Breathing Room

I have a closet in my heart.  

Do you know what that is?

It’s a little storage area beneath your ribcage. 

You don’t choose what goes in there. The heart decides what to hold on to and what to let go.

When we were kids, my mother made hot fudge sundaes if we had a good report card. 

Back then, hot fudge came in these little foil packets that you boiled in a pot on the stove. They bobbed to the surface when the water got hot. Carefully, she drained it into the sink. She cut the foil packet and poured the chocolate over vanilla ice cream. It was like eating a cloud.

In life, there are the golden moments, when everything is lit up and good. 

In between the light, well, there can be badness. 

The time Scooter Phelan spit in my hair when I was walking in the parking lot to catch the bus after school.

The time Michelle DeNova slapped me across the face between two cars in the church parking lot. My face still stings if I think about it. She persuaded me there after I told my mother that her father shared a nasty joke with our entire religion class when the Challenger exploded. I’ve been wary of religion ever since.

Then there are moments where the gold and the dark and so closely intertwined, it’s hard to separate them at all.

My son Jack has autism.

He is nineteen. 

He lives in a program almost three hours away.

We visit him every few months. We walk down the street to get lunch at his favorite pizza place. I watch him bob and weave in front of people, cutting off new mothers pushing strollers and older men with canes. 

I think of her. 

I can’t quite explain how my mother’s story and my son’s story belong to one another, but they do. Maybe it’s the way they are misunderstood in the eyes of the world. Maybe the way they both reject the world altogether. 

Or how deeply I wish they both could have breathed, free of the binds of their minds, if only for a moment. 

How do any of us find the air? That is the question.

The stakes are high now.

This is what my heart chooses to store, even if I don’t want to see it.

The stakes are high.

He could cut off the wrong person.

He could be arrested.

He could be hurt.

My son.

I don’t know how to protect him.

I never knew how to protect myself. From spit, from the sting, from a mother who could boil hot fudge one minute, and tear a room apart the next.

The heart closet. 

I have many golden moments.

Autism, with its own ideas, turned my life upside down. It changed me forever.

Just before my mother died, she asked me what I thought God looked like. We were in the hospital. I perched on the edge of her bed, awkward and uncertain. In an uncharacteristic display of affection, she held my hand. 

I thought of the hot fudge, her youngness as she stood at the stove. Her delight in our grades on paper.

I wanted to remind her of it. But I didn’t know how. 

I just looked at her face. 

I should have said what was stored beneath my ribcage. Words I knew to be true.

The air is coming. 

Don’t be afraid.

Breathe with me.

Breathe with me.