms. Just a quick look at the amount of on and offline dating services that exist out there, and we can see it. We are yearning for connection — looking for that lost half of ourselves. It’s not unfamiliar that concept — our “other half,” our “soul mate.” But is there such a thing? With Hollywood romance pounding the message into our brains that there must be one soul mate out there for each of us, we’ve certainly come to believe it, and all things Hollywood must be rigorously questioned.  Yet instead we go out into the world and look for our mates as if it is our life quest. Gilbert says “our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble.” (p.45). Apparently, as soon as we abandoned arranged marriages and began to choose for ourselves, divorce rates sky-rocketed. As I read her book thinking of our freedom to create different “kinds of families” that we either inherit by default because of circumstances, or choose, I consider that the reader will be left with the question: so which is better; to be able to be free to choose, to remain single or to go back to arranged marriages? Gilbert would opt for freedom, but not of the escapist kind.

When women began to have equal rights and opportunities, they no longer had to remain in bad marriages. Then came the myriad of choices, for better or for worse. While  Western marriage is comforting in the sense that it eliminates all choice, it has, as I’ve hoped to illustrate via Gilbert’s book, its own set of issues. Religion imposes a civil and “moral order” (religion assumes we are sheep that need guiding — another power schematic) — a role that today our lawyers deal with when we get divorced: how property and children are divided. After all, the State doesn’t care about our broken hearts. Gilbert discusses how women gave up everything to be in marriage in history – and let’s face it, to a large extent still do in modern times. In Europe’s history, cites Gilbert, “the legal notion of coverture — that is, the belief that a woman’s individual civil existence is erased the moment she marries…a wife effectively becomes ‘covered’ by her husband and no longer has any legal rights of her own, nor can she hold any personal property…Coverture was a French legal notion that spread to England as late as the nineteenth century. British judge Lord William Blackstone was still defending the essence of coverture in his courtroom, insisting that married women did not really exist as a legal entity. ‘The very being of the woman,’ he wrote, ‘is suspended during marriage.’” (pp.65-66). Woman eradicated as humans? This is not something I enjoy reading about, but I believe it  still exists in the deepest caverns of our collective minds. It plays out in marriages, in court rooms and infects the behaviour of many men and woman today — that our worth is hinged on marriage and men alone.

Just going out with many women, and seeing more middle aged women going out on the town with each other, I’m not altogether happy with what I see. Not only do women just want to go out — and now they can without the man which is of course, great and something we now take for granted — many of us womankind are still fiercely hunting. “MILFS,” (a sexist, unfortunate term meaning “Mothers I’d Like to _ _ _ _”) we in a certain age-group have now earned such derogatory terms — “Cougar” being another one of them. You can see it in the eyes — checking out the men who walk into the room, trying to look coy with that red-coloured martini in their hands (wait..I like red-coloured martinis), probably hoping with bated breath that some guy will approach her. While many women might say they have earned the right to employ on the goose what was done to the gander, I have to wonder if women are out really enjoying themselves, or if they are seriously hunting for a man for the sake of increasing her self-worth. I’m not suggesting that woman are solely to blame here, as She has been the object of sexual oppression for generations. Yet why perpetuate the cycle?

Without the pressure of man-hunting, the best possible relationship and the ones I really value are those of my girlfriends — married, unmarried, gay, and yes, even yearning. None of us are alone with the very same questions Gilbert raises — “sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” (p.81). Doesn’t that just say it all? Now single, I am even aware I may now be a threat, possibly, to some of my married friends. It even shocks me to encounter married women who think it is so wonderful to be single, so easy — as if I can party all night long. It’s all very ironic because none of it is easy. I may represent what perhaps some married women fear they may become and representing that comes with a price that has saddened me to pay. A single gal can’t always win with the married type. It seems married or not, we all want to believe the grass is either greener on the other side, or that it’s as scary as hell. And believe me, it really is hard the first year of transition from married to single life! Don’t let my going on and on about being single fool you for a moment. I cried for six months straight!! Nothing can spare us from the heartbreak following the break-up or a loss of a long-term partnership or marriage.

What I starkly realized whilst becoming single (it’s a process), is the stigma — that I am less valuable if I am not attached to a man (one of woman’s greatest fears). I have also learned that this idea is farthest from the truth. As I grow and spend about as much time thinking about this topic as Gilbert has, being alone for a long stretch in one’s life without jumping into other people’s beds in order to escape loneliness is probably the most important thing we can do at least once in our lifetimes. And we all will — our spouses will die, our partnerships will break up. We simply have to learn to live well with and happily with ourselves. As a single person and a person who may enter any future relationship, it is most important to learn to value oneself first in order to be valued. One way to value oneself is to spend time alone…and not fear it. Elizabeth Gilbert protects her freedom, it seems for similar reasons. Like me, she enjoys traveling on her own. Like most women today, we try to find that safe place where we can have a partnership while also maintaining our need to pursue our own dreams. Ironically, even with all our hard-earned freedoms, it still can seem like an extreme sport.

Gilbert can get us really thinking with the amount of thought she and Felipe pour into their oncoming nuptials. For me the finest chapter was on Marriage and Infatuation. “History teaches us that just about anybody is capable of just about anything when it comes to the realm of love and desire.” She puts new words to the harsher adage “all’s fair in love and war.” It seems to me Gilbert, despite all the research, came up with the answer mid-way through her book about what makes partnerships last or not, and as I read this I considered by parent’s marriage of forty-six years. I witnessed them building their marriage like maintaining a beloved house. Walls had to be repainted, dying trees cut down and replanted, and some rooms eventually completely renovated. It was constant work and in between they lived out their frustrations and their joys. They are products of this historic belief system as much as my generation is, and future generations will be. Something in them and maybe even about them, I don’t know — they just stuck it out. Who knows what those factors were as they traversed life’s trials that bonded them together or nearly tore them apart. These are the intimacies I will never know. But, it does make me realize that to be in a partnership is to enter a contract that is tacitly renewed every single day. And yes, maybe that is supposed to be at times, “hard work.” Expectations or no expectations, it just can’t always be easy.

Gilbert uses the work of Shirley P. Glass, a psychologist “who spent much of her career studying marital infidelity…[whose] question was ‘How did it happen?’” So as I read the following paragraphs, I thought of the “house” with the strong foundation my parents built:

“The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside matrimony – so long as the ‘walls and windows’ of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world – that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barrier of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.

What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself – your deepest yearnings and frustrations – and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.

So be the time your new friend comes into your office one day in tears over some piece of bad news, you wrap your arms around each other (only meaning to be comforting!) and then your lips brush and you realize in a dizzying rush that you love this person—that you have always loved this person! – it’s too late. Because now the fuse has been lit. And you really run the risk of someday (probably very soon) standing amid the wreckage of your life, facing a betrayed and shattered spouse (whom you still care about immensely, by the way), trying to explain through your ragged sobs how you never meant to hurt anybody, and how you never saw it coming.

And it’s true. You didn’t see it coming. But you did build it, and you could have stopped it if you’d acted faster. The moment you found yourself sharing secrets with a new friend that really ought to have belonged to your spouse, there was, according to Dr. Glass, a much smarter and more honest path to be taken. Her suggestion would be that you come home and tell your husband or your wife about it. The script goes along these lines: ‘I have something worrying to share with you…” pp.109-110.

While this piece of information hit me like a brick from that shattered house on my head and comes in the middle of her book, the rest of her book is worth reading too. I thoroughly enjoyed (obviously) reading about wo/man’s journey with marriage and where our beliefs may have derived. Most of us, even if we are good at being single, want friends and partners in life. We are, I believe, built to share. While “love based unions make for fragile tethers…maybe divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love.” (p. 83). I have learned while we need to have choice and freedoms, with them come many responsibilities — for nourishing ourselves and others and treating each other with respect and kindness. And this also grows and changes, like the institution of marriage in our culture, with that tacit contract. Maybe the contract, like people, get better with age. Maybe we come to understand the fragility. Maybe some of us learn, in this age of free expression and openness, that there are some things in life that should be left between two people. Gilbert certainly reminds us of the nature and importance of privacy and the need for a couple to really discuss and think about things, instead of expecting them.

Gilbert, after soul-searching this serious marriage business, finally marries Felipe in the house she buys in New Jersey (which ironically happens to be a converted church) when Felipe’s visa is finally approved. As they utter their vows, a dog suddenly lies auspiciously between them (which just happens to symbolize fidelity). I envision all the people out there writing their long list of pros and cons about relationships. I might be one of them one day. Yet very much like Elizabeth, I still believe in love.

I do, I do, I DO!

Adam is almost eight years old. I can hardly believe how the time keeps marching by; how the year of separation from Adam’s father has also gone by. Soon, Adam and I will be living in our new house and rebuilding our lives.

Adam is changing and I reminisce from the early days — when he was diagnosed at 19 months of age, how I started this blog back in 2005. He is becoming more curious, more adept, stronger. He is always learning. He gets frustrated. He still cannot communicate with words very well. He must use a device. He does not understand, I believe, inherent dangers as he explores his new exciting world. Laundry chutes, small dark corners are inviting spaces for all little children. I teach as best I can with a firm “no,” a new rule that he can easily comprehend, and a stop sign posted to various areas of the house. It may not be “designer” but style makes no sense where safety is concerned.

Adam is also heading out into the world. Yes, he has his aides. But as a newly separated person who now must share time with Adam’s father with regards to Adam, I find myself during lonely nights thinking about how life is always about letting go: of fear, of things, of little children growing into bigger independent children (or quasi independent in our case). As Adam grows, I must learn to let him out into the world with others so he can learn more. It is a great challenge for any parent, and perhaps even more punctuated when one is a single parent. And as all things with our children as we watch them grow, it’s (delightfully) bittersweet. Adam would grow up resenting me if I held him back and did not let him explore. I have to let him do it in safe ways, in stages. When he grabs that sharp knife to cut a piece of fruit, I have to teach him with a dull knife (and with supervision of course). I have to let him explore dark spaces by creating safer dark spaces. I have to let him jump around the house, not on furniture where he may hurt his head, but on equipment set up for the task of jumping. In the case of Adam and his neurological needs, I also have to LET him be who he is and get the feedback he needs.

He needs to run, he needs to jump, explore, and yes, eat lemons. I would never be able to hold him back to change these activities because they don’t look like typical play. I need to provide him safe avenues to explore these things. Instead of viewing these things as “overwhelming” because they are not what all typical children necessarily do, I must learn new ways of helping him explore. While there are not as many programs and “how-to” books out there, common sense, time, and a deep breath help me figure it out.

It’s the same at school and we are lucky right now to have a school that allows Adam to explore safely, that allows aides, that allows us to bring in adaptive technologies and programs that help Adam learn in the way he can. But when people first meet him, I am starkly aware of how they will measure him — what “competency tests” to assess what he does and does not know that are delivered in a way that we take for granted, and perhaps that Adam would not be able to respond to. Far less effort (and money) is paid to adapting those tests so that he could respond — like visual options for answers, multiple choice. Adam is extremely visual and “performs” well when given this option. And I write this because I saw the movie NELL last night with Jodie Foster. I have been calling Adam — among many nicknames like boo boo bear, moo moo, Adiboo, Adamame… and Chickabee — the nickname Nell uses in the film. I must have picked it up a few years ago when I first saw it. I love the movie Nell because it reminds us that humans can create languages that perhaps not everyone understand easily and in the way we are used to, but how we create meaning.

And Adam communicates, indeed. He has a language that I’ve learned to, believe it or not, take for granted! But as he goes out into the world not everyone will know his language. He would be given those “competency tests,” and maybe even fail because they don’t measure in a way that addresses how he can express what he knows. So yes, my Adam now goes out further into the world. And yes, we have to teach him to communicate within it and learn the more common way of communicating. But I still believe he will and should always keep his mother tongue.

I’m excited about this:

This is a painting made for me by Carla Lipkin (click on her website for more information about her artwork). I believe if you click on the image, you will see it more clearly. Carla has worked on it for about six months in preparation for my move next month. It now sits proudly in my dining room. It is a compilation — about thirty layers — of quotes and words I have sent her that have significant meaning for me as I “get to the other side” of my life after divorce. Over the past year, I have been reading and writing and meditating rather than putting myself out there too soon. I believed that mourning a relationship that was the most significant of my lifetime (so far) warranted no less of a process.

I decided, with Carla, to make something beautiful out of this period, and I am excited that it manifested in this result. I want to thank Carla and Hilary (her mom and my dear friend) for supporting me and for making an exceptional commissioned work that will remind me that there are no failures in life — only experiences. That said, thanks also to Adam’s dad not only for thirteen years and for Adam, but also with whom I hope to share a future of positive co-parenting of our wonderful boy.

My little ditty (video) came out very little. I wrote a post with this but it also deletes the video (I know, it was me) and I am letting go of struggling to make it bigger. So grab a magnifying glass… the beginning is a white owl flying in the daylight. They are mainly photos I took in 2009. There are pictures of friends and family, a couple of old highschool photos sent by old friends, and the places I visited this year… Beethoven’s front door…skulls on an alter from the Napoleonic era.

I’ll write the post again this week. In the meantime, I need to thank everything that happened in 2009. They say that we should not discount that in times of struggle or crisis, we just might be having the time of our lives. Click on “Thankyou” below to view:

Thank you

Curiousity is a wonderful human trait. Adam is autistic and while he needs some regularity and structure and familiar environments, he also needs to explore new ones. He is curious. He likes to explore — in his own time — new foods, new things, new places. I pride myself on having traveled with Adam even when it wasn’t easy to travel with him. I do it with him as a single parent now, and his dad and I did it together when we were married. While I was tentative in Adam’s early years of flying him as far as Africa, I do not rule it out as he grows older. Just because Adam is autistic does not mean that he should not see the world. It’s how we orchestrate the process and itinerary that’s important. As a parent, I know I also have to be prepared for anything. Too many expectations can foil the best of plans.

We’ve had great flights and not-so-great-flights. I can never predict or prepare enough. I have learned from Adam to give ourselves plenty of time, to pack his bag with his favorite toys, foods, and DVD’s. I generally know that early morning flights seem to be easier than mid-to-late afternoon flights, although like everything, there are exceptions to that rule. Adam can be happy and calm as I “work” the flight with him. As a parent of an autistic child, I have learned to stay on top of Adam’s needs before any anxiety is triggered, for once triggered, it can be difficult to calm down. So as a parent, I don’t get to read the paper or a good book when I’m on a flight with Adam, but I still believe the effort is worth it. Travel, like autism and life, is a journey we cannot perfect. We cannot always predict how bumpy the flight may be. We can’t predict delays that are a normal part of travel. We can’t predict the mood our child might be in as much as we cannot predict our own. We can, however, try to prepare ourselves and do our best to keep calm in challenging circumstances.

I’m talking about travel because not only do I thrive on it myself, but as a single mom I look forward to exploring the world with my autistic son. We’ve been to Alaska, we’ve been to the U.S. and the Caribbean. I am looking forward to taking Adam to Italy where I have a feeling he will love it for the sights, the gentle sounds of a murmuring town square, the Gelato, tomatoes and salami — not to to mention the flocks of pigeons he can chase and the magnificent art. It’s my dream to take Adam abroad. But it’s not my dream to endure a difficult flight. It’s my problem, I know. I don’t like to see Adam suffer. I think I have to just get things organized (like rent one place and make it our “home base” for several weeks). I am admittedly tentative about the overnight flight to Europe. Everyone tells me that this should be the easiest because children “can sleep on an overnight flight.” They don’t know my Adam. I remember that twelve-hour day from Alaska back to Toronto where Adam was beside himself. We learned that Gravol didn’t put him to sleep as it sometimes does for other children. I’ve learned that Chlorohydrate doesn’t settle Adam before an EEG. I’ve learned that Melatonin won’t relax him on a flight, either. Adam, my Adam, is my prize-fighter. If Adam is anxious and does not want to sleep, giving him sedatives may have the opposite effect. He may metabolize medication differently. Or, he just too anxious, period.

I will eventually book that trip to Italy at some point, deal with my fears and see what happens. I think I’m a well-prepared mom and it’s the times when I’m most prepared that I find easiest for both Adam and I. I’ve found some good suggestions on traveling with the autistic child (see below) that others may find useful and I’ve employed about all of these strategies. But I’ve not yet traveled afar with the little one and I notice that no one else has written a thing on the Transatlantic flight and the autistic child. I assume (hope, really) that some autistic adults may have some suggestions on helping a prize sleep-fighter enjoy his mid-air travels. Like so much information we seek as parents of autistic children, there simply isn’t enough to support us on our travels in life and abroad.

Travel Tip Sites:
Autism Family Travel
Coping With Autism (on Vacation)
How To Prepare For Traveling With A Child With Autism
Caring for Kids — Air Travel

I hear Adam’s cherub voice, Ready. Set. Go! in my head as I’ve returned from Paris with fifty-two pages of something I think is finally good. It’s a little more than the weight and size of the limited edition of Jeanette Winterson’s Dog Days when I hold it. I can hear “ready, set go,” — that phrase we taught Adam to plunge him into a game or an activity, and I don’t forget the sound. Time, people, events happen so quickly and memory is fragile.

Over the past ten years, I’ve written two books, both incomplete and yearning to come together. At the Humber College for Writers and The University of Toronto, where I’ve attended writer’s conferences in the past, I was told that one’s first book takes about seven years to accomplish. Other writers have told me ten to fifteen years, which had me scratching my head at the John Grishams of the world and how on earth could they churn books out so fast. With my extraordinary impatience and harsh self-judgment, a difficult year has introduced me to some gentilité with myself and with others. So please “God,” this just has to be my year.

Thanks, John Baxter,  and his punctual rendezvous avec moi in front of Les Deux Magots, and avec Flannerie along Rue de Bonaparte and Rue Jacob, taught me a little bit more of the Paris that once belonged to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Miller and Gertrude Stein, among some other great literary figures. Thank you for also letting me hold a letter from Anais Nin to Jean Fanchette. I have come to realize why I became a curator but to understand the importance of preservation and memory.

I would recommend anyone out there to read John’s memoirs from Paris. He has written a series of that help describe the underbelly of and life in Paris.

It was not difficult to be alone in Paris and John’s paragraph caught my eye when I ran across it: “For a woman, Paris is a good city to be alone…Most of the expatriate writers who, since the turn of the century, created our image of the city — Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Nancy Mitford, Mavis Gallant, Dianne Johnson — were laureates of loneliness, who, even though sometimes married, preferred to live and work by themselves.” (page 137, Harper-Perrenial edition, 2005.) So here I was, a “ready, set go” decision to go to Paris, meet John, Leda and write. Another “laureate of loneliness,” but with no complaints.

Which leads me to also thank profusely, my long-time friend and pianiste extraordinaire, Leda Perac, who is another laureate living in Paris. I studied and became great friends with Leda in Germany fifteen years ago in colder, hungrier circumstances, nevertheless playing and singing our way through it all with Tori Amos. This time, having dinner in Le Châteaubriand with my face, she noted, visibily drawn from flight-fatigue, and undoubtedly the weight of a difficult year, she presented all of the letters I had sent to her in German when I returned to Canada in 1995 and 1996. Reading them between courses of poisson and some flirtatious chitter-chatter between myself and our exceptionally handsome waiter with the beautiful smile, I required her to translate the some of the very words I had written fifteen years later, to my chagrin. Leda, you helped bring back memories that remind me of who I was, who I am, and maybe more importantly, why I am.

And thank you, Paris. You gave me Adam, love, and fifty-two good pages. I’m ready to really begin.

Vive la présentation et le préservation.

Anais Nin is a woman who is true to herself and true to her writing from a woman’s perspective. I hope to visit her house in Louveciennes this week. Perhaps this short portion of the talk is a way for us to think about how true we are to ourselves when we write from where we are, which is hard to do when we hear so many ideas and inherit artistic styles. As I listen to her and write my way through this life as autism mom, single mom, and woman on a her own unique adventure, I am also learning that I have to go “the woman’s way:”

After listening to La Vie En Rose, I booked a last-minute ticket to Paris. I leave next week to meet my girlfriend, Leda, who I became friends with while studying in Europe fifteen years ago. Leda is a pianist and her father is a well-known composer from Zagreb. I mention this because I need my artist friends. I need to be around them like I need food or else the daily ups and downs of markets confines the spirit to downward spirals only waiting for outside influences to send them up again. Art puts everything into perspective and reminds me that its wonderful to be a part of the human drama. Perhaps because of our foreignness in a foreign country — we were both struggling to be part of German life in a town called Frieburg – and because we shared Croatian roots, and maybe just because we both loved music, Tori Amos and lots of laughter, we became good friends.

I met Leda again in Paris while I was married a few years ago. Our visit was too short. My ex was not that interested in listening to our memories, which made me feel pressured to cut my visit short with her as most of us do when we know someone is waiting. Thanks to email and Facebook, I’ve reconnected with many of my friends and I decided at the last minute to meet her next week.

I don’t know if it’s part of the divorce process – that bucket list of things we’re going to do only because we are not married anymore. Or perhaps it’s due to the sheer desperation to find and become something new, someone different, and the best way to begin is with a list. Like a compass, it can point you in any direction. All you have to do is choose.

It’s difficult, though, to travel with a child waiting for me at home. A child who knows poignantly when I am not with him, with his few but precious words, I am told, says “mama…mama…” and who is visibly missing me. If Adam only knew the sickness in my stomach that I feel every time I leave him for just a few days. I hate that he misses me or thinks I am gone forever and I worry about it until I’m nauseous. It stopped me from taking many long trips my ex otherwise wanted me to take with him. When your child cannot talk easily with you about his feelings or over the telephone, the worry plummets deeper. So I only booked myself away for five days.

In the earlier days when I knew Leda, when we were younger but not less hopeful, I would have booked several months away under similar circumstances and I would challenge myself even more. It’s like teetering on the edge of an old and new life like standing on the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, which I actually did once at The Royal Observatory. Real and imagined, even with five days, I am crossing a line. While I always hate leaving Adam, I still feel a rush of excitement about going to the airport, which despite the relative ease and economy of travel these days, and with delayed flights, packed airports and flaring tempers, still elates me and I might as well be back in the 1950’s traveling as far and foreign as Asia. I feel excited watching all the people getting ready to go to their destinations – people who speak different languages. I will fiddle with my bag, dig out my book and sit beside strangers knowing that just one conversation can change a person’s life. I love the smell of engine fuel and the sound of them revving before lift-off, the movie selection and bad airplane food and the struggle to sleep because tomorrow will be well underway when I arrive.

As I prepare by launching into a temporary state of transformation, I listen to Parisian music. I have booked a full schedule of concerts, literary walks and dinners with Leda when I arrive. I will bring my journal, put on red lipstick and pearls, and smear my coffee cups and wine goblets with red stains, and find a good pen to buy. I can almost smell the Marlboroughs in the air, and hear the echoes in skinny lane-ways on the Left Bank of lovers talking and giggling and the sound of my feet behind them like Anais Nin’s as the night clears the air. In Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the phenomenon of people changing and becoming like the environment they visit. While witnessing a group of Americans in Paris he describes them as “undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecules of a new people.” Travel, he implies, changes us and I yearn to be changed, if only for a week in time.

I am ready walk out into my life again in my little black dress — of rediscovering myself and perhaps who I will become. And I am discovering myself also as a single parent to my son who, even while schlepping to parent-teacher meetings, Adam’s team meetings, O.T., SLP and other like meetings in her Honda, enjoys her red lipstick and Coco Chanel. Discovery is a wonderful thing, and we can be many things to ourselves and to others. But most importantly, the best kind of travel and adventure is the kind where I know I still have Adam to come home to.