Parenting During a Pandemic: The Best of Us

The only social media platform I use is LinkedIn. Which is kind of funny, because I'm really not interested in all the career-related advice and self-promotion that populates much of the platform. Thankfully, there are other kinds of posts to pay attention to. Or to share. In that spirit, I recently posted a photo and a description of my autistic son's latest visit to our local hospital's infusion center, where he gets regular treatments for his ulcerative colitis. My comments focused on how well-liked he is there, and how generous and warm his response is to the staff. In response to my post, Neil F, who knows Noah from his years as a participant in a special needs basketball program commented, "He is one of a kind!! The best natured human being..." That brought a smile to my face, but it also made me realize, once again, how wonderful it is to go through the world just like that--as a unique and incredibly good natured human being. Maybe it doesn't sound like much amidst the cacaphony of other stuff out there--angry, bragging, dumb, ridiculous, and so on--but isn't that how most of us would love to be thought of? I know I would.

Without intending to, Neil's comment reminded me that modeling is something we tend to look to high achievers for, viz., we seek to emulate those who are successful, famous, lauded for some reason or other. Which means we often focus on superficial things like money, status, credentials. Most of the time, character is barely considered in our calculations of what has value and why. Living with Noah turns all of that on its head. He doesn't have traditional "achievements" to call upon. Heck, he didn't leave high school until age 21, and college will never be in the cards for him. My son can't travel independently, take full responsibility for his self-care, understand money (how to earn it, use it, save it, etc), be left alone overnight, do a complex set of tasks completely unsupervised, or engage in truly age-appropriate social interactions. He doesn't have a single friend. Not because he isn't friendly, but because he doesn't understand the give and take of a friendship, or have shared interests with most of the peers he's encountered through the years. Noah's gift is to be that person who, entirely unwittingly, holds a mirror up to everyone else, and allows them to see where and how they fall short of his standards regarding how to be in the world. So Noah in the hospital not only reacts to the kindness of the staff; he inspires it. He puts some extra spring in their steps, is the reason they smile a little bigger, and for a little longer. He's the one they ask for jokes, because he makes them laugh. He offers to share the snacks the staff give him because, well, that's just reflexively what he does. He learned long ago (thank you, Sesame Street!) that sharing is a good thing. And Noah is all about the "good thing." In a world with so many problems, anxieties, and pathologies, there's something gratifyingly simple and reassuring about being the person who is the best natured human being. And I'm so grateful to Neil for reminding me of that...

Parenting During a Pandemic: Letting Go

Everyone has COVID stories. Some are sad; others ridiculous. And still others, truly tragic. Mine is a mixed bag of a bunch of stuff. None, thank God, rises to the level of tragic. But since I rarely let my emotions sit still, and I've lived at a high stress level for so long, it's highly likely that I just suppress--or just blow past--things that might catch others up short. Back in the early days of COVID, my eldest contracted the virus. That was in March 2020. He lived in a different state, so the whole process of figuring out if he was sick, how sick he was, whether and when he needed to get to a hospital, and so on, was all done via text message. Which is a special brand of maternal torture. Then of course there was the bald fact of having a very sick child (turns out he had a COVID-induced case of multi-site pneumonia) two states away, alone in a hospital. The most I could do was wrest a photo or two out of him so he could hold a medicine label over his head and I could see what the doctors were giving him. Since he couldn't breathe well or consistently enough to speak with me, I read the label. And of course it meant nothing to me. I focused instead on my son's glassy, feverish eyes, and his sweaty face. My mother's heart really, really hurt. But there was nothing to be done. We could only let him know we loved him, remind him to use the oxygen left in his hospital room if he needed it, and put our full faith and trust in the doctors and nurses treating him. Fast forward seven months and we're about to turn our son over to another bureaucracy, one in which whatever faith and trust I might have had has been shattered. Not completely, not irredeemably. But badly shattered nonetheless. On October 11th, my husband and I will drop our son off at Officer Development School, a Naval facility where he will immediately go into a fourteen day quarantine, along with everyone else there to learn how to be an officer in the United States Navy. This past year and the three before it have made me wonder if this country deserves my son's service, his commitment, his patriotism. I know that the pustule masquerading as Commander-in-Chief does not. And I openly asked my son if he had any reservations about serving this CiC. "No" came back the firm, immediate reply. I am actually glad that my son can see past the time-limited person at the top of the American military pyramid to the greater purpose the military serves, and the ways in which it can and has represented the best of America. Not because war is a meritorious enterprise, but because the military has managed--perhaps better than any institution, corporation, or other collective enterprise in America--to represent something as close to a meritocracy as we might ever get in this country. So following his Army cousin's advice, my son signed up, because if good people don't serve, who will? This first phase in the Navy is about six weeks, and will be followed by a more task-specific training in how to be a Navy JAG, in understanding the Uniform Military Code of Justice and all of the other requirements of being a lawyer on either side of a case, viz., representing the defense or the prosecution. I joke that the apartment I once thought of as spacious has come to feel like a studio, with five adults and two dogs living in it full time. My son has been sleeping on a trundle bed all these months, in his younger brother's room, stashing his clothes on the window ledge or floor. His autistic brother routinely climbs over him at all hours to come into my bedroom and wake me or my husband

so being woken at 5a.m. to start his Navy days might not feel so bad. At least during quarantine, he'll have a room all to himself, and he'll be obligated to do all kinds of physical fitness tasks. For a workout nut like my son, that probably sounds like fun. But I'll miss him terribly, even for these forty or so first days. He'll be at ODS during his birthday, but home in time for his brother's birthday and Thanksgiving (which fall on the same day this year). My husband will miss having someone to drive him to work, to chat with, to make the commute less lonely. In their months of commuting together, my husband felt like he got to know his son all over again. He's an older child now, with college, a couple of years of full-time work, and grad school under his belt. We haven't seen this much of him in probably a decade. It's nice to meet him all over again and to realize that the person we've liked and loved mostly at a distance, is someone we still like and love up close. No, he hasn't learned to pick up after himself at home, and he still needs to be asked to do things like walk the dogs and load the dishwasher. But I never expected that much change. In fact, I kind of liked the lovable slob he always was. And still is. But I will have some hearty laughs thinking about the quarters he'll be trained to bounce off his bedsheets, having barely figured out how to throw a comforter over his sheets in his shared room in our crowded studio apartment.