And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me
It’s hard to sit through back-to-back movie remakes with your kids–in this case, Aladdin and The Lion King–and not think that life is pretty…cyclical. What goes around comes around. Everything old is new again. We’ve been down this road before.
I watched, between my boys and within the span of a few weeks, as the Genie and Jasmine and Simba and Nala and all the others came to life, in both human and animal form, and it wasn’t deja vu that hit me so much as the reality of repetition. Are we all just walking in circles? After three different versions of Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket (the Gene Wilder movie, the Tom and Jerry version, and the Broadway show brought to Sydney–NOT the Johnny Depp version EVER, you shut your mouth right now), is there anything new under the sun?
Now I find myself, as I slowly back off my meds, covering similar terrain as the kind that put me on them in the first place: bouts of internal rage, lowered thresholds, rising anxiety. But there is also newness: my awareness of it all, namely. And my methods for dealing with it. The fact that there are methods at all. The choices I’m forced to make if I want to stay on this road: meditation, prayer, putting down the phone, watching what I eat and drink. I feel the effects of life and my mind/body reaction to it more keenly. This is hard, but not altogether bad.
I know, having covered the terrain of my own soul on repeat, that “being a good person” is both impossible on my own and, also, not at all the essence of what I believe. My faith has been sifted through the sands of reality, of rebellion, of failure, and what comes after those repeated bouts is not a can-do bootstraps mentality but a “where’s the oxygen?” plea from the end of my rope.
My language has been changed. I speak a different tongue now: a narration from the inside of the whale, rather than a victory dance on the shore. You stop minding so much what looks like darkness and defeat when you find, over and over, that it’s the site of rescue.
For example: last week, we spent two hours in an office building downtown getting questioned, poked, and prodded to be determined as worthy of permanent citizenship, which is just another way of being treated nearly the same as citizens of Australia–entitled to the benefits this country offers. After peeing in cups and having blood taken and chests x-rayed, The Husband and I paired off with the kids–he with Little Brother, I with The Kid–and entered exam rooms to be screened, for a third and final time, by a doctor. TK paced the room, both excited and anxious, narrating from inside his own whale: telling the doctor, unasked, about the surgery he had when he was two; talking about his formerly tilted head; mentioning the last time he’d (unwillingly, then) given a urine sample, through a catheter when he was five months old in the ER with a high fever.
The doctor went through her list of questions for me then regarded TK thoughtfully. “And is there anything you need to tell me about James?” she asked, sending alarm bells through my system: was this an innocent question, or an appraisal seeking specifics?
He’s RIGHT THERE, I wanted to reply. She was acting as though he wasn’t.
“Any problems I should know about?”
Well, that did it. Not to be reductionistic, but I’m finding, from the belly of the whale and through the hard gift of my children, that there are often two kinds of people in the world: those who see magic, and those who don’t. She…didn’t.
“There are no problems,” I answered pointedly as I pulled him to me (LOOK AT HIM! HE IS NOT INVISIBLE) and smiled directly into his eyes. “He does have a pretty cool apple brain. Some people call it autism.”
She continued asking questions as though he couldn’t hear them, and I continued to…not provide answers so much as tell the truth in a story. Narration. Our preferred language.
Some people are trained by life to see “same” and “different” and black and white. Others are split open by life, unrequested surgery that leads to more. To magic.
A couple of days later, we sat on the grass near the beach with friends as our kids played nearby. Occasionally a little one would approach with a request for food or a funny comment. The sun blazed in the middle of winter. The shade would have been too cold, so we remained within the rays.
TK approached with a tale of how he’d fallen off a step on the ladder–grin punctuating what could have been a fearful failure but, in his telling, was a survival story. He bounced away, and our friends asked questions. But they weren’t the alarm-bell kind. They were the marvelling kind. The recognition of magic. An awareness is growing within me, that hits me with the full force of life alongside rage and anxiety, that I recognise with them because it all tends to come together: the victories and setbacks, joy and pain. Maybe I’m tired of trying to parse them.
Maybe I’m just tired, period. Life is hard. The moment his teacher tells me that LB never does anything wrong and I beam with pride, followed by and wrapped inside the next moment, when she tells me that he’s being coerced by a friend into being naughty, and I see into the future this quality of his, of needing to please and be accepted, and this afternoon I’ve planned of cupcakes and playgrounds has suddenly gotten more complicated. So we talk, the boys and I, then we role-play, and later I whisper to each of them their worth, how it’s separate from what people think or scores assess, and the anxiety threatens to sit on my chest and overtake me. Then I remember: the darkness of the whale is the precursor to raging sun. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the difference between them. I breathe and wait for recognition of the truth: magic is just another word for grace.