A Spell for M

I want to make it clear up front that the only reason why I am writing to you is magic. I know that I don’t know the person I’m speaking to right now, that I knew her years ago, but the person I knew then and the person reading this letter are not the same. I am not the same as I was when I knew her. I’ve lived many lives since as I’m sure you have; were we to run into each other on the street, it would be as two strangers who both experience this odd deja vu.

My mom died last December after a long and harrowing battle with dementia. In February I signed my divorce papers, ending a process that had started a year earlier as our twenty-some-odd year old marriage finally started unraveling. In March I had it out with my Dad, who confirmed that he’d never wanted this whole family thing in the first place and maybe it’d be best if we all went our separate ways. Two winters ago I wrote to our old mutual friend S that I felt blazingly, incandescently alone, and that was with all the chains in place. Now they’re all broken, and I’m terrifyingly free.

In 2011, my first son was born. In 2016, he was diagnosed as being autistic. In 2018, so was I. Someone else called getting a late autism diagnosis like watching your past suddenly snap into focus. Things that didn’t make sense, things that didn’t fit, all start to come together. You realize that you’ve been looking at things from the wrong angle the whole time, and that this jigsaw puzzle is actually a crossword.

My mom would do the crossword in the Chicago Tribune every morning. In pen. When my mom got divorced, she started taking classes at Richland with a friend for something to do. She ended up getting a masters in communications from the University of Illinois-Springfield, with a thesis about hypertext. At the end, we would have conversations that weren’t, with her happily chirping a word salad at me, phrases from things she’d heard long past thrown together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason, and because I was the father of two neurodivergent children, I would hang in there, acknowledging what she had said or popping in an aside, all the while letting the stream of words wash over me without gaining purchase.

My marriage was unravelling because I was unravelling. I was unhappy, frustrated, restless, trapped. I was living in two different worlds, my personal inner world, and this outer world of K and the kids, and I was feeling more and more estranged from the outer world. But it was all tied to Mom. I’d lost her, and we had unfinished business, business I needed to take care of if I was going to survive.

My son had a lot of trouble sleeping as a baby. He did not sleep through the night. He would pass out after nursing, but the moment you would try to lay him on his back he would start screaming. I spent several sleepless nights pacing the length of our small house in Iowa City, from the front door, through the dining room, to the kitchen and the back door, then turning and going back, holding a screaming infant to my left shoulder, because the motion of walking quieted him down, if never really led to sleep.

I mentioned this to Mom, and she said I was the same way. Said she had to put rice cereal in my formula and turn on the box fan and leave the room to get me to sleep. We still had that box fan when I was kid. It was huge, heavy and industrial, dating from when everything was made solidly out of steel. One time we got water in the basement at Bayshore, and Dad started up the box fan to dry things out, and when the roar of the fan filled my ears, a feeling of dread crept into my stomach.

My wife and I were in couple’s counseling, but it wasn’t going very well. Every time Kate tried to bring up something confrontational, I would break down, unable to continue. Our counselor suggested EMDR therapy. I found an EMDR therapist and started monthly, soon biweekly, soon weekly sessions. But it was too late. My wife and I talked in midsummer, and she told me it was over, and I agreed.

I think the magic here was that I would explain it all to you, and in doing so, explain it to myself. Crystallize into words all the things that have been floating about in my head, all these thoughts that ache to be born by being etched onto the page. And it relates to you, in a way, at least to a ghost of who you used to be, long ago. It relates to an image of you that I constructed, and while it’s my image, I did build it off my impressions of you from that time.

When my mom left that autistic infant to scream himself to sleep all those years ago, she wounded me, and I carried that wound all these years. It wounded our relationship on a fundamental level, and though we both could feel it, we couldn’t put our fingers on it. I knew that she loved me; I believe with my whole heart that she loved me dearly; but even though I was surrounded by all these tokens of her love and devotion, I couldn’t accept it in my heart. There was something wrong with me, something broken and bad and that’s why she left me, and if I could fix it, then she would finally love me and not leave me.

This is the cry of the Bad Baby. My therapists don’t like it that I call him that. I don’t care. It’s just a name. Don’t get preoccupied with it, it’s just a handwritten label that’s peeling at the corner. But because of the Bad Baby, I couldn’t feel her love when I was growing up.

Then I met you in high school. This is the final part of the spell. Thank you for making it this far; I appreciate your patience.

One of the pieces that snapped into place was how confused I was in high school, and how I looked to you as a guide. Also, how I lagged behind my peers in terms of social development and growth. So with you, I started a process that would continue for decades, a process that wouldn’t end until my wife and I agreed to put our relationship down like a old, loyal dog; gently, with as much mercy as you can manage.

My bright idea back in high school was that if I could find someone who would stay with me then I could finally be whole. Starting with you, I began making effigies to substitute for my mom, and for a while, it sorta worked.

The problem with becoming a parent is that you relive your childhood. If you aren’t careful, you become your parents. My dad followed in his dad’s footsteps and abandoned his family for his job. My mom became a cruel gaslighter, like her father before her, and I as I became a parent I started following in her footsteps.

No one desires evil. I’m pretty sure than my mom was autistic as well. Her father died of kidney failure when I was a baby, so I didn’t really get to know him, but all anecdotal evidence points to the same. It would explain the assholery, the eagerness to knock other people down to their obviously proper pegs. A high-functioning autistic is only as high-functioning as their mask, that point of contact between the self and the rest of the world, and when you are a high-functioning undiagnosed autistic who loves their children, you school them to hide that shit, because it’s going to get them in trouble. It’s going to get them hurt. They need to stop doing that, stop acting like that, or the rest of world is going to turn on them. It’s for their own good.

It’s hard to be happy, living like that, because you assume that once you become an adult, it’s your responsibility to beat yourself, keep your unruly, undomesticated self in line. I didn’t come across the line, depression is anger directed at oneself, until just a few years ago, until after thirty years of therapy. If I’d heard that earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time.

Getting my autism diagnosis forced me to re-evaluate my relationship to my self. Meanwhile, my partner was getting increasingly upset with my parenting, which was very reactionary. It also brought to the forefront that my parents didn’t interact with me much as a child. They were excited by grandchildren, but clearly didn’t know what to do with babies. Anyway, I just didn’t have the experience or the skills to interact with little kids–that’s what I kept telling myself.

But the whole house of cards would come crashing down as Mom got worse and worse. EMDR led me back to that crib, back to the baby screaming red-faced at the closed door over the roar of the fan. She was never coming back; she was hallucinating dogs in the visiting room and asking for my help to urinate on her toast before she disappeared into the howling night forever. It hurts to say it, but it was such a relief to get word in late December that she had finally found the door and made her way out after fumbling in the darkness for so long.

There was no one left. I was blazingly, incandescently alone, only my light pushing back the black. So I did the only thing left to me. I reached down and picked up that baby. I put him on my left shoulder, and I let him scream his pain into my ear.

I laugh a lot; I never cry. I wrote this over and over in my journals through the years. I strapped on grinning Coyote as a war-mask to face the world. But despite this constant struggle with depression, I rarely cried. I would be absolutely miserable with a stony face presented to the world.

The bad baby and I cried together, cried about the unfairness of it all. It’s not our fault. There’s nothing wrong with us, there’s nothing bad about us. There’s nothing that needs to be hidden in shame. We’re just us. Man, are we just us.

I hate crying. I hate how puffy my eyes get, how hard it gets to see while you type. The runny nose and crumpled discarded kleenexes littering the floor. The exhaustion and probable dehydration after. But man, did we cry. A lot of tears.

As an autistic, my emotions are as much a mystery to me as these signals coming from within my body. I just now, after over fifty years of living, figured out that my stomach hurts when it’s thirsty as well as hungry. Emotions are even crazier, because what’s the point of them? Eating and drinking keeps me alive, but what good does crying do? It doesn’t bring back your dying mother or your estranged spouse. It doesn’t reverse any of the harm. No one is going to come and rescue you, so why are you crying?

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you we were near the end. Looks like we’re more in the middle. Time is a flat circle, spinning at thirty-three revolutions a minute. We just can’t see it because we’re down in the groove.

You cry to heal. Whether it’s skinning your knee or your psyche, the tears are the start of the healing process. And when you don’t cry, you don’t start to heal. I know I’m over-simplifying it, I’m trying to get us to the end, but through EMDR, I was able to overcome my trauma response to the bad baby, to hold him, and so I started to heal.

You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself first. I had always read this as an admonition for positive self-esteem, but I had substituted “like yourself first.” Of course I couldn’t love myself, that’s what the other person was for. Their love would validate me, tell me that I was lovable. Their absence was just further proof that I wasn’t.

The reason why you can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself first is that putting yourself in the situation outlined above has you approaching the other person from a position of need. The relationship is lopsided and vertical from the start, with the other person now responsible for your happiness. I don’t quite know what that is, but I don’t think it’s love, though I called it that for years and years.

Reaching into the crib and embracing the baby allowed me to start loving myself, and the healing began. Unfortunately, that meant that a lot had to be unravelled. My wife and I worked together on a collaborative divorce, and were able to come to an agreement pretty easily. I got my own place, started taking care of myself, and then got a bigger place so the boys could stay with me. My relationship with my ex morphed into a partnership based on raising these two incredible individuals, and we’re functioning much better as two equals as opposed to where we were before.

OK, I think we are finally at the end now, because now I can lay down the effigy I made of you, all those years ago. It always sort of puzzled me why I kept carrying it for so long, long after we lost contact with each other and grew apart, became the strangers to each other that we are today. I think because it was my first effort to try to solve the problem without Mom, I poured a lot of energy into your effigy, enough that it took on a life of its own.

Really, this has very little to do with you, just who you were in the past. But you were really important to me, which I transferred to this effigy that I’m taking down now, ending with this spell, the whole point of this. More parts of me are coming out with their trauma, the rings of the tree that make me. As I embrace them and let them cry, let them laugh and sing, let them sit on the couch and play video games, let them play with my boys, let them learn at the library, as I let them be free, the spell starts to work.

Thank you for listening to me. I needed to write this spell for me, to complete the circle, to feel it spinning under my feet. Thank you for being there for me, all those years ago. I wish I could explain how important you were to me back then, better than this silly bit of drivel penned through tear-stained eyes, but I thought you were amazing, a light I forever wanted to follow, but with this I can finish it: I don’t need you to be happy. I’m happy now, finally, even with all these tears. They’re just past due.

I hope you’re doing well. I used to always wonder if we’d meet again, if I’d get to see you face-to-face someday. I don’t know if you’ll ever read these words, but I don’t think it matters. This is my magic, my spell, and it has done its work and laid my false idol to rest.

But where ever you are, I wish you the best. Thank you for being my friend back when I really needed one. I’ll never forget you. The spell is over, the circle is complete.

I hope we all fare well in the end.