I Think I’m Finally Ready to Talk About It
Friday, August 11th, was our wedding anniversary. I had dinner alone at Wasabi Chi on Douglas. I hadn’t intended to go out, but when I got back to my apartment that afternoon I was struck by an urge for ramen. I googled “best ramen des moines”, and Axios informed me that it was our neighborhood sushi restaurant. One day, my oldest son had a meltdown at school and I had to come take him home, because he was done for the day. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember how sad and withdrawn he seemed in the van as we left the parking lot. He was really worried I was going to be upset with him. Instead, I asked him if he’d had lunch, and when he said he hadn’t, I took him to Wasabi for sushi, which is his favorite meal.
I don’t care for sushi. I don’t care for fish in general, but sushi, being cold and slimy, sets off some serious ick factors for me. I let my son order for both of us, professing to be a sushi newbie. He was very happy with our order, which included sashimi served on a fancy platter. I gamely tried everything, ate my fair share, had a good time with my cheered up kid, and confirmed my previously vaguely held belief that I just don’t care for sushi.
But I do like a good ramen. I’ve been trying to respect these urges when they happen, see where they lead. Axios recommended the Char Siu Ramen, praising its rich, smokey broth. I ordered that and a pint of Des Moines IPA from Confluence, also a treat since I’ve largely stopped drinking. While I waited, I read Good Inside, by Dr. Becky. My college student waiter, who confessed to the table behind me that this was his first night, tried to chat me up about it. When I told him it was a book about parenting, he offered up that he had heard somewhere that if you were reading a parenting book you were already a good parent because you were looking to help your kids. I smiled and nodded, and he moved on to chat up the table behind me, who wanted what they had last time, but they couldn’t remember what it was called, so they were describing it to him.
Dr. Becky was recommended to me by my EMDR therapist. I started seeing her because I kept breaking down in couple’s therapy, overwhelmed by a guilt and shame spiral, which was effectively short-circuiting any chance of us actually getting to the therapy. We’d been in couple’s therapy since December, but things got worse, not better. By May we had decided that I should move out; by July, we had agreed to work together on a collaborative divorce over the next year. It was a sad decision to come to, but a good one. We had a long and beautiful relationship together, but now it was hurting both of us, and we needed to set it aside. And while it is sad, we’ve both felt better since we started down this path.
The boys were startled, both when we told them that I was moving out, and then when we told them we were getting divorced. Each time, once we explained that we were doing this to help us become better people, be better parents, and that nothing fundamentally was changing for them, they both shrugged and moved on. Their biggest concern was that I took the kitten with me as an emotional support, so she’s been splitting time between my apartment and the house, though less lately now that the boys are fostering kittens for the ARL.
Dr. Becky described a cycle of intergenerational childhood trauma where well-meaning parents get the behavior they want from their children by traumatizing them, which in turn wires the child to respond the same way to their children, which will then cause the trauma to wire itself into yet another generation, while I sipped my beer. Of the two people whom I could speak with regarding my childhood trauma, one was absent, while the other has lost her mind. My mother’s body sits in a home in Kentucky where she chats happily in word salad and eats cookies with her husband in the afternoon. You can catch glimpses of her now and then, a brief brilliant flash of recognition that whips through you like lightning.
My mother lives in my bones now. While playing solitaire on my phone, I’ll purse my lips in concentration, and instantly be reminded of her wearing the same face while doing the morning crossword. I hear her voice when I talk idly to the cat or when I curse idly at traffic, my reservoir of patience for the world drained. And when I had to react as a parent, the trauma that she wired into me was what I fell back on.
The ramen arrived, and it was amazing. I put the book away to focus on slurping noodles. When I was a child, the diagnosis of autism wouldn’t have applied to me. It wouldn’t apply to me until I was in my late 20s. I didn’t receive the diagnosis for another 20 years, a twenty year period that was the most remarkable part of my life to date, where I met my wife and got married, had two kids and got a steady job, and all the adventures along the way, so that when the diagnosis finally caught up to me, I was pretty damned happy.
Like a lot of autistic people my age, I got my diagnosis from my kids, who were both detected and diagnosed at early ages. I tried explaining to my mother how the similarities between their behavior and mine led me to seek a professional, but she just looked confused and asked what the difference was between being autistic and being eccentric. She was supportive but distant. She tried, but she was already starting to disappear, and we didn’t see it.
The thing was, I was actually pretty damned unhappy. I was living under the dual thumbs of anxiety and frustration; constant anxiety over whether or not I was doing the “right” thing at any given moment led me to be frustrated with every one who asked me what was wrong because nothing was wrong I was happy dammit shut up. Dealing with the anxiety helped me to start dealing with the frustration, but unfortunately, I got in my own way. I couldn’t seem to get past these wired traumatic reflexes, which was how I ended up in EMDR.
Friday, August 11th, was our wedding anniversary, twenty-two years. We’ve been a constantly part of each other’s lives for almost a quarter century. And as sad as it is to see something so dear fade, there’s no denying that we’re both feeling better now. We’re both starting to heal and recover. We’re still working together to raise these kids, keep that house from falling apart. We worked together to build it, and now we’re working together to take it apart.
Friday she surprised me by handing me a card as I was leaving. I apologized; I hadn’t gotten her anything; I honestly didn’t know if we were even going to mention it, but she shrugged it off, said it was ok, she just wanted to give me something. I opened it when I got back to my apartment. Inside was a hand-drawn card with blue jay on it, and inside a note wherein she thanked me for the road that we had travelled together and for the friend I had been to her through all of these years and while the tears rose in my eyes, my heart started to sing because here was the friend I had been missing all this time, reaching out and making contact, making me see and feel how alone I had felt these last few months before we had decided to end it in order to fix it, to start again.
The note fed my soul, and I felt better, so when the body wanted ramen, I decided to listen. I grabbed my keys and said good-bye to the cat like my mother would have done, and headed off to find the best ramen in Des Moines for my last anniversary, free from frustration and anxiety at last.