It came home in your folder today, the flyer with the fun graphics from your even more fun teacher touting “100 Day,” where you are supposed to dress up like a centenarian. Within minutes I am rifling through your closet for a button down shirt and a tie, combing your dad’s closet for a suitable hat. You approve your future garb and I put it aside for the next week, moving on to more important tasks like feeding my always-hungry boys, one mildly autistic and one not-so-much, and for a time, the celebration is forgotten.
Later, as I’m washing my hundredth dish that day, I do the small amount of mental math I’m still capable of doing. Living to one hundred gets you to 2107. Realistically, at that point I will have been gone for more than half your life.
As I think of how much you still like to snuggle with me it seems impossible that there will come a day I will no longer be with you.
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My goal is to remain alive and cognizant until you’re fifty, a goal which I try to attain by regular check-ups, exercise, and (sort of) limiting that wine intake. My mind stretches out over the next four decades of your life- I hope there is a lovely wife, at least a few of the five kids you’re planning on (remember hon, they’re expensive), friends, a career and independence. If I blur the edges a little I can envision you as a husband, a father, a grandfather. I think how much your boundless enthusiasm for life and your eclectic interests will make you an interesting dad and grandad, how I hope these children I may meet when even walking is a challenge will appreciate you.
I know I do.
Of course, I can’t help but let my mind wander to your older brother being a hundred, and since at least on my side of the family our relatives live a ridiculously long time, that goal may be attainable. I’m hoping to make it to fifty with him too, see him settled in a good group home near his sibling, enrolled in a day program he loves, somehow able to get to those therapeutic horseback riding lessons he adores. I envision there will be frequent visits from his mom and dad (if we can still drive), and that in his own way he will one day be independent of me, although never independent of others.
And that’s where the anxiety creeps back in. I just can’t envision getting him from fifty to death without me.
I’ve written before about him making it to eighty and me to a hundred and sixteen, holding hands as he takes his last breath and I follow along behind him. Rationally I know this won’t happen (even giving up more wine doesn’t make that attainable), but God, I wish it was.
I brought him into this world, and with his need for constant care, I wish I could see him out.
I’m hopeful he’ll have his little brother to look in on him, but I know he’ll be busy with those five kids. They do have a bond between them but I can’t say they’re close anymore. When they were both little we could engage them in games together, but as Zach shed rolling balls back and forth for Star Wars trivia the gap widened, only to be truly breached at bedtime with our communal songs. I am certain my youngest will one day be busy with the trappings of a more “normal” life, may not even live near his brother.
It breaks my heart to think that one day you will be surrounded by people who may like you, but don’t love you.
Even as I pen these words I know for me they’re hypocritical. Although I’m a stay-at-home mom I’ve always been the first to tell friends that day care is not the devil, that there was no difference in the emotional stability of the three hundred kids I taught who’d had outside care or had been home with a parent. Kids need love yes, but maybe they don’t need to be enmeshed in love every single second of their day. Justin will be an adult when he enters a home, will have had decades of love and hugs by the time he moves out. Intellectually, I believe he will be okay.
But this quest for hundred year old garb has made me wonder about his future.
Who will take him to the successors of his fancy neurologist to make sure his meds are right?
Who will remember to spend extra care flossing that gap between the two teeth on the left hand side of his mouth?
Who will schedule (and dear God, do the prep work) for his colonoscopy?
Who will cuddle with my seventy-five-year-old and read him an Eric Carle book (I can guarantee he’ll still want that).
Other than his brother, who will love him?
How do I exit from his life? Do I spend every last possible minute with him, or fade out slowly as it becomes apparent that my time is drawing near?
Hell, will I even have a choice?
When I’m gone, will he miss me, or will the differences in his brain allow a quick fade of attachment?
Yup, being selfless for a moment here, I’m hoping for the latter.
Things have improved lately chez McCafferty. After a long bout with extreme OCD my son’s obsessions seem to have been quelled somewhat, giving us a more “typical” life at home, for which my husband and I are extremely grateful. My youngest is thriving.
We are a happy family. I am happy.
But I share with you that for any family looking toward the future with a severely disabled child, there is always that unknown of what’s to come lurking there, obdurate in its tenacity. Even on a good day, and there are many, my concerns for his future are always with me. On most days I’ve shelved this worry for my sanity, but I know it will always be there. It is perhaps the one thing I am certain of with this life.
And if I make it to one hundred and I still know who I am, I’ll carry it with me too.
For more on my family visit my blog at autismmommytherapist.wordpress.com
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