The Evolution of How I Feel About Stretch Marks

Usually, the topic of stretch marks lies in a big old pile of things I do not think about, but I recently saw an ad for lotion to remove them.  I cannot imagine spending my money on this product.  It’s not that I am in love with my stretch marks and decorate them with glitter or write poems about them, but I just don’t consider going to any more effort at eradicating them than I would having my uvula removed. 

I did not always feel this way.  When I was pregnant with my first child and noticed a few angry red marks under my belly button, I was so upset.  I was pretty sure that the next person who ever saw me undressed was going to recoil in horror.  Guess what?  That didn’t happen.  The young man mostly seemed happy that I was naked. 

I am about damned tired of the constant suggestions from advertisers that I need to buy something to make me acceptable.  Am I expected to look 14 years old forever?  If your body is useful, if it is fairly healthy, if it brings pleasure to you or someone else, your body is beautiful.  Please take whatever it is that gives you shame about your body and throw it over there on that pile of things which you do not think about.

When Things End

This has been a week of endings for me.  I left a job I was passionate about and I am preparing to see a city I love grow smaller in my rearview mirror.  Transitions reduce me to a trembling wreck.  I don’t even like to come to the last pages of a great book.

It’s so hard for me to let go of something that I can’t see the wonder and beauty of the life that is hurtling toward me.  I can’t enjoy the last sips of sweet lemonade because all I see is the empty glass to come.  Emily Dickenson wrote, “There is no other in the World—Mine was the only one.”  I tend to harbor similar feelings about people, places and things that I have to leave behind. 

This is the part where I am supposed to make the transition in my post and write about how I will be graceful in my grief and concentrate on how I have been fortunate.  I should be grateful that I ever experienced joy in a vocation and to reinvent myself in a new city.  I can’t do it.  I would be pretending.

What I am going to do instead is sit with this pain a little while.  I’m going to give it the space and time it needs.  I’m going to have a good cry and pitch some minor fits.  Some days I wake up so emotionally healthy that I’m all Eleanor Roosevelt and some days I wake up all Lindsey Lohan.  This is not an Eleanor kind of day. 

I’m surrounded by half-packed boxes and the detritus of the life I’ve been collecting these last five years.  What a mess.  I don’t know which this describes more aptly, the state of my house or me. 

This is the best I can say: Goodbye Wichita.  You were so lovely.

When you are tired of being a special needs parent

Sometimes I get tired of being an autism mom.  There, I said it.  I've often written about the ways in which having a child with special needs makes you more patient, more kind and grateful in ways typical parents never learn and that's all true.  But... there are days when I think, "Lord, I think I've learned all the ways of being a better person that I want to learn for now.  Can I have some time off?" 

My middle son came home this week and asked to be moved out of special education.  I knew this day would come as it came with our older son.  He's beginning to notice that other kids don't get as much support in school, they don't have IEPs and parapros.  He wants to be typical and it kills me that I can't give that to him.  Truthfully, he still has meltdowns and constantly needs redirected to complete a task.  I believe that one day he will not need special ed but he's going to have to act a lot less special at school for that to happen.  That day didn't come for Kiddo #1 until 12th grade and I don't know when it will happen for him.

In less than two weeks, we are moving to a different part of the country.  As if that does not take enough planning and work, when you have a kid with an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), it's not a walk in the park.  You can't just walk into the new school and say, "Hey, we're here!  Sign us up."  I guess you could do that if you really wanted to freak out the administration at the new school but I want them to like us.  There are records to be obtained and sent ahead of your arrival.  Introductions to be made.  Testing you need to make sure is up to date.  Today I spent time updating a tri-fold brochure about my son that I hand out to all the new teachers and support staff who will be working with him that highlights all the great things about my son and prepares them for areas where he needs support.  I do this because my son is more than a big tangled ball of special needs.  I want them to see how he is a person first and someone with autism second.

Maybe I need to make one of those brochures for myself because there is nothing more true about me than I have special needs too. There are great things about me and areas where I need some support.  I could hand them out to the PTA parents whom I'm going to meet and the lady who will be next to me on the elliptical at the gym wondering why I'm going so slow.  My brochure would let them know that before I was an autism mom, I was just a young woman who loved coffee and poetry and big words.   I had all these big dreams and plans to conquer the world in my Toast of New York lipstick.  Then my real life happened and I had to make a lot of adjustments.  Maybe that happened to you too.

Right now, I am just tired.  My heart is hurting for the life my kid wants but doesn't have.  I am grieving a little for the life I wanted but didn't get.  I'm not feeling sorry for myself but I need to say that I am getting some spiritual stretch marks.  I have exceeded my capacity for growth for the moment.  Tomorrow I will put on my big girl underwear and do what I have to do but right now I need to acknowledge that this is a hard damn life.  So I am going to make a new rule.  In the small fragile hours of early morning before the rest of my family wakes up and it's just me and the cat, I'm not going to be an autism mom.  All that stuff, I'm just going to put it down for a couple of hours.  I'm going to be a woman who loves coffee and poetry and big words with big dreams and plans to conquer the world in Angel Red lipstick.

Knit, Purl

I am not an arts and crafts kind of person. Hand-made things that I create tend to look like the projects of a drunken 10-year-old.So you can imagine my resistance when my friend, Jill, wanted to teach me how to knit. I put her off. I made weak excuses. I remembered old wrist afflictions, but she wore me down. Shesat on my couch and taught me using a children’s rhyme that goes something like this: In through the front door, once around the back, in through the window
and off jumps Jack! My first row of stitches was awkward, loose, and slow. This is where I usually quit and decide that knitting/piano lessons/natural childbirth is not for me, but Jill was so excited that I didn’t want to ruin the fun for her sake. You can guess what happened next. I got better. And here is the funny part: I love knitting. I love it like strong hot coffee, Saturday mornings, and fluffy kittens all rolled up together. It’s my new thing.

For the past two months, I have knitted up a storm. At first, all I could do were dishcloths. Then I tried scarves, which are really just very long dishcloths. Frankly, I am still at the scarves stage, but I plan to move onto baby blankets any minute now. I don’t know what is so intoxicating about the process of knitting. The obsessive-compulsive in me loves the rules, the orderly rows, and the repetition. Then there is the joy of yarn slipping through my fingers and around the smooth wood of the needles. And the yarn! I’ve never given much thought, well, any thought to yarn before. Now when I see stacked skeins of yarn I get the rush of a child with a brand new box of crayons.

Speaking of yarn, here is a bit of word etymology: the word “clue” used to be the name for a ball of yarn. It comes from the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, gave Theseus a ball of yarn to find his way out of the Labyrinth after he killed the beast at the heart of the maze. Clue figuratively means, “that which points the way.”

Since I’ve become a knitter, I’ve discovered that there is a community built around our common threads. Now that I can distinguish the difference between a factory-produced or hand-knitted piece, I find that I regularly stop strangers in public to ask about their hat or sweater like it was their new baby. Not one person I’ve approached has found this remotely odd. Last week, my husband stood beside me patiently at the grocery store among the strawberries and the tomatoes as a lady and I chatted about the merits of knitting versus crocheting. We each took a different side, but there were no hard feelings. Needleworkers stick together like that.

I’ve been knitting my way through the anniversary of my mother’s death, the good news of a friend’s pregnancy, and the daily detritus of life with children underfoot. Sometimes I make a mistake and have to unravel a few rows, but I’ve learned that it’s never too late to make a fresh start. There are second, third, and fourth chances in knitting. I don’t know where this habit of knotting together strands is leading me, but I am stitching my way there happily. I know that it fills some fundamental urge I have to construct, to create order, and to commune. Sometimes, it feels like prayer—my hands together offering up the best and worst I have. I find no more peace than this: a quiet moment in the soft grey hours of early morning as I whisper to myself, “knit… purl…knit.”

Save This Word!

Have you “LOL”d this week? Did something make you exclaim “OMG?” Chances are, if you are under a certain age, you are bilingual in English and text speak. But just in case you didn’t know, LOL is an abbreviation for laugh out loud and OMG stands for Oh My God. What began as a method to reduce the time it takes to send a text message on a phone without a QWERTY keyboard has become a new language. My teenage son sends me texts that I have to consult another teenager to decode. While I think using these abbreviations can be clever and fun, I worry that our young people are losing the ability to communicate in rich and meaningful ways.

Last week, I read that the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is cutting 200 words from the new edition. The words that will be replacing them include “tweet,” “chillax,” “staycation,” and “flash mob.” Who decided that there are 200 words that we just don’t need anymore? As a lover of words, my first instinct is a desire to save those orphans, give them a home, and promise to love them forever. Yet, I am not a Luddite: I use computers every day, update my Facebook status frequently, and, yes, I do text. Still, I try to use capitalization, punctuation, and words that mean something. I don’t want to report I am sad when, in fact, I am gloomy, melancholic, or dour.

There are words that I love: buttery words like “supple” and stingy words like “crag.” There are words that I loathe: “underscore” and “pithy” which sound like the opposite of their definitions. But whether I like a word or not, I don’t want us casting them off like rubbish. “What’s the big deal?” you might ask. Remember reading the novel “1984” in high school, the one with Big Brother? In that dystopian world , lexicographers worked to reduce the number of words used in society. They called the emerging language “Newspeak” and the ultimate goal was to replace Standard English so that every single desire or thought could be conveyed with a single word. The major theme of 1984 is censorship by the government. It seems that we don’t even need an oppressive government to censor us. We are quite content to censor ourselves.

Another problem is that text speak has trickled out beyond instant messages and texts. My teacher friends tell me that their students are using it in assignments and papers. I’ve even had a professor tell me that her college students use these abbreviations in their email correspondence to her. I just know that it’s on a resume somewhere! Recent research has even found that those young adults who used more language-based shortcuts produced worse formal writing than those who used them more sparingly.

The social impact of text messaging is staggering. Two and a half billion text messages are sent every day in the United States. Not only are real words being lost to abbreviations, real exchanges of ideas are being lost too. I remember when I used to get handwritten letters. Then I got form letters at Christmas-time. Then came emails. And then came the email forwards. Now I just get status updates and tweets. No one gets real letters anymore unless you have a relative in prison. What will libraries archive one hundred years from today? How will we see the development of great ideas?

I believe in the strange magic of language. I believe that the words we choose mark down in history what we hold dear and what we disdain. I believe that if today we minimize the way we communicate, tomorrow we will minimize the way we think. I encourage you to adopt an endangered word. Challenge yourself to increase your vocabulary. Write a real letter or keep a journal. Preserve our culture; cherish our language. And do me a favor: spread the word.

Unexpected gifts

Like most people, I am a lot of different things. I am a wife and mother of three boys. I am the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a steel magnolia. I am an Episcopalian. I’m left-handed. I am a part-time Volunteer coordinator and a full-time student. But for the last 17 years, I’ve mostly been the parent of two warrior children with autism.
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a profound developmental disorder most commonly found in boys. It affects various aspects of a child’s development. Children with ASD learn to talk late, or not at all. They don’t like to make eye contact, be touched, or be in large crowds or noisy places. Their five senses can be so highly attuned that they can hear a train miles away or smell things from another room. Because their senses are so keen, sensory overload can happen and lead to a major meltdown. A meltdown is not a tantrum. A meltdown is a child thrashing on the floor screaming at the top of his lungs, injuring himself or destroying anything he can reach.
When you have a child with autism, it completely fills every corner of your life. All you do is read about autism, research treatments, go to appointments, write letters to the insurance company, and negotiate educational plans with the school system. When you have two children with autism, it’s like being in a cult.
My sons have high-functioning autism. That means their symptoms are milder than most, they talk, and they do not have any of the mental retardation that often comes with it. I don't know why I need to include the "high-functioning" part when I tell people, except maybe to soften the blow. Don't take it too hard, I seem to be saying. See, I don't want to distress you. I don't want you to misunderstand.

Now I didn't plan on having children with autism, but as strange as it may sound, I don't think I would change this fact of my life. Autism can be hell, especially in the first few years of melt-downs, limited communication skills, and constant therapies. Sleep is elusive and peace is rare. Going to the grocery store takes courage and a back-up plan. Hanging out with other parents who have typical children can be awkward and break your already hurting heart. It can feel like your life will never get better and that the chaos will never end. But it does get better. And what you weren’t expecting is all the gifts.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like without autism. I might go out more and have more friends, but they would not be the kind I have now. It's too much work for the fair-weather types. When you have a sick or injured child, you are going to lose relationships with friends and family. And you didn't need those people in your life anyway. So I have the gift of discernment.

In another life, people would not stare at me and form opinions about my badly-behaving child having a meltdown. So many times when I get dirty looks or ignorant remarks, I want to say, "My child has a brain disorder. Do you have a brain disorder?" I don't explain anymore. I have the gift of letting it go.

Other parents might take language for granted, but I've had the pleasure of collecting each new phrase like a jewel that fell from my child's mouth. I have the gift of marveling at the mystery of the spoken word.

We've seen our first son progress from a speechless little boy who ran around on his tiptoes and hid under tables to an intelligent young man with very few autistic traits left. He’s in college prep classes and has a girlfriend. Perhaps our middle son will do as well or better. I have the gift of hope in life's unfolding.

I have met the most amazing teachers and Para-pros, therapists and doctors. I have been astonished at the hearts of little children who wouldn’t give up on playing with a child who won’t speak or even look at them. I have the gift of seeing angels on Earth.

We found a church that let our son stay in the nursery far past the age limit, and overlooked it when he participated a little too fully in the service. They make sure he is comfortable and included. I have the gift of a deeper faith in God and His servants.

I wouldn't tell a family just facing an autism diagnosis that it's going to be great, but I would tell them that it's going to be okay. You will be a more patient and tolerant person than you were. You will get to see miracles on a daily basis. You will blow more bubbles than the average person. It’s called "occupational therapy." You will learn to love more fiercely. You will have unexpected gifts.

Why I can't speak Spanish

There is nothing more confusing for people than Latinos who don't speak Spanish. Yes, this is a possible combination. Latino means that you are descended from Latin American peoples, while Hispanic means that your first language is Spanish. By all means, I should speak Spanish. But at the time I was acquiring language, my Mexican-American father was learning to speak English, so that was all he spoke. My family called him "Notebook Man" because he carried around a pocket memo pad and wrote down new words. Today, he is fully fluent in English and I speak Spanish only well enough to impress the Americans and make the Mexicans giggle. Let me not start on the jobs I would be qualified for if only I were fluent in Spanish. When you send out a resume with the name Angelina Vaquera on it, people are going to make assumptions. Once, I went to a first appointment at a doctor's office and the receptionist gave me intake papers in Spanish. I actually filled them out for a few minutes before I realized what I was doing. Sometimes I meet another Latino who doesn't really speak Spanish either. We take a look at each other and then try to make introductions in our terrible Spanish. It only truly bothers me when a Hispanic person needs my help and I can't translate well enough. I feel like that really realistic looking plastic fruit that tempts people and then disappoints.