Running before the storm

Mom, Sunday

Sunday I was torn, yet again, between my mother and my children.

Any plans I'd had for the next few days were scotched by the coming of Sandy, a "Frankenstorm" of supposedly biblical proportion.

And this meant especially that I would not be spending Monday with my Mom at her Long Island nursing home, but instead in my home, holed up with the kids, as school was being cancelled. Furthermore, if the storm proceeded as forecast (and it did, as we all know, rather exceed expectations) it would be days and days before I could get out to see her again.

The choice was clear: Sunday or not until Friday at the soonest, if that.

My practical mind told me not to go. Driving was out of the question, as the mere possibility of car trouble, accidents, etc. stranding me out on Long Island for the week was giving me palpitations. But the subway and train option was not ideal either, as New York City's entire transit system was being shut down preemptively at 7pm that evening.

And yet... and yet... my heart told me to go.

And my gut.

Because as much as Mom does not consciously remember my visits, at some deep, other level, she knows. And it affects her in all ways, physical and mental.

Things happen. The initial fall. The middle of the night sink vs. face incident. The butter knife fiasco. These all occurred after a missed visit. They all happened on the rare occasion of there being more than a week's passing since I had last seen my mother. Or, more germanely, since she had last seen me.

So I feel that while she may not remember my time with her, something in her psyche does, and she unravels a bit, if that's missing.

Now this may be all malarkey. It might be coincidence. I may be borrowing guilt for no good reason. But what if I'm not wrong?

And then there's that other thing: what if I don't go and something happens during the storm?

So I fought with myself a bit; crowd-sourced my decision by posting my dilemma to FaceBook, but ended up, of course, taking only the advice that fit in with my gut feeling, unshakable, that this trip needed to be done.

And so it was.

I would have to time it very well. No chance to linger. I would have to catch my train home well before the last subway was leaving Penn Station.

(Such an odd concept to a native New Yorker: the "last subway" being normally non-existent in this, the city that never sleeps. I remember being shocked when I lived in Boston for a college summer to discover the T stopped at midnight, and equally appalled by Paris's dernier métro.)

Going out, I was lucky with the subway, a number two train pulling in moments after I'd arrived in the station, so I made my train with time for Starbucks (there just may be a god).

I arrived to find Mom playing bingo, a new-found pleasure she finds as embarrassing as it is enjoyable (she likes to win, my mother does).

And then, too, a brief visit from Uncle Walter - Mom's 85 year-old "baby brother" - who came bearing flowers, fruit and chocolates, as always.

Mom and Walter at the BINGO table

Owing her a manicure for many weeks running now, I managed to get Mom's nails done as she played, no mean feat.

"I love it when you do my nails" Mom always tells me. But getting her to remember they're wet and hold her hands still long enough for them to dry unmarred is quite another story. (I've figured out to do them one at a time. It takes twice as long, but is the only way it works without tears.)

Still, it's a tangible reminder that I've come, and this is a very good thing. "Your nails are lovely" everyone tells her, and she answers "My daughter did them!"

And then she remembers, she knows (at least for the next few minutes) that I was there.

Her way home

"I just want to go home!" she barks, frustrated, angry, bone weary tired. Then with a whimper and a catch of breaking tears: "Varda, why won't they take me home, now?"

Home. A shifting and shifted concept for my mother.

Home now is a nursing home; half a room; one dresser, one wardrobe, one nightstand and one small bookcase hold the sum of her worldly possessions, whittled down to a nubbin.

"I'm so sorry, Mom. You can't go home today, Mom." Holding her hand, leaning close, I try to break the news to her as gently as I can, for yet again the tenth time within the past three hours that we have been sitting in this, the intake office for the geriatric ward of a psych hospital.

"Why not?" she wails, distraught. "I just want to go home!"

"Mom, your home sent you here to get help; to make sure you're safe. Do you remember what you did?"

She stares at me blankly, searching her near non-existent short-term memory.

"You held a butter knife up to your throat at the lunch table and declared your willingness to end it all."

"Really?" She asks. "I don't remember doing that."

Of course not.

"Mom, you have to stop saying things like that. Then they'll send you home."

In spite of it all, as always, the sense of humor remains intact: on being told she had to stay at the psych hospital until she stops making suicide threats: "Motherfuckers, don't they know a butter knife won't kill you?"

(Yes, I'm a chip off the old block.)

Neither I nor the Psych ER team who evaluated her think she's actually a threat to herself or anyone else. But yes, she is deeply depressed (as her situation IS deeply depressing, with no end in sight) and she does need help to lift up out of it.

And so the nursing home, deeply concerned, has insisted that she ship out until she shapes up.

I understand it is their job to keep her safe. They felt they could not adequately do that, were afraid of the consequences of failure.  But still, I think there has to be a better way, one that will not disorient and frighten her so, on the path to saving her.

Hollow speculation, however, as this is our way now, her way.

No way around it.

Have to go through it.

Mom's going on a bear hunt.

To find her way home.

Days of Argh

This morning barely seems like morning as I awaken disoriented, dry-mouthed, thick-eyed; crumpled snot-filled tissues forming a crackly halo about my throbbing head. The light seeping in through the gaps between the blinds is wan, green, presaging a stormy day; dank and heavy.

It's not how Rosh Hashannah should be, these Days of Awe nearly always crisp and autumnal, sporting achingly blue skies to be glimpsed longingly from inside the synagogue's hush and thrum.

But I have not been this year, sending the menfolk off without me, this virus hitting hard as the holiday's just begun. We have managed the bare minimum tradition requires: a round challah procured, apples honey-dipped, a family meal shared, a sweet new year requested.

And now all I long for is sleep, sleep, sleep. And the room to stop spinning. And the unholy pile of dishes in the sink to wash themselves. And for my mother to walk again.

No matter how far I go in my thoughts, it keeps coming back to that: this huge lump of sadness lodged deep under my heart like that bubble of acid that would not go away throughout my entire pregnancy, spilling out if I tilted just the tiniest bit off true, to the left or right.

My mother has not been my compass for many years, yet I am hers. All she has left. But I am spinning, spinning, spinning right now, unable to find my North.

The storm outside will not come on, teasing all day with skies darkening and lightening and the air growing thicker and thicker until we are all covered in a sheen of our own sweat though we are doing nothing more strenuous than engaging in yet another internecine battle of the homework wars.

Finally, as dusk comes on and the winds begin to lash, the heavens clearly ready to finally open up at any moment, I must leave the apartment for the first time in days, driven by an empty medicine bottle of Jacob's plus the deep need see something other than these walls and my children.

But one insists on coming with: Ethan who will not be separated, even though that age is coming on soon when I will be the one clinging and fearfully watching his back as he strides away. He proceeds to be helpful, carrying bags as we make a few stops to stock our waning pantry as well as pick up his brother's necessary pills.

By the time we trudge back, laden, dying to peel off the rain jackets that were not really necessary but instead have encased us in our own steamy dampness, it has grown near dark and the wind pushes against our bodies, something substantial to resist, fight against, instead of each other, as we find our way home.

Leaps and Bounds

Wide-eyed Jake at our building's Holiday party, 2011

I am happy to report some good news, for a change: Jake's original language has been making some marvelous jumps lately. The things he says out of the blue being startlingly observant and detailed, or his conversation loops are going deeper and deeper, continuing to make sense in wonderful and wondrous ways.

Jake to our neighbor sitting in the lobby with her leashed dog the other day as I brought him inside from his school bus:

Jake: You have a dog!

Neighbor: Yes I do!

Jake: Hi, doggie! What's your name?... (then, looking up at neighbor) What's his name?

Neighbor: His name is Jack.

Jake: Hi, Jack, I'm Jake!

Neighbor: He really likes kids.

Jake: (waving) Nice to meet you Jack! (then, to me, done here) Mommy can we go in and pet Cocoa?

A very nice, little social exchange!

Also, yesterday morning, my husband stumbled into the kitchen bleary-eyed as Jake was getting ready for school.

Jake: Daddy what's wrong with your eyes?

Dan: Nothing Jake, I just woke up, I'm still sleepy.

Jake: Dad, open up your sleepy eyes! Bigger, like this! (gives demo of his ridiculously wide-eyed stare)

And? Driving home from the big family Hanukkah party this past Sunday, we took a different route than usual into the city, as we were going to the East Side first, to drop off my mother.

As we pulled off the FDR into the city streets, Jake looked around and asked: "Are we home?"

I explained we WERE in the city but a different neighborhood, on the Upper East Side dropping off Grandma and would then be driving crosstown to the Upper West Side (where we live) through Central Park.

We were moments out of the park when Jake spotted a familiar building, and complained "That's not home, that's (name of our synagogue)!"

Boy does this all make me happy! Combined with his insights the other day (born, unfortunately, out of pain), combined with his amazing artistic spirit erupting, my son is really blossoming forth.

So as we head into this longest night tonight, having passed through the shortest day of the year today, I tell myself:

Have patience, have faith, it will be getting brighter; brighter and brighter, soon. Know it will happen, incrementally, day by day.

Believe; feel the coming sunshine, even whilst standing in the dark.

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Heavy

"I hope I'm not leaning on you too heavily." my mother said, taking my arm as we slowly made our way through the bustling streets of New York City.

I had just brought my Mom to the doctor for an injection to ease the ache of her arthritic knees. "Of course not," I said "I'm a big, strong woman."

But inside I felt her weight; light on my body, heavy on my soul.

She leans more and more these days. And that's all right, I can bear it; am just weighed down by what it presages, that she is moving farther from independence, closer towards an ending.

We were on our way to the hot chocolate shop just around the corner from her doctor's office, a block, a block and a half away. A short stroll. But for my mother now, taxing.

She has been limited for so long it's easy to forget the energetic middle-aged mother of my youth, the athletic young woman I have heard she once was.

I was just reminded of that this weekend. We were all gathered at her brother, my uncle's house for the holidays, and my cousin Jessie had unearthed my uncle's journal from 1941.

Jess had gone down to the basement storeroom, looking for a bottle of seltzer and instead found an artifact from 70 years ago, from Uncle Walter's 8th grade year, from when he was on the man-boy cusp of 14. (I'm going to blink and my boys will be there, too.)

He hadn't written in it much. Noting the significant year, we went to look up December 7th, the day that will live in infamy, and found... nothing. Entries filled January, trickled into February, and then petered out, an undertaking abandoned.

But in those few short entries at the beginning of the book, there lay a treasure trove.

He wrote of his joy at having walked a pretty girl home after school; musings on the nature of love, sports, and friendship.

And then these two entries about my mother, his beloved big sister:

"I feel lost with out my big sister around. I wait in the store every day just to see and speak to her"

(At this time my mother was 19, had graduated high school and was busy working, but she still came back to her parents' candy store in the evenings.)

"My older sister is a swell gal. My ideal. I wish she was born a boy then we could have some real fun."

As we read these journal entries aloud my mother teared up, as did my uncle. He reminded her of how athletic she had been in her youth. What an influence she had had on him.

"I looked up to you." Walter said. "And whatever you did. I did too: ice skating, tennis, track, basketball, volleyball...  I did all that because you did, I followed in your footsteps. I wanted to be like you."  His ideal.

My Mom & her "little brother" Walter last spring

It's so hard to picture my frail, slow-moving 89 year-old mother as an athletic teenage girl, but I know she was.

And wasn't she lovely as a young woman?

My mom, Sylvia, at about 20

Since my mother did not have me until she was 38, I never knew her like this. Thank goodness for old photographs.

And journals, left laying around in basement storerooms near soda bottles, waiting to be rediscovered, words reaching out across decades. Words of love, family, friendship.

As I write this post, my son Ethan is reading over my shoulder. "Let me see those diary pages again, Mom" he says. "Is that really something your Uncle Walter wrote about Grandma, so many years ago? She's really his big sister?"

And he reads them again, laughs out loud at the line: "I wish she was born a boy then we could have some real fun."

The past reaching out towards the future. Words traveling across decades, generations.

Words of love, family, friendship.

My son, reading, leans on my shoulder.

I will probably (hopefully) someday lean on him.

Hopefully, not too heavily.

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What remains possible

Some days are more possible than others, more seeming infinite in nature. Others shrink down into a nubbin, a hard, mean little kernel that sticks in my throat.

It doesn't help to have a raging headache. It doesn't help to be worn down so thin from autism that I am surprised I can't be seen through, more apparition than person. (My spirit, that is, my waist is thickening like pudding.)

I love my son to pieces but some days can barely stand to be with him; and by bedtime it has been one of those somedays. And it's no one thing, just every little thing. From the moment I greet his bus, on - late today, so I am granted a fifteen minute reprieve, fifteen minutes of sitting in my lobby watching neighbor children arriving home, chatting brightly with their moms or nannies, willing myself to not let envy poison me down to the bones.

I know what Jake-off-the-bus will ask: "Can I pet Cocoa? Where's Cocoa? Can I pet Cocoa? Where's Cocoa, Mommy? Let's go see Cocoa, Mommy!" over and over, and over and over. The same every day these days, his obsession wearing a groove in my soul.

It's nearly all he will talk about, day and night: the cat. The cat, the cat, the cat, thecatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcat; the bloody cat.

I love the cat but I would toss her out the fucking window if that would make Jake stop talking about her. And chasing her around the apartment. And dragging her into his lap to pet her. And petting her sometimes gently and sometimes too roughly, so I never know which it's going to be.

I never know if it's safe to leave her alone with him, and so I have to hover and watch and all the YEARS I've gained of being able to trust that he's pretty much safe in the house so I can watch him loosely and go about my business have to be heaved aside.

I can't leave him alone for a minute or the cat may get inadvertently strangled. Strangled by love and Jake's hands that do not understand you can't carry a REAL cat by the head like you can a stuffed animal.

And Jake? He really is a good, compliant child. Jake doesn't want to, but he does his homework. I work hard to maintain a cheery exterior, to praise and smile when inside I am weeping that it is pretty much the same homework he has been doing for the past four years. That he needs a number line to add and subtract, while his twin has moved on to geometry and equations.

And then he sculpts this incredibly interesting "cat-dragon" out of thera-putty on his five minute break between math and reading.

And then he reads so beautifully but it is so clear in his cluelessness at answering the questions that he retains so little. And I am now getting envious of all my autism mom friends with "little professor" aspie kids who have no social skills, but boy are they academically advanced.

And then I feel guilty for wanting my son the be someone other than who he is, and stupid for feeling envy which is the world's most useless emotion and dangerous, too.

And then it's time for dinner which I have to make in the kitchen while listening hard for signs of cat torture coming from the living room, but Jake can't find the cat tonight which is somehow worse.

"Kitty? Kitty where ARE you?" comes his frustrated cry. "I can't find Cocoa! The kitty is missing! HELP! HELP!" he yells, running through our tiny apartment. But Cocoa? She has her hidey-holes for when she simply must get away from Jacob's obsessive love. Lucky cat.

A bit later, Ethan has been picked up from Hebrew school, dinner been wolfed down by hungry growing boys, and Jake is in the bath while Ethan tackles 4th grade math.

Jake is having a loud, growly day and I don't know how much more animal-boy I can take. Every answer I give that he doesn't like is met with a loud snarl and hands made claws, his face a grimace. "I'm a scary monster" he says "I'm a vampire." Halloween can not fade fast enough.

"Can I watch TV?"

"No Jake, it's bed-time; after your bath is BED."

SNARL

"Can I watch TV?"

"No. Bedtime."

SNARL

"Can I watch TV?"

"I am not going to answer that, Jake, you have asked me TEN times in the last two minutes and you know the answer. What's the answer?"

SNARL

"Can I watch TV?"  

And tonight in bed, for maybe the first time in nine years I do not sing to him, I tuck him in and flee. Because he is growling and giggling alternately with every step up the ladder to his top bunk and I know how it's going to go: I will start to sing and he will giggle and growl and I will tell him I can't sing to him if he is isn't quiet and he will stop for a moment and sound so contrite, only to start again a beat later and it will go on and on and on.

So tonight I don't even begin.

My head is pounding and I can't. I just. can't. do it.

I call out that I love him on the way down the ladder. I tell him I don't sing to animals and monsters and I leave. And cry. And paste a better face on before entering the living room to snuggle with  Ethan and Harry Potter on the sofa.

This I can do. Tonight.
 

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3 AM

My watch says 3 AM.

But ER time is timeless time.

The lights always on full bore. The always ignored monitor alarms calling out their ceaseless beep beep beeyoups, making sleep near impossible in this place where it is so desperately needed by all.

The cots have thinned out by now, their former residents lost to beds upstairs or returned to the street beyond.

Thankfully tonight's more than full share of screamers and moaners, the deeply pained and the ecstatically crazed have been among the dispatched.

The one that really got to me: the man in the curtained berth next door, the B bed to my mother's A, groaning loudly, crying, begging for help with his pain, only to be summarily shushed by the nurses.

"Can you please keep it down?" one of them chided, like he was a wheedling child whining for a cookie.

I found myself fervently wishing his impacted gall stones could be magically transported into their bodies, see if a little empathy might suddenly develop.

I sit in my butt-numbing gray plastic chair snugged up to my mother's feet and watch her toss fitfully, sleep clasped but a few moments before being relinquished again to discomfort.

I have passed out twice, once sprawled, once slumped, keeping my less than perfect vigil as we wait for our number to come up.

Some of the staff here are familiar, faces I know from the last years of my father's life when he was a frequent flyer. We nod to each other as I walk my mother to the bathroom, one step oh so carefully placed in front of the next.

Others are new: fresh scrubbed interns, wearier residents; nurses in colorful scrubs with faces cheery or stern, your luck of the draw which you get. 

I miss my children. I miss my bed and the husband waiting in it, a single spoon, un-nestled.

I miss the Mommy who tucked me in at night and banished monsters for me. She has been replaced by this sweet, increasingly frail old woman - still beautiful with her nearly unlined face, her halo of soft white curls.

Her mind and memory are growing softer by the day, soft as her hands which used to cup my face to kiss my cheek, just the way I now kiss hers, tucking her in when we finally get settled into a room at 4:15 in the morning, nearly dawn.

"Goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite..." I intone in the same singsong she once chimed to me, a thousand years ago in my pink bedroom.

"Where am I?" she asks once again, her voice quavering with exhaustion and slightly slurred from the painkillers that will allow her to finally sink into slumber.

"In the hospital, Mom. You fell, broke your rib."

She nods; reminded, remembers.

"I'm going home to get the boys ready for school, have a shower, an hour of sleep, and then I'll be back."

"What would I do without you?" she asks, patting my hand, grasping it, not quite yet willing to let go.

My mind jumps to all the lonely souls I'd witnessed in the ER tonight, suffering without an ally to stand by, bear comfort.

"I'm here" I say, "I'm here."

And then, eyes closed, breath languorous, her hand unfurls, releasing mine.

And I'm gone.

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Not my best

I am having a really hard time this week. A really, really hard time.

It's a limbo week, and that's where I am. Feeling stuck and rudderless in every way imaginable. This is the last full week of "summer vacation" and we have no plans and I have no spontaneity left in me. I was going to try to find somewhere for us to go this week, last minute and depending how we all felt.

We had some options: Vermont to my cousins, a few mid-week days at the beach. But I hadn't counted on Irene and her aftermath. Or on how much my boys after their first week away at sleep-away camp would want to just go home so much. To be, in fact, desperate for HOME.

So here we are.

I have mountains of laundry and unpacking to do, which I am way too slowly working my way through, thoroughly unmotivated but tired of looking at the suitcases in my living room.

And I am so not doing my best mothering right now, finding my boys on these beautiful last summer days mostly inside: one on the Wii, the other on the computer. We live in New York City. I can't just toss them out into the backyard. There IS no backyard.

And I'm on the computer, too. But I'm not writing as I need to, just aimlessly surfing and noting how many more comments and readers other bloggers have. Those by now completely irrelevant BlogHer recap posts that are almost but not quite done? Still undone. I just don't have it in me to finish them.

Until the upstairs neighbors came home late yesterday all of Ethan's friends were out of town. Jake still has no friends. (And I feel sad and guilty beyond guilt that I haven't been able to do anything about that yet.) So playdates aren't happening.

And the two of them together are just awful right now. Awful. Jake in Ethan's face, talking non-stop. Ethan screaming at his brother to shut up and leave him alone. So separate screens is the best I can do right now. Sigh. Biggest sigh ever.

And I am feeling how much this is not how I wanted to parent. I always pictured us as a minimal TV home. Envisioned myself to be the mother leading her kids on nature hikes, visits to the zoo, days at the beach, rainy afternoons spent painting and sculpting, reading books, exploring the city's museums together. Hanging out with other families, frolicking.

But then again I didn't count on autism, and boys who fight all the time, and my utter exhaustion.

When friends write about how they wish they had another week of summer and how much they are enjoying this relaxed time with their kids it just hammers at my heart. Because that is how I want to feel, it's how I expected I would feel. I DO love my time with my kids but individually, because going out or doing anything with them together is. just. awful.

And we are all together 24/7 until school starts right now. And I don't know how I'm going to make it another week and a day.

So I am one of THOSE moms, desperately waiting for school to start (Thursday the 8th for Ethan, Monday the 12th for Jake). And I hate that. I hate feeling this way.

And it's so my instinct is to hide when I feel like this, to disappear. And that's what I was planning to do. But then in my surfing this morning I saw all the tweets about folks who had linked up their posts with (this week's SNSS guest) Shell's "Pour Your Heart Out" linky.

And then I remembered that amazing fact that Aunt Becky had recently written about in a post, how writing actually helps us heal.

And then I thought "I'm a blogger, Damn it! I'm not going to curl up inside myself and hide away, I'm going to write about it."

So here's my ugly, all splayed out on the page... screen... whatever. It's not my best post. But it's all I've got today. So it will have to do.

(P.S. Updated this afternoon: It worked! Feeling much better now, about to drag the kids out to the park. )

I'm linking this post up to Shell's Pour Your Heart Out linky at Things I Can't Say (Thanks, Shell)


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Coming Along

Jacob’s speech is shifting again, he’s moving ahead, coming along… swimmingly.  The pace is fairly glacial, and so like the encroaching ice it moves so slowly you don’t notice it has crossed the line, carried on to elsewhere until, suddenly seeming, it is there!

Jake used to ask everyone questions that he already knew the answers to: "Is that a baby?" while staring at a baby. Contrary to the standard “book” on autistic people, Jake actually found it easier to ask a (straightforward, factual) question than to make a declarative statement.

Well, that seems to be shifting now, and Jake is just declaring away to any and all around him. Thankfully most of the people he talks to are willing to play along, not delve too deep into why a big kid is sounding so much like a little kid.

There is no meanness. Yet. But, then again, he hasn't tried talking to too many teenagers. Yet.

Jake to a man walking a dog the other day on the street: “Excuse me, Man? You’re walking your dog!” Luckily the man smiled quizzically then kindly, and agreed that yes indeed, he WAS walking his dog.

When we took a train ride recently, on the return trip home the train was very crowded and it took a long time for the conductor to make her way through the car. Jake was leaning out into the aisle watching her, clearly impatient to talk to her.

He started to shout out to her, but I made him wait until she was close. When she was two rows away from us, he just couldn't contain himself any longer...

Jacob: "Mrs. Conductor!"

Conductor: "Yes?"

(I couldn't wait to hear what in the world he was dying to say to her; really had no clue.)

Jacob: "I have a ticket!"

Conductor: "And I'm going to come punch the heck out of your ticket in just one moment. Wait and I'll be right there."

When she comes to take his ticket, Jake is beaming, then makes a request: "Make a happy face, please." (The conductor on the outgoing train had done that, pleasing Jake no end.)

Conductor: "Okay..."

And then? Jake kicks it up a notch: "With teeth, a happy face with pointy teeth!" (I'm thinking: no more vampire movies for you, my son.)

The conductor, bless her soul, is game: "Well, I'll try..."

And she did. And Jake was pleased. It doesn't look much like a vampire happy face, but she get's an A for effort and kindness, for sure.

The other day I was listening to Jacob tell me something when it hit me like a ton of bricks: He was using complete sentences without prompting.

A year ago, while he was certainly capable of using complete sentences, we mostly got single words and short phrases (if it wasn't a completely scripted phrase) unless we pushed for more. And so we had to push, push, push him. And deny him, pretend to not understand. If he could get what he wanted with two or three words, that's all we'd get.

Instead of "I want to want to wear the red shirt today, Mom, can I have it please?" (now) he would say "Red one." We had to pull expansiveness out of him, and it was exhausting.

So when did that change? I couldn't tell you. When did this full-sentence-talking-boy emerge? Dunno.

That night I asked my husband: "Have you noticed Jake almost always talks in full sentences these days?" And he had to stop and think about it, and then agreed with me that yes, he does, and no, he too has no idea exactly when that shifted.

And that's the maddening thing. There is no exactly. It's minutely incremental, like how sand dunes "walk" across a desert, a few inches a day. And you never notice the day-to-day movement until suddenly it's clear the landscape has altered irrevocably.

That's Jake.

He is also asserting himself in new and interesting ways...

When Ethan grabs the TV clicker as he sits down in the living room where Jake is in the middle of watching a show, Jake will now pipe up with: "Ethan, don't change the channel... I'm watching something!" 

When I spoke to him the other day and addressed him, as I often do, as "sweetheart" I got this response:  “Don’t call me sweetheart. My name is Jacob.” (This is probably an adaptation of a script from a TV show, book or movie that I just don't recognize, but it's so damn appropriate that I'm going to count it as amazing anyway.)

I don't know where all this is going, but I know it's a long way from where we've been. And for this next year,  I'm vowing to pay more attention on the way,

But I'll probably still be taken by surprise by Jake's changes. He's a sneaky one, that boy, growing and growing up, changing and evolving while I'm distracted and focused elsewhere for a moment.

I look at him and he's standing in place, admiring the flowers. I turn around and there he is, a whole square further down the path, smiling and waving.

And as long as he's forging ahead, I wouldn't have it any other way. Keep going Jake, keep going... leave me in the dust, please.

I'm also linking this post up to Shell's Pour Your Heart Out linky at Things I Can't Say



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