Survivor Guilt

NASA satellite image of Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy hit New York City a week ago. The kids are back in school today. After a few days home, we were out and about in our Upper West Side neighborhood as if nothing had happened.

The only signs of anything being off or odd were all the big kids on the street in the middle of the day; a few more branches and leaves on the ground than on your average fall day; and the grocery stores looking sad with their half-stocked shelves.

And yet we were a little island of normal in a sea of despair and destruction.

So many of my friends sat in their cold, dark houses, cut off from the world, yearning for heat and light.

People lost homes, businesses, and lives.

A mother's young sons were ripped from her arms. Lost. (The family needs help paying for their funeral costs, please click HERE if you can give, even a little.)

And yet, here we sat, untouched, my biggest problem keeping a pair of jangly 10 year-old boys entertained and away from each others' throats.

It felt - it feels - surreal, odd. I feel uncomfortably disconnected. If I didn't have these children on my hands I would have tried to go out and do something to help the relief effort. But have them I did, 24/7, for a whole week.

My husband, a writer who can work from home as easily as anywhere, had many projects demanding his attention, deadlines to meet, and really no excuse to not work (we had lights, heat, food, internet). So he did. A lot.

So much human drama was unfolding all around us, I should have been electrified, writing away. But I wasn't. I wasn't writing a thing (facebook updates don't count).

I felt moved, horrified and numb at the same time.

The fact that this came at breakneck pace, right upon the heels of our very small, local tragedy (the Krim children's murder) just pushed me further out from my center, thunderstruck.

I feel scooped and hollow, yet vastly lucky and deeply guilty all at the same time. 

Today the children were back in school. But I still had no time to myself (train rides, surrounded by jabbering strangers don't count). I wanted to go to the Krim children's memorial service to support the family and gain some closure there, but other needs pressed: my mother. (Always my mother, these days.)

So I boarded a Long Island Railroad train today, as I had just before the storm, and went to spend the day with my mother, who has forgotten there ever was a storm, but was deeply happy to see me, as ever. (And evoking ever more guilt, as whatever I may have to give is not enough; she needs a companion, and that I just cannot be.)

She, who is now the eldest of her clan, was the one who first taught me the phrase "survivor guilt" when describing her own mother, my Grandma Dunia.

My grandmother was a difficult, gruff and mostly unloving woman. The eldest daughter of a large family in Eastern Europe who all stayed behind and vanished in the Holocaust, she was the sole adventurer, come to America. The sole survivor.

She would not talk about her family. She shut down her feelings. Her oft quoted retort to my mother - who had answered her question of "Why are you in therapy?" with "Because I'm not happy, Mom"... The classic: "Happy! So who's happy?"

Me, Mom & Grandma Dunia in 1974 (Mom was 52 = my age now!)

I fear there may be a passing down of this familial torch some day, as they say that siblings of kids with special needs often feel a form of survivor guilt, too, as they leave the family behind and march on with their lives.

I hope to spare Ethan that. But then again, it's impossible to truly control what emotional baggage we pass on to our children, can only hope it's knapsack-sized and not the whole damn steamer trunk.

Tomorrow morning we'll make cookies and bring them to Ethan's school for the traditional "Election Day Bake Sale" this year's profits going not to some school project but rather to provide relief to the victims of Hurricane Sandy; assuage our collective guilt with a little sugar.

For though our buildings may have been untouched, here, our hearts have been breached by this storm. And only by reaching out with our hands, and doing... something... anything... just a little baking, even, will we move forward, together, into the sun.

Planets

Venus & Jupiter in the sky - so NOT in New York City

Tonight Ethan and I ran a little excursion after dinner. Just the two of us. When we walked out the door it was not quite seven o'clock. These days that means a sky full of light.

Added to the ridiculously unseasonable warmth, us stepping out of a March eve in mere t-shirts, and I was hard pressed to remember it wasn't a languorous summer evening, but yet a school night, and thus we had to execute our errand quickly and hurry home.

Besides, I had promised the upstairs neighbors with whom I had parked Jake that we'd be back within the hour, and I sorely did not want to abuse my favor currency with them, would surely be needing to spend it again soon.

Jake himself was delirious to be upstairs with his "best friends" -- the four year-old sister of a pair of brothers who are Ethan's good school friends, and their white terrier, Mac, with whom Jake is nearly as obsessed as he is with our cat.

Ethan and I were on a mission, because I had failed in my mom-duties today: I was to have picked up a particular book for Ethan, another in the once-seeming-endless Warriors series that we are now close to outflanking.

The latest installment comes out in April, and the one before that will appear in paperback the same day, when we will finally snatch it up. I adamantly refuse to purchase these throwaway books in hardcover, so Ethan is going to have to get over his aversion to the library if he wants to read that last one anytime soon.

We absolutely HAD to go to the bookstore because he had finished the last Warriors book in our possession the day before, and thus we were now in the dreaded state of NOTHING TO READ.

I will not mention again the hundred wonderful books, sitting uncracked in our apartment; forlorn, unbeloved, rejected out of hand. Ethan is a picky reader. But for that he is now these past two years an avid reader, I am eternally grateful. I will forgive the undeserved scorn he heaps upon those poor maligned tomes, for the joy suffusing his being as he greedily devours the chosen volumes.

Ethan is in high, silly spirits as we walk the busy Broadway blocks to our local Barnes & Noble, and I am grumpy, nursing a throbbing elbow that may be a cracked bone or terribly distressed tendon. No way to tell until I visit the doctor, which I have such a deep aversion to doing.

I don't mind doctors and their offices, really I don't, feeling quite at home there from the countless hours spent looking after my elderly parents' health. And I kind of like peering inside my body, the few times I have myself merited scans or x-rays, mysteries revealed in dramatic, if ghostly, black and white.

But it's the time I dread; the time, the time, the time I do not have.

And so Ethan skips and darts around me walking down the street, as much crazed mosquito as boy, as I protectively cradle my elbow and brood.

"Look at all the people out in the evening!" Ethan proclaims with wonderment, and I dive again into pointless regret that we are not living anything like the life I had imagined, filled with evening family strolls and nighttime explorations of the city.

Jacob does not like to leave home all that much, and to be out with Jacob and Ethan together is most often a form of torture. I must steel myself for it. I must have some wealth of resilience in my bones, some stored reserve of calm and good mothering at the ready. There are days when I can and days when I can't and today was decidedly in the inconceivable column, my tanks in the red zone, surely running on fumes.

<^>^<^>

Mission accomplished, book in hand, Ethan and I pushed through the store's glass doors into a city become near night, the sky's blue glow nearly extinguished, the streets bathed in yellow-orange incandescence. 

Turning west to walk the two short blocks to Riverside and home, the brightest of stars appeared in the overhead sky. Not stars, planets: Venus and Jupiter blazing, blindingly bright in the deep cerulean sky that slices between the highrises, thankfully not obliterated. These two gods are in a much celebrated love fest this March, a conjunction the likes of which will not manifest again until next May.

And yet, while they appear to be quite close, kissing distance on the Ides, they are in fact not truly crossing at all. It's just an artifact of our perspective, the way they look from here on our own dear mudball.

They are in fact deeply distant from each other, Venus lying sunward from us, drawing us in toward the heart of our solar system, while Jupiter circles round us from the outside. To gaze upon Jupiter is to reach out toward the distant galaxies and the universe's noisy edges at the jagged beginning of time.

I do not like that my children are distant planets, each locked into their own distinct orbits, occasionally approaching but never truly crossing paths, both merely circling 'round me, their sun.

How I wish instead they were more like a double star system, like so many of the other twins we know: circling each other, at times closer, at times more distant but always in orbit, one about the other; connected, entwined, hurtling through space as one.

But I must, as ever, resist the siren pull of the "what ifs," of the dark matter that draws me to its crushing embrace.

I must instead stay here, in the now, in the track of my actual sons.

The one who lives on planet Autism.

And the one who does not.

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