The Absent Child. The Good Soldier.

I wonder if anyone reading my musings knows I have a third child.  My daughter and Noah ("the autistic one") have made repeated appearances, but not so much (at all?) my eldest.  That's no reflection on my affection for him, which is as great as it is for his siblings.  I think it's more a reflection on his physical absence, and on his overall quiet presence.

Sam is off on his post-high school journey, well-earned and well-timed.  He was probably ready to leave a year before he did, and not because of difficulties at home, but due to boredom with the whole high school experience.  In terms of his home life though, I wonder if he's relieved to relinquish his role as the good soldier.

While my husband and I joke that Noah is sandwiched between the ideal siblings--passive and aggressive--that's actually quite true.  Ariel is out there with her critiques and with her helpful advice about Noah.  Sam has made an art of not complaining.  Perhaps that's why I was taken aback--and pleasantly surprised at the same time--when Sam told me, not long before he left for school, that he never really had a playmate in his little brother, that he missed out on that.

For Sam, that tiny bit of revelation spoke volumes.  He was finally saying out loud what he'd lost in having an autistic brother.  And it was a lot.  The boys are only two years apart chronologically, but universes apart developmentally.  It must have been painful for Sam to have a little brother and yet not really have one.  He saw the things his friends did with their younger brothers, and he must have imagined even more.  He knew from his own experience what it felt like to be embarrassed in public, to fume in private.  And yet...

Sam has become--and probably always was--a deeply compassionate young man, someone who has a real loathing for braggarts and others consumed with themselves.  He has on his own chosen to work with developmentally disabled children, teens and adults, though he has not gone out of his way to help his brother.  He has not thwarted Noah in any way, and has done whatever we've asked in terms of helping Noah, but he has not made a point of reaching out proactively, or helping us understand Noah better, the way Ariel has.  There's no judgment in that; I think everyone in the orbit of the disability asteroid protects himself however he can.  Sam found his own way.

And maybe that's the embedded lesson here:  each of us finds his own way.  For some of us, it's a constant flurry of activity, to try to "fix" our child and his functioning; for others of us, it's giving our breath--almost literally--to that child, to the point of depriving ourselves; for still others it's a whiplash walk between love and hate; and it can even be an evolution of understanding, both of ourselves and our place in the family orbit.  Each journey has its gliding moments and its rattling turbulence, but we still stand a chance of arriving at exactly the right destination.  And if we're lucky, we might even arrive together.