30. Before This
May 10, 2023
My son locked me out in the backyard a few days ago.
He either forgot I was outside, or (more likely) I’d been out there too long and he just couldn’t wait any more to return the latch on the sliding glass door back to its locked position.
For many of you, that scene will sound familiar. He’s been doing this to me for a long time. (At least now, I have a key pad on our garage door!)
For those of you who are more recent subscribers, my first experience of being locked out by my child was one of the earliest stories I wrote about this kid – it appeared in 2012 on my blog “Stay Quirky, My Friends” (a nod to the old Dos Equis marketing campaign to “Stay Thirsty”).
I wrote a lot about my son on that first blog, from 2012 through 2020, when I decided to publish instead on It’s Like This.
I’ve finally shut down that old Wordpress site and have been playing around with different ideas for putting my work all in one place, in a curated collection of some kind that might be useful to future providers or other families like ours.
For now, I’ve decided to “migrate” a selected archive of my earlier pieces to my Substack page – you can find these if you scroll back in my “Archives.”
It was hard to narrow down my selections (but I really did, I swear), because so many of these stories tell me something about where we’ve been.
There was, of course, that time my five-year-old locked me out of the house,
That time I overheard a playground bully demand, “Tell me your name, or we’ll shoot you,”
That time his new first-grade classmates had unexpected questions about him,
And, that time I heard my son speaking to me all the way over in Japan.
Some of these stories still make me laugh:
From the history of our “Stella!” inside joke,
To how “unaware” I was in those early days before his diagnosis,
And, the IEP I crafted for my New Years resolutions (still quite unachieved ten years later!).
I hope it doesn’t seem self-indulgent to share these with you again. Just like those blue elephants I kept from his babyhood, I cherish all of these memories.
Like, how he got on a surfboard – just that one time,
How a snake lost in Safeway didn’t cause the panic I expected.
There’s also been a reality to raising this kid that I don’t want to lose sight of —
Because there are bad patches that make it hard to write about the good,
And there are things that keep me up at night.
Even the life hacks described in these stories still work for us today —
All kinds of visual supports for him,
I read these stories, and feel re-connected —
To my own growth in this caregiver role,
And to my deepest wish to hear what he’s thinking.
These old posts remind me of how far we’ve come, how much has changed, and how much has stayed exactly the same. Inadvertent locked doors included.
They also remind me of other stories in between that I haven’t written yet.
Stories that I’ll share with you here soon.
Around here, It’s (still) Like This. And, of course, we’ve stayed Quirky, my friends.
I hope you’ll check out a few of my previous essays when you have some time —
As always, thanks so much for being here.
